Sober Gay Poz Ex-Con

I'm a Stud!

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 19:19:14 GMT

A special thanks to The Hunky Gardener of Guy Meets Garden blog for naming me as a Bloggin Stud with this cool award!

Not only does he garden but his blog is jam packed full of information, tips, ideas & wonderful images & all things botanical.

Check him out at:

www.thehunkygardenerblog.blogspot.com

Spiritual Security

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 18:59:57 GMT

I heard a gut- wrenching report on NPR this morning on the devastation wrought by Gustav in Haiti. (Here's an article about it.)

The per capita yearly income for Haiti's almost 9 million inhabitants is around $1200. With the money we spend in Iraq in ONE month, $10 billion dollars, we could double that. Obviously, it would be highly simplistic to think we could just pass out 9 million checks and eliminate poverty, (the resulting instant hyperinflation would eat up most of it) but that kind of investment in infrastructure, housing, and education could go a long way.

Given the extraordinary income inequality in Haiti, they themselves could probably eliminate much of that poverty with a redistribution of wealth, but that would basically involve something along the line of the Cuban revolution. The privileged don't usually give up their privileges freely, they tend, in fact, to feel completely entitled to them.

Hey, I'm no fan of Castro--but I'd much rather be poor in Cuba than poor in Haiti. I haven't heard any reports of starvation or malnutrition in Cuba, in fact the medical care there is better than for anyone in this country who lacks insurance. (Been to an emergency room lately?)

This is the bug up my ass this Sunday. I didn't hear one reference to poverty at the Republican Convention, and way too few at the Democratic convention, not even to poverty in the United States. To poverty abroad, zilch. (Most Americans would probably find it difficult to find Haiti on a map.)

The preoccupation is with our military security, but what of our spiritual security? Wasn't the greatest revolutionary of all time about being "my brother's keeper?" McCain says "we are all Georgians" but would he ever say "we are all Haitians?" Why is bone-crushing poverty suffered daily by millions not considered a crisis like a military incursion affecting tens of thousands?

I do not have a simple cure for poverty, but I know the lack of questioning on the part of most Americans about a system where so few are allowed to amass so much has something to do with the fact that so many have to share so little. You can't give three pieces of pie to one person, and expect the other three at the table to make do with the one piece that's left over. But most Americans not only don't question this system, they are devoted to it.

We have gotten so inured to poverty in the world, so overwhelmed by how much of it there is, that we take refuge in mass distraction as a form of denial. I'm as guilty as anyone. I love me my Tabitha's Salon Makeover. Then I work on my screenplay in hopes of making enough money with it that I can live much better than I do now. I just hope I always vote for more taxes on myself, for more foreign aid, and that I give a lot of money away.

I suppose I suffer from pre-guilt at the suspicion that I might hold on to more of it than I think I would now, when I have none to give. It's easy enough to imagine oneself a philanthropist, isn't it? At least nudging everyone else to keep remembering what it's like out there for most people is free of charge.

MCO 2008

P.S. The Hy-Art and Dyce and Pisarro and has nothing to do with anything, it's just pretty to look at. Too bad art never filled a belly.

Tags: Cuba, Dyce, Gustav, Haiti, Pisarro, Poverty, Restribution of Wealth

Math of the Heart

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 15:00:36 GMT

What a relief to return to my fantasy world of Hy-Art after a week spent as if Joe Biden was going to call me at any moment to help in debate preparation, and I had to read EVERYTHING. As it was, I found www.truthout.org and The Huffington Post to be indispensable sources of news. And of course, Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann are national treasures.

I went out to dinner with a good friend last night, and it somehow clicked what September 5th meant to me. It was the day I left for my year abroad in France in 1975, a month shy of 17. It astounds me that it was 33 years ago. And I realized with that calculation, I am exactly now the age my Mother was when I left for France (which sounds like abandonment, but she arranged the whole thing.)

I was already actively gay, but my parents did not know it (my father suspected) until January of 1976, when my mother announced she was coming to France to see me during her February break from teaching. By then I had moved in with Rene, who was 29. This seems impossibly young to me now, but it was 12 years older than I was then, so a dramatic enough detail added on top of the considerable shock when a well-meaning cousin decided to tell my Mom the truth about me back in New York, a month before her trip.

Like most 17-year olds, I thought if you did adult things you were an adult. It took years--if ever--for my maturity level to catch up with the complexity of my choices. I certainly came out early by any estimation, for about a decade, I was always the younger one. Then for about anoither decade, it could go either way. Then, suddenly it seemed, I was almost always the older one.

The math that has come to haunt me of late is that I'm going to be equidistant from 35 and 65. That seems just entirely wrong. For the first time, I might be older than the President. That hurts, but I'll take one for the team.

I'll tell you what will make a really interesting book, in about a decade. "The Ballad of Bristol and Levi." About 10 days ago, they were just two teenagers with problems, and now their personal lives have blown up in a big way. This must be surreal beyond belief for them. Frankly, it reminds me of that trip to France my Mom did make, that was so dramatic I made my first student film about it.

The thing is, you think the rest of your life is going to be that intense, and it changes. You grow up, and you develop layers. They are necessary to survive, but there's something gone too. The virginity you really lose isn't physical at all.

MCO 2008

P.S. Manet is the camouflaged women, Pissaro the village landscape.

Tags: Aging, Bristol Palin, Joe Biden, Manet, Pisarro, Seventeen

Cry the Beloved Country

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 08:24:30 GMT

In the past few days, I must have read over 50 articles on the present political situation. The Republicans either made an extraordinarily astute strategic choice with Sarah Palin, or a huge tactical blunder, because if my circle of frantic emailers and I are any indication, millions of us are galvanized for Obama like never before.

But it is exhausting. I am deeply angry at once again facing the prospect of being led by people who want to wield power but have no interest in governing well, who hold out the very idea of government as something "they" are doing to "us" instead of the purest expression of democracy. "We the people" read the first three words of the Constitution. The government is not a collection of faceless bureaucrats imposed on us from without who care about nothing but trying to control our lives, they are men and women doing jobs that are mostly necessary to the well-being of us all. I don't know about you, but I like my roads paved, I want my teachers paid, I believe in Social Security and Medicare and courts and police and yes, even a strong defense. But 761 bases across the world-YES, 761--is not defense, it's empire. It is draining our treasury and corrupting our warriors and feeding the giant parasite of the military-industrial complex so that we can keep declaiming the absurd propaganda that "we are the greatest country in the world."

What the hell does that mean? How is one land better than another, one people nicer, smarter, more kind? Do these "patriots" feel so insecure that they can only feel better about themselves by internalizing a descriptive that makes us superior to others? If these people consider themselves Americans rather than citizens of the world, then can I ask what planet they are living on?

Sarah Palin just got a passport last year; and John McCain still can't pronounce Vietnam correctly. It is clear as day to me that in that dank prison cell long ago he vowed to himself that his suffering would not be in vain, and when we lost that war--justly so--he embarked on a lifelong hunt for some sort of war to win that would somehow redeem his torture. Maybe he just should have apologized to the Vietnamese people for blindly serving an unjust cause he never questioned merely because in his world, it was and always would be, "my country right or wrong."

We didn't invent such an inane sentiment, it has been passed down from empire to empire, from nation to nation, leading to a first World War in which millions died just to prove their country was the "greatest" ever, to a second where the loser wrought untold havoc because it couldn't bear having lost that first time. Now that they finally seemed to have learned their lessons, the Europeans prosper in a relative peace, and somehow still get held up to ridicule by Giuliani because they're, well, European. They don't all carry guns there, don't all believe that Jesus Christ is their personal Lord and Savior and no one goes bankrupt because they can't pay their medical bills. Heathens.

I just don't get people who want the right to execute a rapist but would force the mother he raped to bear the child produced by that crime. I don't get people who think it's all right for Americans to bomb Iran but have no curiosity as to why we are so disliked in the world that we are the target of terrorism in the first place. (Who can understand what people are like who don't speak English, after all?) I don't get people who think men who love each are somehow unholy but men who kill and even torture are thought to be doing "God's work."

I can only take comfort in looking at the grand sweep of history and hope that if the Berliners and Parisians who engaged in mutual carnage 70 years ago are now closer to each other than the current residents of San Francisco and Fort Worth, that maybe in several years these States might truly be United again. I pray for a country that feels no need to puff itself up, to "kick ass," to have more, to consume endlessly, and to refuse to take responsibility for its part in any of the world's problems.

As someone who does speak some foreign languages and has lived abroad, I will tell you this about Americans. In general, we are more friendly than not, less pretentious as a people than most, and our class distinctions are fairly fluid. But we can be rather more boorish, xenophobic, and downright anti-intellectual than most, too. Neither set of traits make us much better or worse than other people; like the odd English we speak, it's just the closest we come to a national identity.

Isn't it high time we dropped the sense of exceptionalism that we use to set us apart and above from the rest of humanity?

MCO 2008

Tags: Republicans, Nationalism, Militarism, Empire

The Gloves Are Off

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:50:27 GMT

Thank God we have the angry left liberal media elite (I couldn't be a prouder member) to expose the earmark-grubbing alaska-seceding trooper-firing penetcostal lies of Sarah Paydirt in so many different forums that you I don't have to enumerate all of them--though I can't resist this one. I will just make a few points.

1) What the hell is the difference between joining the P.T.A. and community organizing? How dare she? Obama found jobs for the Chicago steelworkers in the SAME PROFESSION of her unionized husband! As far as her vaunted "executive experience," an Illinois State Senator represents far more constituents than a mayor of Wasilla, and a U.S. senator represents about 20 times the constituents than the entire state of Alaska.

2) Oh I see, when John McCain bombs a country across the world in which we have no business being, killing thousands of innocent Vietnamese civilians, and is caught red-handed, his subsequent imprisonment and torture is an egregious violation of human rights. But when a chauffeur to Osama bin Laden is captured, anything short of waterboarding is "coddling terrorists." Because everyone we capture is, by definition, guilty, because Americans would never make a mistake like that, what with the same extraordinary intelligence-gathering that couldn't prevent 9/11 or said W.M.D. in Iraq were a slam-dunk.

The only positive about Palin that I can come up with is that her participation in the Alaska Secessionist movement reminds me that if she and the "war hero" wins, secession might be a might good idea for those of us who are starting to wonder if we can even live in the same country with these yahoo simpletons who think being American makes you one of God's chosen people.

MCO 2008

Tags: Sarah Palin

Abe Lincoln's a-trunin' in his grave

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:50:55 GMT

The leaning lady and the languid lass are via Mary Cassatt, the summer house from Manet. It's rather a propos for the whiff of back-to-school in the air, n'est-ce pas?

I watched as much of the Republican Convention as I could stomach last night, embarassed to be a white American.

I have no complaints about the quality of my life. The goverment and healthcare system has done quite right by me. Of course I think it's perfectly acceptable to live in a small studio in working class neighborhood and own one small car, because, as a citizen of the world way before I'm a citizen of America, I realize that as modest as my standard of living is, I live in the lap of luxury compared to several billion people. In fact, the greatest thorn in my prosperous side is the very fact that millions of people across the world and even in the country will go sick and hungry and without clean water today, and every day.

I don't understand how those delegates--"haves" all of them, by any measure, can feel so smugly entitled to their prosperity and the certainty that they deserve even more of it. They don't mind if everybody is prosperous, but the idea that they might have a little less so that others can live in dignity and security--that's too much to swallow, They rail against bureaucracy as the root of all evil, but the one thing they don't mind half of their tax bill going to one of the hugest and most inefficient bureaucracies in the world: The U.S. Defense Department.

That's all the diatribe I have in me this morning. Take a "staycation" in my Hy-Art and enjoy the day.

MCO 2008

P.S. I did enjoy Fred Thompson's references to the car John McCain drove before going to Vietnam. Evidently, that's what McCain was thinking of when he promised to "vette" Sarah Palin.

Tags: Cassatt, Manet, Republican Convention

The Relevance of Bristol Palin's Unborn Child

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:43:37 GMT

First off, my Mom was an unwed mother when she had my older brother. If she had terminated that pregnancy, she would never have married my father, who helped her through this very difficult time France in the 50s--you can imagine), and my other brother, sisters, nor I would never have been born.

Both my niece and nephew are the results of teenage pregnancies. I can't even imagine the world had my sister not adopted them.

Barack Obama's mother was 18 when she had him, and look how he turned out.

I am pro-choice, but not pro-abortion. NOBODY is pro-abortion, any more than anyone is pro-unplanned pregnancy. I am anti-unwanted and unloved child. I was in prison with scores of them. They are exactly the same "precious human lives" the hard-on-crime Republican right seems to delight in depriving their "welfare mothers" of aid, then "educating" them badly in underfunded schools, then using them as cannon fodder or warehousing them in prison. Want some irony? Some of these kids "saved"from abortion by pro-lifers endup on death row. I don't think you are doing a child who will be abused or neglected any favors by bringing them into the world. I think the first, fundamental right for a fetus should be the right not to be born.

There are two reasons the pregnancy of Palin's daughter should factor into the campaign. One is that it underlines the fallacy of a Republican social agenda that insists the solution to teenagers having sex is vows of chastity and abstinence education. It doesn't work, and the vast majority of the children born out of such unions are born into poverty. (Happy endings are the exception, not the rule.) I think when the message the kids get from school and conservative Christian parents is to just say no, teenage hormones being what they are, the inevitable occurs. What bothers me is that Governor Palin cannot see, despite glaring evidence to the contrary in her own life, that the approaches she advocates simply do not work. And though I'm sure her grandchild will be very loved, what if Bristol wanted to give the baby up for adoption? And would anybody care to lay bets on the longevity of Bristol's marriage to Levi? Would he be agreeing to this union if he didn't feel horrific pressure because of his future mother-in-law's political ambitions? How can a party that screams about the sanctity of marriage be so willing to insist on one held at the end of a shotgun?

Palin's private life is pertinent only to the degree it points out hypocrisy. For years, the right has been railing about "women's libbers" and "feminazis." They don't mind women working outside the home anymore, but the clear bias has always been for a submissive wife who tends to hearth and home first and foremost. Can anyone in their right mind suggest that the Vice-President will not have to prioritize work over family? I personally think it's a perfect opportunity for Mr. Palin to step up in thetraditional maternal role, I just object to the way the left's attempts to make this feasible in the real world via day care and equal pay for equal work have been fought every step of the way by those now cheering so loudly for Palin. As usual the right resists all progress, then embraces it as their own after it occurs. (See Civil Rights legislation and Medicare, for example.)

The second, far more important point, concerns how John McCain makes a decision. He's had months to vet potential V.P.s. Anyone with an I.Q. over 10 could have told him that rule #1 would have to be to choose someone without the kind of baggage that would fuel the breathless 24-hour news cycle that has become our national pastime. Whatever your opinion on Palin's parenting skills and relatively thin resume, it is undeniable that anyone who had more than a ten-minute conversation with her and a google search or two could come to the conclusion this woman brought with her some major potential distractions. Oops? What's that you say? John McCain made the decision after an 8-minute conversation and was too busy oogling her to google her?

I don't care how McCain'spinners are trying to spin it: this choice was not vetted, it was an impulse decision on the part of John McCain, who has obviously been chafing at the loss of his maverick status and wanted to get it back.

We've just had eight years of a President who shoots first and ask questions later (and a V.P. who just shoots!). We need another like buckshot in the face.

MCO 2008

Tags: Bristol Palin, Unwed Mothers, John McCain

The Sarah Effect

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 16:58:10 GMT

First of all, I must trumpet my growing credentials as an astute political commentator. From the blog last week, on Hillary's speech:

"But she had a second task as well, which she and Bill were smart enough to understand. She had to sway voters like me, who were so pissed at the conduct of her campaign, that we would have had a lot of trouble supporting her first in any future Presidential primary fight."

And from Frank Rich in the New York Times yesterday::

"Hillary Clinton's Tuesday speech, arguably the best of her career, was as much about her own desire to reconcile with the alienated Obama Democrats she might need someday as it was about releasing her supporters to Obama. The Clintons never do stop thinking about tomorrow."

SNAP! Let's see if I can do it again!

I was reading my blogami, Sheria, who took umbrage at the notion that McCain seemed to feel disaffected female Clinton voters would be shallow enough to vote for him on the basis of Palin's gender alone. While I certainly don't disagree (I never disagree with Sheria), something occurred to me while I read her. It's a strategy that I don't know if McCain was even concious of when he chose Palin but has probably occurred to Karl Rove. The idea being that the appeal of Palin is not to women, but to men.

Think about it. Say you're a working class Reagan democrat from Western Pennsylvania who voted for Hillary in the primary because your wife just lost her job and you have to admit that the Republicans have screwed up the economy. You like McCain because he was a P.O.W. and he's "strong," but you have to admit that when you watched Obama on Thursday, he made sense in all sort of ways, even if though you resent how smart he is. You would never admit it, but it kills you that he didn't have any of the advantages of a McCain or Bush, and still made it., You didn't have any advantages either, and you barely made it through one semester of community college. You were always getting stoned back then, you didn't step up until you met Marie and got the job with UPS, and started having kids. Obama makes you feel like a loser. (Bush made you feel like you could have been President if you were born into his family too.) When you watch Obama on the couch, you look at your pot-belly and you feel inadequate. And you are vaguely disturbed by how easily your wife seems to be transferring her affections from Hillary to Obama. She was way too into that speech--you know she like the way he looked in that suit. You don't even own a suit.

Suddenly, Sarah Palin is nominated. Wow. She owns a gun and hunts, like you do. She works and has kids like your wife, too but damn, she's a lot hotter. No, she doesn't seem to have a lot of experience, but she'd be the Vice-President, not the President, and if McCain got sick, she'd have time to learn. Bush did, and he kicked Saddam's ass! (Your nephew's in Iraq, and damn if you're not going to believe in that mission.) Mostly, you've never had the experience of being attracted to a woman running for national office, and there's something vaguely taboo about it that excites you. (Just like it does McCain.)

You'll tell your wife you're voting for Obama, and a pollster if asked. But in the privacy of the voting booth, who knows who'll you'll pull your lever for?

MCO 2008

Tags: Campaign, Hillary Clinton, Obama, Pennsylvania, Sarah Palin, UPS

Marc at the Movies

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 19:45:19 GMT

I'm a little unsure if this is a nun depicted by Sargent, but set against this tableau of summer via Monet, it's certainly fitting enough for a brief discussion of one my favorite movies of all time, which just happened to be on last night, The Sound of Music.

The pleasure of seeing a movie over and over again is that you eventually notice all these little things you missed in earlier viewings. For example, the Mother Superior welcomes a new novitiate into the convent right before she consults Maria about why she left the Von Trapps, and the young girl is wearing the pretty green dress Maria then dons for her return to the children (I had wondering for years where she got that second dress). And earlier, when one of the children asks Max if they can keep the puppet show, he replies: "I certainly won't return it to Professor Cohen at the University," which I realized was the screenwriter's signal to us that Georg had Jewish friends. (To anyone who is not a fan of the movie, these observations will be obscure in the extreme. To lovers of this finely-tuned if slightly saccharine masterpiece, you will think me the astutest of cinephiles.)

And then as I watched the delicious Baroness, I thought, wouldn't it be great if that's as mean as anyone in the world ever got? If that was the ultimate in villainy? Herr Zeller was even too mean for me.

Yesterday I also went to see Tropic of Thunder, which was hilarious and inventive, and this morning rewatched The Painted Veil on cable, which must be the most underrated movie of all time, certainly of 2006. It's absolutely beautiful, and I can't understand why we don't see more work from the director, John Curran.

I seem to be one of the few people who treat Labor Day Weekend like any other. Not that I have much choice.--David took the car to San Diego for the weekend. But don't mind me. I'm a hardy fellow with a dog and a remote.

MCO 2008

Tags: Monet, Painted Veil, Sargent, Sound of Music, Tropic of Thunder

The Confessions of Nat Turner and Marc O.

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 20:01:36 GMT

For the past two weeks, I've been reading The Confessions of Nat Turner, by William Styron. It's the imagined memoir of a very real slave who masterminded an insurrection in 1831 which resulted in the death of over 50 whites before Turner and his confederates were themselves captured and killed.

I picked it up at thrift store because I love the writing of William Styron, to whom I actually served drinks at a party in New York in the 80s. I hadn't chosen it as reading to coincide with the nomination of Barack Obama, but it certainly provides an interesting backdrop when contemplating the historicial context of racism in this country.

The first slaves were brought over in 1619. It would be TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR years until the Emancipation Proclamation, and ONE HUNDRED more years of third-class citizenship for blacks legally, socially and economically. It took another thirty years (1963-1993) before the cultural landscape shifted enough that we could see the kind of progess that made a journey like Barack Obama's possible.

If we count a generation as 30 years, that's roughly 12 generations of one kind of thinking, and only 1 of another. We tend to think slaveholders and their lynching heirs knew they were doing something evil, but trust me, in their own minds they completely believed that the ownership of blacks consituted natural order no different from how we consider the ownership of a pet or a horse. How else could they reconcile their actions with the concept of themselves a good Christians?

On the one hand, I am amazed at the patience and non-violence of black people over hundreds of years. Given the inhumanity of slavery, Nat Turner's rage seems completely reasonable, the anger of the Black Panthers restrained. On the other hand, the acceleration of history is astounding. Arguably there's been as much progress in the 45 years since 1963 as there was in the 344 years that preceded it.

The messages that justified slavery and opression passed from generation to generation over several hundred years. They have a lingering and invisible power that is almost impossible to measure, but has not evaporated just because we all "know" better. We Americans like to think ourselves as a people that perpetually reinvents itself, looking ever forward. But we have a dark and terrible history, and nominating a man of color does not alter all the myriad ways we are ALL infected by the legacy of racism.

The biggest mistake would be in thinking of racism only in its obvious manifestations. Even in the Deep South you won't hear the n-word when a camera is rolling. People know to hide it, these days. It is far harder to identify the subtle, unconscious notions of betterness and otherness and less-than-ness that most of us have internalized in ways immune to any but the most rigorous self-examination. And even then awareness is but the first step.

I am of a generation that will never be colorblind, no matter how hard I want to be. It has never impeded the most extraordinary closeness with people of color, but there is a consciousness of the fact of it in a way that never occurs with the whites I know. And it goes both ways---I am quite sure I'm sometimes mentioned as the gay friend or the white friend to many of my straight and/or black friends, though it doesn't bother me at all. (I love any kind of special attention, let's admit it.). I think you get past it by acknowledging it. But if you pretend it's not there-- the consciousness of it---then you can't transcend it.

So let's keep this conversation going, in the hope that one day, we really don't need to have it anymore.

MCO 2008

Tags: Nat Turner, Obama, Racism, Van Gogh, William Styron