People like to begin the New Year with a resolution. However, I ain’t people, as Lina Lamont so flatly and aptly stated in “Singin’ in the Rain”. It should be noted however that I am also not a bright shining star in the Hollywood firmament. But I do think it is a good idea to look upon the beginning of a new year as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. So in that vein, I have come up with some things that we can all do together to make 2008 a great new year.
The Life Straw. I know I am about two years behind since Time Magazine named it one of the best innovations of the year for 2006. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear about it until I was watching Bill Moyer’s Journal on PBS last week and one of his guests brought it up. Last summer I watched an amazing speech by Justice Anthony Kennedy from Hawaii where he talked about the issue of bringing safe, clean drinking water to people in Africa. Most of the great diseases of the 20th century, long since eradicated in the United States still persist in developing nations (like much of Africa) and this is primarily due to contaminated water. Building a water treatment plant is a daunting and often arduous process and that’s when you have the financial resources and a stable government to support it. However, for a few dollars each, the Life Straw can be distributed to people. It works like your Brita water filter, only it is inside a reusable straw. So it is easy to ship and carry and use. It makes almost any water source into pure drinking water when sipped through the straw. And this single invention could help combat death and disease on a massive scale, potentially saving millions of lives by providing something as simple as pure drinking water.
Mass Text Messages. I know you care. But when I get a generic “Happy New Year” text message at midnight, it just makes me feel like I am getting junk mail from a friend. Either we are close enough to warrant a personal message, or I hardly know you and you are just keeping your phone book up to date. Either way, the mass junk message sends the opposite message you were hoping to convey. Yes, I will have a happy new year if you stop sending me this crap. And maybe I am old fashioned. I personally write out holiday cards, upwards of 100 each year. But when someone gets a card from me with a personal message that I wrote uniquely to them, they know at my CPA’s office that I really do appreciate the work they do on my W-2s.
Bull in the China shop. About 13 years ago following the death of Sam Walton, Wal-Mart switched from a “Buy American” only policy to one that demands foreign goods production in order to meet strict price controls. Since then, China has become a huge source of goods sold in the United States. Coincidentally enough, our trade deficit with China is directly proportionate to the profit margin at Wal-Mart. Did I forget to mention the lead in toys? Not only did moving production decimate the manufacturing base in the United States, it also removed most of the consumer protections people take for granted. And the next thing you know, dog food is poisonous and your child has a toy made with toxins in its mouth. Meanwhile the country is in a froth about lost jobs and rampant illegal immigration. However, if the jobs that went to China had gone to Central America and Mexico instead, we would have not only been able to better control quality (i.e. no deadly products) but it also would have stabilized their economies and kept illegal immigration down to a dull roar. But since China holds vast qualities of our debt, we have very little sway over them. It is the same reason we can’t make any progress in Darfur. Darfur is a region in Sudan, which is a primary source of oil for China. And you may think genocide and toxic toys are good enough reasons to pressure a country to change their ways. However, if you owed say, $100,000 to VISA and were only making minimum payments, how much sway do you think you would have over them? Our best hope for the situation is to move our manufacturing to our hemisphere at the very least. And work on technology and alternatives to oil that we can turn around and sell to China, which would off-set our trade deficit, our debt, our lost manufacturing base, and remove the money flowing into the butchers of Sudan (not to mention the Middle East, which is a whole other oil-based mess).
Kids: Not seen, or heard. Enough with out of control children in public. As a society we need to stand up and tell parents to their faces that the out of control behavior of their children is not acceptable in polite society. I understand the desire to build a healthy self-esteem in a child. But giving everyone who can’t read a gold star and telling a child crashing carts into each other at the supermarket that they are being “creative” will only make a generation of illiterate monsters. And when you are in a nursing home, who the hell is going to wipe your ass and make your lunch? These kids can’t even make change when the register at McDonald's tells them what the correct answer is. Yes, Social Security will definitely run out of money when your nieces and nephews grow up and can’t get jobs, pay taxes or contribute in any meaningful way to society. However, they will know how to play Guitar Hero like a pro, even though they can’t actually play the guitar. Sure, they will think the world is flat, think ten dollars an hour is the best wage they can get, and just assume that at some point the scratch off lottery will pay them enough money to not have to worry anymore. Good luck! A re-emphasis on science, math and yes art (since the arts help developing brains learn better) at home and at school and well as a return to some good old-fashioned rules and boundaries will better prepare America’s youth to take over for the rest of us when we are too old to care. Which in my case, is right now.
Happy New Year!
Showing posts with label Supreme Court. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Supreme Court. Show all posts
Friday, January 4, 2008
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Jingle Balls II: The Escape Clause
You may recall my frank discussion of my balls some weeks back. Well, I have some resolution to the story. Just in time for the holidays! Because nothing says holiday cheer like discussing your scrotum in public.
The final step in the process was a review of the situation by the urologist. I have never been to the urologist in my life. Why should I? The junk works, so why mess with perfection? As usual, in need of a doctor, I rummaged around on the internet for a while and then picked someone with a catchy name who was nearby. I suppose I could check credentials or something, but I have to assume a total quack would not be able to afford to pay rent in one of the most expensive cities in the world if he didn’t know what he was doing. And yes, I did specifically choose a male urologist. It is weird enough having a stranger manhandle me under fluorescent lighting, I don’t need to make it completely bizarre by bringing a woman into the mix.
The doctor I chose was in Gramercy Park, steps away from a convenient subway stop and my regular doctor. He is right around the corner from the National Arts Club, which when I passed it reminded me that it had been a long time since I saw Manhattan Murder Mystery, so I picked it up on DVD. I had to wait seven weeks for my appointment, and even though my doctor told me it was probably nothing and the two women at the ultrasound office couldn’t even FIND what I was talking about, I was still filled with a certain level of anxiety.
I had my appointment in the week before Christmas. I trotted down to his office and sat in the waiting room filled with current magazines and old men for about 45 minutes before he finally saw me. The urologist looks like all doctors in Woody Allen movies: tall, reed thin and expressionless. He also spoke with a German accent, but not like a character actor in a Hollywood movie about Nazis. He sounded more like a mad professor in an old Looney Tunes cartoon (although visually lacking the mess of white hair and the cheesy Frito Bandito moustache). The whole package instantly filled me with confidence, as all situations that remind me of the movies do.
He asked me the usual routine questions, even though I had filled them all out on the form in the waiting room.
“How many zexual partners: zingle or multiple?”
“Um. Right now, or over my lifetime?”
“In your lifetime.”
“Oh. Multiple.”
He arched his eyebrow and gave me an ever so disapproving murmur. I was instantly outraged and defensive about what a slut I have been. You know what. I am a sexually active 38 year old man. I don’t need to get shit from some stranger about the fact that I have had sex with more than one person in my whole life. Granted, the number isn’t two. But how does he know that? If I want to feel judged, I’ll go to a department store cosmetics counter and put my head inside the black light box with the magnifying mirror in it that makes you buy anything they put in front of you. I don’t need to hear it from the man who is going to tell me definitively if I have cancer.
So he sends me off to the waiting room while his assistant contacts my doctor to have my records faxed over. After that he calls me down to the separate exam room.
“Take your pants down and I will take a look.”
I kick off my shoes and then start in on my pants when he stops me.
“You can leave your shoes on. I von’t be examining your feet.”
So, like James Edstrom in the Ramble, I just shoved my pants down around my ankles and hopped (quite literally) onto the table. I laid back as instructed and he began to dispassionately knead my balls like bread dough.
“Zo. What do you do for a living?”
Really? A conversation about the wonders of satellite radio while you are all over my balls like a case of the crabs? This is definitely one of those situations, like when you are standing at a urinal, when I am not in the mood for idle chit chat. He asked me where the lump was that I felt, and when I told him, he stopped the exam as suddenly as he began.
“What is behind and above the left testicle is a normal structure. Put your pants back on please and see me in my office,” he declared as he ripped his surgical gloves off dramatically and dispensed with them in the trash can nearby. He just left me lying on the table with my pants down around my ankles. I felt so vulnerable!
Once I pulled myself and my outfit (such as it was) together, I went back to his office. He glanced over my paperwork and looked up at me. “There is nothing going on in your genitals.” He stated it so flatly I instantly wanted a second opinion. It was the second meanest thing a doctor has told me during this ordeal, only behind my regular doctor assuring me that I have nothing to worry about because “testicular cancer is a disease of young men.” I don’t need a stranger to tell me there is nothing going on in my genitals. I live with them. I know what they are doing at night.
Unfortunately, my ultrasound results weren’t there, so he insisted that I come back on Monday for a follow-up. Monday, as in Christmas Eve. Aren’t Jewish doctors the best? I guess he doesn’t like movies and Chinese food. However, it did take seven weeks for the initial appointment and he is on the American Board of Urology, so I guess I should take whatever appointment I can get. I trotted back down to the city on Christmas Eve, waited once again in his waiting room with several of the same loose characters I saw during my initial visit. He called me in, glanced over my ultrasound, and then waved his hand over it as if performing a magic spell.
“Nothing. There is nothing here. Go home. Enjoy your time. Have fun. I will see you in six months. Maybe there will be something there then.”
And with that my testicular cancer ordeal was over. As definitive as the Supreme Court ruling in Bush Vs. Gore, the process was stopped dead in its tracks. Yes, maybe something else will go wrong in my genitals, but as I will be six months older during the next go round, I am that much further away from testicular cancer. So now there is nothing left to do but sit back, enjoy Diane Keaton reunited with Woody Allen and pronounce my personal Manhattan mystery solved.
The final step in the process was a review of the situation by the urologist. I have never been to the urologist in my life. Why should I? The junk works, so why mess with perfection? As usual, in need of a doctor, I rummaged around on the internet for a while and then picked someone with a catchy name who was nearby. I suppose I could check credentials or something, but I have to assume a total quack would not be able to afford to pay rent in one of the most expensive cities in the world if he didn’t know what he was doing. And yes, I did specifically choose a male urologist. It is weird enough having a stranger manhandle me under fluorescent lighting, I don’t need to make it completely bizarre by bringing a woman into the mix.
The doctor I chose was in Gramercy Park, steps away from a convenient subway stop and my regular doctor. He is right around the corner from the National Arts Club, which when I passed it reminded me that it had been a long time since I saw Manhattan Murder Mystery, so I picked it up on DVD. I had to wait seven weeks for my appointment, and even though my doctor told me it was probably nothing and the two women at the ultrasound office couldn’t even FIND what I was talking about, I was still filled with a certain level of anxiety.
I had my appointment in the week before Christmas. I trotted down to his office and sat in the waiting room filled with current magazines and old men for about 45 minutes before he finally saw me. The urologist looks like all doctors in Woody Allen movies: tall, reed thin and expressionless. He also spoke with a German accent, but not like a character actor in a Hollywood movie about Nazis. He sounded more like a mad professor in an old Looney Tunes cartoon (although visually lacking the mess of white hair and the cheesy Frito Bandito moustache). The whole package instantly filled me with confidence, as all situations that remind me of the movies do.
He asked me the usual routine questions, even though I had filled them all out on the form in the waiting room.
“How many zexual partners: zingle or multiple?”
“Um. Right now, or over my lifetime?”
“In your lifetime.”
“Oh. Multiple.”
He arched his eyebrow and gave me an ever so disapproving murmur. I was instantly outraged and defensive about what a slut I have been. You know what. I am a sexually active 38 year old man. I don’t need to get shit from some stranger about the fact that I have had sex with more than one person in my whole life. Granted, the number isn’t two. But how does he know that? If I want to feel judged, I’ll go to a department store cosmetics counter and put my head inside the black light box with the magnifying mirror in it that makes you buy anything they put in front of you. I don’t need to hear it from the man who is going to tell me definitively if I have cancer.
So he sends me off to the waiting room while his assistant contacts my doctor to have my records faxed over. After that he calls me down to the separate exam room.
“Take your pants down and I will take a look.”
I kick off my shoes and then start in on my pants when he stops me.
“You can leave your shoes on. I von’t be examining your feet.”
So, like James Edstrom in the Ramble, I just shoved my pants down around my ankles and hopped (quite literally) onto the table. I laid back as instructed and he began to dispassionately knead my balls like bread dough.
“Zo. What do you do for a living?”
Really? A conversation about the wonders of satellite radio while you are all over my balls like a case of the crabs? This is definitely one of those situations, like when you are standing at a urinal, when I am not in the mood for idle chit chat. He asked me where the lump was that I felt, and when I told him, he stopped the exam as suddenly as he began.
“What is behind and above the left testicle is a normal structure. Put your pants back on please and see me in my office,” he declared as he ripped his surgical gloves off dramatically and dispensed with them in the trash can nearby. He just left me lying on the table with my pants down around my ankles. I felt so vulnerable!
Once I pulled myself and my outfit (such as it was) together, I went back to his office. He glanced over my paperwork and looked up at me. “There is nothing going on in your genitals.” He stated it so flatly I instantly wanted a second opinion. It was the second meanest thing a doctor has told me during this ordeal, only behind my regular doctor assuring me that I have nothing to worry about because “testicular cancer is a disease of young men.” I don’t need a stranger to tell me there is nothing going on in my genitals. I live with them. I know what they are doing at night.
Unfortunately, my ultrasound results weren’t there, so he insisted that I come back on Monday for a follow-up. Monday, as in Christmas Eve. Aren’t Jewish doctors the best? I guess he doesn’t like movies and Chinese food. However, it did take seven weeks for the initial appointment and he is on the American Board of Urology, so I guess I should take whatever appointment I can get. I trotted back down to the city on Christmas Eve, waited once again in his waiting room with several of the same loose characters I saw during my initial visit. He called me in, glanced over my ultrasound, and then waved his hand over it as if performing a magic spell.
“Nothing. There is nothing here. Go home. Enjoy your time. Have fun. I will see you in six months. Maybe there will be something there then.”
And with that my testicular cancer ordeal was over. As definitive as the Supreme Court ruling in Bush Vs. Gore, the process was stopped dead in its tracks. Yes, maybe something else will go wrong in my genitals, but as I will be six months older during the next go round, I am that much further away from testicular cancer. So now there is nothing left to do but sit back, enjoy Diane Keaton reunited with Woody Allen and pronounce my personal Manhattan mystery solved.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Gay Life Exposed
Yes, I am possibly the gayest person alive. But for me, being gay is something of a hobby. I enjoy it, but I like to think I can’t make a full time occupation out of it. Then again, it’s a little bit like being a die-hard Yankees fan. It doesn’t matter what career you may pursue, everyone assumes that most of your waking thoughts are about baseball. I wish there was a way to leave the unfinished puzzle of my gay life on a game table in the living room and run some errands unrelated and unfettered by the lack of resolution. After all, it will still be there when I get back. But as gay people, we are vertically integrated by not just our love of sex with men but also a desire to arrange flowers, listen to Judy Garland or declare someone too fat for that outfit. As much as you may want to quit, hide or sideline it, gay can pour from your pores like the smell of gin from a notorious alcoholic.
Apparently, for some people, gay isn’t just a hobby, it’s a way of life. And for them we have the Gay Life Expo. These kinds of expos are like speed dating between gay consumers and mainstream corporations. In each case, they are hoping to find perfection. But just like most speed dating rounds, what actually stands in front of you can often be very disappointing. For the gays: disappointment in the quality and diversity of the companies that bothered to show up. For the companies: wonder as to the location of these high end consumers demographers have been promising them for years. And if you ever want to dispel the myth of gays as fashion forward, articulate trendsetters, this is the weekend adventure for you! Other myths, such as gays being indiscriminant whoring drunks and lesbians being aggressively cheap and demanding of free items, remain woefully intact.
I wanted to go because I think it’s important for our company to crack into the NYC gay market in a substantial way. And a trade show seven weeks before Christmas is as good a place as any to plant the holiday gift seed. It was also a chance to spend some time hanging out with co-workers that I like (Jeremy Hovies, Keith Price) without the embarrassment of needing to be nice to the ones I don’t like, which I will have to do soon enough at the annual holiday party.
I had a short segment on the stage that I originally thought was just an opportunity to wave to the crowd and throw some free t-shirts to the lesbians. But when I was at the office thirty minutes before the show printing out the information, I noticed that I would instead be an emcee and be introducing some of the performers. This was not good news. Emceeing at a pride event is hard enough, but at least the crowd is drunk and excited. Performing at a trade show is like trying to sell real estate to death row inmates. The chairs are usually filled with people too lazy to walk the length of a convention center without needing to rest an hour for every ten booths they passed. I tried to encourage them to enter to win the free radio we were giving away, not more than ten feet from the closest chair but most of them preferred to stay in their seats and stare dead-eyed ahead. I don’t need a TV show now. I already know what it feels like when people watch you on TV, from the perspective of the television set itself.
The lowest form of degradation came at the end of my set when Scott Nevins launched into his “game show” with the OutQ personalities playing along with “real people” from the audience. Scott, with his Groucho brows and pancake make-up projecting like Ethel Merman to the third balcony, took to the stage like a rat diving into a sewer. For the purposes of the game and a chance at some playful nastiness in my direction, he paired me with a genetic male cross of Ab Fab’s Edina Monsoon and Jodie Foster in Nell. He was wearing X-Ray goggles from the back of a 1970s comic book and a puffy white jacket with the entire NYC subway map printed on it, his native language that of Leeloo from The Fifth Element. It seemed from his insistent waving of a gay bar rag in my face that he was in the current issue of HX Magazine, photographed for Halloween in what I can only assume is his normal attire, and captioned as “Bee Bitch.” So the other hosts had actual contestants and I was paired with a lump of mashed potatoes. As I should have learned from the Faggot Feud with Richie Rich in 2004, never walk on a stage where someone else is controlling the mike. Point taken.
After the event, I decamped with the folks at HERE TV for dinner. Cutie pie Chris was there again, although in retrospect, I realize he was the only actual HERE person at the restaurant. At the Expo, I saw Josh, but he opted to head home after the long weekend and crash. Earlier from the stage, I saw Peter Stickles walking around, but he left before I was unshackled from the umpteenth just-so Judy impression emanating from little Scotty Nevins. I hope Peter didn’t see me, but as a performer, I am certain he would have sympathized with my plight. Lady in a cage!
So it was Chris for dinner and my friend Terry from Los Angeles. The other two were flirty Jimmy with sad eyes and a boyfriend in the steam room (unrelated) and adorable newcomer Jonathan, who was too young to appreciate my dusty early 80s references. Hey, did you know that Vic Morrow was named Rotary Club Man of the Year?
What? Too soon?
We went to Ariba Ariba, which in the absence of real Mexican food, will do in a pinch. Jonathan and I bonded over our mutual hatred of the sexy yet slow homos who were occupying our future table. Besides, we were in a hurry. I noticed in the midst of the football game playing on the TV over the bar that the Amazing Race was starting that night and I was fairly certain it wasn’t in the DVR at home. There were 3:34 minutes left in the third quarter which I gay-estimated was about an hour left in the game. With an hour of 60 Minutes sandwiched in between, I knew I had to leave as soon as the game ended to be home in time to not miss the start of the show.
It turns out Jonathan is as plugged in to politics as I am, and he is in the midst of reading The Nine, which I have been dying to pick up. I am such a Supreme Court junkie, I would call in sick to work just to watch a televised confirmation hearing. Then again, I would call in sick to eat a container of ice cream, so the threshold there is pretty low. And I was enjoying all of our banter until I looked up and noticed the football players touching each other inappropriately and CBS announcing the Play of the Day. In my head I heard the stopwatch ticking and Leslie Stahl, with her whipped cotton candy hair and dulcet tones, laying out her segment about famine in Africa, Lindsay Lohan or both, and I knew it was time to go.
As I raced home through the wooded splendor of the Saw Mill Parkway, the concrete monoliths of Manhattan in the rearview mirror, I took stock in the level of gay in my own gay life. Years ago, I left the ghetto behind. I loved my time in West Hollywood, but a body can only take so much abuse, and really that kind of stress testing is for the young. My existence now is suburban, surrounded on all sides by the known markers of heterosexual existence: soccer moms and RVs. And in the middle of it all, my little Cape Cod house, with the bay window and stocked bar in the basement. It’s as gay as a picnic basket, even without the bags of flower bulbs waiting on the window seat to be planted, carefully arranged by blooming season and chosen to resist the voracious dietary habits of the deer that cruise my yard like it’s The Ramble. In looking over the goods presented at the Gay Life Expo, I don’t think my life, as defined by their terms, is gay. Yes, I am fussy about my few precious elegant things, but I think that is borne more out of a desire for strict traditionalism and less about homosexuality. I’m old-fashioned, and I don’t mind it, as the song says. But given how unlike the rest of my family that is, I suppose I can lock that final piece in my gay life puzzle and consider it solved.
Apparently, for some people, gay isn’t just a hobby, it’s a way of life. And for them we have the Gay Life Expo. These kinds of expos are like speed dating between gay consumers and mainstream corporations. In each case, they are hoping to find perfection. But just like most speed dating rounds, what actually stands in front of you can often be very disappointing. For the gays: disappointment in the quality and diversity of the companies that bothered to show up. For the companies: wonder as to the location of these high end consumers demographers have been promising them for years. And if you ever want to dispel the myth of gays as fashion forward, articulate trendsetters, this is the weekend adventure for you! Other myths, such as gays being indiscriminant whoring drunks and lesbians being aggressively cheap and demanding of free items, remain woefully intact.
I wanted to go because I think it’s important for our company to crack into the NYC gay market in a substantial way. And a trade show seven weeks before Christmas is as good a place as any to plant the holiday gift seed. It was also a chance to spend some time hanging out with co-workers that I like (Jeremy Hovies, Keith Price) without the embarrassment of needing to be nice to the ones I don’t like, which I will have to do soon enough at the annual holiday party.
I had a short segment on the stage that I originally thought was just an opportunity to wave to the crowd and throw some free t-shirts to the lesbians. But when I was at the office thirty minutes before the show printing out the information, I noticed that I would instead be an emcee and be introducing some of the performers. This was not good news. Emceeing at a pride event is hard enough, but at least the crowd is drunk and excited. Performing at a trade show is like trying to sell real estate to death row inmates. The chairs are usually filled with people too lazy to walk the length of a convention center without needing to rest an hour for every ten booths they passed. I tried to encourage them to enter to win the free radio we were giving away, not more than ten feet from the closest chair but most of them preferred to stay in their seats and stare dead-eyed ahead. I don’t need a TV show now. I already know what it feels like when people watch you on TV, from the perspective of the television set itself.
The lowest form of degradation came at the end of my set when Scott Nevins launched into his “game show” with the OutQ personalities playing along with “real people” from the audience. Scott, with his Groucho brows and pancake make-up projecting like Ethel Merman to the third balcony, took to the stage like a rat diving into a sewer. For the purposes of the game and a chance at some playful nastiness in my direction, he paired me with a genetic male cross of Ab Fab’s Edina Monsoon and Jodie Foster in Nell. He was wearing X-Ray goggles from the back of a 1970s comic book and a puffy white jacket with the entire NYC subway map printed on it, his native language that of Leeloo from The Fifth Element. It seemed from his insistent waving of a gay bar rag in my face that he was in the current issue of HX Magazine, photographed for Halloween in what I can only assume is his normal attire, and captioned as “Bee Bitch.” So the other hosts had actual contestants and I was paired with a lump of mashed potatoes. As I should have learned from the Faggot Feud with Richie Rich in 2004, never walk on a stage where someone else is controlling the mike. Point taken.
After the event, I decamped with the folks at HERE TV for dinner. Cutie pie Chris was there again, although in retrospect, I realize he was the only actual HERE person at the restaurant. At the Expo, I saw Josh, but he opted to head home after the long weekend and crash. Earlier from the stage, I saw Peter Stickles walking around, but he left before I was unshackled from the umpteenth just-so Judy impression emanating from little Scotty Nevins. I hope Peter didn’t see me, but as a performer, I am certain he would have sympathized with my plight. Lady in a cage!
So it was Chris for dinner and my friend Terry from Los Angeles. The other two were flirty Jimmy with sad eyes and a boyfriend in the steam room (unrelated) and adorable newcomer Jonathan, who was too young to appreciate my dusty early 80s references. Hey, did you know that Vic Morrow was named Rotary Club Man of the Year?
What? Too soon?
We went to Ariba Ariba, which in the absence of real Mexican food, will do in a pinch. Jonathan and I bonded over our mutual hatred of the sexy yet slow homos who were occupying our future table. Besides, we were in a hurry. I noticed in the midst of the football game playing on the TV over the bar that the Amazing Race was starting that night and I was fairly certain it wasn’t in the DVR at home. There were 3:34 minutes left in the third quarter which I gay-estimated was about an hour left in the game. With an hour of 60 Minutes sandwiched in between, I knew I had to leave as soon as the game ended to be home in time to not miss the start of the show.
It turns out Jonathan is as plugged in to politics as I am, and he is in the midst of reading The Nine, which I have been dying to pick up. I am such a Supreme Court junkie, I would call in sick to work just to watch a televised confirmation hearing. Then again, I would call in sick to eat a container of ice cream, so the threshold there is pretty low. And I was enjoying all of our banter until I looked up and noticed the football players touching each other inappropriately and CBS announcing the Play of the Day. In my head I heard the stopwatch ticking and Leslie Stahl, with her whipped cotton candy hair and dulcet tones, laying out her segment about famine in Africa, Lindsay Lohan or both, and I knew it was time to go.
As I raced home through the wooded splendor of the Saw Mill Parkway, the concrete monoliths of Manhattan in the rearview mirror, I took stock in the level of gay in my own gay life. Years ago, I left the ghetto behind. I loved my time in West Hollywood, but a body can only take so much abuse, and really that kind of stress testing is for the young. My existence now is suburban, surrounded on all sides by the known markers of heterosexual existence: soccer moms and RVs. And in the middle of it all, my little Cape Cod house, with the bay window and stocked bar in the basement. It’s as gay as a picnic basket, even without the bags of flower bulbs waiting on the window seat to be planted, carefully arranged by blooming season and chosen to resist the voracious dietary habits of the deer that cruise my yard like it’s The Ramble. In looking over the goods presented at the Gay Life Expo, I don’t think my life, as defined by their terms, is gay. Yes, I am fussy about my few precious elegant things, but I think that is borne more out of a desire for strict traditionalism and less about homosexuality. I’m old-fashioned, and I don’t mind it, as the song says. But given how unlike the rest of my family that is, I suppose I can lock that final piece in my gay life puzzle and consider it solved.
Saturday, August 19, 2006
"Civilization Is A Conversation Over Time"
No one who knows me will be surprised by my odd and well-documented fan girl obsession with the U.S. Supreme Court. My pin-up love for John Roberts Jr. hasn't diminished, although I would be lying if I said I didn't miss cranky old Rehnquist, waving his walking stick violently at reporters attending his morning walks. Alito is not very interesting to me, mostly because he doesn't have weird doilies popping out of the top of his robe like The O'C did.
Speaking of The O'C, I have been recording C-Span's America & The Courts on my DVR and I love it. They had a great award program honoring The O'C herself attended by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Roberts Jr a while back. There was thunderous applause at the end of the speech so she had trouble finishing with her big finale about being the first woman on the Supreme Court. "I look forward to the third, the fourth and the fifth!" clearly indicating her preference for the majority of the court to reflect the majority of the population. I agree.
More recently, I caught a speech by Justice Kennedy at the ABA Convention in Hawaii earlier this month. I have never followed him closely, and this was the first speech of his I ever witnessed. It was great. I now have a new pin-up for my wall. Here are some of my favorite moments from the speech:
"The enlightenment was of tremendous importance to the civilized world. Isaac Newton, for over a hundred years, was the most famous person in the world. The average person didn't read his thesis on physics, but this business about the apple falling down made sense. And people wondered 'If we can explain the laws of the universe, can't we explain the principles that should control a government? Can't we have a government by conscious design?' And so the framers drafted the American Constitution."
I loved his direct connection between the advancement of science and our ability to create our own destiny as a society. The only way to create progress is by distinguishing reality from myth and superstition.
"The framers knew that they weren't prescient enough and they were not brazen enough to specify all of the elements of justice. They knew this could become an apparent only over time. They knew that the whole purpose of a Constitution is to arise above the inequities and the injustices that you can't see. But now we are in an era, where I sense something different is happening. We know that 'truth' needs no translation. There is a word for 'truth' in every language. We know that the world is getting smaller. We know that the rule of law is essential. We hear a lot about security. But our best security, ultimately our only security, is in the world of ideas. And I sense a slight foreboding. I sense that we are not making the case as well as we ought."
I think he has really hit the core of the issue we have, especially in the Middle East. The value of democracy is participation and engagement in change. There is a resistance to want to understand why we are resented around the world, but I don't think we are hated and resented. I think it is their frustrated attempt to engage in a change, to affect their own destiny. But we have to make the case that our path of reasoned and modulated change over time is better than chaos, terror and totalitarianism, even as we struggle ourselves with the slowness of that reasoned change in our march of equality at home.
Justice Kennedy talked about clean water in Africa and that the main issue blocking the most fundamental need in human existence was not science, but government corruption. The law only works when people respect it, and they feel that the government they share is worthy of that respect. This is the fundamental problem in Iraq. It is lovely that people voted in the election, but the elected officials need to be worthy of that vote. As we see at home, if politicians don't operate as promised, the electorate gets very cranky. But we have a foundation of democracy to temper our feelings. It is much harder to create that same foundation of trust that we have out of a bad situation of bombings and terror. Election cycles and change seem far away compared to car bombs and explosions.
"For us, law is a liberating force. It's a promise, it's a covenant. It says that 'you can hope, you can dream, you can dare. You can plan. You have joy in your existence.' That's the meaning of the law as Americans understand it. And that's the meaning of the law that we must explain to a doubting world where the verdict is still out."
I think it is easy to forget the importance of consistency in our American experience. Life here is not perfect but there are certain things you can count on. I was reading some crappy in-flight magazine a few years back and an economist wrote about the importance of the basic right to own land. He described it as the backbone of the human experience and more importantly civilization as we know it. If people can depend on the land they own (that no one will suddenly take it from them, or blow it up randomly and leave them with nothing) they can make plans, for home, for family, for business. The chaos of life is what prevents the stability and wealth we know here at home. Iraq can never be free without the security of a consistent notion of law, of property, and of common sense and reason. Until we convince them that this level of consistency (and not corruption and chaos) works, there can be no peace in the world.
Speaking of The O'C, I have been recording C-Span's America & The Courts on my DVR and I love it. They had a great award program honoring The O'C herself attended by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Roberts Jr a while back. There was thunderous applause at the end of the speech so she had trouble finishing with her big finale about being the first woman on the Supreme Court. "I look forward to the third, the fourth and the fifth!" clearly indicating her preference for the majority of the court to reflect the majority of the population. I agree.
More recently, I caught a speech by Justice Kennedy at the ABA Convention in Hawaii earlier this month. I have never followed him closely, and this was the first speech of his I ever witnessed. It was great. I now have a new pin-up for my wall. Here are some of my favorite moments from the speech:
"The enlightenment was of tremendous importance to the civilized world. Isaac Newton, for over a hundred years, was the most famous person in the world. The average person didn't read his thesis on physics, but this business about the apple falling down made sense. And people wondered 'If we can explain the laws of the universe, can't we explain the principles that should control a government? Can't we have a government by conscious design?' And so the framers drafted the American Constitution."
I loved his direct connection between the advancement of science and our ability to create our own destiny as a society. The only way to create progress is by distinguishing reality from myth and superstition.
"The framers knew that they weren't prescient enough and they were not brazen enough to specify all of the elements of justice. They knew this could become an apparent only over time. They knew that the whole purpose of a Constitution is to arise above the inequities and the injustices that you can't see. But now we are in an era, where I sense something different is happening. We know that 'truth' needs no translation. There is a word for 'truth' in every language. We know that the world is getting smaller. We know that the rule of law is essential. We hear a lot about security. But our best security, ultimately our only security, is in the world of ideas. And I sense a slight foreboding. I sense that we are not making the case as well as we ought."
I think he has really hit the core of the issue we have, especially in the Middle East. The value of democracy is participation and engagement in change. There is a resistance to want to understand why we are resented around the world, but I don't think we are hated and resented. I think it is their frustrated attempt to engage in a change, to affect their own destiny. But we have to make the case that our path of reasoned and modulated change over time is better than chaos, terror and totalitarianism, even as we struggle ourselves with the slowness of that reasoned change in our march of equality at home.
Justice Kennedy talked about clean water in Africa and that the main issue blocking the most fundamental need in human existence was not science, but government corruption. The law only works when people respect it, and they feel that the government they share is worthy of that respect. This is the fundamental problem in Iraq. It is lovely that people voted in the election, but the elected officials need to be worthy of that vote. As we see at home, if politicians don't operate as promised, the electorate gets very cranky. But we have a foundation of democracy to temper our feelings. It is much harder to create that same foundation of trust that we have out of a bad situation of bombings and terror. Election cycles and change seem far away compared to car bombs and explosions.
"For us, law is a liberating force. It's a promise, it's a covenant. It says that 'you can hope, you can dream, you can dare. You can plan. You have joy in your existence.' That's the meaning of the law as Americans understand it. And that's the meaning of the law that we must explain to a doubting world where the verdict is still out."
I think it is easy to forget the importance of consistency in our American experience. Life here is not perfect but there are certain things you can count on. I was reading some crappy in-flight magazine a few years back and an economist wrote about the importance of the basic right to own land. He described it as the backbone of the human experience and more importantly civilization as we know it. If people can depend on the land they own (that no one will suddenly take it from them, or blow it up randomly and leave them with nothing) they can make plans, for home, for family, for business. The chaos of life is what prevents the stability and wealth we know here at home. Iraq can never be free without the security of a consistent notion of law, of property, and of common sense and reason. Until we convince them that this level of consistency (and not corruption and chaos) works, there can be no peace in the world.
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