Category Archives: Religion

War on Drugs, War on Terror, War on the Poor

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Coming to a New York near you: Soldiers map Afghanis for future waterboarding

“Human mapping”?  This has something to do with DNA, right? You plot out all those genomes, and pretty soon you can rebuild Einstein from some vitamin pills and a teaspoon of battery fluid. Before you put that primeval soup on the stove, though, be aware the phrase means other things.  In Afghanistan, “‘human maps‘ help fight Taliban”:

 ”I’m 105 years old,” said Bismiullah, an old man stopped by a patrol in southern Afghanistan as part of military efforts to map the population in the battle against the Taliban. …

Troops in the region and across Afghanistan are gathering photographs, fingerprints and employment details as well as canvassing opinions from local residents to find out what they want for the war-racked province. The goal is to strengthen relations between pro-government forces and the local population.

But the information gathered can also help troops catch Taliban fighters, for example by matching fingerprints on home-made bombs or guns.

Formally known as human terrain mapping, the process is a key strand of the strategy to build better ties between pro-government forces and local people as the war enters arguably its most important year.

Yes, fingerprinting centenarians is a great way to win hearts and minds!  As with most counter-insurgency efforts, however, those organs are less important than controlling musculature and movement. In Vietnam or Malaysia, the imperial powers isolated populations in “strategic hamlets” to keep them away from rebel forces. Now you use information and the associated technologies to identify people, fix loyalties and locations, survey where people go. “The guerrilla must swim in the people as the fish swims in the sea,” Mao said, more or less. The old idea was to drain the water and leave the fish exposed and flopping.  Now, you tag it with an electronic beeper, and later set a drone after it. Politics as animal control!

We don’t have guerillas here in the United States, but you can never be too careful.   That, at least, is the argument behind the New York Police Department’s recently revealed, hugely controversial surveillance plan to keep tabs on Muslims. The Associated Press’s reporting on this in the last few months has unveiled an enormous domestic intelligence program, arguably the most insidious since the COINTELPRO probes honeycombed the Left back in the 1960s.  There were “mosque crawlers” sent to infiltrate places of worship; there were spies on student groups at jihadist caravanserais like Yale; there was “human mapping” of “communities of interest” and “Locations of Concern.”  A “Location of Concern,” so the cops’ secret papers say, is a

–Localized center of activity for a particular ethnic group.
–Location that persons of concern may be attracted to.
–Location that individuals may frequent to search for ethnic companionship.
–Location that individuals may find co-conspirators for illegal actions.

Or: a “Popular hangout or meeting location for a particular ethnic group that provides a forum for listening to neighborhood gossip or otherwise provide an overall feel for the community.” Just watch these terrorists:

Monsters.

And there are literal maps:

In addition to Egyptians, Afghanis, and Nigerians in teeming Newark, the NYPD also mapped out Brazilians and Portuguese. Each fado may conceal a fatwa, if you play it backwards. The flame of the churrascaria burns in the eyes of the martyrs.

Plenty of people have condemned New York’s spy system since the story broke, but the Obama administration has been quiet. Today, though, we learned that US government money went to pay for the local secret-police work:

The money is part of a little-known grant intended to help law enforcement fight drug crimes. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush and Obama administrations have provided $135 million to the New York and New Jersey region through the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, known as HIDTA….

The White House HIDTA grant program was established at the height of the drug war to help police fight drug gangs and unravel supply routes. It has provided about $2.3 billion to local authorities in the past decade.

The War on Drugs morphed, like a late-model Terminator, into the War on Terror. “After the terror attacks, law enforcement was allowed to use some of that money to fight terrorism.” We don’t know exactly how much is some: “NYPD intelligence operations receive scant oversight in New York. Congress, which approves the money for the program, is not provided with a detailed breakdown of activities.” $1.3 million of the money, though, went to buy cars that “have been used to photograph mosques and record the license plates of worshippers.”

the Eye of Sauron

In addition … the White House money pays for part of the office space the intelligence division shares with other agencies in Manhattan. When police compiled lists of Muslims who took new, Americanized names, they kept those records on HIDTA computer servers. That was ongoing as recently as October, city officials said.

Many NYPD intelligence officers, including those that conducted surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods, had HIDTA email addresses. Briefing documents for Kelly, the police commissioner, were compiled on HIDTA computers. Those documents described what police informants were hearing inside mosques and which academic conferences Muslim scholars attended.

When police wanted to pay a confidential informant, they were told to sign onto the HIDTA website to file the paperwork…

The truth is that governance in the US has been slipping fully into the modes and mindset of a security state for a long time. The government sees large parts of its population not as citizens or constituencies, but as potential objects of a counterinsurgency campaign.

The security state no longer legitimates itself by safeguarding the general welfare. Neoliberalized and mortgaged up to its testicles, it’s given up on that.   It defines itself by its ability to defend the borders: to provide military triumphs, a sufficient if never unquestionable sense of safety, and some colorful, invigorating rah-rah . Since there is a limit to how often threats from outside can be conjured or concocted, it eventually turns to other enemies, internal, intestinal.   Its purpose becomes defending part of the population against another part.

The War on Drugs, far from being a placid predecessor of the Terror Games, was a perfect template. It identified marked, ethnically defined groups within the citizenry as Communities of Interest (and don’t think I mean the white suburbanites who recharged the coke market in the ’80s).  It mapped out Locations of Concern, and helped resegregate the Interestees in them.  It charted a new geography. It plotted out the ties of import and exchange that linked Concernful places inside the boundaries — in inner cities, in shuttered crack houses, in the muling guts of migrant women — to strategic Concerns and enemies abroad, from Colombia to Kandahar. The internal crisis became a cause for external action. We devastated Panama, or seized the poppy fields of Afghanistan, because invisible tendrils tied them to our own neighborhoods. The sense of mysterious linkage made for menace, but out of it we recuperated the knowledge that we were different, and better. (Steven Soderbergh’s weird, fantasy movie Traffic, about the drug trade, makes the myths explicit: he filmed the Mexico scenes on old, yellow stock, as if foreign air were made of different chemicals and, once immersed in it, you start swimming through molasses.)   War at home and war abroad cooperated. Other nations’ sovereignties surrender to our impotence over what happens within our own. Most recently, the US presided over a massacre in Jamaica: local police and military killed dozens of civilians in order to capture a single drug lord who had offended against the Americans. What we ask of our allies in South America or the Caribbean is that they become slightly less chaotic versions of Waziristan.

This means, too, that the Wars on Drugs and on Terror amount in essence to a single War: the big one, on the Poor.   Mike Davis wrote a decade ago about the coming urban landscapes where states will control unemployed and disenfranchised masses of migrants with force. That’s what you’ve got in Brazil. What the US pushed Jamaica’s government to do, Dilma Roussef did at her own discretion (with, to be sure, the added push of cleaning up Rio for the coming Olympics): she called in the military to invade and clean up the favelas. 

The NYPD, I’m afraid, is onto something. It’s true that the closest thing to a terror attack on the city in the last decade was foiled, not by their millions in surveillance money, but by a T-shirt vendor who noticed an oddly smoking car in Times Square. But for Mayor Bloomberg, this only means we have to enlist the entire T-shirt vending community as permanent informers. Faced with the fact that “The NYPD routinely monitored the websites, blogs and forums of Muslim student associations at colleges including Yale, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania,” he answered: “If going on websites and looking for information is not what Yale stands for, I don’t know.” We need an enemy, and if a sophomore blogger is what we’re stuck with, run with what you got.  The watching cameras multiply. This is our new world, where all the wars are civil wars.

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On choice

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Cynthia did not put adequate thought into the ramifications of her words

The Cynthia Nixon scandal roils on. I’ve stopped keeping count of who’s blaming her for what these days; the last I heard, she was responsible for kids being electroshocked in Tennessee. Loose lips sink ships; but it seems that Cynthia’s, like a Helen of Troy in reverse, have torpedoed a thousand of them. It all reminds me a bit of G.W. Bush’s press secretary, in the chilly first days of our War of Terror, warning critics that “people have to watch what they say and watch what they do.”   I am not sure that Guantanamo has a cage or two for loquacious actors, but I gather some folks wish it did.

In discussing the affair, Andrew Sullivan graciously linked to my own post, and the question of what would happen if we treated sexual orientation like religion, “a decision so profoundly a part of one’s elected and constructed selfhood that one should never be forced to change it.” He added:

Of course, I don’t actually experience my faith as a choice, in the usual sense of the word. It feels as deep a part of me as my orientation.

Those two sentences rang true, and they pointed me to a basic question. What do we mean by “choice,” anyway?   There are certain cultural horizons that define people as much as any biological ones do.  And thinking about these things can make the concept of “choice” seem inadequate as a way of grasping how human beings act, decide, and are.

It’s inadequate, at least, if taken in the way we moderns tend to treat it, as a pure act of untrammeled freedom, occurring on an abstract plane vacated of constraints or pasts.  Andrew has stuck with being a Catholic despite the Church’s best efforts to make people like him pariahs. Is that courage, or acceptance? I would bet at some point he has expressed this as “I choose to be a Catholic because” … But I would also bet he has expressed it as “I can’t imagine not being a Catholic because…” Both seem to me equally valid ways of saying much the same thing – equally true pictures of the same situation, only seen from different aspects, like the blind men groping the elephant. We don’t always choose by making pure, existential leaps in the dark, like Kierkegaard or Lord Jim. Sometimes our freedom consists in staying rather than in going, though to stay means embracing the conditions that formed us and limit us. Sometimes we choose by being, not deciding.

For myself, though I am certainly not a practicing Christian, though I was not raised in an especially devout family, and though I believe virtually nothing of Christian dogma, when I’m asked about my religion I almost always describe myself as Christian – because certain aspects of a religion that in other ways I loathe form my horizon still. The myths of resurrection and redemption are deeply if inarticulately ingrained in me,  frames of hope and mercy through which I understand the world. (I have tried telling people I’m an “agnostic Christian,” but it nearly always makes everybody terribly mad.)  I confess to a mild, instinctive mistrust of people who convert from one whole religious tradition to another: Muslims who become Christian, or Christians who become Hindus, switches like that.  (I make something of an exception for Buddhism, since it is less a religion than a philosophical stance.)  At some gut level I feel you can lose your religion and become an atheist, but you can’t just take on a completely different tradition, with all its weight and taboos and cultural baggage. Such converts appear to me at times like followers of Gilbert Osmond, the cold-blooded collector of culture in James’ Portrait of a Lady, who said that if you happen to find yourself one day without a tradition, it’s incumbent on you to purchase a new one as rapidly as possible. But that won’t work!  I feel like shouting. You can scrap your original one, but that doesn’t mean the new one you try to own will own you.

Objectively, I realize this is completely silly. To change your beliefs in one compartment of your life doesn’t make you a luftmensch (a person of the air, as the Nazis called the supposedly rootless Jews). Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with being a luftmensch.  Air is healthy. My point is that I feel a weight, a drag, of resistance to the idea that choice is unconditioned, and I feel it in areas completely apart from the putatively destined, determined realms of sexuality or desire. There’s not some simple antinomy where genes decide a part of who we are, and all the rest is up for grabs. Everybody has their arenas where they feel freer, and others where they feel fixed. Our histories decide them, not just some biological allotment.

Another instance: I know I am and will always remain a middle-class American. Being rich or being poor, moving to another country, even changing my passport wouldn’t alter that. Wherever I’ve lived outside the US borders,  I’ve always eschewed the American expatriate scene. You don’t go abroad in order to make new American friends.  But from time to time, every couple of months or so, I found I needed to talk to my fellow countrypeople. Not to share political chat, or explore our economic interests, or voice some gross contempt for the locals: But because there was a subtler if more trivial common horizon of pop culture, of gestures comprehended and jokes understood, of TV commercials we watched when we were kids.  I needed that to remind me of who I was. Living in Romania, I might have a lover who was Romanian, and we might understand each other better than anybody else in the world did. But he still didn’t know why the silly rabbit could never eat Trix. Sometimes I needed to talk to people who knew that Trix was for kids.

It’s strange I should feel this about religion or nationality, by objective standards fairly contingent things, when I firmly believe we can change our genders. But gender, when it’s assigned to us at birth, isn’t given us with a history. As we grow up, it takes on all kind of symbolic meanings, but doesn’t necessarily acquire a past.   Being a “man” doesn’t require associating yourself with the whole history of manhood (some model figures, yes, but manhood itself doesn’t have a story). It’s forward-looking. You will become a man, fathers tell their sons, you will grow into manhood. Gender is a project, a perpetual becoming. It’s easier to abandon a future than a past. By contrast, faith and class are part not just of our personal histories, but of the immensely longer history behind us. Some people can liberate themselves from that history to greater or less degrees; some don’t want to.   But whether any one area of your life has been thus liberated as against another is, perhaps, a morally neutral question. What Kant called the project of autonomy, the task of ridding yourself of the vast weight of the given, is necessarily partial. No one can ever denude herself altogether. Recognizing that you can never place all your life under the dominion of choice, you must choose where you will strive to exercise your choices.

Our language around “choice,” and “freedom,” is terribly impoverished. By “ours” I mean “us Americans”: but also parts of the LGBT movement in many places around the world, which have got their vocabulary and a fragment of their worldview from an American definition. This is one consequence of being from a place where choice is so valorized, so elevated as the sole intent of life, that no one bothers to define or interrogate what it means. We either imagine that choice is completely free, untrammeled,  taking place in a vacuum –or that we’re completely constrained, controlled,  defined, overdetermined creatures of an implacable destiny. It’s obvious, and yet hard to articulate, that neither is true.  It’s telling that one side in the most extended U.S. political battle of the last forty years couches its advocacy in terms of the “right to choose.”  It’s never the right to choose something – to have an abortion or not, to carry a child to term or not. All that’s elided, as though “choice” summed up that and everything else that could be said. Certainly, this rhetoric was field-tested for palatability and persuasiveness, and I cringe to cavil at it. Equally certainly, controlling reproduction opens up for women a whole repertory of other choices that would otherwise be closed.  But insistently reiterating a right to unlimited choice must turn many a listener’s mind to all the things she never had a choice over: the hand-me-down clothes in childhood, the crappy carpet that came with the house, the job, the husband. And with that comes resentment, a feeling such choice is less a right than an invidious privilege.  Has this whole strategy worked out the way we planned?

The truth is that we choose; and we choose from a repertory that our pasts have given us; and we choose as beings who are already endowed with histories behind us, not sprung fresh and new from Jupiter’s head or the half-shell.  We bring our lives to our choices. What would they be worth otherwise?

Being in love is a bit like what I’m talking about.  There has to be an element of free will in it, otherwise nobody would want your love. To be sure, nobody in love feels entirely free. Nobody deludes themselves they’re in full command of their feelings. Yet who would wish to be presented with an attachment that’s just a bundle of involuntary drives? Who would like to be told, “Honey, my hormones selected you,” even if they get a bouquet of roses into the bargain? From one side it’s an unstoppable passion, but that’s not the only aspect. The side from which we can say we chose the loved one represents our respect, not just for them as deserving objects of desire, but for ourselves as reasonable beings who deserve to be desired back.    And yet, of course, it’s a determined choice. And of course, love opens up a Pandora’s jewelry box of further choices everyday: To stay or to go, to accommodate or argue, to speak or be silent, to share or not to share.  In our intimacies where we struggle most to be ourselves, choice and compulsion are inextricably intertwined.

Nixon in "Wit": The bald truth

Maybe we in the United States need a bit more Edmund Burke, to ground our sense of freedom in a context.  Burke understood that when we vote our ancestors vote with us: that we are inheritors of history, not just its inhabitants and masters.   But that knowledge is not just a property of the Right. Marx too grasped that our consciousness is conditioned, that history makes us before we can make it.

Nor do philosophers map the only road to realizing this. A poet or two has been there first. These days Cynthia Nixon is reading John Donne on Broadway (the New York Times, which exposed her heresy on “choice,” gave her a glorious review to make up for it).   Perhaps, in her private moments when the audience is gone, she also whispers to herself some lines from Auden:

Wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice
Again and again we sigh for an ancient South,
For the warm nude ages of instinctive poise,
For the taste of joy in the innocent mouth. …

We envy streams and houses that are sure:
But we are articled to error; we
Were never nude and calm like a great door,

And never will be perfect like the fountains;
We live in freedom by necessity,
A mountain people dwelling among mountains.

 

Mitt, money, Mormons, class

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Among the revelations stemming from Willard Mitt Romney’s tax returns – now being combed with the exigetical intensity usually given to sacred texts – are his contributions to homophobia. Most directly, his family foundation gave $35,000 to two “pro-family,” anti-gay groups. For Mitt, of course, that’s nothing. But he also tithes — gives at least 1/10 of his income to his institutional religion, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; in the last two years, that amounted to more than $4 million. The Mormons, in turn, are big funders of the homophobes. Mike Signorile says, “The church itself gave over $180,000 to help pass Prop 8 [the 2008 anti-same-sex-marriage referendum in California]. The church was fined by the California Fair Political Practices Commission for not reporting its numerous financial contributions to the cause.” The Mormons also have a network of small, strange NGOS, circling around a few post office boxes in Arizona, that carry on similar struggles at the United Nations.

It seems to me this opposition has a large component of sour grapes.   Deep in the Church festers a feeling of: If we didn’t get to redefine marriage, why should you? 

The LDS, after all, held sacrosanct for years the practice of polygamy or plural marriage, as in Big Love, the better to multiply their congregants.   A Supreme Court ruling conclusively banned it in 1879, and eleven years later God spoke to the head of the Church and told him, be fruitful but only with one woman per, until further notice. But a certain resentment remains, a feeling that others should not get away with matrimonial overflow – whether beyond the bounds of number or of gender — denied to the chosen. I say this based not just on intuition but on some conversations with very right-wing Saints over the years. Most notably, around a decade back I spoke at a conference on religion at Cornell. Upstate New York (where Joseph Smith found the golden plates and the magic spectacles, and founded the glorious religion) still has warrens of underground Mormons, some of them dissident, clinging to the old-time faith, living in secrecy somewhat like monsters in an H.P. Lovecraft story.   Several were in the audience. They seemed to blink unfamiliarly at the light. They were all men, all compact as Toby mugs, with those patriarchal beards that omit mustaches and make the wearer look like his own ancestor, or C. Everett Koop. (Later, when I met Salafists in Egypt, I recognized the style.)

Brigham Young and his beard

After my address, we got into a discussion about the concept I’d introduced: sexual rights. Almost shyly, they asked how a right to sexual autonomy would affect the number of people one married. I said, very carefully, that one could in theory construct a human rights argument for legal recognition of polygamous relationships – as long as gender equality was respected. They perked up visibly, like portraits coming to life. The reservation about gender seemed to them a potentially endurable concession, something you could put in the law as long as you didn’t tell the women. The women wouldn’t learn to read, anyway! I felt that if we had a few more hours, we might almost have arrived at some historic compact, like Mussolini’s concordat with the Vatican: a polygamous-promiscuous alliance to sweep the nation simultaneously forward to the Age of Aquarius, and back to the Age of Abraham.  I wonder if we could revive the prospect someday. Divided, we are weak; but together, we can rule the world.

Happy Pride! You're fired.

Mitt, notoriously mercurial about everything, used to be a bit nicer to the gays. His opponents this year brought up a bright pink flyer his campaign distributed during his 2002 run for Massachusetts governor, with he and his running mate saying “All citizens deserve equal rights, regardless of their sexual preference.”  Mitt now says he never saw it before. Probably this is that pink slip he was always worried about getting.

Mitt’s devotion to one-man one-woman marriage is perhaps made more interesting by the fact that Mitt’s own family comes from the Mormon colonies founded in Mexico by plural marriers fleeing persecution in the United States. His father, George Romney, was born there, in 1916, just before the colonies broke up because of the Mexican revolution and the exiles returned to the U.S.   (George ran for president in 1968.  Spawned on foreign soil, he would, oddly enough, have been disqualified under the standards birthers try to use against that Kenyan interloper, Barack Obama.  Mitt’s son Tagg, who lately voiced his affinity with the birthers, might want to check his family history.)

On a very cursory search, I don’t see any evidence that Mitt’s own ancestors practiced plural marriage; there seem to be few enough of them to suggest that monogamy straitjacketed their sperm into limited outlets. But certainly they must have been ideologically, or theologically, in favor; that was the main motive for the exodus to the Sierra Madre.   It would be intriguing to confront Mitt with this genealogy sometime, particularly if Rick Santorum were in the room to contribute his own questions. They have coyotes in Mexico, Mitt; did your granddaddy marry any dogs down there? It could make an interesting discussion.

The reason I got to thinking about these things was because for weeks I’ve kept seeing Mitt Romney described, in news articles, as a “WASP” and an “aristocrat.” And he’s not.

It’s  a terrible, amnesiac misrepresentation. He cannot be called a WASP; Mormons are not, in the normal sense, Protestants, which is what the P stands for. They occupy their own distinct niche within (or maybe a little bit without) Christianity. Meanwhile, his clan were aristocrats, in  a sense, but Mormon aristocrats: dignitaries within a community that had long been a tribe wholly unto itself. Until his father’s generation, they had nothing to do with the seats of American power. The sachems of the Protestant ascendancy, with their rites of the Episcopal Church and the Porcellian Club, their temple complexes at Exeter and Andover, Harvard and Yale, their human sacrifices at the debutante ball, inhabited a completely different world. The Mormons were beneath their notice, hardly better than far-off Aztecs when viewed from New York or from the heights of Beacon Hill.

"In Memorial Brigham Young": 1877 anti-Mormon cartoon

In America, for a very long time, the Latter-Day Saints remained morally and sociologically isolated. It took the Mormon church decades to shed the disreputability that polygamy had smeared across it.  In the first decade of the 20th century, the US Senate required three years of hearings before seating an electee from Utah (the later-famous Reed Smoot), because his detractors claimed his status as a Mormon Apostle disqualified him.  (It was of Smoot and his battle against immoral literature that Ogden Nash wrote the immortal lines:

Senator Smoot (Republican, Ut.)
Is planning a war on smut …
Senator Smoot is an institute
Not to be bribed with pelf.
He guards our homes from erotic tomes
By reading them all himself.

Read more here.)

By the time the church had won a partial respectability, the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s made it a pariah in a new sense. The Latter-Day Saints still understood the deity to say that blacks were a separate and inferior creation to whites; the rest of the United States heard the Lord, or at least the law, differently.   Only in 1978, when God changed his mind, did the ideological barriers separating the Church from broader American society fully relax. For those of us in the advocacy business, it would be interesting to know what kind of lobbying persuaded God.

Romney père: auto-maton

George Romney was a figure who bridged both worlds, the insular one of his tribe and the wider one of public power. He was a thoroughly self-made man – he never went to college, and worked his way up to head of the American Motor Corporation, which as they said at the time was fourth among the Big Three car companies. He then ran for governor of Michigan, and won.  Despite the Church’s residual prejudices, he fought racism vigorously in public life and supported the civil rights movement honorably. At the same time, he was a grandee of the Church, in every way a pattern of dignity and rectitude. (His uncle, also a Mexican colonist, had been the first president of what’s now Brigham Young University.) But with all that, you wouldn’t quite call him part of the American elite. The deliquescent ease with which his presidential candidacy dissolved in 1968 (his support melted away like Utah snow when he said he’d been “brainwashed” over Vietnam) indicated that the truly powerful felt no special closeness to him. He ended his career as Nixon’s secretary of urban development which in that administration was like a chauffeur pensioned off to polish hubcaps when he can no longer drive.

If you want to know what an American patrician looks like, cast an eye instead on George H. W. Bush: Andover, Yale, Skull and Bones, son of a senator and grandson of an arms salesman. How different from the Romneys! He was Gumby-postured and slouchy; he spoke like Bertie Wooster; he wore unpressed suits in the style of 1955, and he got blind drunk every day by 3 PM. (So it was rumored in Washington. He was careful to start press conferences and wars before noon.)   He didn’t have to prove anything to any higher class, because there was no higher class. He could just be who he was, although what that was in a deeper-than-sartorial sense he was never sure.  (Unfortunately, as a politician he was forced to pander to the lower classes, which caused him no end of trouble, as he proved terrible at it.  His apparently smug son George W. was actually much more insecure, probably accentuated by his eschewal of hooch, which served him well – he empathized with the jitters of the unwashed Yahoos, and could talk their language.)

Are these things clothes, even? They don't have pinstripes.

Mitt Romney is nothing like that. Just watch. He’s stiff. He’s uncertain. He combs his hair too closely and his suits seem to have been dipped in Superglue. He moves like someone who just got his body for Christmas, but lost the instruction manual.  Persuaded to wear unfamiliar jeans on the campaign trail in order to “humanize” himself, he keeps glancing down uneasily as if he’s really naked and they just haven’t told him yet. His robotic demeanor has nothing to do with the hauteur of “aristocracy.”  Iit’s the checked hyper-caution of someone watching his own every move and trying to be what he’s not. He’s impersonating a member of an elite that hasn’t let him in. As a devout Mormon leader he’s obliged to wear special underwear, certifying he and his genitalia are secretly sacred to the Lord. These antiquated garments keep showing in the imagination, faint creases through his shellacked clothes, and they seem like the most natural part of him. The rest is all costume, and it’s not cut to his size.

Mitt Romney’s father George remained  in and of the West, as Nick Carraway would say in Gatsby – in that abode of American individualism very different from the class-bound, class-defined East Coast. He knew his limits and by and large he stuck to them. (Michigan, for Carraway, would have been amply West enough.)  Mitt sought out the East; he came to Harvard; he stayed in Boston; and it’s fairly obvious this exotic Mormon with his strange skivvies never quite fit in. He still doesn’t fit in. He’s comfortable in a simple corporate world where status comes from money — but not in the world of class, that other ghost-world that persists and underlies it, made out of memories, of phrases registered and gestures half-remembered, where people are judged by a numinous quality of accommodating, of knowing how things are done or are undone, of understanding how life is woven out of signs and one must signal back to be a part of it. In his hardened carapace of fake skin, he sees the seamless world of the social but it can’t reach him.   He’s lost and no longer at ease there, not recognizing the looks on people’s faces, smiling when he ought to sigh.

Poor Mitt. He’s a prisoner of the persistence of class in American life. It’s the thing nobody talks about but everybody has to understand.

Maybe the real insecurity of his church is actually similar — I mean, the reason they spend so much money to “defend marriage”: they know the memory that shadows them in American society, the mark of their exclusion from the class system, is that they were off the map on marriage before, and now they must be plus royaliste que le roi.   Still, it’s Mitt who’s suffering right now from the paradox of class. His inability to comprehend it is destroying the political career he spent his adulthood trying to buy.

It’s sad he keeps getting confused with an “aristocrat”: that only makes things worse.   Maybe he’d be happier off in the simpler past, in that long-lost Mexico colony where each hut had bedrooms for eight wives, in the vanished century and the arid hills.  Somebody should ask him. Rick Santorum?

Queering the Hitch: Why Christopher was not my kind

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I never knew the late Christopher Hitchens. Friends of mine who hung peripherally around The Nation, that bastion of embattled leftiness, were full of stories about him that sketched a Falstaffian outrageousness: the time, for instance, that he tried to charge his girlfriend’s abortion to his magazine expense account. He drank famously and enormously, of course, and there was a feeling that he did so because it offered an excuse for actions that would be inexcusable if committed while sober. His peccadilloes, or worse, were as celebrated as his passions. Just one example: driven by his almost-obsessive loathing for the Clintons, he tried to get his former friend Sidney Blumenthal, who defended them, indicted for perjury.   It was possible to see this too as somehow a side-effect of the lush life, treachery in a drunken rage; but it was hard to imagine him staying smashed over the whole months-long progress of the investigation. Not impossible, but hard.

His most famous betrayal, of course — that’s how many saw it — was his support for the Iraq war and George W. Bush.   One could almost hope, too, that this was something he did in a decade-long drunken binge; that he’d wake up one day with a hundred thousand Iraqi corpses around him, like the smashed glass and broken friendships relicted after a more ordinary bender, and go into a twelve-step and start rifling his Rolodex for people to apologize to.   He never backed off, though. The war was one thing he remained faithful to till the day he died, which as it happened was the day the US finally left Iraq — though the combat, with new combatants, will likely go on and on.  Although I didn’t much follow his career, I do remember seeing him on TV in a hotel room in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, back in 2006.  Saddam Hussein had just been condemned to death, and Australian news had rousted up Hitchens to comment. It must have been five in the morning in Washington, and he was still, or already, drunk.  He didn’t just slur his words; whole sentences shaled over into a jumbled heap of grammar, as if they were melting below the knees. I recall wondering: Who can possibly confuse him with an expert? Why is he on TV?

Now Ace Reporter Doug Ireland has penned a short memoir of Hitchens, which, for those of us who’d largely buried the man’s memory under accusations of treachery, goes far to explain why others liked him for so long. He could be a wonderful writer; he knew a lot, although it didn’t always inform his judgment; he had an immense appetite for life, and if his loyalties were erratic, they were intense and real. (He remained loyal to Doug, at least, which is saying something.)  The topic coaxes Doug out of his usual defensive perimeter of pompous prose. He writes with real feeling. It’s impossible not to be touched by the story of how Hitchens consoled Doug after his lover’s death, and dissuaded him from suicide; or by the little billets-doux of affection and respect by which Hitchens, so often bullying and competitive, encouraged a less materially successful colleague. Kudos to Doug on humanizing Hitchens; he makes one share the sense of loss he clearly, deeply feels.

It would be too much, though, to say he makes me like Hitchens, or entirely reconciles me to finding the man’s grumpy face decorating the cover of Gay City News, with the headline “My Queer Friend Christopher Hitchens.”   It feels like those glossy gay periodicals that put straight celebrities up front, partly to sell copies, partly, I suspect, to speak to the gays’ deep insecurity that they’re just not good enough. We need some hetero’s approval to make us feel proud. A fellow fag’s support doesn’t cut the proverbial mustard.

Of course, I recognize that Doug wanted to memorialize Hitchens someplace, and GCN is almost the only venue that will publish him these days.   Still …. Queer? What entitles the man to the epithet?

Let’s see. I tend to dismiss the schoolboy crushes and university affairs involving fellow lads and cads that Hitchens discusses in his autobiography, a matter Ireland makes much of. He quotes Hitchens’ own account:

‘He’ was a sort of strawberry blond, very slightly bowlegged, with a wicked smile that seemed to promise both innocence and experience. … He was my age. He was quite right-wing (which I swiftly decided to forgive him) but also a ‘rebel’ in the sense of being a cavalier elitist… The marvelous boy was more urbane than I was, and much more knowing, if slightly less academic. His name was Guy, and I still sometimes twitch a little when I run into someone else who’s called that — even in America, where in a way it is every boy’s name.

Were poems exchanged? Were there white-hot and snatched kisses? Did we sometimes pine for the holidays to end, so that (unlike everyone else) we actually yearned to be back at school? Yes, yes, and yes….

Threesome with teddy bear

How very Brideshead Reedited!  But British boarding schools and homoeroticism are inextricably interlinked, like rum, sodomy, and the Royal Navy. If any boys miraculously escaped it, they went on to a belated initiation at Oxbridge, like Charles Ryder.  Adolescent male bisexuality was as common in the upper ranks of the United Queendom as was the assumption in classical Athens that teenage boys would enjoy the sexual tutelage of older men. In either case the normative path was always toward an adulthood of penetrating and impregnating women, and Hitchens too found pleasure in his flock of hetaerae as his beard set in and his paunch expanded. If kissing Guy makes him queer, so were Kingsley Amis and Winston Churchill.

No: there’s a certain quality to Doug’s queering of Hitchens that smacks of whitewashing — even “pinkwashing,” to use a loaded term.   It’s as if he wants to excuse Hitch’s support for a murderous administration and a brutal war, not with the appeal to booze and its confusions — unusable for such an enormous perfidy — but by reinforcing the quirky dissident credentials of the dead. I don’t want queerness used that way. I resist the attempt.   At the same time, I think it’s a telling move: telling about Hitchens, about the gays and their politics in these darkening days, and also about Ireland himself.

Ireland points to an exchange of emails he had with Hitch in 2003, after the latter declared his support for George W. Bush’s reelection. Doug published a redacted version of the correspondence back then; it makes intriguing reading. I do wish Ireland had left out the salutations and complimentary closes, which carry their own schoolboyish infestation of the cooties: “Hope you thrive, fraternally, Hitch,” “Duggers, old horse,” “Love and kisses for regime change from D.C. to Baghdad, Doug,” “My dearest,” “cher ami,” “Valentine smooch, Hitch.”  Mass slaughter has not been so amorously discussed since the heyday of Ernst Junger.

What’s interesting is that even though Doug edits it all so as to give himself the last word and the best lines (surely an improbable thing with Hitchens), he still loses. He loses because he chooses to fight on Hitchens’ own turf: secularism versus religion. “Most important to me,” Hitchens says, “is a settled resolution to call the new fascism by something like its right name.” That means the Muslims:

I …. the most committed anti-theist of us all, have decided that the overriding issue is the willingness of the U.S. to intervene in the civil war that’s going on in the Muslim world, and to help make sure the other side loses.

Ireland keeps haplessly trying to bring up the “theocrats” around Bush, “who are quite busy trampling into the dust the constitutional insistence on the separation of church and state through a series of patronage boondoggles for the enhancement of the GOP-labeled ‘faith-based initiatives.’”

You have always proclaimed — and I am not aware it is a view you have renounced — that you are an atheist, and I’ve heard you over the years make some of the best arguments for godlessness one can proffer. But this administration’s politics are riddled with theocracy, and the way in which Bush has now put the fight against AIDS and sex education into the hands of the right-wing Christers and condom opponents and the abstinence-only crowd is crippling AIDS-prevention efforts…

Hitchens is able to demolish this with little more than a throwaway line, because when it comes to fundamentalism, Bush remains a piker. “My opposition to religion and the religious is deeper than you credit. …

However, Duggers old horse, you know better than to suggest any equivalence between American god-botherers and Osama. (The nearest to equivalence one could get would be Robertson and Falwell saying that America had it coming on 9/11: Chomsky and Fisk in clerical drag.) Nobody is going to escape their share of irony and contradiction here: Bush is actually forced to defend the secular state and to make secular allies, even if he fantasizes about some kingdom of heaven.

Organize your thoughts, idiots! The Silhouettes command it!

Timothy Garton Ash coined the phrase “enlightenment fundamentalist,” for Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Whether Hitchens (or Ireland) is enlightened in this exchange is up for argument. But the fact is, they mirror the fundamentalists perfectly: for all of them, the key determinant of whether somebody is right or wrong, good or evil, is whether they believe in God. To Islamist or Christianist, of course, what’s evil is disbelief, whereas to Ireland and Hitchens, belief (or failing to “defend the secular state”) is the mark of sin. Other than that detail, though, it’s a perfect match — one made in heaven.

Terry Eagleton has written, sensibly, that the “New Atheists” — Richard Dawkins, Martin Amis, et.al, a chorus among whom Hitchens was perhaps the loudest voice — have not just a theological but a political agenda.

Writers such as Martin Amis and Hitchens do not just want to lock terrorists away. They also tout a brand of western cultural supremacism…. Both Hitchens and Salman Rushdie have defended Amis’s slurs on Muslims. Whether they like it or not, Dawkins and his ilk have become weapons in the war on terror. Western supremacism has gravitated from the Bible to atheism.

Ireland has joined this too: promoting stringent Western laïcité as the defense and bulwark of the embattled gays. He’s published screeds against theologian Tariq Ramadan, hawking the Islamophobic rhetoric of Ramadan’s opponent Caroline Fourest. (Malise Ruthven has delivered an incisive refutation of Fourest’s claims, for those interested in the dispute.) Gay City News has also given space to a bizarre attack on French women wearing the hijab, not, one would generally think, its area of expertise:

There’s nothing sanctifying or empowering at all about the ugly black, dirty drapes that hide older Muslim women as they stagger down the street. When I see them I want to ban all the abayas, hijabs, and headscarves I see. And give a good hard kick in the balls to the young men and boys with their degenerate fathers sauntering several yards in front of the women they despise as trash.

The logical conclusion of “covering” women is a mere 3,485 miles east in Afghanistan … [O]ne thing at least is clear. That it’s not more freedom of religion most Muslim women need, but freedom from the monsters that use it to keep them safely hidden and in chains.

oh, yes, you are

The message coming from Ireland and Hitchens, as with other devotees of laïcité, is clear: secularity should be the price of full citizenship, and abandoning religion and its robes the prerequisite for getting your human rights.

Somebody should investigate why, after a century of scientific advances, secularism remains largely the property of elites and a mark of privilege. (The Egyptian election returns forcibly press home the point.) Surely one reason is that, absent some larger program to build a juster, fairer here-and-now, it offers only resignation. It’s incapable of making most people happy. (And if the endlessly angry Hitchens and the jealously resentful Ireland were atheism’s only poster boys, I would get me posthaste to a monkery or a madrassa.)

But it does provide Hitchens and Ireland with common ground, even across the fissure of the Iraq invasion. And it is, in a sense, Ireland’s last defense of Hitchens. He helped the gays because he fought their greatest enemy: God.  Ireland cites Hitch’s comment on his separation from his schoolboy love: “it helped teach me as vividly as anything could have that religion was cruel and stupid.” Even in supporting a stupid war, one infers, he had his eye on the real foe.

Ireland writes:

Many of my left-wing friends who had stopped speaking to Hitch were surprised that I continued to maintain warm and friendly relations with him. This was possible only because, after our pubic debate, we both instinctively avoided those subjects on which our differences were too profound.

Undoubtedly wise, but I can’t help thinking there was more at work. After all, Ireland too launched his own jihad against the jihadis midway through the Iraq war. No sooner did Iran elect Ahmadinejad in 2006 than Doug fell into a morass of speculation and outright lies that fed on popular hysteria against the mullahs. His ensuing promotion of rumors about Iran as well as Islam not only won him readers, it gave the atheism he shared with Hitchens that longed-for political field to work upon. Although Ireland insisted he opposed an actual attack upon Iran, Hitch (who cheerled happily for one: “How many Iranian dissidents are really going to be nationalistically upset by an intervention that comes in and removes the Revolutionary Guards?”) must have approved his rhetoric.

One more point. Touching on Hitchens’ bisexual escapades, Ireland observes that

In his memoir, Hitch, in describing his sexual encounters with young men while a penniless and militantly left-wing student at Oxford, relates how he’d frequently be invited by wealthy and attractive young men, often right-wingers, to lavish dinner parties with good food and even better wine and spirits and would often accept, knowing that he would have to “sing for his supper” — a euphemism that should be understood as not merely being entertaining but as “putting out.” … [The Daily Mail quoted]  Oxford contemporaries of Hitch’s as saying “He had a reputation for being AC/ DC and, although a Trot, he was fancied by quite a few gay Tories and moved in those circles.”

Trotsky bust on eBay: the prophet discounted

At this point I recall with delight the rather dreadful George Galloway’s description of Hitchens as a “drink-sodden former Trotskyist popinjay”—the only good line of George’s career, and one that might see his corpse squeak into whatever corner of Westminster Abbey is reserved for purveyors of invective. (There must be one.)  Something that’s never been adequately explained is the propensity of youthful Trotskyites to lurch severely rightward in later life. Saul Bellow (who was actually in Mexico trying to meet the Old Man when Ramón Mercader excavated Trotsky’s ice-cold intellect with an icepick), Max Eastman, Sidney Hook, James Burnham, Lyndon LaRouche … the list goes on and on.  I suspect it has something to do with Trotskyism’s propensity for the Great Man theory of history. After all, Trotsky’s solution to bureaucratism, Stalinism, and the other ills of Communism was simply … Trotsky; give him power, and all evils would go away. The romantic belief in the brilliant, rejected hero, so immensely appealing to intellectually  insecure young men, is ultimately more compatible with the Right than the Left. Hitchens only followed multitudes who had tracked the relentless logic of the Superman to its home in the country house of Colonel Blimp.

But the stories Ireland (along with Hitchens) tells suggest something more: Hitch’s early infatuation with power, and power’s regular partner, money. And this persisted. What else did Hitchens do, in attracting the attentions of Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith by unequivocally shilling for their war, but “sing for his supper?”  Of course, this was easier blowing: he didn’t need physically to put his lips to Wolfie’s or Feith’s distasteful members, just to the inflatable balloon of their reputations. It’s quite true, as Michael Lind writes, that the dialectics of fame always drove Hitchens’ career: he was “a gossip columnist of genius” who “escaped from the ghetto of little-known leftist writers when he discovered that he could become a celebrity by denouncing bigger celebrities.” In the last stage of his  life, though, he found he could feed his fame best not by denouncing but by ingratiating the biggest celebrities of all, the wielders of bombs and the breakers of nations. It did wonders even for his literary reputation. As his former publisher at The Nation, Victor Navasky, remarks, his essayistic talents were little noticed until he moved right, where there were ready crowds of “muscular liberal” critics to acclaim him.

Doug, I’m afraid, has done the same sort of thing on a much smaller scale. He told me once that his first, sensational, deceptive postings on Iran got his blog 60,000 hits; the lure of popularity at career’s end kept the fictions coming. Gay City News, too, held its own little fire sale of its integrity. Lately it’s hosted one Ben Weinthal, a flack for the “Foundation for the Defense of Democracies,” a far-right think tank pushing for military action against America’s enemies. Weinthal’s job is to produce propaganda promoting war with Iran as well as support for Israel (the Foundation organized an “Iranian Threat Campaign” to disseminate panic about the danger).   Weinthal’s first agitprop piece in GCN praised Doug Ireland to the skies, and warned of “Iran’s Anti-Gay Genocide”: a unique genocide, the first genocide in world history with no demonstrable dead. Samantha Power would be proud of it.

It’s distressing that a once-progressive rag should turn itself over to such warmongering; but you can see that Ireland and the paper’s editors are flattered by the attention, as much as Hitchens was overwhelmed by getting invites to Paul Wolfowitz’s parties. Policymakers, the powerful, the deciders, all usually ignore the gay press. But now an influential rookery of neocons, one that features Christianist Gary Bauer and Mouth-of-Sauron Richard Perle on its board, is actually complimenting Ireland’s half-baked articles and taking GCN seriously! Such interest can only be won by serving the prejudices of the powerful. Hitchens did it, in his later years; in their lesser sphere of influence, Ireland and GCN have learned to do it too.

Ireland writes,

In my view, Hitch was queer in several ways — both in the Merriam-Webster definitions of the word as “eccentric,” “unusual,” “unique” (he certainly was “sui generis”) and in the sense that he “got” us in a way that few non-gay writers ever have.

I sympathize with his mourning for a remarkable friend. But “queer” — as I learned to use it in my salad days, the days of AIDS and spreading death, of militancy and Queer Nation — implies something more than either uniqueness or understanding. It means a consistency in rebellion, refusing to fit in or satisfy the mandates of authority, refusing to kowtow or conform, either to settle for the average or sell out for privilege. It means holding fast to the impalpable stuff of difference, always situating yourself in its uncertainties and unplotted crevices rather than in a safe or named or protected place. It means not merely speaking truth to power, but startling it with the odd well-timed obscenity. It means saying “no” whenever “yes” would be easy.  It means that solidarity with the dead matters more to you than the approbation of the living. Hitch was queer at times in his career, I’ll grant you that. But not at the end.  You can be gay, or lesbian, or even trans and sit down at Paul Wolfowitz’s dinnertable. But queer? No. Not my kind.

The gay – Muslim nexus

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protect yourselves by buying duct tape

Two groups who face harassment in schools found common ground in Michigan:

Gay and Muslim groups say they are relieved after a Michigan lawmaker agreed to drop a provision in an anti-bullying bill that would have carved out an exemption for religious or moral beliefs.

State Sen. Rick Jones, a Republican, inserted a carve-out for a “sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction” in the Senate version of the bill. The state House of Representatives’ version of the bill did not include the provision.

Jones on Monday (Nov. 14) said he would drop his amendment and vote for the House version after critics said the language could allow gay, Muslim or other minority students to face harassment.

Earlier this year, the chronically crazy episodically sane birther guru Joseph Farah warned, on his right-wing website WorldNet Daily, that there was sinister “patty-cake politics between the Muslim Mafia and the Gay Mafia.”

Why don’t the active Muslim Brotherhood front groups in the U.S. speak out in opposition to policies that would never even be whispered about in any Islamic state on the planet?

I will tell you why: Because they recognize the promotion of this ["homosexual"] agenda in the U.S. actually serves the Islamist long-term agenda. They recognize that the success of this agenda promotes the weakening of the United States of America in multiple ways.

More power to them.

 

“We are all One”

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Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism

A Sikh writer situates LGBT rights in the tradition:

[T]here’s an important concept in Sikhism called Sarbat da Bhala, which means working for the welfare and well-being of all people. This is a spiritual obligation for us Sikhs. We recite these words countless times, as they conclude one of the central Sikh prayers,  Ardas  (meaning “petition”).

Fortunately, many Sikhs are indeed embodying these words we say so often. A few months after the shooting and killing of two elderly Sikh men in Sacramento, Calif., in March, the Sacramento Sikh Temple offered a reward of $1,000 for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrator of a violent anti-gay hate attack in the same neighborhood. Twenty-six-year-old Seth Parker was punched in the face, suffering multiple facial fractures, while the attackers directed anti-gay slurs at him.

A spokesperson for the Gurdwara stated: “The Sikh Community condemns this disgusting attack motivated by ignorance and hate. In light of the recent murders of two Sikhs in Elk Grove and the hate crime conviction in Yolo County (of two men who attacked a Sikh taxi driver), we are especially sensitive to such crimes. We hope that our reward will help bring these criminals to justice.”

Now this is the kind of solidarity that is at the heart of what it means to be a Sikh. …

The oppression of LGBT people is one of the most pervasive and accepted forms of subjugation today. Indeed, many individuals and institutions deem LGBT people a lower class or caste, justifying their discrimination with dogmatic rhetoric of what’s “natural,” “normal” and … what are true “American values.” This is no different than saying turbans are not truly American, so Sikhs should not be allowed to wear them in public. Oppression is oppression. Our struggles are intertwined.

Just as Guru Nanak said hundreds of years ago, “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim,” perhaps today we can also say, “There is no straight, there is no gay.” Indeed, his message was ultimately that we are all One.

Tunisia votes

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Into the box

Tunisia held elections Sunday — the first of the Arab Spring, now turning to a chillier fall. Al-Nahda, the moderate Islamist party, appears to have won: they claim over a third of the vote as the count continues.

According to the New York Times, they

won at least 30 percent of the votes cast on Sunday, and party officials told a news conference the party had come out ahead in nearly every voting district. Ali Laredi, a top official of the party, said it expected to receive possibly more than 50 percent when the final results are tallied. Calling his party “the most modernist” Islamic political movement in the Arab world — meaning the most committed to principles of democracy and pluralism — Mr. Laredi predicted that it would now “lead the way” for others around the region.

Ettakol, a leftist party, is running at about a fifth of the vote, but is likely to join in a coalition. Khalil Zaouia, the party’s number two, told Al-Jazeera:

“Al-Nahda is certainly the majority, but there are two other democratic entities, Ettakatol and the CPR [Congress Party for the Republic, another left faction], who were weak at the start but now find themselves in the position to contribute to political life and usher a rational modernity in this Arab-Muslim country.”

The Times suggests that Al-Nahda is negotiating with the full spectrum of liberal parties for inclusion in a coaltion. But the election’s real success , surely, is that actors associated with the old regime were decisively rejected.

“Rational modernity” is a very Tunisian phrase. The nature both of national modernity – what it means for Tunisia’s state and society to be modern – and of political reason itself have been subterranean subjects of debate since the Revolution.  Secularists insistently demand: can an Islamist party really be a rational political actor in a country where authoritarian secularism has defined the national identity? Al-Nadha seems publicly unfazed by the question. It maintains it can. Nouri Gana of Jadaliyya, in an incisive if tendentious report on the election’s stakes a few days back, writes:

Perhaps the trouble with the electoral campaign in the end is that it has allowed questions of cultural identity, religion and laïcité to override other important and thorny issues that have to do with the economy, unemployment, justice and political reconciliation, etc. On the one hand, Islamists have focused very much on their past histories of struggle and have insisted on their progressive civic agenda as well as on their preference for parliamentary democracy. On the other, pseudo-secularists have been fixated on the critique of Ennahda [al-Nahda], all the while remaining reticent about or oblivious to the ideological underpinning of laïcité. By presenting their ideology as a form of critique, Tunisian pseudo-secularists have steadily, even dogmatically, constructed themselves beyond critique. A critique of Tunisian laïcité, however, is never more to be desired than at a time when its complicity with the old regime of Ben Ali and French cultural imperialism has become an everyday Tunisian reality. Tunisians who will go to the polls this Sunday cannot be expected to deliver such a critique—they will deliver their long overdue judgment.

Love is the answer, and I forgot the question

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This song is one of the crucial pop-philosophical moments of the 1970s.  It comes from Todd Rundgren and Utopia (though it was covered, and ruined, by England Dan and John Ford Coley a few years later), and is spliced together here with “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” from the same album, a song that has something vaguely to do with William Blake but is really just sublime in a completely different way, like Armageddon reimagined as a block party where everybody smokes a lot of hash practically under the cops’ noses and a lot of people vomit in some nasty old man’s yard.

Mr. and Mrs. Universe
In their cabin in the sky
She’s a little bit of heaven
He’s a hell of a guy
And like all suburban couples they may have a spat
But that is that
It’s back to normal
And it’s your night to feed the cat

Let us raise a glass
And we’ll drink a toast
And the devil will dance
With the holy ghost
And the good and the wicked
The strong and the frail
They will all join hands
At the end of the world

apparently wasn't God

The 70s was a weird decade. I missed most of it, particularly the sex, which is probably why I am still alive. Todd Rundgren was one of its now-almost-forgotten icons, and there was a rumor going around back then that he was actually God. It appears that he wasn’t, but you can make out here why it was such an attractive idea.

Madness, coming to a Moldova near you

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not this one, the other one

It seems impossible that there should be two men named Kirk Cameron who are both lunatic Christian fundamentalists, but it’s true.   One of them, the former teen star of the sitcom Growing Pains, now is in his forties. He tours college campuses denouncing Darwin; not entirely abandoning his art, he’s starred in the movies based on the endless Left Behind books, about godly action heroes fighting the Antichrist after the Rapture. The other Kirk Cameron, perhaps a duller fellow, is a statistician in the fundamentalist resort town of Colorado Springs. Not any normal statistician, no. He cooks up figures (remember Disraeli on statistics? “Lies, damned lies…”) to support the anti-homosexual ravings of his father, Paul Cameron.

Paul Cameron!  Paul Cameron is an ex-psychologist — almost thirty years ago, the American Psychological Association expelled him. He runs his own think tank, if that is the phrase, out in Colorado: the Family Research Institute, a wellspring of anti-gay vituperation. (Sample quote: ”Gays are an octopus of infection stretching across the world. Fresh, undiluted pathogens are its daily food and excrement. Most gays are veritable Typhoid Marys, pursuing and being pursued by others as biologically lethal as themselves and having sex in settings unrivaled for stupidity and squalor.”) The right wing cites this as “research,” and he appears as soi-disant expert in campaigns and trials alike. One journalist writes:

His detailed descriptions of diseased sex organs have been repeated from the pulpits of the religious right. Thanks to Cameron, church audiences across the country have blanched at the thought of gerbils crawling up rectums, which he describes as a gay sex practice.

He has advocated quarantining gays and literally branding AIDS victims with the letter “A” on their faces. He makes a point of noting that other societies have called for the extermination of homosexuals. Accused of advocating the killing of homosexuals, however, Cameron replies, “That’s not true. All I said was a plausible idea would be extermination. Other cultures have done it. That’s hardly an endorsement, per se.”

“Other cultures”? What does he know about “other cultures”?

Switch to Moldova.  (If American homosexuals, busy exchanging pathogens and rodents, know anything about this place, it’s because it was the scene of the wedding massacre in the 80s camp soap Dynasty. Or have those nibbling gerbils eaten away their rectal memory cells completely?) Moldova is a splinter of a country between Romania and Ukraine, a point of contention between Russians, Turks, and others for centuries, and one of the poorest states in Europe. An anti-discrimination bill that prohibits unequal treatment on grounds including sexual orientation is before its Parliament, due for debate at month’s end.

In the days before the debate starts, Paul Cameron is coming to town. An e-mail from the Alianţa pentru Salvarea Familiilor din Moldova (Alliance to Save the Family in Moldova) announces that the “U.S. sociologist, founder and president of Family Research Institute” will stay from October 24-29, and “will share the U.S. experience in implementing anti-discrimination legislation.” There will be a roundtable with “representatives of various parliamentary committees, ministries and other institutions of the state,” plenty of lobby meetings with lawmakers — and, of course, media will be saturated with Cameron’s fake statistics.

This is not his first visit to Moldova. In 2008, he came through to preach about the dangers of anti-discrimination laws.  An Orthodox priest who translated for him describes his message:

According to what Dr. Paul Cameron said, it is necessary for every woman of a nation to give birth to 2.1 children, so that that nation may perpetuate, while in the Republic of Moldova, every woman gives birth to 1.3 children. In this way, the population of Moldova will be halved in 35 years. Among the factors that have brought us to this demographic disaster, it is so-called “woman’s emancipation”, that gave such a position to a woman, that she prefers a career, studies, etc. to giving birth to children and being a mother. Among other factors are the spread of the imposed immorality and especially, the promotion of so-called “rights of sexual minorities”, i.e homosexuals, that don’t contribute in any way to the perpetuation of the nation or to the wellbeing of the society.

Here, for those who forgot to order a horror film from Netflix for Saturday night, is a video of one of his lectures in Chisinau.

We’ve seen this before: in Uganda. The overlap is large. Cameron’s bogus research has been cited again and again by proponents of the “Anti-Homosexuality Bill” there. And US evangelist and fellow madman Scott Lively, one of the main motive forces behind the Kampala proposal, also came to Moldova in March of this year to oppose the non-discrimination legislation. He warned of an “outbreak of homosexuality.” He offered his own definition of “discrimination”:

“The word ‘discrimination’ means not being in agreement with something, and anti-discrimination law says it is illegal not to agree with that. … So anti-discrimination policy based on sexual orientation says that you, as citizens, and government will have no right to condemn homosexual behavior in public. All the levers of government will be in the hands of gay activists who have a strategy and an agenda of control over society…

“But God is in control and it was Divine Providence that I’m in this country in this period and can contribute with tips and ideas to stop this evil. … If you stay silent and indifferent, and this law goes forward, everything related to Moldova will change: all your children will be indoctrinated in perversion. Some will become gay, many will become gay, but all of them will change their values, and then everything that happens in the West, all the sexually transmitted diseases, perversions and other bad things that occur in the West, will take place in your country.

“I want to tell you something interesting. You have long been part of the Soviet Union. In fact you were in a fierce communist captivity. You have independence and freedom today, and God came into people’s lives and many positive things have changed in the country. But now the European Union tries to lure you to enter her captivity, and this is gay bondage. They are in control.” (My own translation from the Romanian)

Here is Lively on Moldovan TV (they call him “Lively Scott”):

Moldovan human rights activists fear Cameron’s visit, coming immediately before the Parliamentary debate, ”will have again [a] very big negative impact on the public acceptance of the law in general, and discussions with the parliamentary commissions will supply them with erroneous arguments against the law.” Again, the U.S. is exporting deception and hate to a country where desperation can feed on them.

But there is a denominational difference, as it were, between Moldova and Uganda.   The anti-homosexual agitation, and bill, in Uganda were the product of indigenous evangelicals, who spoke a very similar emotional and religious language to the Scott Livelies whom “divine providence” brought them.  But Moldova is 96% Eastern Orthodox, so are most of the groups ( such as Christian Moldova) fighting the law, and the Orthodox Church has a testy relationship to American evangelism.

North American missionaries are all over Moldova like maggots on spoiled meat. Google “Moldova” and “missionary” and you’ll find hundreds of evangelical outfits that have planted themselves in the country, from small mom-and-pop affairs to glossy God Squads. I saw a similar inflow when I lived in Romania almost twenty years ago. Poverty draws them; they know in their guts that their message is manna to the poor. But so does post-communism. They came to Romania, as they come to Moldova now, convinced that Communism simply exterminated religion in the country, and that it’s an open field for them among the benighted, cannibal survivors of atheism’s reign. They’re canny in their way; but they know even less about the country than Dynasty fans do.  (Lively’s own comments, above, show how Communism is the prism through which they interpret anything they grasp about where they are.) They arrive with little idea there are domestic religious traditions with roots and strength. The situation is set up for nasty competition.

The Orthodox Church has its own problems. For one thing, there are two of them, churches I mean — one division for Russian speakers, one for Romanians. Their political clout has been damaged by declining religiosity among the young. They look on the flood of missionaries with envy and rage.

Yet the church also looks for what, in the United States, would be called wedge issues: to mobilize the public on its side, and reassert its political power. Homosexuality is a perfect one. And if they can borrow rhetoric, arguments, pseudofacts, megaphones and manpower from American evangelicals more experienced at pressing this particular red button, they will.

So there’s an uneasy, not to say unholy, alliance. I wonder whether, in the longer term, there is a way to exploit the diverging interests of the evangelical Livelies and the Orthodox prelates.  Can anything be done to promote a split?  Finding out exactly what American evangelicals say on their websites, or preach in their churches, about unsaved Moldova might be one way: do they insult the Orthodox in asserting the urgency of their missionary work? I don’t know.

In the meantime, though, Cameron’s visit impends.

N.B. Greg Herek, a professor of psychology at UC Davis in California and an expert on homophobia, has compiled a fact sheet and other information on Paul Cameron and his checkered career, for use in refuting his claims. Check it out; I’ve already passed it on to Moldovan activists.