Musing's musings

Leavin', but not on a jet plane

This year, we're doing it a little different. Normally at this time of year, I'm climbing on a plane to fly out to Las Vegas for vacation with my best buddy who lives there. We usually head up to Cedar City for some Shakespeare, and then pick a national park to go ogle.

This year, Dave's coming here for a change of pace. Going to spend a couple of days in Chicago hanging out and catching at least one show. Then we're heading up to the North Woods to the neighborhood of the old family homestead for a few days of hiking in the woods and floating on lakes. Down the Great River Road to the Quad Cities, overnight with the Trappists, and finish off with a flying trip to the alma mater and a couple of days in Springfield to look over the new Lincoln library.

I don't know what my internet access is likely to be over the next ten days, so posting will probably be light. I'll likely have pictures when I get back.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Especially this picture:

This past weekend, Pat Buchanan (the back of whose head you can see at right in the above image) was at a Republican strategery conference (as was the other dude in the picture, who runs a white-supremacist website that I will neither name nor link to for obvious reasons). Among the initiatives proposed at the conference as a way of attracting allegedly disaffected "white working-class Democrats" to their party, they were proposing to encourage Republican support for English-only initiatives in the coming year.

Perhaps before they run around insisting that everyone speak only English in this country, they ought to have to learn it themselves first? Who was it who said "Remove the plank from your own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck in your brother's eye"? Oh, yeah. Someone that Buchanan at least (and probably the other guy as well) claims to know very well and whose words he claims to follow.

The fail is truly epic.

(Hat-tip: Think Progress)

Who comes up with this stuff?

Checking over my site stats listing this evening, and I noticed a referral about an hour ago from a Yahoo search with the query "Who did Obama have the gay affair with?" I mean, really. I know there's a tendency in certain quarters to assume that because someone is vehemently anti-gay that they're actually in the closet, but come on. Obama may not be the "fierce advocate" for gay rights that he's continually claiming to be (or that I wish he were), but he's nowhere near as anti-gay as our last president (to use but one example), and I don't recall ever hearing any insinuation that G. Dumbya might have been a bit light in the loafers.

Now if you'll all please excuse me, I need to go find some brain bleach to get that image out of my head.

ARRA: #GOPFail

Pardon me for lapsing into what I understand to be Twitter-speak in the post title. As I was waiting to pay my bill yesterday at lunch, I caught a glimpse of some blowhard on Fixed Noise bloviating about how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, better known as the stimulus package) was "full of waste."

The bloviating blowhard even had a few examples. I couldn't write fast enough to get them down, but I did jot down the total. According to this pundit, there's $5.5 billion in "waste" in the ARRA. Oh, noez! Five and a half billion dollars, down the drain! Wow, that's really wasteful!

I'm sure that's the reaction the Republicans and their bought-and-paid-for propaganda outlet were going for. But let's put those numbers into some context. According to Recovery.gov (where anybody who's interested can go and see exactly how much money is being spent on what, in which places: it even has a handy-dandy link where you can report suspected waste or fraud involving ARRA funds--which I suspect might be where the bloviating blowhard got at least some of his numbers), total ARRA funding amounted to $787 billion. According to my back-of-envelope calculations, that means less than 1 percent of the money invested has been pegged as "waste." By Fixed Noise, so take that with a grain of salt, please. (And if it really turns out to be waste, I have little doubt that the federal government will demand that the money be given back, so they can put it to better use somewhere else. I know for a fact that's what the federal granting agencies are telling people--spend it, and spend it wisely, or we'll make you give it back.)

Now let's jump into the Wayback Machine, shall we? Set the dial to 2005, when an inspector general's report found a total of $9 billion of U.S. funds unaccounted for under the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. A year later, and another report claimed that as much as $50 billion had been handed out with little or no oversight to various private contractors in Iraq. A year after that, it emerged that our government had flown in nearly $12 billion in cash to Iraq, and could hardly be bothered to keep track of what it then did with those 363 tons of money. (That's how much 281 million greenbacks weigh: almost 400 tons.) Where were the Republicans while all this was happening? Sending college interns, if memory serves, over to Iraq to help hand out that $12 billion--of course making sure that it always went to worthy causes and individuals, naturally.

So the take-home message from the GOP seems to be that anything under $10 billion is "waste," while anything over that amount is "business as usual"--at least as long as it's a Republican in charge of handing it out. As ever, the GOP's rhetoric rings hollow. But I just love it when they make it so easy to fact-check them.

Sex, money, and amateur sports

Last August, I wrote about the two University of Nebraska wrestlers who were dropped from the squad after news became public that they had posed nude on a pornographic website that largely caters to gay men. The two wrestlers, Paul Donahoe and Kenny Jordan, were both interviewed (along with several other figures associated with the scandal) for an episode of ESPN's Outside the Lines which aired this morning.

While ESPN's reporting suggests that there may have been more to the story than was apparent 10 months ago, I nevertheless found the rationalizing of the Nebraska officials they interviewed about the dismissals both specious and self-serving. Their major concern, at least as expressed in the few public statements they have been willing to make about the incident and the very few documents the university was willing to release in response to ESPN's request under the Freedom of Information Act, seems to have been the damage done to the school's image by having two of its student-athletes appear in pornographic videos.

Considering that a third of the athletes on the Nebraska wrestling squad over the last two years have faced criminal charges--and yet were not dropped from the team--that reasoning seems mighty thin to me. When you consider that Tom Osborne, now the athletic director at Nebraska and head coach of its football team in the 1990s, handed out only token punishments to stars on his football team (suspension for one spring exhibition game for Christian Peter, who racked up eight separate arrests and at least one conviction, and an on-again, off-again suspension for Lawrence Phillips after he assaulted and injured an ex-girlfriend), the rationalizations look thinner still.

Terribilis est locus iste

The title of this post is from the Vulgate Latin of Genesis 28:17. Of old, it was the Introit or entrance hymn proper to the dedication of a new church in the Catholic tradition. Literally translated, it means "This is a terrible place," but "terrible" needs to be understood not in the modern sense of something awful or bad, but a place that inspired awe. I'd have said "awesome," but those connotations are not right, either--especially in view of the context in which I'm writing.

Stephen Tyrone Johns, 39, a security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (of which I have the honor to be a charter member), was shot and killed this afternoon in the line of duty at the museum. An 88-year-old Maryland man, James W. von Brunn, walked into the museum carrying a rifle, pointed it at Mr. Johns, and pulled the trigger. Mr. Johns did not even have time to draw his own weapon. Mr. von Brunn, described as a "hard-core" white supremacist (is there another kind?), was wounded by other guards who returned fire. He is listed in critical condition at George Washington University Hospital.

This was heller Wahnsinn, to use the language Mr. von Brunn's ancestors probably spoke, "utter madness." Wahn is virtually an untranslatable word in German--there is no clear English cognate. "Madness," "insanity," "mania," "delusion," "craziness"--all fit, but none of them precisely.

The last time I was in Washington, I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum for the first time. It was, indeed, both a terrible and an awesome place: not quite the equal, in my estimation, of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, but nevertheless a hallowed place for what it commemorates and the work that goes on there. Terribilis est locus iste, indeed. The museum may not, to carry on with the text of Genesis, be literally a domus Dei et porta caeli, "the house of God and the gate of heaven," but it is certainly now a more terrible and awesome place for having the blood of a martyr spilled at its very gates.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the family of Mr. Johns. I will leave them with some words that may perhaps provide some comfort in their time of sorrow:

...all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

--John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII

"How many years..."

"...can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?"

Bob Dylan penned those words the year before I was born, but they ring just as true today. But it's the next couplet from "Blowin' in the Wind" that's on my mind today:

Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn't see?

That's what I'd like you to tell me, President Obama. How many times are you going to keep turning your head and pretending that you don't see the signs telling you that your silence on gay rights has gone on far too long? How many times are you going to send insincere notes of condolence to soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines that you sat idly by and let be discharged from the military under a policy that you promised to end? How many times are you going to suck up to the forces of hatred and bigotry and division, in the misguided hope that you might be able to gain their support?

And how long, gay and lesbian and bisexual Americans, are we going to sit idly by and let him get away with this kind of crap? This man came to us, time and again, for money and for support during his two-year campaign for the presidency. And we showed up, time and again. He promised us that he would be a "fierce advocate" for our rights. Can we honestly say that he has even tried living up to that promise? No. For proof, I invite you to examine the White House web site. Can you find any page there, or even a bullet point, that speaks to a single gay rights issue? I've looked and looked, and I can't.

UPDATE: OK, taylormattd at Big Orange caught a boo-boo. There is actually some language on that page about gay rights issues. Not much, however, as he pointed out, and not that the president has actually gotten around to doing anything about any of the issues he listed there.

We have, yet again, been used and tossed aside by a politician who has cynically calculated that we will just swallow the outrage and come crawling back in two or four years when he will again ask for our time, our talent, and our treasure. In all likelihood, he will again cynically promise to do better on our issues this time. Many of us will believe him.

I, however, will not be among them. Because unless I see some concrete action on one or more of the following, Barack Obama will not even get my vote in 2012, much less any more concrete forms of my support:

Mr. President, I need your voice

The following is an e-mail I sent to the White House last night:

To quote your recent e-mail to me, Mr. President, I need your voice. You wanted me to speak up in favor of your health plan. Well, Mr. President, I want you to start speaking up on gay rights. You and your staff keep telling me how fierce an advocate you are on gay rights. When were you planning to start proving those repeated assertions? Vermont legalizes gay marriage--you say nothing. Iowa legalizes gay marriage--you say nothing. The Department of Defense fires an Arabic linguist because he's gay--a policy you promised to do away with--and you say nothing. The California Supreme Court twists itself (and the law) into a pretzel to uphold an amendment saying that only marriage between one man and one woman is valid, but the 18,000+ marriages that don't fit that definition and that took place before the amendment was enacted are still valid. And you say nothing.

Are you starting to see a pattern here? I sure am.

Now, I'm not surprised at the shape of that pattern. I was never under the impression that you were a liberal or a gay-rights supporter. But an awful lot of your supporters kept telling me that you were both, and that if I'd only wait a little while longer, you'd show me how wrong I was.

Well, Mr. President, I've been waiting for forty-five years thus far. Just how much longer do you think I'm going to have to wait? Because, as happy as it makes me to be able to rub the noses of those people who told me you'd be a great president for gay rights in your failure to live up to that promise, I would be far happier to have them rubbing my nose in my epic fail after you stepped up to the plate and proved me wrong.

A common excuse that's offered in your defense is that you've just started your term and there are plenty of huge problems on your plate to handle, so gay rights will just have to wait. My answer to those people is one I'm sure you're familiar with, because it's from Martin Luther King's famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail":

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was "well timed," according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease .... For years now I have heard the words [sic] "Wait!" ...This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

I'm not waiting any longer, Mr. President. And if you expect to keep my vote in 2012, you won't, either. Show me some concrete progress on those issues you campaigned on, and we're OK. But keep putting me off with empty words and insincere promises, and I'll be looking for a better candidate to support in 2012.

I'm not expecting any reply, directly or indirectly. But I'd love to be proven wrong.

I won't be going to California any time soon

Yes, the outcome was what I anticipated it would be: upholding Proposition H8, but also upholding the 18,000 marriages that took place before it was approved. That still doesn't mean I'm inclined to do anything that supports the ignorant people who voted (albeit narrowly) in favor of that bigoted piece of misguided legislation.

I haven't had a chance to read all of the 186-page opinion (I managed to download a copy before the servers crashed), but I have to say I'm not thrilled by the Court's reasoning thus far. And I'd love to see how they managed to twist themselves into pretzels to come up with a ruling that (a) upholds the validity of the 18,000 existing same-gender marriages and (b) at the same time upholds the constitutional amendment that says, quite plainly, that only opposite-gender marriages will be considered valid in California.

The silver lining in this particular dark cloud is that the decision is likely to trigger an appeal to the federal courts, which could poke our allegedly "fierce advocate" of a president into taking some real action on getting rid of DOMA at the federal level so those 18,000 California marriages might mean something in the other 49 states even if they don't mean anything where they were performed. And I do think California voters will be voting on this question again in 2010, though hopefully this time those of us who recognize that separate most definitely is not equal will do a better job of presenting our case and pointing out just how many lies and half-truths the other side is putting out there.

But until this odious claptrap is removed from the California lawbooks, I won't voluntarily be setting foot in that state.

The last full measure of devotion

The image is of the Freedom Wall at the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. I took the picture the last time I was there, a couple of years ago this coming fall. Each of the 4,000 gold stars on the wall represents 100 Americans who gave their lives in that war, and today is the day on which we collectively pause (or should, in between the barbecues and the baseball games) to remember their sacrifices.

Today's a day on which I find myself thinking of C. Valerius Catullus who, long ago, had to make a perilous journey across the Mediterranean to the Troad, where his brother was buried. He wrote about it as follows:

multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras frater ad inferias
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem
quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum.
heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi
nunc tamen interea haec prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu
atque in perpetuum frater ave atque vale.

Carried past many peoples, across many seas,
I come, my brother to these doleful rites,
That I might give you at last this gift in death,
And to speak in vain to mute ashes,
Since Fortune has taken you yourself from me.

Oh, poor brother snatched unjustly away from me,
For the time being do you now accept, wet with
Fraternal tears, these things which ancestral custom
Has handed down as the sad gift for the dead,
And for all eternity, my brother, hail and farewell.

--C. Valerius Catullus, Carmina ci, my translation from the Latin