HoYay! brought the Visigoths at the Gates

-or-
"I wanna be noted for the fall of your Civilization! At the Gay Bar, Gay Bar, Gay Bar, Woo!"**

Interesting article on the otherwise-annoying-me-quite-a-bit-recently Slate today, reviewing James Davidson's "The Greeks and Greek Love." Author Emily Wilson goes over Davidson's "fascinating, meandering, funny, and thought-provoking study of how ancient Greek men loved one another." Observing the current state of things vis a vis gay marriage and the status of same-sex relationships, Wilson calls it

"a central problem for modern Westernized societies. Many countries allow same-sex couples the right to a "civil union" but withhold from them the name of marriage. The Netherlands was the first modern nation to legalize marriage proper for gay people, in 2001. Since then, seven U.S. states have also legalized gay marriages, although one, California, has just backtracked. On May 26, Californian lawmakers upheld a ban on same-sex marriages in the state... The ban is based on the idea that there is—or should be—something fundamentally different about sexual and romantic relationships between people of the same sex and those between a man and a woman. Since history is so often invoked, either implicitly or explicitly, on both sides of the debate, now is a particularly good time to look back at the history of same-sex relationships."

She goes on to say that the book

"ought to be required reading for anybody curious about the antecedents of the current impasse. [It] is a landmark study that challenges earlier historical interpretations of the evidence. For instance, [some] scholars... have argued that the Athenians were obsessed with anal sex, which they saw as an act of domination and humiliation. Davidson brilliantly shows that this interpretation is largely a projection on the part of modern historians, who have been reluctant to imagine a world where gay relationships could be expressions of love, affection, and appreciation, rather than deeply skewed power arrangements."

Observing Davidson's arguments on the Athenians ("same-sex relationships—which seem to have generally taken place between youths in their late teens and young men in their early 20s—were an important part of a boy's journey to manhood... [and] many men continued to be interested in "boys" even after marriage; happily married poet Sophocles and unhappily married philosopher Socrates both flirted with young men at drinking parties and caused no scandal in doing so. (The amazing thing about Socrates' sex life, according to Plato's Symposium, was not that he fancied the gorgeous Alcibiades but that he resisted having sex with him, even when snuggling under the same blanket"), Cretans ("Cretan rituals were equally strange, from an Athenian perspective..."), and Spartans ("In Sparta... a curious kind of sex seems to have been the custom between well-behaved men and chaste teenage boys. Apparently the lover was supposed to relieve himself only by rubbing against the boy's cloak: The cloak had to remain on at all times, as a sort of all-body condom"), I realized that I must have missed that part of The 300.

Of course, the funniest thing to me about the article (and somewhat exemplifying Slate's more-than-occasional breathtakingly tone-deaf and dumb contrarianism) is that it reminds me of a typical Slate contrarian years ago who was all "can't we have just ONE uber-violent movie with mainly manly men battling, oiled and sweaty, without just ASSUMING homoerotic tones?" To which I thought, sure, go ahead, but if I were you, I wouldn't take my stand on HoYay's inappropriate over-application and tie up the end of my mediocre article on the (lack of real) homoerotic undertones in action movies by talking about "The 300" and fucking SPARTA, where there actually WAS homoeroticism, you know, in the form of HOMOSEXUAL SEX. Not explicitly in The 300 itself, if I recall, but in that silly thing called "real life."

This being, after all, the same real life where two of Western Civilizations's most influential cultures, Greece and Rome, had common and rather accepted forms of gay love and managed to, oh, form the rhetorical and historical basis for much of modern Western society. (Not to mention the many celebrated philosophers we so often cite in our paeans to reason or democracy who, at the very least, batted for both teams, and of course that historical war juggernaut, Alexander the Great.*) But, I'm sure Rome's eventual fall was probably due to a lack of heteronormative "family values."






*"Alexander the Great, just steaming through Persia; took out Darius the 3rd as we all know. And then he ran on... and after a while his army's going, 'Hang on. Alex, I think we lost 'em. You know, I don't know where we live any more, and we've killed most of the people we've met. So would you just like to chill out.' And Alex is going, 'Look, I'm 32, I'm gay, I'm on a roll. Let's go!' On you go."

**

Zogby on Obama, Israel, Netanyahu, and Middle East Peace

A nice piece on Truthout here by James Zogby on, well, on Obama, Israel, Netanyahu, Middle East Peace, and the US Congress.

I'm out of the loop on recent events on this front, but Zogby writes:

At their White House press briefing last week, Netanyahu may have been stubborn, but Obama, too, held his ground. Addressing his remarks directly to the cameras, the US president lectured Netanyahu about the steps that must be taken: "all the parties involved have to take seriously obligations they previously agreed to"; "settlements have to be stopped"; "if the people of Gaza have no hope, if they can't even get clean water É if the border closures are so tight it is impossible for reconstruction or humanitarian efforts to take place, then that is not going to be a recipe for [the] peace track to move forward," and much more.

Further,

A recent poll of American Jews commissioned by J Street, the Jewish pro-peace lobby, found that substantial majorities of American Jews (in the 70 percent range) support President Obama and support a two-state solution that includes a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem and some limited "right to return." In addition, a strong majority opposes settlement construction and opinion is split down the middle on whether or not to cut aid to Israel if it becomes an obstacle to achieving peace!

Progress in the Palestine-Israel conflict always seems far away. But, as I feel silly saying but many people seem to forget, no conflict lasts forever. History shows us that sooner or later, this conflict will end -- though history also shows that it may end peacefully, but also may end by the dissolution of the present-day states in the area or brokering as the result of another World War (heaven forbid). But it will end, and this rhetoric and polling at least seems to point to the continued possibility of it being the first scenario (well, relatively close, it's already too late for it to be "peaceful" in the full sense of the word, but you know what I mean, a resolution without significant further violence or another change in the scale of violence).

Of course, my very informal recent research made it appear that our aid to Israel has already significantly decreased in real terms (~90%!) as well, of course, as a proportion of total aid, though my conjecture remains, as it was before, that perhaps our aid to Israel has shifted to less direct forms because it seems like a 90% scale-back of all aid to Israel would have elicited some kind of notice in the MSM. Of course, you never know just exactly what new low in competence the MSM will reach for, so... ??

El primero presidente negro-indígeno de América del Norte?

Interesting piece forwarded by J-friend SY, here, about Mexico's first black president (you know, the one before their second black president, Juan Alvarez). After some digging (so you don't have to!), the main advocate of recognizing Vincente Guerrero the first black Mexican president (and Juan Alvarez the second) is Ted Vincent, apparently a former historian at UC Berkeley. He is apparently of sufficient scholarship and repute that his books have been published by both HarperCollins (a popular publisher) and University Press of Florida (the joint university press of the Florida university system, seemingly no slouch). I researched his "repute" because recognizing these two as black presidents seems to be something primarily championed by himself, and various independent outlets (like the Berkeley Daily Planet) that have reprinted his work. There's no indication that his analyses are incorrect, and indeed, his analysis has an explanation for why we've not heard this before in this manner:

[The Mexican] congress had made it near impossible to organize against racial injustice through their passage of Law No. 310 that, though ostensibly in the spirit of equality, prohibited mention of anyone’s race in any public document or in the records of the parish church. One consequence of this law has been that knowledge of the racial attitude of the elite toward Guerrero’s African roots are relegated to private letters and anonymous pamphlets against “the black,” and many a modern history identifies him merely as of “peasant”or “laboring-class” background.

I find all this interesting, because Vincent's piece is one of those that, like works from Chomsky and Zinn (for me, at least), seem to make history make much more sense, they put what I've already learned in a context that seems so much more internally consistent rather than a disjointed collection of facts, and are sufficiently challenging to the ideas of US centrality and supremacy that it makes sense that they're expunged from our history lessons as a matter of course, with no doubt reasonable-sounding protestations of their ancillary importance. While Mexico is certainly no racial haven, the greater degree of intermarriage/intermixing in their population over the years makes them having had a black president seem like a logical probability (according to Vincent, they've actually had 3 presidents with strong African heritage), and Guerrero's actions and abolition of slavery (and the popular support keeping this abolition in place even after Guerrero's execution and rescinding of many of his reforms) make the secession of Texas from Mexico make all the more sense. (Remember, Texas threatened war on the US if the US didn't make them part of the US. That's gumption. And by gumption, I mean... Texas, ho boy, Texas.)

So anyway, in the waning days of Black History Month, which I believe I usually do SOMETHING for on the J Continuum, read Vincent's article, and if the spirit moves you, also read about Paul Robeson, why don't you, cuz from what good J-friend KC and I can tell, he appears to have been one of the best people ever, and we don't hear SHIT about him. (You know, spoke 25 languages, third African American ever accepted at Rutgers, first accepted to Columbia Law School, I think, lettered in like 7 college sports*, black actor who broke the color line and was adored by many white fans before his radical politics came about, helped striking Detroit autoworkers get better pay AND helped black autoworkers get closer to pay parity, told the House Committee on Un-American Activities to go take a flying fuck at itself, not in so many words, etc. etc. I mean, 16,000 people or so tried to attend an event for his 46th birthday -- his 46th! Not even a milestone birthday. So go, seek, Google. And while you're at it, read about James Baldwin in last year's J-entry for Black History Month.

--J

*He actually lettered in 15 varsity sports, apparently. In case you were wondering, J really would like to name his future son Robeson, should he ever have a son. Though there's some wiggle room, this is a potential deal breaker should the future J-significant other disagree on this point.

In the Name of All That's Holy...

Geez. A quite snotty, if correct in its overall conclusion in regards to free speech, article here from the Calgary Herald. (How/why was I reading the Calgary Herald? Short answer: thesising is driving me batty. Long answer: checking Slate every 20 minutes meant I read this post from Rachel Larrimore referencing the article. It was a not particularly bad post for the increasingly gormless posts on the XX Factor, but I digress.

The thing annoying me about the Calgary Herald piece is the presumption it carries that Muslims should "clean up their own house", one of my FAVORITE wackaloon fuckwit notions of all times. Besides the fact that many Muslims are already engaged in trying to do just that, there are several unasked questions that really aren't discussed, and the at least arguable viewpoint that Muslims individually hold some responsibility for the actions of others within the religion or hold responsibility to outreach to the more diverse communities many of them are living in in Europe and the US (or if not diverse, different non-Muslim communities) slides into blaming Muslims as a whole for the actions of some. When is the last time we blamed Catholics for the sins of some of them? White people? Republicans? Democrats? Oh, wait... Nevertheless, the sophistic reasoning that Islam is some kind of inherently violent brutal religion, despite millions of negative examples, is ridiculous. Any group containing one billion people is going to have a lot of very violent ones within it. Notwithstanding that, during the Middle Ages and for times after that, they were the ones carrying the torch of tolerance and knowledge for Western/Middle-Eastern civilization. It quite seems from the historical evidence that, on the whole, you'd be better off as a Jew or Christian in many of the Islamic-controlled areas than, oh, say, SPAIN? (Achem, Inquisition, achem.)

Anyway. I needn't remind everyone again that many Christians have done horrific things in the name of Christianity. And though I enjoyed Bill Maher's movie Religulous, my friends and I were all horrified by his equating of religion with extremism. His basic point in the end was that religion = war = nuclear armageddon. Now, don't get me wrong, it'd take a severe... replacement with a wholly different person for me to join an organized religion at this point, and I may agree with Maher that much of it is senseless, but I think if religion disappeared from the world today, there would still be violence, threat, strife, and possibly from the exact same people. Religion doesn't, on average, cause irrationality -- it serves as a rationale for many. It is a channel for energy, be it goodwill, love, and a feeling of greater than yourself, or your hate, dissatisfaction, and longing for direction. Islam didn't cause terrorism, just as Christianity didn't cause the Holocaust. Religion is an abstraction, and abstractions don't do anything -- it's the people that choose how to use them. (Well, kind of, but it sounds rhetorically nice so we'll leave it.)

Anyway. Lost train of thought.

There are many legitimate and interesting questions to be asked about religion, animosity, modernism, liberal/secular values, etc. But they musn't and can't start from a presumption of inferiority, of this ridiculous "your religion must've caused this and ours is the way of liberal democratic peace" bullshit. All religions -- all peoples -- have histories that have involved violence. If we want to talk about, seriously talk about how to address violence in the modern era, we should all start with a look inside and ask how we've stopped killing those different than ourselves as we did in the past, and hope that we're even correct in the presumption that we've gotten that far. If we look to our own cultural baggage first, and then at another's in an attempt to understand it as a real lived human experience and not an existential threat from a hot mess of an abstract nonsensical conglomeration (Islamofascism, I'm looking at you), then we may find ways to address things and appropriate and reasoned questions to ask. If we don't understand ourselves, we can't understand others, and deflecting soul-searching in favor of crude generalization and cultural blaming will only keep things the same. Is our goal to feel good about ourselves, and superior to others? Or is it to actually stop the present strife? Because I guarantee you, we will never do the latter if we embrace the former.

James Baldwin: Your Must-Learn-About for Black History Month

Listening to my backlogged Democracy Now! podcast, an excellent hour discussing James Baldwin, gay African-American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist, and civil rights activist. His Wikipedia entry is here.

A boy last week—he was sixteen—told me on television—thank God we got him to talk, maybe somebody was taught to listen—he said, “I’ve got no country, I’ve got no flag.” And he’s only sixteen years old. And I couldn’t say, “You do.” I don’t have any evidence to prove that he does.

And the moment you were born, since you don’t know any better, every stick and stone and every face is white, and since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose that you are, too. It comes as a great shock, around the age of five or six or seven, to discover the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover the country, which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality involved any place for you.

--James Baldwin, in Cambridge debating William Buckley, also seen in the documentary The Price of the Ticket, written and directed by Karen Thorsen.

If the people of this nation are not capable of true self-evaluation, this nation may yet become one of the most distinguished monumental failures in the history of the world. People imagining their history flatters them, as it does indeed, since they wrote it, they are impaled on that history, like a butterfly on a pin, and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world. Now, this is the place in which, it seems to me, the most white Americans find themselves: impaled. The do not know how to release themselves from it and suffer enormously, see, from that resulting personal incoherence. See, they are dimly or vividly aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, alright?

Now, the one person who released us all from that suffering—I met on that blood-red soil of Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Martin Luther King. He told me, he says, “Jimmy, segregation is dead.” And I replied, “Yes. But just how long and how violent and how expensive of a funeral is it going to be?"

--Calvin Levels, portraying James Baldwin, on Democracy Now!, December 7, 2007.

A fantastic edition of Democracy Now!, a fantastically interesting and important person to learn about, a man with a fantastic cadence, diction, and pose. An incredible early advocate for civil rights, for blacks and homosexuals. A last quote from him that applies as well to the J Continuum:

"Look, I love America more than any country in the world, and it is exactly for that reason that I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. Anyway, that’s all I have to say about that."

Solidarity, on a belated Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day note

Brought to my attention by J-friend Becky:

“It's one of the strangest things that all the great military geniuses of the world have talked about peace. The conquerors of old who came killing in pursuit of peace, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, were akin in seeking a peaceful world order. If you will read Mein Kampf closely enough, you will discover that Hitler contended that everything he did in Germany was for peace. And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”

MLK Christmas Eve Sermon, 1967 .
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/12/276406.shtml

That about says it all.

The Hindu: A Brief History of US Imperialism

A great summary of the problems of US Imperialism -- which abroad has arguably been just as bad under Democrats and Republicans:

The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky

For The Hindu, Arundhati Roy recounts a brief history of US foreign aggression, adventurism, neocolonialism, and cruelty, through the prism of Chomsky's excellent construction (based on a term from influential journalist Walter Lippman's book in 1922) of Manufactured Consent: the sleight of hand that makes us think we really know what's going on in the world, and give our tacit and explicit consent to US policies that we would likely recoil from if we knew the truth of it.

Ask yourself this, in this holiday season: would you really, eyes wide open, happily and merrily trust a government that looked to "save" the Vietnamese while being so gleeful about their demise:

Here's an American pilot talking about the joys of napalm:

We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn't so hot — if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene — now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter [white phosphorous] so's to make it burn better. It'll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it'll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.

So the lucky gooks were annihilated for their own good. Better Dead than Red.

And lest we forget, sadly forget: we've used Napalm, or perhaps more accurately, Napalm II in Iraq. As Marx said, History repeats itself, 1st as tragedy, 2nd as farce: We still have to melt the people to save the people, apparently. And do they thank us for it? Sheesh.

Merry Christmas, and an anti-imperialist New Year...

That's Right, Irrelevant Exuberance: Slate Writer Calls for Iraq Withdrawl

Philip Carter, Slate writer and correspondent for their "War Stories" column, and himself an Iraqi veteran, is calling for a withdrawal from Iraq. (Indeed, in May he outlined a plan for it.) I don't consider him to be the world's biggest dove, proof 1 of which might be the fact that he served in Iraq. You can object to war on principle and still serve in the Armed Forces, but that hardly qualifies you for pacifist-of-the-year. What I'm saying is, this is yet another call from someone who can hardly be characterized as a crazy left commie pinko effectively pro-terrorist weak-kneed girly man, but someone who a) seems to know what they're talking about and b) would likely support a politico-military "plan for victory" in lieu of withdrawing if, in their opinion, there was one. I've had something like this viewpoint for a while now, but it's nonetheless good to see it gaining steam, some years later than I'd've liked. (And while one may say, "Well, years ago we didn't know it would turn out like this," please see some of the other countries we've reconstructed post-WWII-reconstruction: Haiti (#1 poorest country in our hemisphere, very high intervention by the US for decades), Nicaragua (#2 poorest country in our hemisphere, high intervention, most of it illegal i.e. Iran-Contra), Afghanistan (not doing so hot), Guatemala (ended up helping a prolonged civil war continue with thousands of civilians killed), Greece, Brazil, Grenada, Libya, overthrowing the democratically elected Shah of Iran, and sundry other examples. In other words, there was no real reason to think intervention by the US was going to lead anywhere good in this case either. Go ahead, closely examine the history of US intervention -- results like those we've seen in Haiti, Nicaragua, and Iran are far more common than those for post WWII aid to Germany and Japan.

A distant cousin (but close childhood friend) once said that he wanted to go into the field of history to make sure that the US learned its lessons and never went completely the way of the British Empire through the course of making the same mistakes, for the love of God. He's since gone into a different area -- it doesn't seem like the slack's been taken up on this one, hmm?