Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

current events

Alla This

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On Thursday morning I was very much in my head while sitting on the trolley, listening to Ani DiFranco’s madly terrific new song “Alla This.” The song is partially about the intersection of the personal and the political, with Ani at one point delivering the following:

i won’t rent you my time
i won’t sell you my brain
i won’t pray to a male god
cuz that would be insane
and i can’t support the troops,
cuz every last one of them’s being duped,
and i will not rest a wink
until the women have regrouped

I already love the song as much as anything she’s done this decade, but at her concert earlier this month that verse sent a thrill through my body – in eight lines it succinctly hits commercialism, religion, war, and feminism. Amazing.

The verse ended as I stepped off the trolley, and my mind began to wander. I thought about Ani’s constant challenging of the patriarchal status quo, and how any form of discrimination ultimately connects back to that hegemony.

In the distance between the trolley doors and the stairs to sunlight somehow that rolled into my wondering about the Iraqi citizens, and if life has actually improved for those that exist outside of the patriarchy both of that nation and of the force the world is imposing on it.

I wondered, what about the gays and lesbians in Iraq? I knew nothing about this group, though I was sure they existed. What was their life like before the invasion, and what was it like now? While I am advocating for the rights of my lesbian friends to marry are their Iraqi counterparts struggling for the simplest of rights – for the ability to exist as themselves without fear?

Sometimes my brain and the internet do a peculiar zeitgeist tango, where the same day I wonder about a topic it shows up in my daily reading, and sure enough when I got to my desk CNN was running a story entitled “Gays in Iraq terrorized by threats, rape, murder.”

As it turns out, as the Iraqi government came unmoored the situation of their GBLT citizens deteriorated. Any hint of their sexuality risks not only their own lives, but the lives of their entire families.

What a terrifying closet to be trapped within.

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Just a day later I was at the Philadelphia Theatre Company to see Elise’s brother in his weekly theatre lab.

One of his classmates – barely a teenager – wrote a brilliant play about how bullying can go too far, as the actions of a few are enabled by the inaction of their peers at large. Here the result was the death of a young girl at the hands of her tormentors – their faces unimportant, as all of her classmates were complicit in her fate.

In the play’s last scene Elise’s brother acted as a federal agent, gingerly interrogating one of the girl’s classmates, getting nowhere. Finally, grimly, he asks her:

“Is it true that the girl who was murdered had a crush on you?”

And then, brilliantly, sparking immediate tears in my eyes as much for his delivery as for the line itself:

“Have you ever heard of a boy named Matthew Shepard?”

So powerful, and from the pen of a girl half of my age. Vital proof that we still have some terrifying closets of our own, whether their doors are open or closed.

As the lights came up, Ani’s voice rung out again in my mind as the voice of murdered girl, of those Iraqi men, of Matthew, and of Larry.

i will not stand immersed,
in this ultra violent curse
i won’t let you make a tool of me
i will keep my mind and body free
bye bye minutiae
of the day to day drama,
i’m expanding exponentially,
i am consciousness without identity

Oblermann, At Length

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I love words.

I was notorious as a child for needing something to read at any idle moment. Eating breakfast? Better hope that cereal box has lots of copy on it. Long car ride? Multiple paperbacks required, just to be safe.

The internet has taken the edge of my constant need to consume the written word, but I sometimes get intellectual heartburn from all the junk food of message boards and user comments I devour to keep my gears spinning. Even worse than the junk are insubstantial articles – 500 and 1,000 word affairs that get me all spun up and then just stop.

I vastly prefer, and eternally adore, longform journalistic writing, especially in the form of media critique. It’s a style of writing I love to consume, and the style I enjoy writing the most. You can trace my appreciation back to being hooked on the reviews at Furia.com in the nineties, and more recently in Jacob Clifton’s poetic, academic, polemic recaps of Battlestar Galactica.

Last weekend the piece that caught my extended attention was from the New Yorker – a complete recounting of the personal history and personal psyche of Keith Oblermann.

Based on the sheer word count that has been devoted to Oblermann recently, I’m assuming you know who he is. You have to remember, I don’t consume these people on television – just through their print coverage and occasional video clips – so I commensurately don’t understand how famous they are to actual teevee viewers. However, even from my detached vantage point Keith Oblermann’s name and face seem to have reached zeitgeist levels of recognition.

I used to enjoy Keith’s critical essays on MSNBC dot com long before I knew he was an on-air personality because he didn’t do the typical journalistic dance of balance when someone was clearly in the moral right or wrong. He just spoke the truth, which sometimes meant speaking out against his topic of discussion. Yet, he wasn’t an op-ed writer – he was just a reporter. He just reported the truth.

Given the recent backlash against him, it seems that Keith (or, at least, his public persona) has undergone a translation from truth-speaking broadcaster to liberal figure(talking)head, held in apposition to make-pretend journalists like Bill O’Reilly.

The difference, I think, is that Keith has aggressively shifted the focus of his considerably audible and influential voice away from the morally black and white and into the politically gray. He’s still engaged in a mainly journalistic pursuit, rather than an opinionated one.

As discussed in the feature-article, Keith recently punctuated a special commentary by commanding our commander-in-chief to “Shut the hell up!” Of course, most of Bush’s words and actions seem more morally black than politically gray to any rational human being, but it is a bit beyond the pale to viciously criticize a sitting president from your anchor chair.

However, Keith has also turned his focus into the Democratic fray to slam Hillary Clinton for invoking the assassination of RFK when discussing why the nominating process might (and, per her, should) continue through the summer. Unlike Bush, this is clearly a gray area, or at least gray enough that a nine-minute retort seems a little overboard … possibly the vented hot air of a gasbag.

As the hot air continues to vent, and as the dissenters continue to get in line, the picture of the New Oblermann becomes increasingly crisp. He is not just liberal Bill O’Reilly, or liberal anyone else, because he’s not simply espousing liberalism. He’s espousing truth and logic, much in the same way Jon Stewart does, except he does not have the shield of “Fake News” to hide behind. And, sometimes to highlight the illogical he needs to rachet up his own rhetoric to full blast to make sure there is no mistaking his commentary for equivocation.

Sometimes Keith Oblermann needs to be illogical to attach the illogic.

A commitment to truth and logic in real news is a scary thing – something many Americans haven’t experienced in their lifetime, and certainly not anything they’ll catch on their local six o’clock news. Keith is treading into untested waters with his brand of journalistic critique. And, even if it’s all just hot air, right now you can hear the bones of the rest of the mainstream media establishment creaking in the wind.

Or at least that’s what it seems like from my teevee-abstaining, mainstream-media-eschewing vantage point.

UK

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I’m not sure why all of my wedding posts have to wind up with such a maudlin tone. I think I’m just in the maudlin phase of wedding planning.

Now for something completely different.

I love reading UK tabloid papers – so much gossip for one island! And, i love the almost rudely authoritative way they’re written. Almost makes me wish I was a journalist over there, except I suppose most of them are assigned to the Amy Winehouse deathwatch.

I’m not one of these teeny-bopper pervs with a countdown clock marking the time left before the next Disney diva becomes legal, but I will admit that I’ve been rooting for Emma Watson (aka Hermione) to blossom into a classic bombshell rather than just a vaster forehead with ever-twittering brows.

Her brief see-through underwear incident of last month aside (Certainly an 18th birthday is the most appropriate occasion, n’est pas? And, see-through underwear is a bit different than commando), she is knockout stunning in this photo presaging her as the new face of Chanel’s Coco Mademoiselle fragrance.

Also, I might have to buy this book that this cynical article about fabricating the next Brit Boy Band was sourced from.

Oh, and these pants…

Loving

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There were kittens in our yard, but now there are not.

You were going to get a whole post about the joys of kittens and the joys of pet fostering, with a smattering of Bob Barkerisms, but we returned from work to find said kittens and accompanying momma gone from the yard.

So, no wacky kitten pictures with captions in stilted lolzcatian English.

Honestly, I’m only mentioning it now so that in five years I can recall when it was we found the kittens in our yard.

So, for historical reference, the apparent close of the kitten incident happens to coincide with the first day of legal same-sex marriages in California.

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Just as I am a feminist, I am an advocate for civil rights for everyone, and that includes the GBLT community. I honestly don’t understand how anyone can not be an advocate and an activist for both, because each movement is rooted in a simple concept: equality for all.

As we celebrate the landmark California Supreme Court decision and the many beautiful unions that it will yield, I was also reminded today of another beautiful union – this one fifty years old.

The union in question was of Mildred and Richard Loving, two Virginia small-town sweethearts who in 1958 found themselves pregnant and decided to wed in neighboring Washington, D.C.

Back in Virginia, five weeks after their wedding the couple found themselves on the receiving end of an unfriendly visit from the local Sheriff’s department because they were in violation of the state’s Racial Integrity Act.

Richard Loving was white; his bride Mildred was black.

The Racial Integrity Act made their marriage – and, for that matter, any marriage between a white person and someone of another race – a felony.

This post isn’t meant to be a history lesson- you can read other sources detailing the Loving’s arrest, or their subsequent exodus from Virginia under threat of imprisonment, and how – nine years later on June 12, 1967 – the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the Racial Integrity Act in their landmark Loving v. Virginia decision.

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I know most people (maybe even you, reading now) see the Lovings’ story in black and white – literally and figuratively. However, laws like the Racial Integrity Act were leveraged against couples of any interracial combination across the country. If it weren’t for the Loving’s and the unanimous SCOTUS decision their case garnered, interracial marriages might never have become as visible and accepted in mainstream American society. (And, similar laws lingered on the books for decades until the last one was repealed in Alabama in 2000.)

If those same laws were prevalent today it might not be legal for me to marry Elise. And, it certainly would have been illegal for her parents – one white, the other Chinese – to marry and have children.

Consider that for a moment.

All of these years I’ve been one blessed white male in the multi-ethnic sea of America. I never experienced any personal discrimination to cause me to believe in feminism or civil rights, but I believe in them because equality should be for everyone, without strings attached.

Little did I know at age five, or age twelve, or age twenty-two that my blessed life would benefit from the battles waged before me in the most meaningful way possible – because they cleared the way for me to have and hold the love of my life.

Could you imagine denying us legal recognition of our happiness just for something as trivial as the colors of our skin?

Your answer, I suspect, is “no.”

Then, consider that as of today one of my co-best-ladies and one of my dearest friends can only legally marry each other in two states in the country, solely because they are both women.

Why is it that we can all imagine denying them legal recognition of their happiness just for something as trivial as their gender?

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In my mind, the two are the same – the two couples, the two imagined denials, and the two inevitable, ineffable sets of basic human rights.

Just as I advocated for those rights before I ever knew they would effect my life so directly, I will continue to advocate for them even after my marriage is legally recognized – because everyone should have the same rights as Elise and I, regardless of race or gender.

That’s feminism. That’s civil rights. That’s equality.

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As I write this post there is a tiny dent in the dish of cat food we put out in the yard, hoping to lure back momma and her four stray kittens.

And, at the same time thousands of Californians have had the imagined denials cleared from their path to a legally recognized life of loving.

Best Political Quote…. Ever?

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[The current Republican Party is] a dead, rotting carcass with a few decrepit old leaders stumbling around like zombies in a horror version of Weekend at Bernie’s, handcuffed to a corpse.

Attribution? Improbably, longtime GOPer Larry Hunter, as quoted by The New Republic. Via Salon.

I literally rolled around on the floor in convulsions of laughter the first time I saw Weekend At Bernie’s, but the morbid schtick didn’t hold up as well to repeat views as, say, Clue.

In a related incident, I garnered a Bernie’s reference this weekend during my decisive win of a limbo tournament, made all the more impressive by the fact that I was competing against at least two people less than five feet tall.

Also, IIRC, my unbeaten streak in seriously competitive limbo extends back to at least 1999.

Ontologically related to the above: the movie poster for Oliver Stone’s impending W is so great that I may have to hang it in my home office: