mennonno sapiens - one giant leap for mankind

Silver Linings

2009-07-02T17:35:00Z

Water, water everywhere.

As I talk to friends and relatives who aren't in New England at the moment, and realize that the sun is shining and temperatures are above sixty-three elsewhere in the world, the rain has started to get to me a little.

"Bad" weather is like in-laws. Tolerable enough when it comes for a visit and knows when to leave. It's when it just loiters and lingers that it becomes oppressive. If we could just spread out the bad weather -- a couple days here, a day or two there -- but June was a total wash-out. According to the Globe, this June was the cloudiest in a century, with the sun breaking through only about a quarter of the time.

If every cloud really had a silver lining, we might have a new source of funding for the region's hobbled economy. There are apparently advantages to a month of rain. The Globe reports: "fatal and nondeadly shootings in Boston have plunged, and police acknowledge the weather has been a key factor." Hey, it's something.

Of course, when the sun does make a cameo appearance, people get giddy. Days and days of rain makes everyone stir-crazy. And then when the sun finally comes out, they go nuts.

On the one day last week I could actually sit on the front stoop and enjoy watching life pass by outside my door, I was hanging out with my housemate Alden, who had stepped outside for a smoke, and a friend of mine, who was passing time with me. It was all of ten in the morning -- a time of the day you feel relatively safe to sit out on your steps. We watched the world pass by and chatted a little. It was a nice respite from the rain.

Suddenly a bum stumbles down the street from Davis, catches my eye, and as if he'd been hailed by an old friend, makes a bumbling beeline for us.

_______________________

A bum may joke with you,
but he will want to be paid
before the punchline.
_______________________

He had the wasted, craggy look of a man who had probably been called handsome in his youth -- Scotch-Irish, his eyes all the more piercingly blue for the whites being so bloodshot -- but whose one passion had left him drained and shriveled twenty or thirty years on. By now his blood had turned to alcohol and he clearly couldn't survive in the thin nicotineless atmosphere of earth for longer then ten or twelve minutes at a time.

We were wary from the beginning, of course. The overly friendly greeting was what's known in advertising as a pitch. It's the same method the clipboarders (charity muggers, or "chuggers" as the Brits call them) use to rope polite pedestrians in. But don't forget: it's a solicitation and you should feel no obligation to engage them unless you intend to give them money. And who really wants to give anyone else money?

This bloke had an elaborate pitch that seemed totally dependent on some concept of charm he may once have actually possessed, but which had dried up with the rest of his personality not devoted to procuring alcohol and cigarettes. A bum may joke with you, but he will want to be paid before the punchline. Even with the charmingest bum, I would rather they just cut to the chase.

No one invited him over, so he started right in on his shtick without even introducing himself.

"Didja hear those police sirens?" he asked.

We all shook our heads.

"You'll never guess what happened!"

We just stared at him.

"There was a drunk in Davis Square," he said.

Shocking, I know.

"Using all kinds of language!"

Another shocker.

"Like the 'c' word!"

No one needed to prompt him to clarify. We knew he would.

"Cunt!" he stage-whispered, and continued: "I said, 'you don't talk to little kids like that! Somebody should dial nine-eleven!' And somebody did! And the police came and took 'em away!"

We all nodded, reflectively.

He took out a cigarette and joined us on the stoop. (In case you didn't know: they don't just go away if you ignore them.)

"I don't have anything against drunks," the drunk went on. "But if you're gonna drink at this time of the day, do it on a side street!"

It was all starting to make sense.

We sat in silence, trying to think of an excuse to split, but not wanting to leave him there on our front stoop. Maybe it would rain.

The bum knew what we were thinking of course, so he slipped in his proposal. It was like a kidnapping or hostage negotiation.

"I was just minding my own business," he said, "trying to come up with two bucks to get a sandwich, you know..."

I stealthily reached into my pocket and fingered a couple of bills, but didn't make a move. I wasn't so sure I couldn't get out of it without paying him off. I looked around and could see my friends were all thinking the same thing. It was every man for himself.

The bum had time. He had us right where he wanted us.

"Didja hear who died?" he asked, plopping down beside me.

There was pregnant pause, and then:

"Regis and Kelly!" he blurted.

For the first time since he'd shown up we couldn't contain ourselves.

"Oh my God," my friend said, anguished. "Kelly Ripa?"

"No!" I screamed. "Is this the rapture, or what? Farrah, Michael, and now Regis and Kelly?"

"Are you sure???" my friend implored.

The bum was surprised by our sudden outburst and recanted. He wasn't sure, he admitted. And he certainly didn't want to alienate us.

But it was too late. I decided to make my move. I stood up.

"Was that a rain drop I just felt?" I asked my friend.

"Yeah," he said. "I just felt one too."

"We better get inside quick before it starts raining again!" we said in unison.

"I was thinking about getting lunch," the bum informed us. "Thinking, if I had two dollars..."

He reached into his pocket, and pulled out a little bottle of vodka and took a swig.

"Instead of two dollars someone gave me this!"

That's a tip: if you're going out, carry three or four flasks of grain alcohol around to hand out to the vagrants and bums. It saves them a trip!

"Well, it was great meeting you!" I said, making to shake his hand.

"Um, yeah," he stammered. "I was just passing by, thinking about lunch, you know. Thinking if I had two dollars for lunch..."

I nodded sympathetically, but as if I understood nothing.

I beckoned my friend, who wished the bum good luck, and we beat a hasty retreat, leaving my housemate, Alden, who, in all fairness, had not finished his cigarette -- what? were we supposed to wait for him? -- to the hard sell. When I saw Alden later, he told me he'd given the guy a couple bucks, at which point the bum had adjusted his initial estimate for inflation: times were hard -- wouldn't five be more appropriate? Alden was like: two, final offer.

The lesson: rain -- even the threat of it -- can be a great excuse for escape. See, there's always a silver lining!

Gay Men Have Healthier Sperm

2009-06-30T16:54:00Z

That's basically what this study is saying, y'know.

Remembering Michael, Forgetting Iran

2009-06-29T21:03:00Z

I don't want to freak you out, but I had a sort of premonition a couple days before Michael Jackson died. Not exactly that he was going to. But I was thinking to myself, this Iran thing's just going on and on, day after day those revolutionaries are stealing the headlines. It's getting kinda stale. Now, if Michael Jackson up and died all the sudden, we'd get some real news up in there again. I'm serious.

And now all you have to do is look at the front page of the Times today to see we've moved on to bigger and better things:

Not a squeak about Iran. Not one dickey-bird.

Forget Nada, Neda, whatever. Today the world mourns a real loss to freedom and human dignity. Jackson's family is obviously too deep in mourning to talk to the press. Um, at least about Michael. We'll all remember him our own way, of course. I stumbled upon this during a break from the slog today. Good times, good times.

Meanwhile, buried somewhere deep in the news, Iran's so-called Guardian Council announced it has confirmed the election results, surprise, surprise. I guess it's really not headline-grabbing stuff at this point, just run-of-the-mill tyranny. Now with a coup in Honduras and protesters confronting soldiers there, too, you have to wonder which pop icon will be next to steal the spotlight through heart attack, overdose, or autoerotic asphyxiation.

Disinventing the Homosexual

2009-06-28T08:42:00Z

With the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall today, there's a lot to reflect on, gaywise. The gay movement has made tremendous strides since 1969, despite, as an article in the Times the other day kvetched, never having had a national leader like other civil rights movements in our country.

The article quotes Dudley Clendinen, who has written about the gay rights movement and concludes: “Because this movement is fundamentally about the right to be sexual, it’s hard for the larger public to see that as a moral issue."

I know I write about sex here oftener than I probably should (though not nearly as often as I have a right), but it seems to me Clendinen's declaration overstates the case, and worse: it takes unquestioningly and as a given the categories that have been invented for us and which the movement is only now breaking down.

Sexuality -- and sexual intimacy -- is such a fundamental and multifarious part of being human, there is nothing exceptional about gays where the desire to explore and express it is concerned. And it belittles the real potential significance of the gay movement and misrepresents its place in the broader struggle for civil rights to reduce it to "the right to be sexual." And yet it's a common enough notion of what the movement represents.

While "the right to be sexual" is a part of the gay rights movement, it has also been part of the women's movement, and was a major facet of the cultural revolution of the sixties, and continues (and will continue) to be an aspect of youth rebellion. The discovery and exploration of sexuality is at the core of much of art and literature, from the Biblical epic to Anna Karenina to Gossip Girls. It persists in providing the headline-making conflicts that define public figures from Michael Jackson to Mark Sanford. We are all defined to some degree by our sexuality, in all its glory and squalor.

The use of sexuality to marginalize and persecute individuals and groups is, not surprisingly, as old as sexuality itself. If you look at any civil rights struggle, hypersexuality and sexual perversity have been persistently attributed to marginalized or scapegoated populations: from blacks to Jews to women the threat of rampant sexuality has, in modernity, been an excuse to deny rights or inflame hatred of the other.

________________________________________________________________________

To be defined as "homosexual" is demeaning.
Even "gay" is a provisional identity,
made necessary by an
equally provisional power structure.
________________________________________________________________________

The popular stereotype of black men as predators and rapists of white women, immortalized in the 1915 racist film epic Birth of A Nation, persists to this day. The Nazi regime perpetuated an image of Jews as lecherous porn-mongers lifted from nineteenth century stereotypes of Jews as sexual deviants (in fact, there are hybrid conspiracy theories about the Jewish origins of the gay movement -- linking what conspiracist view as the inherent sexual perversions of Jews with homosexuality). The sexual freedom conferred by the pill (introduced in 1960) unleashed a floodgate of fear about sexually insatiable females. To this day powerful women like Hillary Clinton are seen as "ball-breakers".

But in the wider discourse of identity, this is a watershed moment. The discourses on gender and race in the US have been deepened and complicated by Hillary Clinton's viable run and Barack Obama's election to the Presidency. The old identity politics, with its categories invented by and for the status quo, are no longer adequate to describe the times we live in.

Likewise, the more visible gays are in daily life, the less the old discourse with its patronizing clinical categories applies. Homosexual, in reference to not an act but a whole category of self, like its converse and complement, the heterosexual, is fundamentally a modern invention, but we are living in a postmodern world. Reducing what gay people are fighting for to "the right to be sexual" denies that two of the major struggles of the gay movement now --the repeal of DADT and DOMA -- are actually about desexualizing, erasing the distinctions in the law based on gender and sexuality. Constitutional protections against hiring and firing based on sexuality likewise seek to remove sexuality as a factor in these decisions.

Even if a man or a woman has sexual desire for or sex exclusively with others of the same gender, this fact, in a society that has no need to other people on the basis of it, is only sometimes interesting and nominally, categorically relevant. The complexities of social interaction already extend to race, gender and class. We negotiate these every day in multiple interactions, from work, to commerce, to play. It's conceptually not a huge step to include sexuality.

What laws protecting people against institutionalized racism, sexism, and homophobia do in part is acknowledge our ability to negotiate these issues among ourselves in a free and open society. They broaden who and what is "permitted", expanding the kinds of experiences and variety of narratives, bringing out the potential for greater harmony from discourse, ultimately enriching our collective experience and presenting us with additional tools to break down the obstacles of needless falsehoods and fears, helping us get at the truth of that experience. The danger is that the more demotic the discourse, the harder it is for any one person, class or interest to control.

In order to control discourse and interaction, certain categories of interaction are taken off the table. What segregating (of races, ethnicities and genders) in various ways does, is takes the complexities of dealing with those who come, in a variety ways, from a different place, out of the equation. Segregation does this in the crudest way: by actually removing the persons themselves from the equation. If whites don't have to mix with blacks, we don't have to finesse the uncomfortable complexities of our respective and collective histories (nor will we ever transcend them). With women segregating them also in obvious ways simplifies discourse and interaction, maintaining a social order based on a familiar hierarchy.

Closeting is a form of coercion that calls for the complicity of gays in second-classing themselves. Reducing gays to their basest sexual urges is a way of shaming them -- there's a long-standing taboo of discussing the details, the mechanics of sex publicly. Conjuring the image of specific sexual acts (real or imagined) whenever a "class" (real or imagined) of people is mentioned is thus a way of at least attempting to demean and ridicule them, regardless of whatever hypocrisy is inherent in doing so.

Alternative hierarchies and power structures arise with shifts in power and priorities. We are seeing tremendous shifts today based both on demographics and values (and indeed the two are linked, but in much more volatile ways than we may suspect). Shifts in population and values, of course, threaten other populations and values. This is why racism resonates -- because the notion of "racial purity" symbolizes the (imagined) integrity of a population as much as the idea of "traditional" gender and sex roles affirms the social hierarchy and power structure by imagining a fixed basis for them in biblical or natural history.

What we're seeing play out in the Obama administration's strategy on gays is the "official" version of the process of discouraging new complexities in open discourse. Right now the state literally sanctions the closeting, segregation, and active persecution of gays -- that is, the power structure officially prohibits a "class" of people from engaging in open discourse, actually deeming their contribution to open discourse a danger to national security. It's a step up from laws on the books at the time of Stonewall that made homosexual acts punishable by castration, but still. This stance tells us a lot about the administration's priorities in general. The active pursuit of an ideal by those in power cannot beunderestimated, which is why Obama's bait and switch on gay rights isdisappointing and dispiriting.

As power dynamics -- ideas about what constitute our strengths as a society and the structure of relations within society -- shift, so does what is allowed in open discourse and interaction. And vice-versa. The Obama administration would like us to believe that decisive moves toward equal rights for gays would actually undermine equal rights for gays in the long run. But by sustaining the taboo, Obama may be doing more harm than good. The administration is needlessly perpetuating the notion that the homosexual is some kind of strange predatory species (something between a butterfly and a vampire bat, if you believe the alarmists at the DOD) when it should be arguing that as a category of identity it is benign, irrelevant.

The question of how much of gay culture is described by homosexuality is one that the gay rights movement is struggling with in its own way, or should be. We want to believe that the whole world is gay, of course, but when a social conservative like Larry Craig who has consistently voted against gay rights in the senate and congress is caught in a homosexual act and vehemently claims he's not gay, should we believe him?

I think so. Because consciousness of sexuality and gay identity are separate, though related issues -- obviously, but in subtler ways than we might admit. Gay liberation and gay rights challenge the social hierarchy -- we call it a movement because it seeks to revolutionize -- it is about deepening the discourse, and allowing in new complexities -- things that even the current establishment balks at.

Just as we acknowledge that sex acts themselves do not determine one's sexual identity (many gay men have had sexual relationships with women, many straight men have had sex with other men -- the notion of situational sexuality applies to everything from "experimentation" to rough trade), sexuality as a defining category of identity actually doesn't challenge the status quo. It is not revolutionary. Those who argue that the homosexual can simply be removed from the closet and placed in an office cubicle are missing the significance of what's happening.

The right to be sexual without sexuality defining identity is what the gay movement is about. Gay people do not argue for the repeal of DADT in order to "be sexual" in the foxhole or barracks shower. They are fighting for the right to serve regardless of their sexuality. They are arguing, in essence, that sexuality while a component of identity is not the whole, or defining element of it.

To be defined as homosexual is frankly demeaning. Gays argue that they should be defined as mothers and fathers, lovers and friends, brothers and sisters, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, students, teachers, lawyers and doctors, politicians, artists, craftsmen, merchants, soldiers, Americans. Even to be defined as gay is a provisional identity made necessary by an equally provisional power structure which it is the aim of the gay movement that began 40 years ago today to transcend, and by transcending transform.

When I think of Stonewall I think of the fall of the Bastille.

"Is it a rebellion?" Louis XVI asked his counsel.

"No, sire," came the reply. "It is a revolution."

Vive la Révolution!

Ridicule

2009-06-26T17:42:00Z

John Dickerson at Slate has decided to squander some of his credibility as a political commentator on castigating other commentators for piling on poor Mark Sanford, the certainly-soon-to-be-ex governor of South Carolina and latest in a long line of Christianist social conservative moralizers to become victims of their own hypocrisy.

Dickerson is offended that the wicked courtiers are snickering and saying vicious scornful things about the governor:

The minute Sanford started speaking, the reviews poured in via e-mail and Twitter. He was rambling, confused. He didn't tear up enough when talking about his wife. He favored his mistress. He answered the questions too thoroughly. All these judgments seemed absurd. A man standing in front of a bank of cameras in the middle of a complete collapse is going to say a lot of things poorly.

...And when he does, people are going to snicker via twitter and say vicious scornful things in their blogs or broadsheets or on the TV chat shoes. Those, dear Dickerson, are the rules of the game. Sanford has played it long enough himself to know. So your pity is probably wasted on him.

But Dickerson feels sorry for him anyway. It's what he takes for this liar's sincerity that seems to be the sticking point for him. Dickerson says Sanford "seemed to know and feel [the severity of his crime against his family] more profoundly than other politicians we've seen go through this familiar apology exercise before." Dickerson apparently doesn't know that, as Rochefoucault once archly observed, "the name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices."

_______________________________________________________

It's one of the occupational hazards
of being a professional hypocrite.
_______________________________________________________

Dickerson wonders why no one lamented the human cost to Sanford, as if that were the big story here.

I'm not offering Sanford's humanity as an excuse. I'm just marveling at how few people stopped for a moment to even nod to it. Maybe people expressed these views in private conversations. But in the e-mails and Twitter entries and blog posts I read in the aftermath, Sanford's human ruin was greeted with what felt like antiseptic glee. The pain he's caused, the hypocrisies he's engaged in, seemed like license to deny him any humanity at all.

Well, of course they did. They don't know the man. But they do know a little about him. For instance, that he made political hay of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair (of which he said, gallantly: "The bottom line is... he lied under a different oath, and that is the oath to his wife. So it’s got to be taken very, very seriously.”) He earned conservative street cred by playing the family values card and bashing gays, but where was he this Father's Day? With his four kids and faithful wife? Um, no. With his Argentine Mistress, whom he visited on the taxpayer's dime at least three times.

Here's the bottom line, bitch: he was an elected official who abused his office and willfully misled the people who elected him to it, and deceived his family for years while preaching family values for political gain.

So when Dickerson mewls...

What Mark Sanford seemed to be trying to say is that he screwed up, in the biggest possible way, because he lost his bearings. He lost his self-control. He was indulgent. He forgot that there were other humans in the world. Yet in the constant flow of abuse, joke-making, and grand conclusions about his failings, it seemed everyone having a good time pointing at his self-indulgence was also engaging in a form of it.

...what he doesn't seem to get is that that's OK. We aren't being hypocritical when we indulge in "pointing at his self-indulgence." And we aren't obligated to treat the hypocrite with the same degree of respect once he has been exposed. There are actually elaborate, age-old (maybe even hardwired) rites for the ridicule of hypocrites. And that's precisely what hypocrites deserve: ridicule. They have earned it, and it's some compensation for those they contemn.

As for Republicans. It's not unusual for them to demand leniency from those who, when the shoe's on the other foot, would never get an ounce of sympathy from them. And, further, to call their enemies hypocrites for not hewing to a higher standard than they themselves do. The argument goes something like: "Of course, we're intolerant, vicious and vindictive, but that's our brand! You guys are supposed to be the goody-goodies!" But the rules of ridicule are long-established and cut across all party lines.

If reports that the governor is going to fight to stay in office are true, he obviously hasn't been ridiculed enough. He deserves to be ridiculed all the more and then impeached.

RIP PYT

2009-06-26T13:06:00Z

It was a rough day in Neverland.

The stars were oddly aligned yesterday, weren't they? Now, for some reason known only to the gods the storied King of Pop and the once and future angel* are forever linked in our minds.

Unfortunately for Farrah, the brutal hierarchy of fame that had proved insurmountable in life came into play even in her death. It was best put by Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News last night: "On this night when we were preparing a remembrance of Farrah Fawcett, suddenly word arrived from Southern California... that Michael Jackson had died." And that was the extent of his eulogy for Farrah.

But it's certainly understandable. Farrah was a 70s teenage masturbation fantasy. There's not much mystery in that. Yes, later she did The Burning Bed, and her candidness in the face of her struggle with cancer, even if it was mixed with celebrity cheese, set her somewhat apart, but the arc of her career was familiar enough that it didn't ever quite transcend the banal.

Jackson was a prodigy (that's indisputable -- his vocals for the Jackson Five were way beyond anything we've heard since from a child performer), and evolved into such a singular persona -- he seemed the very embodiment of the pop archetype. There is hardly anyone who doesn't know his name. It was impossible not to have an opinion of him.

Though it would be wrong to make comparisons, some might plausibly be made. Both were trying to recapture a moment in time through bad plastic surgery -- Fawcett: an actual moment (which makes her vanity less interesting, but her decline more poignant); Jackson: a dream moment he had obviously glimpsed and fixed his sights on long ago of sometime in a future where he would finally bend the world -- and the flesh -- to his will.

Once Jackson's journey of physical transformation really took off, his music career was finished -- he would coast on a limited repertoire of physical and vocal gestures, but not imbue them with the form or function of ritual. They did not represent a creative obsession, but rather a marketing tool. Brand Michael.

The existential project of one of the world's most extreme make-overs eclipsed any and all other creative endeavors for him. Was he on the cusp of a comeback? No. The music career was a means to a greater end. All of the ups and downs of the typical pop career only disrupted a perfectly linear task whose end was immortality. He was distilling, refining, in pursuit of that dream moment -- that eternal moment -- when he would finally become what he really was.

The rejection of the notion that what we are born with is what we must live with and the doomed attempt to transcend it -- this hybrid quasi-religious American-dream pop-journey -- complete with persecution complex -- is what resonates so deeply with some, and why we can't simply write Michael Jackson off, even though his work has been lackluster and derivative since 1982.

In the end, neither Michael nor Farrah captured their moment, of course. And now, as fate would have it, they share this one.
__________________________________________
* A previous version of this post contained an off-color reference to Farrah's anal cancer, which was probably in very poor taste and was certainly very bad karma for me. At any rate, I removed it. For those who were offended, who obviously look to me as a paragon of good taste and decorum in the face of our ever tasteful and decorous pop culture, I offer my sincerest sympathies, and urge you to demand an anal pap at your next annual physical.

Can I Be Your Doormat?

2009-06-25T17:11:00Z

Your were looking for a doormat - m4m (Framingham)

Reply to: pers-sgwgk-1238525880@craigslist.org
Date: 2009-06-25, 12:10AM EDT

You came into my store today looking for a doormat. I got to say bro you were hot. I got kind of nervous talking to you and glad you liked my shirt. If you see this ( I doubt you will) and want to go out sometime I would love to buy you a beer and kick it with you. Just tell me what color shirt I was wearing and what store it was.

Question of the Day: Are there such things as red flags on Craigslist Missing Connections, or are all Missing Connections red flags in and of themselves?

A Cheap Solution to the Universal Health Coverage Crisis in Massachusetts

2009-06-24T10:24:00Z

Universal Health Care in Massachusetts is dead. The budget did it!

When the way you propose to save your universal coverage plan is by eliminating coverage to tens of thousands of residents (classed as "legal immigrants" -- presumably those here under a visa or with a permanent resident card) and "slowing enrollment" at a time when it has spiked (from 165,000 to nearly 177,000 in the last three months) because of rising unemployment, it's over.

Needless to say: although the state is no longer offering coverage to those who most need it, the latter will not be exempt from the $1200 penalty for not having it. Doh!

So, anyway. Now that universal coverage is dead, what should we call what we've got instead? I vote for something simple and understated, like just add air-quotes.

Universal Health Coverage? What Universal Health Coverage? Oh, you mean: "Universal Health Coverage"! Yeah, I'm totally "covered"!

Come on. Everybody likes air-quotes, and this way there won't be any need for costly changes to the literature. Plus, all those legal immigrants and the newly unemployed will get plenty of exercise making air-quotes when they're paying their penalty at the end of the year.

Yeah, about that. Too bad we can't throw up some air quotes around that penalty, too. Just think of it like you're paying for "health care" and it's not so bad!

Boston Public Garden This Afternoon

2009-06-23T23:33:00Z

Rage Against the Machine! (By The Way, Are Bicycles Considered Machines?)

2009-06-23T12:49:00Z

It's a law of nature that the most vulnerable are the funniest, too. It's a survival mechanism. That's how infants have traditionally made it to adulthood. Here's the deal: if you're small, amuse us or die. It's your choice.

Domesticated animals are usually pretty funny, too. What would be the incentive to keep them otherwise? Cats can get a little dour later in life, but they start out frisky, bringing to mind the old Ogden Nash poem:

The trouble with a kitten is
THAT
Eventually it becomes a
CAT.

If kittens were born cats, they'd have gone extinct thousands of years ago.

Fish are an exception. They don't do much, but then they're more like interior decor.

Even when they rage it's mostly fun for us. In fact, we all know people who delight in whipping some helpless creature into a frenzy just for sport. (Some of us enjoy this as a vicarious pastime -- the Mean Kitty Song, for example, has been viewed almost 22 million times on youtube. 22 million! That's the population of Australia.)

Human rage is not quite as amusing, of course. Because even small humans sometimes carry guns. But anyone who's ever been in a relationship knows that sometimes whipping someone into a lather can allay the onset of ennui. You just have to be sure there are no guns in the house and you've hidden all the knives. There is certainly a time and a place for rage, but you should always be careful not to waste it. The least you can do is put it to some use.

The other day, I was on my bike, and encountered a very angry pedestrian. Because I was on a bike, I found him amusing. His rage was wasted. If I had bumped into him on foot instead, I'm not sure I would be here today to tell the tale, so outsized was his hard-on against the world.

Sidewalk rage is rarely covered in the media, but it does exist. The reason you don't hear about it is that it doesn't have the potential for gruesome fatalities that road rage and air rage do, although having scalding hot coffee (sidewalk ragers' weapon of choice) thrown in your face is certainly no picnic. But particularly where it is set off in pedestrians by those using other modes of transport it's the least likely to result in any real harm in the end.

Futility and impotent rage have been staples of comedy almost as long as they've been staples of tragedy. If you've ever been splashed by a passing bus, you know the feeling of futility and impotent anger I'm talking about here. And if you've ever watched from your office window as others get splashed, you'll understand the difference.

However warranted a pedestrian's rage, so long as you're in a car or on a bike or in an office across the street you know the pleasure the gods take in tormenting mortal men.

Like most people, I've played on both teams. As a midwesterner who grew up in a mid-size city I can be polite to a fault as a pedestrian. I look both ways before crossing, make eye-contact with drivers, and wave at cars who stop to let me pass, a quaint custom where I come from which usually elicits a polite "just cross the street, friggin douchebag!" from motorists here.

When I'm on my bike I try to remain sympathetic to pedestrians, but I have to admit it's not easy. Something happens when you change modes of transportation, particularly from slower to faster, and lighter to heavier, successively more mechanized modes: a different part of the brain lights up. The transformation from "pedestrian" to "jogger" to "cyclist" to "motorist" roughly parallels the journey of Jekyll and Hyde, or our modern-day Dr. Bruce Banner to The Hulk. Power corrupts. Horsepower corrupts absolutely.

_________________________________________________

Power corrupts.
Horsepower corrupts absolutely.
__________________________________________________

I'm really not a ragey person. Rage is like vomiting to me. Even when I feel like I've got to, I won't. It's just too abominable. I probably owe my aversion to raging out to my father. He was a bit of a hot-head (100% Italian -- and 180 degrees from my mother's cold, northern temperament), and I found it so selfish, unbecoming and tedious that I vowed not only not to go there, but not to be there when others did.

I have been mostly successful in this, although it's not as easy as it sounds. I don't pretend not to have issues. We all get angry, frustrated, threatened. But rage takes it to a whole nutha level.

A few years back I dated a tall, incredibly handsome, and frankly brilliant local boy. He could be a little patronizing , and would editorialize unnecessarily at times. It was always happening when he put music on. We're the same age, and shared many interests, and yet he would always ask me if I knew who the artist was, and be sure to tell me how "surprised" he was when I did. We're talking no-brainers, like Chet Baker singing "My Funny Valentine" here, not Yohimbi Orchestra doing "Psychiatric Care for Geese."

Still. I endured it, and despite the fact that the sex was awkward at its best, we were sorta inching towards actually getting serious.

I'd stayed over one night, and in the morning I asked to check my email on his laptop.

The dude still had dial-up. I was like, "wow, how does this work again?"

And instead of answering "oh, just click the icon there," he unleashed a string of epithets on me that would make the ragingest Masshole on the Pike blush, and then went off to have his shower as if nothing had happened. Now, if we'd had a little thing going where we playfully insulted one another, but this was out of the blue and bordering on Tourette's. Frankly, it was shocking. And a deal-breaker for me.

The Orphanage has a hot-head-in-residence who occasionally unleashes the beast. The last time she lost it it was in front of everyone, and we all just shrank back in stunned silence. Really, it was like watching someone helpless to stop themselves masturbating on the T. We all felt like we needed a shower afterward. Rage, after all, is a kind of emotional incontinence -- projectile incontinence at that. It was like being psychically spewed on. All these rancid, age-old but undigested issues of hers heaving out in flaming chunks.

(She apologized some months later, and of course we forgave, but you never forget something like that. I mean, you'll always remember that girl in fifth grade who puked all over her desk during the social studies test, and she will always be "that girl in fifth grade who puked all over her desk during the social studies test.")

Rage takes the primary emotion of anger, which, according to psychoanalysts Glick and Roose, provides motivation "when a goal is interfered with and when organisms wish to overcome the obstacle to that goal," and basically removes the primary obstacle and the goal, leaving "incomplete or disorganized forms of anger" to explode like a microwaved chihuahua all over more or less innocent bystanders.

There are loads of hypotheses regarding sources of rage. Some blame evolution, overcrowding, even brain-damage. Most psychoanalysts agree with Dartmouth's Jim Platt, who says it comes from suppressed anger about lack of control:

Frequently the underlying anger is related to a perceived loss of control over factors affecting our integrity—our beliefs and how we feel about ourselves.... Rage is the accumulation of unexpressed anger and perceived disrespectful transactions that after multiple “stuffings” finally flow to the surface. When we become enraged, usually there is the belief that someone is deliberately attempting to incite us to become angry.

There's no question getting around Boston is frustrating, whatever mode of transportation you use. As a cyclist, my biggest frustration is the lack of connectivity in the broken network of bike lanes. There are several trouble spots. One is the Boston end of the Harvard Bridge. If I take the Charles River bike path, this is my on-off ramp:

The signs say to walk your bike, and if the ramp is crowded I do, but once you get to the top, if you're heading north over the bridge toward Cambridge there is no way to access the northbound bike lane, since there's a barrier between the sidewalk and the street:

If you're headed south towards Boston there's no legal crossing for about a block, at Back Street. And it's often not safe to cross until Beacon, two blocks down. So, if the sidewalk's free, I take it down to Beacon and cross the street there. I'm a pragmatic cyclist -- I'm not one of these spandex-clad road warriors who cycles on principle. In the real world sometimes you gotta improvise.

The flipside is that I don't take offense at the fact that no one else, including said spandex-clad road warriors, are following the rules of the road either, within reason. Who could? Build me a city where it's safe to bike by your rules, and I'll bike by your rules. Until then, I'll bike safe by mine. I'm not totally lawless: my Prime Directive: do no harm.

I follow the rules of the road when I can, of course. But when it seems to endanger my life or the life of others to do so, which it sometimes does, forget it. If I have to choose between a busy road without an accessible bike lane and a wide empty sidewalk, guess which one I'm taking?

But, just so you know, I don't ride on the sidewalk like it's the street. I basically coast with one foot on the pavement, keeping as far to the right as possible, making eye-contact and giving pedestrians a wide berth.  I really do. I know it's a sideWALK. I use 'em for walking, too. But if we've got six feet between us, and we're aware of one another and can pass without event, why make a federal case of it?

Of course I understand. It's irritating. Everybody wants everybody else to follow the rules, but at the same time everybody wants to be the exception to the rules. And it's stressful when different modes of traffic mix. I avoid it at all cost, but sometimes it's unavoidable.

So, to make a long story short: one morning recently I had just crossed Back Street and headed down the empty sidewalk towards Beacon Street. I had no reason to expect a rage event before I got to the crosswalk. But that's just what happened. I'd hardly even hopped the curb before a sporty-looking guy -- could've been an MIT student -- gave me the evil eye, issued a huge, exaggerated huff, and made a big to-do of jumping over the guard-rail into the bike lane, as if there wasn't a block separating us and more than enough sidewalk between us to share.

As I continued down the sidewalk he stomped up the bike lane berating me. OK, a little bit of that you expect when you leave the house in the morning. This is Boston, after all. A "douchebag" or two. "Idiot", "moron". No biggy. But it just went on and on. It's times like these you wish you had a freakin' taser. Just end it.

As I passed him in slow-motion, I couldn't help but gawk at the spectacle he was making of himself. I mean, from the itensity of his anger you'd think I had just murdered his first-born right in front of him. He was very nearly ululating. This was the closest thing to a jihad I think I've ever been on the receiving end of.

If he had been more sensible -- maybe had merely grumbled something as I passed -- I might have explained to him, as I have to you, why I was abusing sidewalk privileges, and how I sympathize with his frustration with cyclists bullying pedestrians. I really do. And that if there were better options at trouble spots like this one, some of these frustrations could be mitigated. He was kinda cute -- maybe we could've gone for a coffee (decaf for him) and rapped about the BRA and dedicated bike lanes.

But as he stomped off, shaking his fist and cursing me at the top of his voice -- "Sidewalk-murderer! Rot forever in hell, son of spandex-wearing bicycle-fucking whore!" -- I looked back, at first shocked, then bemused, and then, when his anger seemed not to be abating, in fear of him chasing after me on foot. I've had four flats so far this year, so my escape was far from assured.

I'm a mellow ride. Just ask around. I'm not the type of guy who's going to shout you down, no matter how egregious your traffic violation. I grumble and mumble under my breath, sure -- I mean, you can't ride up Mass Ave. without dodging pedestrians and parked cars coming at you from every which way. You'd have to be a Jedi Master not to get flustered sometimes. You don't drive, cycle or walk through Central Square and come out the other end with a renewed love of humanity. It's just not possible.

But raging out never helps. I mean, it's hard enough to ride a bike in Boston without trying to do it blinded by rage.

Unarmed

2009-06-22T13:18:00Z

Another weekend more or less a wash. Gloomy, pissing rain off and on. Saturday all I wanted to do was sleep. By Sunday I was slipping in and out of coma. Somehow I managed to rouse myself in the afternoon and call the Marines. Friends of the Blog know I've got my own little Army of One I call upon when things look dire, like they did yesterday.

But when he showed up, looking hotter and scruffier than ever, I was online reading the news from Iran. Talk about gloomy. We looked at some of the pictures from the protests I'd posted last week, and he agreed with my thoughts on Persian men, especially this one:

He was like, "yeah, man, effin hot." And then added: "too bad he's gonna lose that arm."

I'm like "WTF?"

He shrugged: "Yeah, they're totally gonna cut off his arm, dude."

"He will not lose his arm!" I snapped, as if I could save it by fiat. "They have hospitals and doctors and they'll fix it and he'll be in a cast for a couple months and then he'll have a sexy scar. That's all."

But he was relentless.

"You think the government forces won't be waiting at the hospitals to haul the wounded off to jail?"

I had to admit I hadn't really thought it through. But I had an answer.

"You don't think he knows that?" I retorted. "You don't think there are doctor protesters he could go to?"

He ignored me.

"He’ll go to the hospital and they’ll arrest him, and they’ll cut off his arm. But he’s totally hot."

I didn't actually hear this last part, because I had clapped my hands over my ears and was busy shouting "LA LA LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU! LA LA LA!"

Eventually I'll get my way, I thought. See, we were looking at the pictures before we got down to business, and I could not focus on the task at hand until I was sure my bloody protester was OK. I gave it the old college try, but after a couple of minutes in bed, I was like, "take it back. Otherwise we can’t do this. I cannot have sex while this guy is having his arm amputated by some evil Mullah."

He shrugged.

I pinned him down.

"Repeat after me: 'it was only a flesh wound.'"

"Mm," he said, "I like it when you hold me down."

Hopeless.

Father and Son

2009-06-21T12:56:00Z

Me and my dad, c.1969 (I'm the one on the left).

You Don't Need a Fantasy Tan to Post a Missed Connection...

2009-06-21T01:57:00Z

But it definitely helps.

Under the Big Top

2009-06-20T00:42:00Z

They're here for the free Cheez-its.

They do it every summer -- pitch a big tent on the Common and have an "Old-Time Revival".

Yesterday morning as I strolled through the Common on my way from the T to work I saw the tent and two dour old men, one on either side of the wide path that leads from Parkman Plaza to the Central Burying Ground, the chubby one to the right, the skinny one to the left, gravely pamphleteering passersby.

Not all passersby, of course. And not exactly random passersby, either, from what I could see. There was definitely some racial profiling going on, sorry to say. As I approached, I watched the skinny guy on the left let three Araby-looking fellows pass by without offering any of them a shot at salvation.

And it wasn't because he was busy saving other souls, I can assure you. Seemed to me he was actively withholding the possibility of salvation from certain ones. Fair enough, I guess. I mean, if I had a say in who'd be my neighbors for all eternity in the Great Trailer Park in the Sky I probably would not choose the pamphleteers. I want Hidetoshi Nakata on one side, and the Ohio State wrestling team on the other, personally. Oh, and the South End Knitters across the street, of course.

Choose your battles, right? And anyway, whoever heard of Arabs at an Old-Time Tent Revival? Bedouins, maybe. The Arabs, for their part, seemed like sweet-natured fellows and looked at the mean skinny evangelizer sheepishly as they passed, expecting the pitch that never came at them, and seeming, frankly, a little hurt at his disinterest in their souls.

Meanwhile, the chubby one was more generous -- or maybe less discriminating (sometimes you can't tell the difference) -- because he had managed to catch my eye. I thought I might be able to slip past as he pamphleteered another guy ahead of me, but I didn't quite make it. It seems I am too Arab-looking to let go without a pat-down at airports, but not Araby enough to be passed up as a lost cause by street-preachers. You can't win.

"Do you know about Jesus Christ?" he called out to me.

"Je-whoosy-whatsy?" I said, not breaking my stride.

"Jesus Christ," he repeated. "Your personal lord and savior?"

"My personal what?" I said, stopping and looking at him screwy. "Did I win an iphone? What is this?"

Before I go on I'd like to commend the gentleman for not being the least bit incredulous, and taking my questions at face value. Sincerity is almost certainly a precondition to salvation, and if it is, I'm sure he's going to Heaven. I'd go so far as to say he'll have the last laugh, but everyone knows there's no laughing up there. To borrow from Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting...

Things deprived suddenly of their supposed meaning, of the place assigned to them in the so-called order of things, make us laugh. In origin, laughter is thus of the devil’s domain. It has something malicious about it (things suddenly turning out different from what they pretended to be), but to some extent also a beneficent relief (things are less weighty than they appeared to be, letting us live more freely, no longer oppressing us with their austere seriousness).

But you don't have to believe Kundera, who is, after all, not a theologian. The question of whether God and his angels have a sense of humor is as old as God himself, despite the fact that, as the great Reinhold Niebuhr points out in his essay "Humor and Faith", there is only one instance in the Bible when laughter is attributed to God (Psalm 2:4) -- and where it is, alas, coupled with derision (news-flash!: he may not be laughing with us, guys).

Niebuhr is often quoted as saying "humor is a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer." But the second half of the famous quote is: "Laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humor is fulfilled by faith."

"Laughter," he says, " is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially." Indeed, "the ultimate incongruities of life... are too profound to be resolved or dealt with by laughter. If laughter seeks to deal with the ultimate issues of life it turns into..." LOLcats? No. According to Niebuhr: "It turns into bitter humor."

Laughter is not merely a vestibule to faith but also a 'no-man's land' between faith and despair. We laugh cheerfully at the incongruities on the surface of life; but if we have no other resource but humor to deal with those which reach below the surface, our laughter becomes an expression of our sense of the meaninglessness of life.

In other words, you can laugh out in the lobby, but once you're inside, zip it.

Of course, in Hell everyone's a comedian. It's like an open mic night at Chuckle's Comedy Club that NEVER ENDS. Payback time for earthly ironists and their retarded hill-billy cousins, the sarcasticists (fear not, there is help for you).

Still, here on earth, while circumstances sometimes require a straight face, there's, mercifully, a time for laughter, too. And a time for taking the piss. I mean, don't come up to me, say something like "do you have a minute to save the children?" and expect me to answer you seriously. Because here's what you'll get: "No, today's my day to rescue kittens from trees. Sorry."

Well, "have you heard of Jesus?" Is right up there.

So I'm like: "Cheez-its? Mmm! Love 'em!"

"Jesus," he patiently repeats. "Jesus Christ."

"You sure you're saying it right? Is it Spanish? They pronounce the 'j' like an 'h' you know."

"No, it's Jesus," he says, enunciating: "Gee-zuss."

"Does he play for the Sox?"

"Does who play for the Sox?"

I roll my eyes.

"This Gee-zuss."

"I'm talking about Jesus Christ, the Son of God."

"Didn't he date Madonna at one point?"

Protestants and evangelicals: not into Madonna, at all. I could see his eyes narrow -- he was suddenly suspicious. Was I a Catholic? For evangelicals: worse than Arabs, Jews, and Satanists put together. That was my cue to exit, stage left.

I passed back by on my way home in the drizzle, and noticed they'd moved in under the big top, where a somber preacher in a cheap suit was waving a floppy Bible at a sparse joyless gathering of five or six. Either they were seeking shelter from the rain, or among the few who hadn't heard of Jesus yet, or maybe just pronounced the "j" like an "h" and thought they were going to get a free sample of Cheez-its.

Anybody Want a Horse?

2009-06-19T21:15:00Z

The Mayor's people have sent out an email:

Our current global economic crisis has forced many cutbacks in city government. Unfortunately, this means that our mounted patrols are now being disbanded. This was a hard decision but it was better than the alternative, removing much needed uniformed officers from our streets. We are currently searching for a new and safe home for these horses. Thanks again for your concern.

Blood Lust

2009-06-19T12:52:00Z

I don't want to trivialize what's happening in Iran right now. It's hugely significant when a people rise up in great numbers like this. So what if so-called reform candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi isn't exactly Mahatma Gandhi. As one Iranian commentator put it: even Satan is to the Left of Ahmadinejad. Democracy doesn't guarantee you'll necessarily have a good choice. A lot of the time it's the lesser of two evils.

But, aside from all that, it is always stirring to see people take to the streets in a revolutionary fashion. And anyone who has been through one can tell you, revolution and fashion go hand in hand. Especially when, as in Iran, roughly 60 percent of the population is under 30, and roughly as many of them are hot as anywhere else. And I'm not even talking about their soccer team....

What is way hotter than hot guys chasing after a ball on the pitch? Hot guys chasing dreams of democracy on the streets of Tehran!...

But the most iconic image for me so far is this one:

Now, what makes this such a hot shot is that you've got the guy on the left, who's military, and the guy on the right, who's sheltering him, with the green shirt -- that would indicate that he's a demonstrator. The cop was getting the shit kicked out of him by a bunch of other demonstrators until this one came along and saved his ass. "Randy young soldier rescued by tender-hearted rebel realizes the error of his ways and switches sides." If that's not porn-hot, I don't know what is.

We know that love is forged in revolution, and as terrible as the struggle against tyranny is, the bonds formed in rising up against it are immortal.

Knitting Animals!

2009-06-18T12:38:00Z

The South End Knitters are at it again! This time near the intersection of Arlington and Tremont, where they've knitted this lovely sweater for a lamp-post outside the South End chapter of the Animal Rescue League...

By the way: June is Adopt-a-Cat Month.

And South End Knitters: I think I love you.

Obama: Gay For Pay?

2009-06-17T16:46:00Z

The Obama administration is expected to sign a presidential memorandum today extending benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees, though he will, according to the Times, "stop short of pledging full health insurance coverage."

Turns out -- surprise, surprise! -- that DOMA, which the administration vigorously defended in federal court (and in the most despicable terms) just last week, plays a big role in the President's half-measures on health insurance for gay partners of federal employees. The Times explains:

In California, two federal appeals court judges said that employees of their court were entitled to health benefits for their same-sex partners under the program that insures millions of federal workers. But the federal Office of Personnel Management has instructed insurers not to provide the benefits ordered by the judges, citing a 1996 law, the Defense of Marriage Act.

So instead of health insurance, Obama is giving us a memo. He has to do something, since so far he hasn't done anything. At least not anything for us. And if you think hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, you have never met an dissed drag queen.

__________________________________________________________________________

If you go around posing as a prostitute and then
gay-bash your johns, well, word gets around.
__________________________________________________________________________

According to administration officials, "the timing of the announcement was intended to help contain the growing furor among gay rights groups. Several gay donors withdrew their sponsorship of a Democratic National Committee fund-raising event next week."

Hmmm. Well, the good news is that obviously this means the President will be gay for pay. Just how gay is the question. If he's gonna turn out to be just another str8 cocktease who thinks we're going to keep buying him drinks when he never puts out, he'll find himself alone at the bar, nibbling on his maraschino cherry and chewing ice all night.

On the other hand, if you go around posing as a prostitute and then gay-bashing and robbing your johns, well, word gets around. Trust me, Mr. President, you don't want that kind of reputation.

One If By Land, Two If By Sea

2009-06-17T14:03:00Z

The Mayor and the Governor have reached a million-dollar deal for security for the five day festival of the Tall Ships.

Meanwhile, the mounted police, with their annual budget of almost half what the state will spend for five days on the Tall Ships, still seems doomed. (You can write the mayor one last desperate plea if you want, though I don't know what good it will do -- there's been tremendous feedback on the issue, even pledges to pay for the care of the horses, and still hizoner seems inclinced to cut the unit.)

The state, through the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, will spring for city's security forces for the Tall Ships. The Festival is expected to bring local merchants a lot of business, which makes state funding politically feasible. Even though the cost of additional security could, conceivably, be covered by charging a small fee -- $2.50, say -- for a day pass for the expected 600,000 visitors to the ships. Problem solved.  With change to spare.

The mounted police, on the other hand, provide valuable services patrolling the Fens and Back Bay most of the year, and keeping order among occasionally unruly Sox fans (and if you think they could do it on bicycle -- come on, are you kidding? No one respects a cop on a bicycle).

The impact of axing the mounted units may not be immediately felt, just as their presence is often taken for granted.  But the loss to the community will be felt in years to come. They are a part of the fabric of the Fenway. That's how you destroy a community: you start pulling at threads here and there until the whole thing unravels.

The state is very kindly subsidizing the private sector in the case of the Tall Ships, when the private sector should be being encouraged to fund the special needs of the festival. If projections of $120 million to the local economy are ball-park accurate, the additional security could be covered for less than one percent of the expected take.

Meanwhile public sector services that actually need state funds to survive are axed.

What's wrong with this picture?

Yes We (Probably) Can (You Can Bet on It!)

2009-06-16T17:07:00Z

I think we need some serious campaign truth-in-sloganeering reform.

Remember "Yes We Can"? Well, forget it. I mean, check out this encouraging quote from Obama's HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, in a Q-n-A about the future of healthcare reform: "Will something probably be phased in? You bet."

Wow.

I'm not a betting man, but that sounds like a pretty good bet to me! I feel heartened by the fact that it's practicaly guaranteed that something might possibly maybe some day be sorta kinda phased in at some point, don't you?

Of course, the beauty of the Obama campaign slogan was captured in the post-election bumper-sticker that started popping up in its stead, gloating: "Yes We Did." I guess if you understood the original slogan as referring to electing the first black president, then, yes, we did indeed.

Beyond that, apparently, all bets are off.

Except for things like closing Gitmo, or the repeal of DOMA, or healthcare reform -- You can bet on those -- that they might maybe someday probably happen somewhere. Of that you can be sure.