corrections

Oops. I made an error the other day.

In the post where I complain about glbt stuff disappearing from the White House Website, I was wrong. It's still there. It just does not seem as huge as it once appeared.

And the chairman of the Democratic National Committee is Tim Kaine, otherwise known as the invisible/silent man for the low profile he keeps.

Another busty day and I'm pooped. This is all you get. Sorry.

Into the fray...

The entire progressive political world has got its panties in a large and uncomfortable bunch over Rev. Rick Warren giving the invocation prayer at Barack Obama's inauguration next month.

For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past year, Warren's written a couple of books about living with purpose and he's got a mega-church somewhere west of here (California) and preaches to thousands each Sunday in what looks like a converted multiplex theater. He gets all het up and paces and shouts, a lot like black preachers sometimes do, but this guy's white, so conservative white people like him instead of fear him. Here is the Wiki page on him. Research at your own leisure.

The queer activists are in a lather. I mean a LATHER. See, Warren is a bit of a dope on queer issues. He's a bit of a dope on a lot of issues. He is against a woman having control over her own reproductive process, he is against gay rights and certainly gay marriage, he has espoused some pretty conservative views on women's role in society, Jews, and all the usual hot-button issues. He is on tape comparing gays to pedophiles, and incestuous siblings and all sorts of nonsense. He says homosexuality can be cured - prayed away, if you will. Anyone with any sense knows he's full of shit on these issues.

The list-serve I belong to has been rife with talk and sputter about this guy and Obama's choice of him. How could he betray us, the glbt community, by giving this guy a podium at our party? How could Obama talk about equality for us but then invite this schmoe to give the invocation?

What is interesting is that I have heard nary a peep from the conservatives about Obama's choice for the benediction, one Rev. Dr. Joseph Lowrey. Lowrey is a black preacher and a progressive who supports equality for the glbt community. He gave the eulogy at Coretta Scott King's funeral a while back and was widely acclaimed as a voice for progressives of Christian faith in America. (If you need a wiki reference for Mrs. King, please leave this site now. Get out. You're nowhere near smart enough to be here. )

So back to Rev. Warren. You might remember that he hosted a kind of forum/interview thing with John McCain and Barack Obama this summer. He invited each to his church and interviewed them separately on issues that were of importance to a lot of people in America, but particularly to evangelical Christians. Both men performed pretty well, and while McCain gave answers that I am sure were much more in line with the views of Warren's congregation, Obama held his own, explaining his moral bases for the positions he takes, and he did not alter his philosophies in order to accommodate the tastes of that audience.

Appearing on that program was considered risky by some, brave by others, and a sell-out by others still. Warren was criticised by the left for spending too much time on gays and abortion while in the Obama interview, and by the right for having him on the program at all. For McCain it was win-win. He showed up, was a grumpy old white conservative and probably didn't lose any votes for his effort. Obama had a lot more at stake at the time.

In all of the back-and-forth that has been going on this week, I find myself in an unusual position at the less liberal end of my queer caucus. Everybody, and I mean everybody, is worked up about this thing. The embittered Hillary supporters have been shouting that she never would have done anything as bone-headed as this (bullshit). I have not seen emotions this high amongst my crowd since the caucuses. It's nasty out there. People are protesting in the town square and planning personal viewing boycotts of the inauguration.

And you know what? I don't get it. It's not worth dying for. Our community has been through so much worse, and at the hands of people who claimed to be our allies (think Clinton administration, DOMA, DODT, etc.), that this is really minor. Bill Clinton had Billy Graham give his first inaugural invocation. Irony, anyone? At least this Warren guy preaches against violence against us. He preaches against discrimination. He does not damn us to eternal flames or a watery grave as other evangelicals do. Let's back off a bit, kids.

I live in a very progressive world. I work for myself and much of my work comes by word-of-mouth referrals, so it often involves friends and like-minded people. My community has two world-renowned genetic research laboratories that attract a highly-educated, world-class, generally liberal staff of scientists and support staff. There is also a very hippy college with one major - human ecology. So yeah, I live behind the tofu curtain. I regularly participate in my list-serve, also filled with like-minded souls, many of whom cut their teeth in the women's lib movement of the 60s and 70s and all of the other assorted liberal/progressive things that happened in those years. I am steeped in my liberal world.

Only my liberal world is not universal. The rest of America looks quite different from the world I live in. In fact, just after the 2004 elections, when Bush won so handily, I remember thinking "who are these people who like this guy? Where do they come from?" Honestly, I knew maybe a half-dozen people who voted for Bush in 2004. Everybody I knew was voting for, volunteering for, getting out the vote for John Kerry. On the day after the election, it was as though I woke up in a foreign land.

So what did liberals do? The shrub had a majority in both houses and "political capitol" to spend. We were screwed. The usual circular firing squad was formed and blame was flung in all directions. But after we got done with that, when we were shut out of every part of government, we got pissed and then we got organized. We suddenly got over our petty shit and worked together and came back with a vengeance. We kicked ass this year and wrote down names. We didn't just remove the boot from our throat, we broke the leg it was attached to.

Now we must be careful. If we do not want to lose this all again in eight years, we've got to be careful not to do what Chimpy did and get all arrogant and pushy.

Yes, I live in a liberal world. But I am sure there are many hundreds of thousands of Americans who live in a very conservative world. You could take five members from each camp, set them in a room together and all parties would leave convinced they had just visited space aliens. We are nearly that foreign to one another. I have no concept of the thought processes of a person who is anti-choice, anti-gay rights, pro-death penalty, pro-war, and who thinks the bible should be used as a guide for legislation and policy decisions. I just don't get that mindset. They, on the other hand, probably cannot grasp my world - non-christian, lesbian, working in a male-dominated field, anti-nuke, pro-choice, pro-gay everything who thinks that the bible is best filed under "fiction."

But both of us exist. And probably in similar numbers. American politics is, after all, something like a bell curve, with similar amounts on the edges of each end (that's me on the left) and the majority of folks in the middle somewhere. This year, the bulk of that big bulge in the middle shifted incrementally to the left. We are still much too far to the right as a nation for my tastes, but the pendulum is beginning to swing back my way. I want to make sure it's going to keep swinging our way for many, many years. We have a lot of making up to do since Reagan got elected in 1980.

So anyway, those conservative evangelicals have got to be looking at this Obama thing and wringing their hands in grief and anxiety. The whole administration is going to be filled with those godless heathens who want to take away our guns! Oh woe!

That happened to us eight years ago. What did we do? Got pissed, got organized, remember? Right. So how do we keep them from getting pissed, getting organized, and throwing us out on our ass after eight years?

Include them.

Rick Warren is not darling of the religious right, but he's closer than anything we've got. They don't love him, but he pisses us off - a lot - and that endears him to them, certainly. He would not be their choice, but they trust him to speak their language and to carry their message to that seething liberal pit that has become their government. The conservative religious portion of America sees Warren probably as we see some of our not-as-liberal-as-we'd-like-them-to-be-progressives. No, he's not all aces, but he can go places the more strident of us cannot. He will make progress that we can agree with. If he compromises on a thing, we might complain, but he'll explain it so it doesn't stink so bad.

And that is what Barack Obama is counting on. This guy has the ear of the religious right. He is not their leader nor their emissary, but he can sway some of the masses. In order to affect lasting change, Obama must garner the support of ALL of the people, not just the ones who think like him. That's what the current occupant did. He got to the point where he just passed stuff over our protests. So what? he said. You haven't got what it takes to override it or even filibuster, so go pound sand. It is because of that attitude that progressives were able to take power. Obama is doing everything he can to avoid that kind of bully behavior. He must be a president for ALL Americans, not just the ones I happen to agree with.

Would Warren be my choice? No. Gene Robinson, maybe. Some wiccan crone, perhaps. Whoopi Goldberg, maybe, or Wanda Sykes. Donna Brazille - nah, I'd just get flustered and distracted. But then, it would be a strange day indeed if I were elected president. That's fluff in the clouds.

What is reality is Barack Obama trying to bring together a nation that is more fractured and more divided and more rancorous than it has been in any year since Nixon was impeached. He's not going to march to my drumbeat. Like he has done through his entire campaign, he is going to march to his own drum, play his own game, work his own strategy, and achieve many, if not all, of his goals and objectives. This is not new behavior for him. People who have known him for years say he's running true to his history and true to his pragmatic nature. He will get stuff done, and much of it will please us, however his methods might make us scream.

Hate

This is in today's edition of the Mount Desert Islander, my hometown weekly newspaper:

Racist effigies appear
by Mark Good

MOUNT DESERT ISLAND - Election night here was marred by the discovery Wednesday morning of effigies depicting a black man found hanging from telephone lines in Tremont and Bar Harbor.

The cardboard effigies, which some officials believe are a response to the election of Barack Obama as president, were removed Wednesday morning.

Maine State Police received a report at 12:30 a.m. Wednesday that a cutout figure of a black man was hanging from telephone lines near Seal Cove Pond in Tremont. Trooper Alden Bustard responded but was unable to remove the figure because it was too high off the ground. Fire chief Brad Reed agreed to use a fire truck to take the figure down. In Bar Harbor, a similar cutout figure was found hanging from telephone lines near the intersection of Route 102 and the south end of the County Road. A Bar Harbor fire truck was used to remove the effigy.

Hancock County District Attorney Michael Povich said the person or persons responsible could be subject to a civil action and criminal charges.

"At a minimum they could be charged with disorderly conduct," he said.

In criminal cases, the aspect of a hate crime could be considered an aggravating factor during sentencing, Mr. Povich noted.
mgood@mdislander.com

Dawn back talking now:
How nasty and petty and shallow and mean can people be? Well, I guess the depths of that reservoir have yet to be plumbed.

Less than two hours after America elected its first ever African American president, some knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, cousin-fucking asshole pulls something cute like this. Yessireebob, I bet the boys back at the bait shack are gonna have a real good hee-haw at that.

But what is particularly chilling is the fact that this brilliant piece of political commentary could not have been pulled out of a redneck's ass in the 90 minutes between when the networks called the race and when the first call to police came in about the cardboard black man in a noose. That means that Billbob, or whatever the fuck his name is, had to prepare for the event in advance, making the cutouts, painting them black, tying the nooses (they're not easy, I've done them) and figuring how much rope and weight would be necessary to get the thing in the air and sufficiently wrapped around the lines so as to be a pain in the ass to take down, all probably done very quickly and from the back of a pickup truck. I am sure it must have taxed our hero's little pea brain to calculate such things, and to make TWO of them, plus figure out where to put them.

I am sure the schoolchildren who rode past one of the effigies on the bus in the morning were proud of their neighbors for such a display. I bet the black kids especially thought it was clever and funny.

I am so pissed right now as to be nearly be beyond words. I have some kind of flu-bug thing that is making my ears and throat sore, and despite the fact that my community, my county, and my state voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama, one or two wingnuts have seen fit to throw a wrench into the celebration of a historical milestone with this holdover from a much darker time. My head is throbbing, my muscles hurt, and now I'm mad. Bleah. Fuckers.

Perhaps tomorrow I can write something meaningful about forgiveness or charity or something. But not today. Not yet.

I have a neat list of topic ideas for this once-a-day-for-a-month blog thingamajig, but "hate" had to be added and then bumped to the top for this thing. All of my ideas are pretty heavy topics, so if anyone wants to offer some lighter fare for me to chew on during November, please do leave a comment to that effect. Otherwise, I'll be working my way individually through the seven virtues and the seven deadly sins (with apologies to Peter Sagal).

A dream I never dared

I never imagined that I would live to see last night, an event when a black man was nominated as candidate for President of the United States of America. I never imagined that a woman would have come so close to winning that nomination either. I figured those things were far off, perhaps something even to be done by our opponents over in the R camp. They had Margaret Chase Smith, after all, and they've got Olympia and Susan in the Senate from Maine while we have sent nothing but white men there for a while. We do have a woman running for Tom Allen's old Congressional seat (Chellie Pingree) and I think she's got a real shot of getting there.

Last night I sat on my couch and got goosebumps when Barack Obama accepted the nomination of his party. It simply took my breath away. Not only have we, the Democrats who have so long talked the talk of inclusion, nominated a black man to be president, but truly he was the best candidate out there AND he is likely to win. This is not a Geraldine Ferraro situation, where she was placed on the ticket as a gimmick to show how progressive we all were. No, Obama is the leading man in this drama, and because he was the best contestant.

It was cruel what the Dems did to Ferraro, throwing her into the fire like that just to make a point. She was right when she said that if her name had been Gerald Ferraro, she'd have been nowhere near that ticket. It's true. She was a gimmick and the boys used her as such. She was no more prepared to compete on a national stage than I am. And despite all the fun we had at George I's expense, he was the guy who ran the CIA for Nixon. He may have been socially inept, but he was smart and he played dirty. There aren't a lot of people who could go up against him and come out on top.

This primary battle was different, though. Hillary was her own woman, not put up to anything by the more powerful men in her life. Truly, I don't think there are more powerful men in her life. I think she is the alpha in her world - at work, at home and wherever she goes. Aside from that, she ran a good race, fought hard, and did not win. She pulled out all the stops and tried everything she knew to get the delegate count she needed, but it simply did not happen. Were my candidate faced with those challenges, I would want him to fight the same way and try every trick he knew. Good for her. But I am still glad Obama won. He's my guy.

I feel like I should be holding my breath. This is a moment I never thought I would see, and I fear that if I exhale to take another breath it will slip away, dissolving like fog in a dream, leaving me heartbroken as the sun streams through the early morning window. It is almost too good to be true. He is right on everything, he holds a high ethical standard and demands the same from the people around him. He has a beautiful, powerful wife who can hold her own in any forum and beautiful children.

Comparisons have been made with Jack Kennedy and with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And that scares me. Both of those men were killed violently in the prime of their lives. Please, God, keep this one safe. Please. Our country needs him and his message and his hope so badly.

Yes! Yes, we can!

Wow. I never thought it would really happen in my lifetime. We have a nominee for the President of the United States of America who is: young, black, liberal, smart, community-based, and not a part of the entrenched, corrupt system that currently has a stranglehold on Washington, D.C. I have hope. It's name is Barack Obama.

I haven't dared to hope too loudly. I know what it is to feel disappointment. I have lived in Red Sox Nation for too many years to not know what heartbreak feels like. But now I have hope.

At the caucus in my town in February, I spoke passionately of my support for Obama. I got some real applause, too, and was selected to be a delegate to the state convention. Life intervened and I was unable to go, but an alternate went in my stead. My feelings have not changed, though.

I am 42 years old. The first president I have any memory of is Richard Nixon. That should tell you a lot about how I view politics right there. He was crooked and a bully and corrupt and got his lousy ass thrown out. OK, so he resigned before it could happen, but that's what the cards were showing.

Then we had Ford. I'm not sure why, but we did. The only thing he did that was memorable to me was pardon Nixon and piss off a whole bunch of people. There was no healing of the nation going on there, it was political cronyism and it stunk as bad as the whole Watergate thing.

Then we had Carter. He was smart, really smart. Brilliantly smart. Nuclear physicist smart. But dumb as hell when it came to politics. He was ethical and naive and it bit him in the ass. He came in looking overwhelmed and a little confused and left looking like he'd been dragged behind his farm tractor over 40 acres of rough ground.

Then we had Reagan. What a prick. He was a racist, bigoted, fuck. AIDS was killing my brothers and sisters and he didn't give a damn. Fags didn't vote for him, let 'em die. For eight years, he gutted the New Deal policies and institutions that made America the place that the world admired. He trod mercilessly on the old and the very young, the weak, the uneducated and the vulnerable. He was the most highly-polished bully US politics had seen in 100 years. What a fuck. Alzheimer's was too kind for him. I'm not done hating him. Dig him up, I'll kick him again. I hold him personally responsible for the deaths of THOUSANDS of my friends from HIV/AIDS. Bastard.

Then we had George the First. He tried the kinder, gentler thing, but still supported policies to help the rich and piss on the poor.

And then I pinned my hopes on a candidate named Clinton. For the first time, the glbt crowd was courted as a voting block. We were invited to the party, and not just to be the caterers and designers. We were welcomed, and it was heady stuff. We organized rallies, got out the vote and donated scads of cash. And we got screwed. Without so much as a peck on the cheek and some lube. We got bent over. We got Don't Ask, Don't Tell, we got the Defense Of Marriage Act, and we got shown the door. Thanks a bunch, asshole.

After eight years of heartbreak, we went right back to the Bush Dynasty with Mad King George. W has been a nightmare that I don't have to describe here. We know what it's been like. The wealthiest one percent of Americans holds more wealth than the other 99 percent COMBINED. Great swaths of the population (including me) have no health insurance. Americans are working two or three jobs just to make the bills each month. Thousands of homes are being foreclosed on every month, and don't even get me started on the war.

So here we are at a crossroads. We were faced with a choice between Senator Hillary Clinton of New York and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. Hillary spent a good deal of time running on her husband's experience. That puts a bad taste in my mouth already. And she voted for the war. She's out. Over and done. It will be a very long time before I put my trust in another candidate named Clinton. I've been burned by that stove already. Add to the fact that there is nothing in this country that would unify the Republican party quite like HRC for president, and it's a migraine to consider.

So I look at Obama. He's not perfect. He doesn't support SSM, but Michelle does, I think. But he was opposed to the war from the start. He was a community organizer. He understands the struggles of people who this year will have to choose between groceries and fuel oil. He understands that the key to progress is coalition-building, not beating your opponent into submission. That only creates a resentful foe ready to spring at the first sign of weakness. It is far better to have your adversaries involved in the process so that they have some ownership than to leave them out. Lack of ownership often gives permission to snipe or destroy a thing. If a person has worked on a project, he is less likely to firebomb it in the night.

As some of you know, I am originally from Massachusetts. It's not my fault. I got here as soon as I could. Be that as it may, the word of the Kennedys still holds some pull in my life. I grew up in a world where it was common for the front parlor (the formal room for receiving guests) to have hanging on the wall in a conspicuous place, a crucifix, sometimes with a font for holy water. On one side of the cross typically hung a portrait of the pope and on the other a portrait of "Our Dear Jack." After he was shot, many families draped the picture of JFK with black, others opted for a black and white photograph in a simple black frame. The popes and their portraits have come and gone, but Jack remains. So this is where I come from.

When Caroline Kennedy endorsed Obama back in Januray, I sat up and took notice. Ted is a political animal, he endorses and opposes things all the time, but Caroline never has. Caroline is the last surviving member of Camelot. She focuses her energies primarily on charitable works - children's literacy and such. She rarely ventures into the political realm. She was born into it, has lived surrounded by and steeped in it, but rarely does she jump in and splash around. So when she wrote a piece in the New York Times, I paid attention.

Like me, Caroline has, aside from her father, who died when she was quite young, and LBJ, known only the political history that I have known. People come up to her almost every day and tell her about how her father inspired them to do great things, to join the Peace Corps, to volunteer, to get involved. Until she met Barack Obama, she said, she had not met anyone who inspired her in the same way. Here is what she said: "I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans."

This is the first time in my lifetime when I feel real hope. I feel like things might be different, like this guy is going to challenge us to be more than we are, to do more than we think we can, to stand up and say "we are America. We are better than what we've been, we deserve better than what we've accepted of late."

We can do it. Yes, yes we can. Obama '08

The tide has turned

It seems more and more inevitable now that Barack Obama will get the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States. I never thought I would see in my lifetime a black candidate with a real chance at becoming president. I am at once thrilled and terrified.

I am thrilled that America has come so far. I remember growing up with a father who adored Archie Bunker. He missed the genius of the satire completely. Rob Reiner's brilliance was utterly beyond his grasp. He really believed that Archie Bunker was right. For all I know he still may.

And that is what terrifies me. We are pretty well insulated in our liberal little corner of the Northeast. A guy I know refers to Bar Harbor as being "behind the tofu curtain" for its dearth of hippes-turned-entrepreneurs. Free range organic flax seeds are available at the grocery store here. Yeah, it's kinda liberal compared to the rest of Hancock County, and quite liberal when compared to any number of rural counties in the midwest and the deep south. Now before all you southerners and midwesterners get your panties in a knot, please understand that I know that not all southerners are rednecks and not all midwesterners are nazi-sypathizing offspring of German immigrants. Let's just say that I know that not everybody in America is as cool and hip and progressive as we are here in the liberal northeast.

I worry what will happen to Obama. On the campaign trail, who will guard him? The same secret service guys who put a noose in the work area of a black colleague? What happens if he wins? Will he have to travel around in a bullet-proof bubble like the pope? How tragic for us if he does.

On the other hand, what happens if he does get elected? What kind of progress can be made with a new approach, a new mandate, a new way of doing things? There is so much to hope for, it is sometimes difficult for this lifelong Red Sox fan to deal with. I have become reluctant to hope. There is a part of me that looks at the last few years of Red Sox and New England Patriots' championships as a fluke. It's too good - it can't be real. It will be taken from us. We know what that is about.

Honestly, I am more comfortable sometimes working from an underdog position. It is familiar. The work is hard, but it is comfortable. I know it and I am good at it. Operating from a position of power or authority is foreign to me, I don't trust it.

So I worry about getting a big majority in both houses of Congress and capturing the White House at the same time. Good God. It might be too much. We'll screw it up. Just like the Rs did after '96. They came on strong, like the bullies they were, and kicked ass and took names. I fear that we might do the same after being back-benched for so long. That or we might just fart around and get all tangled up in our own importance and get nothing done. Like the Red Sox do (or did) and the Patriots (ditto there).

Tom Allen threw his support to Obama today. That was nice. I am getting more and more impressed with Tom Allen every day. For a straight white male lawyer from Portland, he is remarkably good on a variety of issues. Unspeakably dull to listen to, but dead-on when it comes to the issues. I must remember to donate to his campaign this week.

I must learn to feed my hopes and sooth my fears. In politics as in life. I must learn to put one foot on front of the other, to do the next right thing and to move forward, trusting that what I need will be there.