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| ARCHIVES: March, 2004 |
The Agenda:Testing the Premise: Are Gays a Threat to Our Children? What the "Dutch Study" Really Says About Gay Couples Federal Hate Crime Statistics: Why The Numbers Don't Add Up Favorites:
Photo Essays:The Anasazi Ruins of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico Now Showing / Reflection on Hayden, Arizona
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Mea Culpa
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Mirror Mirror
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Those Googley Eyes
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Mammoth, Arizona
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Everything's big in Mammoth.
Well, not really. Just this outsized shrine that's bigger than a house. We passed through Mammoth a few weeks ago, never having been there before. It's a pretty typical Arizona mining town, although it has a few more house trailers than average. But there's not trailer park in the world that has views as beautiful as the typical home in Mammoth.
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Mammoth is perched on one edge of the San Pedro River valley, affording virtually each and every one of its denizens a view that the upper-crust inhabitants of the Tucson foothills would pay dearly to have. I can imaging the residents barbecuing in their yards while admiring the clouds gathering over the mountains, the Little Leaguers tossing the ball around as the sun sets down the far end of the valley, and young lovers looking out across the valley floor in the moonlight.
It just goes to show – sometimes the best things in life really are free.
What a beautiful, lazy day. The sun is shining, but a strong wind had kicked up a good cloud of dust in this desert wilderness. I can barely make out the outline of the Catalina Mountains from our library.
Yes, my friends, we now have a library. Chris and I just finished putting it together this morning. He has spent a lot of time and energy painting it, and now it is nice and peaceful – a good place to work and hang out.
He spent most of the day yesterday painting, I spent a good part of the day pulling weeds, trimming trees and doing laundry. Today, we’re pretty much spent. This is a day for doing nothing.
We like being on the go a lot. We’ve done a few spontaneous car trips the past three weekends or so. But this weekend, we’re pretty much staying at home. And the change of pace, the slowdown, is very nice and calming. It’s good to have a nice, calm haven in these times.
I’ve been working on a review of Dr. Paul Cameron’s scholarly, yet homophobic literature. It’s pretty nasty, but because it’s chock-full of footnotes, it looks like a pretty impressive document on why nobody should ever be gay, approve of gays, or even tolerate gays. Hell, if the research he cites were true, I’d have to change my stripes. Unfortunately I’m finding that, tons of footnotes aside, it’s pretty bad stuff. But because it is heavily footnoted and he has a “Dr.” in front of his name, his research has been cited on national television and radio by such people as William Bennett and Pat Robertson as well as prominent political leaders. While they may not mean much to you or me, these people have huge audiences and Dr. Cameron gives them the ammunition they need.
I suppose that’s why I haven’t been posting much lately. It’s a combination of writer’s block and a preoccupation with what I see as more pressing and time-consuming work. A lot of people have posted a lot of information warning about deficiencies in Dr. Cameron’s work, but there isn’t a lot that really dissects his particular research line byline. So, I’m doing that – going over each of his seven pamphlets line by line, source by source, and what I’m finding is pretty… what should I say without giving it away… interesting. And hell, I’m just a layperson. Imagine what a professional would uncover! So anyway, that's what I've been doing. Meanwhile, keep an eye on Jon Darby’s presentations on the World Wide Rant. He’s on the same warpath.
So, yeah, doing this research is stressful, so it’s good to do it in this really nice home library. The ceiling fan is on, the windows are open, and the house is very quiet.
But then next weekend, this show will move to the University of Arizona Library. That’s where all of the journals are. Dr. Cameron, I’ve read your stuff and checked your facts, and I’m going to show the world the amazing things I’ve discovered.
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Last weekend, Chris and I made a spontaneous journey to Marfa, Texas, home of the Chinati Foundation, which is “a contemporary art museum based on the principles of it’s founder, Donald Judd … The emphasis is on works in which art and the surrounding landscape are inextricably linked.”. Donald Judd was a pioneering minimalist sculptor and several of his most important works are on display in Marfa, where he made his home. Chris had interned under Donald Judd in 1991, and he was as eager to show me around the Foundation as I was to see it. It was an incredibly inspiring experience in Chris' life.
In addition to Donald Judd's work, there are several permanent exhibitions by several other contemporary artists, including Dan Flavin, Ilya Kabakov, and John Chamberlain. All were outstanding.
There was a very interesting installation by the sculptor Carl Andre. His installation consisted of a selection of his poetry, which does not follow the pattern that we would ordinarily expect poetry to follow. He took the words and rearranged them using a manual typewriter, exploring the physical forms of the words and their spatial relationship to each other, and created a sculptural presentation of poetry. His poetry is understood in terms of visual relationships that the words have with each other, as well as to the blank space on the page. These aren’t poems which can be recited (except for “Poem for Three Voices”) or reproduced in book form, but rather are mounted works of art in physical form using the 8½” x 11” sheet of paper as the medium. There is a much better description by the Chinati Foundation’s acting director Rob Weiner that I encourage you to read.
I was thinking about Carl Andre’s poetry installation as I sat in several meetings yesterday. In the defense business, we employ a lot of acronyms that are second nature to us. These acronyms have become a sort of private language, without which our conversations would have little meaning. As I sat in the back row of one such meeting, I furiously scribbled notes, but if anyone would have been able to look over my shoulder they would have seen nothing but acronyms. The result is this Carl Andre -inspired poem.
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RFP SOO ROM CCSS SRS IRS ICD SOW EMD FSD CDRL TRD SDD VDD POM P3I SIP CLIN RVM ECN RDW WBS IMP IMS PIDS CPI SPI EAC SRR PDR CDR BCWS CCB CAB FRB IPR VTC TRR BCWP CMM SQE SCM TCM FCA FQT ACWP ESS SPC QRT
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The second Carl Andre -inspired poem represents my own personal approach to self-discovery, based on the Japanese concept of the Five Why’s.
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WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY?
WHY? |
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The Bush-Cheney 2004 website has finally – finally! – figured out that the entire Internet Nation was having a blast defacing its Bush-Cheney poster. The fun is over, but it was so good while it lasted. I would love to have been a fly on the wall at the meeting when they finally quashed the feature that allowed anybody to insert their own clever slogan into an official "Paid for by Bush-Cheney 04, Inc" poster. Vandalism was never so much fun – especially considering they provided the spray paint!
These are the guys running the country???
Anyway, I had some more fun today, as you can see below. Again, you will need Adobe Acrobat to see them full-size:
All images courtesy of
georgewbush.com. Whether they like it or not.
The Bush-Cheney 2004 website has given us an amazing opportunity for entertainment. If you go to this page, you can create your very own, custom-made Bush-Cheney poster with just about any slogan you want! There is very little filtering going on. You can find more information here.
This is so colossally dumb on their part that I expect this nifty little feature to be pulled down any minute. So, hurry! Put your imagination to good use.
There are a few limitations to work around. Some punctuation marks won't work, and a few words are filtered. But if you use the "City" field for those words, they aren't filtered. Also, sometimes the poster you get back doesn't have the text you submitted. It has someone else's text. That's how I ended up with Representing Corporate Interests Everywhere! And the kind person from Decatur who was expecting a "Decatur loves.." poster and got Seig Heil!instead, well, what can I say except "heh heh!"
These are some that I came up with. You will need Adobe Acrobat to see them full-size:
All images courtesy of
georgewbush.com. Whether they like it or not.
According to this article in the Washington Blade, one of “Bush’s most visible openly gay appointees” was the highly prominent and eminently influential Washington insider and policy heavyweight, Donald A. Capoccia.
Who, you may ask is Donald A. Capoccia? Why, he’s the most visible openly gay appointee. Weren’t you paying attention?
Okay, I’ll explain it to you in more detail. Apparently you haven’t heard about the high-powered position he held as vice chair of the U.S Commission on Fine Arts. How’s them for fine apples? And they say Bush doesn’t like gay people. It’s the Commission on Fine Arts, for crying out loud. You know you gotta have some queens on that sucker.
Anyway. Donald Capoccia has decided to resign in protest over the President’s endorsement of the anti-gay marriage amendment. Great. We managed to get one of our own into such a high-falutin’ position in the administration and he quits on us. Who do you suppose the second most visible openly gay appointee would be? I’m guessing he’s the guy in charge of the White House Christmas pageant. Either that or Mrs. Bush’s decorator.
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On a much more serious note, that same article discusses the broader reactions from a number of gay Republicans on the President’s announcement, with most reacting very angrily and pledging to fight against the proposed amendment. One group of gay New York Republicans declined Gov. Pataki’s invitation to act as delegates to the Republican National Convention this summer in New York. They vow instead to make their presence known inside and outside the convention hall by other means.
Then, the article concluded with this set of paragraphs that really caught my eye:
Former U.S. Rep. Steve Gunderson (R-Wis.), who is gay, said he supports efforts by gay Republicans to speak out forcefully against the president’s decision to back an anti-gay constitutional amendment. However, Gunderson cautions gay Republicans against overreacting.
“I think it’s a waiting game,” said Gunderson, who is a partner in D.C. area political consulting firm. “The real question is, is the president giving just rhetorical support in response to conservative constituency? Or will there be a strong, concerted legislative effort to push this?”
Gunderson noted that in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan gave mostly rhetorical rather than legislative support to the pro-life movement on abortion related issues. He said Bush might be following Reagan’s playbook on the gay marriage issue.
“It’s March. It was February when he did this,” Gunderson said of Bush’s support for the FMA. “Let’s see where they go on this.”
I find this hard to swallow. Mr. Gunderson is in effect saying that maybe it is okay that we be used as human fodder in the service of the Republican Party’s southern strategy, that it is okay for them to use us – as people and as fellow citizens – as bogeymen to scare others into voting for Bush. While this is something we’ve always had to deal with, there comes a time – at long last – when it should simply come to an end.
I guess this is the crux of the gay marriage argument: it is time. And it is finally time for more than just gay marriage. It is time finally for us to decide that labels should cease to hold power over anyone. It is time finally for us to decide that dividing citizen against citizen is bad politics. It is time finally for us to decide that demonizing a class of people is poisonous to our culture.
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Openly gay Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Az) held a town hall meeting in the Raytheon auditorium Friday during the lunch hour. I decided to sit in and listen as he fielded questions from the audience. Some answers I agreed with, most I didn’t. The ones that I didn’t agree with can be chalked up to one simple fact: he’s more conservative than I am. That’s okay really. It’s why he’s a Republican and I tend to vote Democratic, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Inevitably, he was asked about the controversy over gay marriage. The first question was somewhat oblique, referring to ongoing challenges over “family law”. He did not exactly shirk away, and gave a pretty strong condemnation over the idea of amending the Constitution.
Now, when I say he gave a strong condemnation, I’d have to clarify that his words were strong and unambiguous, but his body language was very uncomfortable. I suspect that he thought that the audience at a major defense contractor would be a bit more conservative than the general public. Maybe he was steeling himself for a negative response. I don’t know. But as he kept talking, it started to look like he was beginning to backtrack a little. He held out the possibility of civil unions as a compromise, and mentioned that if one state recognized gay marriage, that maybe other states shouldn’t be forced to recognize that same marriage.
I don’t see how such an arrangement could possibly occur under the “full faith and credit” clause of the constitution. He’s smart; surely he understands that very problem. Maybe he was throwing a bone of some sort. But if that were the case, wouldn’t he have understood that if the audience was really that conservative, those caveats would not placate it? Politicians say a lot of things that aren’t altogether logical, but rather what they think people want to hear. Is that what he was doing? I experienced quite a letdown at that point
But fortunately, that didn’t end the discussion. Someone else asked a follow-up question in a much more forceful tone, saying that our nation was becoming a “laughing stock” over the events in San Francisco. Uh-oh, I thought, this is where it gets ugly. Maybe Rep. Kolbe was reading the audience correctly after all.
But to my surprise, this is where Rep. Kolbe got his back up, dug in and held his ground. He didn’t use words like “the tide of history”, but his answer traveled along a similar arc. He made it clear that he felt gay marriage was inevitable, just as mixed-race marriages were inevitable, and are now legal and widely accepted. The time for gay marriage will come, he said, and it will come very soon. He predicted that in another decade it will be quite commonplace and we will all wonder what the fuss was about. He pointed out that the only time the constitution was amended to restrict any sort of rights was the temporary imposition of prohibition, and it was wrong for the constitution to be amended to restrict rights against any identifiable group of people.
And he talked about the first couple to marry in San Francisco, two ladies in their eighties, who had been the together for fifty-one years. And he contrasted that lovely couple with Britney Spears’ fifty-five hour marriage and subsequent annulment.
At that point, there was a good round of applause from the audience, which both surprised and gratified me. Not everyone applauded; I’d say fewer than half the audience. Probably about forty percent or so. But it was much more than I would have expected. Believe me when I say this: Raytheon is not 40% gay. And I was further gratified to think that even though a lot of people applauded, there were probably more who agreed with him, but were reluctant to applaud and make their thoughts known to their coworkers. Fear works in irrational ways sometimes.
I walked out of that auditorium feeling like we had turned some sort of corner. If the conservative workforce of a conservative defense industry can get behind the idea of opposing the amendment – with all of the implications that holds for the eventuality of gay marriage – then society can’t be that far behind. I think we have turned a corner of sorts.
But turning a corner and making your way back home are two very different things. It’s far from over, and as Yogi Berra once said, “It ain’t over ’till it’s over.” There will certainly be more setbacks and attacks. There will be court challenges and losses and overturns and defeats at the polls. And there will be victories and celebrations.
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I don’t know how you can be gay and remain a Republican in today’s climate. But I’m glad that Jim Kolbe is there fighting the good fight within his party. I’d like to see the Republicans learn a thing or two from the U.K’s Conservative party, which is, as we speak, actively courting and reaching out to gay and lesbian voters in Great Britain. They have just concluded a conference where they met to discuss ways to reach out to the gay vote.
Our country is split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans. That is pretty much how it should be. The gay vote, in a perfect world, should split the same way. There’s nothing about our sexual orientation that should yoke us to a particular political orientation. We can’t choose our sexuality, but we should be completely free to choose our politics. But as things stand today, we can’t freely choose our politics because the dominant forces in the Republican Party won’t let us in. Not only have they barred the door, but as a party they have signaled their intention of using us – fellow citizens! – as a wedge issue to divide America. They used to put Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy on their fundraising brochures. This year, it’s our faces that they will use.
I used to vote Republican, but over the last twelve years I have increasingly voted Democratic, although I’ve never done so on a straight ticket. I have been registered as an Independent, which in the state of Arizona meant that I wasn’t allowed to vote in the closed Democratic primary. But my drift to the Democrats has become a full-bore run. I’m running into the only shelter in the storm, which is sad because I’m really not all that liberal.
Today, there are a lot of gay Republicans who are now confronted with the ethical dilemma that they’ve worked hard to avoid: how do you remain a loyal Republican while continuing to openly love the one you love? It is estimated that a million gay men and women voted for Bush in 2000. I doubt many of them will vote for him in 2004.
And that is a terrible tragedy because in a sense there’s another right they’re denying us: the right to vote freely on the greater issues affecting all Americans. We won’t be allowed to vote freely on tax policy, homeland security, defense, Iraq, Social Security, education, or any number of other issues important to all Americans. It’s as if they’ve taken away our right to vote on any of those things. We won’t be allowed to vote on those issues because we will be compelled to vote instead for something far more fundamental: the preservation of our dignity under the Constitution.
My job bores me sometimes. Whenever I reach this point I start looking around at job postings, which never ceases to depress me. I find that the past ten years of working in management have rendered me unqualified to do much of anything useful anymore. When I look at these job descriptions, I see specific programming skills listed that I don’t have.
I haven’t done any programming to speak of since 1994, and a lot has changed since then. There’s this whole new Internet thingy that barely existed back then, and it has spawned a whole new world of technologies and ways of being. Employers now want skills like Perl, PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, and so on. It's like the world has passed me by, and I'm staring at everything with that puzzled look on my face like the time my great-grandmother tried to use the microwave oven.
When they ask me if I can speak JavaScript, I suppose I can say yes, in that I can say “This calls for a JavaScript, don’t you think?” As a manager, I tell other people how to program all the time. I say things like “add a button here”, or “change this printout there.” And guess what? It seems to happen, just like that. So really, how hard can it be?
These things can’t be that hard to learn. I have some very smart people working for me, but I don’t think that I am all that hopeless. Never mind what you’ve heard them whispering about me in the cafeteria. I think that given enough study and enough books for dummies I can learn pretty much anything. I’ve been meaning to do this for a very long time now. Ten years, to be exact.
I didn’t used to be this irrelevant. I used to be able to work my way through POSIX and sockets and forks (oh my!). I could spawn processes and threads with the best of them. I peeked and poked more registers than these kids can ever dream of. How many stacks do you think they popped or pushed? This object-oriented stuff has made them lazy.
I dazzled my superiors so much, they promoted me into management. That’s when I became immersed in the world of staffing, budgets, schedules and of course PowerPoint. I blame PowerPoint. It has the ability to make anyone look ten times smarter than they really are. So as I dazzled them with my PowerPoint slides about the software projects I was managing, I found myself moving further and further away from doing any actual programming.
So now, I find myself in a position where I couldn’t write a simple “Hello world” program if my life depended on it. I don’t know my way around these new-fangled Integrated Development Environments (IDE’s) anymore. Visual-this and simu-that. In my day, we worked from command lines. I was the master of the cntrl-key shortcuts and the vi editor with its arcane escape sequences. I basked in the comfort of a blinking curser. It was always there, waiting patiently and watching attentively for my next move as my fingers danced upon the keyboard. The mouse was for pussies.
But no, everything has to be so different these days. And what’s this? Now I read where Panchesco is brushing up on his programming skills and I’m feeling even more inadequate. Even Dogpoet is getting into the act! He's a writer – an artist for crying out loud, not a programmer!
So the gauntlet is thrown. I need to go to the bookstore this weekend and get me some tutorials. And if I’m lucky, I’ll need to go out and buy me some really cool software. And if I’m really lucky, I’ll need an even cooler computer with a flat screen digital display. In fact, I’m pretty sure PHP requires the use of a 21-inch flat-screen plasma display, doesn’t it?
Well, okay, maybe not. Back to reality.
I originally decided to create this blog using FrontPage instead of using tools designed specifically for blogging. I wanted to force myself to learn HTML, and I’ve pretty much been able to do that over the past few months. I even learned to hand-code my own RSS feed, since I don’t have a tool that will do it for me. I have now reached the point in my proficiency where FrontPage’s insistence on doing things its way is really annoying. I’m too much of a control freak to let the control freaks at Microsoft have their way. I want to learn CSS, but they think they know better, so they hide everything where I can’t find it and give me this crap called “Themes” that they expect will keep me happy. I can hear Bill Gates now: “Forget industry standards. You’ll use our Themes and you’ll like it.”
Who do they think they are? Who said Microsoft knew what was best anyway? I’m still waiting for their latest security patch to finish downloading.
No, I think the first thing will be to pitch this lame FrontPage thing in favor of Dreamweaver. I see it in a lot of job listings. I just installed a brand-spanking new copy of Dreamweaver and opened it up, and it looks so oh-my-god complicated. But since it’s what professionals use maybe it will let me quietly make my own mistakes with CSS. And maybe I can start to learn about PHP since FrontPage is completely ignorant on the subject. What do they know?
Who knows – maybe someday I’ll be able to add my own button and change my own printout without some snotty-nosed twenty-something making me fell like an old fogey. If I wanted to be an old fogey, all I’d have to do is hang out on Fourth Avenue.
Okay. I've now managed to write over a thousand words on this subject. You can now officially call me a geek, even if I'm still a poorly-qualified one.
Oh, god. I hope I don’t have to go back to college. Last time I did that, I had to program using punchcards. They don’t still use punchcards for JavaScript anymore, do they?
Has anybody seen the new Mel Gibson movie “The Passion”? I haven’t, although I’ve heard a lot of reviews about it. I hear he really nailed it in the end.
Barrump-bump!
I was at an offsite meeting yesterday at one of Tucson's finer resorts with our customers from the DoD, and we had this get-to-know-everyone exercise where we stood up and gave our name, what our job was, how long we've been doing it, and who people say we look like. Since I'm bad at identifying famous people, I knew this was going to stump me. Then a lady got up and said that when she dances, people think she looks like Tinker Bell.
Hmmm, I thought. What a coincidence! That's what they say about me!
Anyhow, Straight Plan for the Gay Man has answered the Fab Five with the Flab Four, Kerry is the new Dean, and I still can’t find that picture of John Kerry in Vietnam – you know, the one where he’s shirtless and holding a puppy. That should be his campaign poster.
I’ve been studying Leviticus lately, preparing for another answer to homophobic Christians. Did you know that eating shrimp can get you stoned? Honestly. I had no idea.
Oh, they mean that kind of stoned...
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