Monday, December 8, 2003
Conflicted about the Conflict: Giving Thanks
On Thanksgiving Day, President Bush made a covert visit to Iraq, to have Thanksgiving dinner with a selected group of soldiers. The event was done under heavy security, apparently with many in the White House itself not aware of what was happening, nor the President’s own family, and only a select group of aides and reporters were taken along.
To hear Talk Radio go on about it for the next few days, you would have thought he bit the head off a puppy on live television. The lefties ranted about how the event was a superficial photo op, pure politics. The righties ranted about how Bush was a “stud” for doing this (yes, that term was used) and how the lefties were just trying to co-opt the event. (And then they went on to decry Hilary Clinton’s trip to Afghanistan as superficial photo op, pure politics. And the same thing about Howard Dean and his brother’s remains in Laos.)
In reality, they are both right.
We’re less than a year out from the next Presidential election. Everything that Bush does is geared for maximal political effect. The administration wants to direct and control the media as much as possible, and to get big impact out of every event they can. Don’t be surprised to see further big “events” occur every couple months — at Christmas, at Memorial Day, at July 4th — any time that Bush & Co. see their numbers needing to be propped up. Expect most of these to involve the Troops, which plays to both the pro-War side and the “Support the Troops” folks.
At the same time, everything that the Democrat candidates do is also geared for maximal political effect. (In the Dean case, the 30th anniversary of the death of his brother was in mid-December, but Thanksgiving week plays better.) Nothing will be done without the impacts — both Democrat-positive and Republican-negative — being carefully scoped out, maximized or minimized, and targeted to where the largest impact will be. Expect to also see some attempts by both sides to pre-empt the stunts of the other.
On the other hand, Bush’s visit to the soldiers in Iraq was, without a doubt, the right (ahem) thing to do. Discarding the political photo op side of things, it was a brave action to visit a strife zone like that, and it is bound to be a morale boost for the Troops, to know that the President is willing to take that sort of an action and show his direct support for them. (I’ll stop short of calling Bush a “stud”, though.)
(As for Hillary’s visit to the Troops in Afghanistan, some pundits said it was yet another overture on her part to test the waters for a 2004 Presidential bid, but I think that she would need to have declared by now if she was going to do that. It was definitely a photo op, and arguably a really good thing to do for the morale of the Troops who are being forgotten about in Afghanistan, what with 99.9% of the media focus having turned to Iraq for the past year. I can’t help wonder, though, if she didn’t somehow get wind of Bush’s trip, and did hers to suck some of the wind from his sails.)
Updated on October 22, 2010
Gay Marriage: The Meaning of Massachusetts
I’m on the Legal Marriage Alliance mailing list for Washington State, and after the Massachusetts decision was handed down, someone asked:
If I interpret the decision correctly, in six months time, same-sex couples in Massachusetts will be able to marry. How does this impact out-of-state couples?I responded with a number of bullet points, and I’ve added a little more to them here.
- The court said that not letting same-sex couples marry violates the state constitution and that the legislature has to resolve this in 180 days. I don’t know what happens if that deadline comes and goes with nothing happening. Does the court fine the legislature?
- In Vermont, it was “resolve it or create a parallel institution,” and hence “civil unions” were created, but that’s apparently not an option provided here.
- Hawaii and Alaska sidestepped the issue a few years ago by amending their state constitutions. That evidently takes three years in Massachusetts, while the deadline is six months. An amended constitution could happen anyway, but with a gap where same-sex
marriage is legal. Every year it takes will surely work in our favor.
- Assuming things do progress as we would hope, this directly affects only couples who reside in Massachusetts, as the state can only grant the benefits that the state has power over. But it’s a stepping stone to insisting on those benefits elsewhere.
- According to an Associated Press piece (no longer available at the original site), Massachusetts state law doesn’t allow non-residents to marry there if their marriage would not be legal in the state where they live. A little web research indicates that there is no basic residency requirement. Given that such legal here/not legal there marriages have not been an issue for decades, this may be a law dating to miscegenation times (or earlier). If this law is still on the books, it’s not clear what value or legal weight it has beyond being a stop sign to convince couples to not get married in Massachusetts. In particular, does it have any effect when Massachusetts residents marry and then move elsewhere?
- The Massachusetts marriage issue itself is not something which should go to the Supreme Court, as Massachusetts’ definition of marriage is limited to Massachusetts. What would go to the Supreme Court is someone being denied marriage benefits in another state when they are married in Massachusetts, via a violation of the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution. Framed in terms of whether a marriage in one state should be recognized in another, regardless of who the married people are, that’s the same thing that the Supreme Court has already ruled on decades ago, regarding miscegenation (inter-racial marriages) and should be a win for us. (But it ain’t over ’til the fat Justice sings.)
- One potential outcome of this is likely to be a national hodgepodge: some states allowing the marriages, all states being forced to grant the benefits. That might take decades to resolve to where the marriages could be legally done in every state.
Updated on October 21, 2010
Indeed, some of that “hodgepodge” has become the case now, several years later. Some states recognize same-sex marriages done in other states despite not being willing to do them directly. In other cases, states which do not recognize same-sex marriages have refused to grant same-sex divorces (since that would mean tacitly “recognizing” some legitimacy of the marriage, but at the same time, Massachusetts will not do a divorce unless the couple (or at least one member) resides in the state and has for at least a year, leaving those couples high and dry.
The “religion card” idea is still untested, so far as I know.
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Whacko Jacko
In the long run, I don’t care if he did it. [He = Michael Jackson. It = sexually molest young boys.] But some of the media hoo-hah surrounding it this time brings up some things worth commenting on.
- Is the investigation racially motivated?
Pfft. I rather doubt it. Everything negative involving a black man is not racist. Get off the cross, we need to burn it. [For the sarcasm impaired, yes, that last comment is intended as a tasteless joke.] However, it’s worth noting that since there are fewer famous blacks than famous whites in this country, we do tend to pay more attention to the stories involving famous blacks, and thus the media may give us more of what we pay more attention to. So while I don’t think the investigation is racially motivated, the media attention may be, indirectly.
- Is this an attack on Michael himself?
Well, sort of. But less because he’s famous than because he’s eccentric. Oh, and because rumors and full-on investigations about exactly this have swirled around the guy for over a decade. Let’s face it, Mikey: it’s not like no one ever imagined that you might have done this before.
- Why does this happen when he has a new record release?
Is this taking advantage of Jackson’s other current media attention to get this higher play? Or the conspiratorial reverse, is this intended to distract attention from his new record and damage his sales? These questions play into both the racial and personal attack screeds. Frankly, when I heard that the police search of the Neverland Ranch occurred while Michael was in Las Vegas shooting a new video, it seemed apparent that the investigation probably was timed… to be done while Michael was out of town and couldn’t interfere with the search than to specifically target his fame.
- And finally, did he do it?
It’s really tempting to say “Yes, of course, I always knew he was a pervert,” but what we “know” is largely innuendo and supposition and accusation, all supported by a media who would love to crucify him (there’s that cross thing again!). Him or anyone else equally famous they could dig at.
On the other hand, Jackson has enough eccentricities that it could be just one more. Maybe this all truly is a fabrication of a sex-crazed media, and he really does love (platonically) children and wants to embrace his inner child so very dearly (perhaps in response to his own media-stolen childhood), and thus when he “sleeps” with kids he really does just sleep with them, cuddling them like teddy bears. And nothing else.
Updated on October 19, 2010
And as of summer 2009, we will perhaps never really know.
Sunday, November 23, 2003
Gay Marriage: Marital Misdirection
The opposition to same-sex marriage is composed of almost exclusively misdirection. In the end, there are no rational reasons for the opposition, only emotional ones, and thus the arguments put forward are typically intended not to counter same-sex marriage but to derail the discussion, driving it off course and getting it stuck in a swamp.
First is the partial misnomer, “gay marriage.”
The proper term is “same-sex marriage.” To call it exclusively “gay” is a convenient shorthand, but it also allows (even encourages) the discussion to focus exclusively on the male-male side of the question, and thus male-male sex, which is a subject which squicks a lot of straight America (certainly more than are squicked by girl-on-girl sex). In focusing on the male component, it also thus renders half or more of the marriage seekers somewhat invisible — and its those “invisible” ones who are often in the most stable relationships and thus more likely to be raising children within their relationships. And speaking of “invisible”, let’s not forget the bisexual men and women who might be in a longterm same-sex relationship: just because you can’t visually tell whether they are exclusively homosexual doesn’t mean that they are.
(Even more proper a term is “same-sex civil marriage”, which takes the religion component out of the picture. So long as the government certifies marriages for opposite sex couples without requiring a religious component, religion doesn’t deserve any say into whether government can do the same for same-sex couples.)
Second is the “slippery slope” argument.
If same-sex marriage is approved, won’t that lead to triad (or more-ad) marriages, to intra-family (mother/son or sister/brother) marriages, to adult/child marriages, or to human/animal marriages? The answer to this is that those questions are different from (but parallel to) the same-sex marriage question. One type of marriage will not automatically lead to another type, just as mixed-race marriages didn’t lead to other changes when they became fully legal, nearly 40 years ago. The laws which specifically prohibit same-sex marriages (DOMA, et al) don’t address these other types of relationships, and there are already separate laws relating to those which don’t touch on the same-sex issue.
The opposition likes to put this strawman up as a question to same-sex marriage proponents: “Well, if gay marriage is accepted, what will you say to the man who wants to marry his sheep?” The best answer is “I don’t care. That’s a different type of marriage. Let him fight his own battle.” Keep the discussion properly and narrowly focused.
On the other hand, maybe same-sex marriage would lead to other marriage shifts, but in a completely different way. (And by extension, the mixed-race marriage issue may be a lead-in to same-sex marriage after all.) Without passing judgment on any given type of relationship where those involved might like it to be a full-fledged marriage, we see in both the mixed-race and same-sex cases that some of the laws governing them were (are) regressive, hateful, and downright wrong. Once we take the time to examine those laws closely and see them for being the bogus laws they are, we may also find that other laws governing other sorts of relationships are equally as regressive, hateful, and wrong, and thus also need to be changed. (Or we may not. I don’t foresee marriage being approved for those who cannot give informed consent, such a children and animals. But that’s merely one example, and there are many other laws relating to such relationships.)
Third is the “marriage is for procreation” argument.
There is absolutely nothing about procreation itself which is improved by the presence of a formalized bonding of exactly two opposite sex, unrelated people; the wife is not more fertile as a result, nor is the man’s sperm more aggressive. And there is nothing about marriage which requires that progeny result from the union. This is actually a confusion of procreation with heredity. Procreation is deemed to be best when it occurs within marriage because then the spouses have better control over one another (more specifically: the husband knows who the wife is having sex with), and thus the line of descent (and of inheritance) is made clear. In the end, ensuring proper inheritance is a goal of both opposite-sex and same-sex marriages.
(Note that this does not make any statement about the raising of children by anyone. I’ll discuss my thoughts on that at some point. The stated opposition here is only about procreation, so that’s all I am addressing in my counter-argument.)
Fourth is the “thousands of years of tradition” argument.
These traditions never actually applied to exclusively “one woman and one man,” because two of a single gender just wasn’t a social option. When society is unable to conceive of the existence of homosexual people, much less of ongoing relationships between such people, society doesn’t have rituals which apply to such people and situations. Let’s face it: society changes over time, and when it does, so do its traditions. Holding to “thousands of years of tradition” would have our sailing vessels never leaving sight of land. It would have us using human and animal power for all our transportation needs. It would have our systems of government be non-democratic monarchies. It would have us treating women and children as property. It would feature multiple wives for each man. It would have us worshipping a multitude of different gods. It would have us huddled in caves, painting on walls.
Updated on November 11, 2003
Updated on October 14, 2010
Added bit about “same-sex civil marriage’.
Friday, November 21, 2003
Pick a Number, Any Number
You know what annoys me? (This week, anyway.) The abuse and misuse of math, specifically in number metaphors.
Lately, I’ve been hearing an add for Seattle-area car dealership Carter Subaru which claims that they are in the Top Three (which means they are #3, because otherwise they would say they are #1 or #2) out of 500-and-some dealership teams in the nation in sales. All well and good. Then they go on to brag at least twice in the commercial about how proud they are to be in the top 99.5% of the sales teams in the nation. SCREEEECCHHH! Everybody except the bottom 3 or so would be in the top 99.5%; it’s nothing to be proud of. (What they really mean is that they are in the 99.5th percentile. Ah, the subtlety of a single syllable.)
Twice in the past month or so, I’ve seen misuse of “360 degrees”. Once was in The Stranger, comparing something to a drag queen making a 360-degree spin on one heel and going the other way, and once was in the Seattle Gay News (never noted for their skillful editing anyway) about Mary J. Blige’s latest album being a 360-degree change from her previous one. (Unfortunately, web searches won’t bring up either reference.) Girls, “360 degrees” is a full circle; you can’t go the other way out of a 360-degree spin, and a 360-degree change means that Blige’s latest album is no different from the previous one! (What they both meant, of course, was 180 degrees.)
In the same vein, but not using numbers per se, are Disneyland references to when they used to use ticket books for the rides rather than an all-day pass. (They changed around 1980, I think. I had been to Disneyland maybe a dozen times as a kid, and I recall being enthused about not having to have a ticket book when I went to Dollywood in 1979. We had a simple pass when we went to Disneyland again in 1982 or so.) The ticket books featured A Tickets, B Tickets, and so on up to E Tickets, each type being good for a different class of rides. The really cool ones (the Matterhorn Bobsleds and such) were E Ticket rides (and you never got enough of those tickets in the booklet!), while the A Tickets were the extremely tame rides like the King Arthur Carousel and Sleeping Beauty Castle. Today, 20-plus years from the end of the ticket books (and even a decade ago, only 10-plus years out, when I wrote one of my earliest letters of comment on the subject), people forget this and they assume that “A” was the best thing, perhaps like getting grades in school. And thus, when someone refers in print to some experience being “a real ‘A Ticket’ ride,” I can only roll my eyes and bitch quietly to myself.
Updated on November 23, 2003
Updated on October 13, 2010
According to the tickets shown on this site, Sleeping Beauty Castle was a C Ticket in 1957, reduced to a B Ticket in 1959.
This site indicates it as an A Ticket in 1972; I would have been at Disneyland as early as 1969 (age 3).
Thursday, October 23, 2003
It’s Not Easy Being Green
When I still lived in California, up through November 2000, I was registered with the Green Party. That wasn’t necessarily because I agreed with all of their platforms and directions — it worries me when someone says they do agree with everything some person or group says or does — although I did agree with a fair number of them. In part, it was to keep the Democrat Party off my back: as a donor to gay causes but not registered with any party, I got way too many presumptuous mailings from them. Mostly, though, it was to help ensure that there was some added variety in the California electoral process, something beyond the double-headed coin of Republicans and Democrats we usually had.
(Now living in Washington, I’m not registered with any party.)
In the 2000 Presidential election, I did not vote Green. In the primary, I voted for McCain. At one time, California had an open primary, where anyone could vote for any candidate, but the state had recently (after a court challenge) shifted to a semi-open primary, where anyone could vote for anyone, but only the registered Republican votes counted for the Republicans (and so on). This is probably a good thing for the parties, especially in states which lean heavily to one side of the coin: if enough Democrats (and Greens and Independents and…) wanted to in the previous system, they could have thrown the state primary to McCain rather than Bush (and left the core Demos to nominate Gore, already a foregone conclusion); with a state like California, this could have tilted the entire national scene. So that option precluded (alas), I still voted for McCain in the primary as an “advisory” vote, a note to the state party and others that a heck of a lot of people who weren’t registered Republicans (for whatever reasons) still cared enough to send a message that McCain and his policies were preferable to Bush’s, in the hope this might end up coloring the national platform beneficially.
(Update: The down side to this is that if your party had no one running for an office, or if you weren’t registered for a party at all, you ended up with no vote in the primary at all, even if you actually favored one party or another. This has the bonus effect of convincing people not to vote in the primary at all, since not being able to vote for some of the races lessens your interest in voting for any of them. Variations of the “blanket” primary are still an option in some states, including Washington. You apparently have the option of choosing a singe party slate to vote for the in the primary. That is, if you pre-choose the Democrat slate, you only get to vote for Democrats in all pertinent races on the ballot, even if you are registered Republican; you don’t get to choose from all the candidates, but you at least get to choose in some fashion.)
Come the general election in 2000, I ran scared. I voted for Gore rather than Nader. I didn’t think Gore was a better candidate than Nader, but I knew Nader could not win and I was scared that Bush might in California (and thus nationally) if Gore didn’t get enough votes.
So now we turn to Florida in 2000, where the popular vote was close enough to cause recounts and grudge-holding and claims of election theft years later, and where the small percentage of Green voters, had they voted for Gore instead (they sure wouldn’t have voted for Bush to any significant degree!), would have solved the whole matter and kept Bush out of the White House.
Thus the question: Should the Democrats blame Nader and the Green Party for Bush winning the White House?
And then the answer: No. They should blame themselves. If anything, the Democrats deserved to have 3% or so of the electorate (6% of their base; the most progressive, extreme, and dedicated-to-their-ideals portion) pulled away from their voting bloc. One of the most depressing facets of the 2000 campaign wasn’t that Bush beat Gore, but that Gore and Bush were the best candidates either party could put forward. (If nothing else, that should shine a light on the folly that is an automatic granting of Chosen Candidate status to the incumbent Vice-President. The only thing worse than Gore in that regard would have been Quayle!) If the Democrats could not offer up a decent candidate, one who could overcome the inadequacies of Bush with a loss of just 3% of the voters — less than that, given the small number which Buchanan pulled away from Bush — then perhaps the Democrats truly didn’t deserve to win. They made the bed, but we all have to lie in it.
And there’s a corollary: The Greens need to pay attention as well. Nader was never electable; no one will seriously claim he was, no projections would have ever given him more than a tiny percentage of the votes (enough to affect the overall outcome but not to win himself). With the result of Bush winning — someone even further from their position than Gore — Greens who voted for Nader in Florida (and anywhere else where the vote was very close) should be taking cold comfort in the idea that by holding to their ideals, they allowed Bush to win.
Ideals are great things to have, but they are even better to have when the country is in a state where you can enjoy them.
[Weblog title reference: “It’s Not Easy Being Green” was a song sung by Kermit the Frog.]
Updated on November 21, 2003
Updated on October 12, 2010
Washington eventually changed its primary structure (via a popular vote) to a “Top Two” primary: voters get to choose from all candidates, and the top two vote getters advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation. This had the political parties completely up in arms, because it meant that a strongly liberal or conservative district could promote two candidates from the same party, if they both got more votes than the others, locking one major party completely out of some races.
(In theory, in a strongly leaning district, this meant that second-tier parties could actually make it to the general election as one of the only two choices. Voters willing to gamble could even throw their votes away from a sure thing primary winner onto a lesser party to try and block the other major party from getting to the general election at all.)
They took this to the state supreme court, claiming that the primary wasn’t about narrowing the field, it was about the party selecting its candidate — and thus the whole bit about having to chose a party ballot and only being able to opt for candidates from that party. As I recall, the supreme court said that the political parties were right, but then it got appealed back to the national Supreme Court who said, “Nope, the voters get the sort of election they want” and tossed things back to a Top Two status. There was something about Montana-style (fully open) and Louisiana-style primaries (top two) in there, too, but I’m not going to bother looking up the details. Okay, I did look up a little.
Fallout from this meant that candidates in partisan races had to declare a party, but they didn’t have to hew to Democrat/Republican/Green/etc. So we got some Repulicans in the 2008 election listing themselves a Conservative party or GOP party or other things intended to distance themselves a bit from the blackball word of “Republican”.
Monday, October 20, 2003
Who cares what mLife is?
A couple years ago, there were billboard ads all over the place, asking “What is mLife?”, but never cluing you into what the product or service or whatever was. After seeing the umpteenth billboard ad — actually, after seeing probably the third one — I stopped caring. If they couldn’t bother to tell me, I sure couldn’t bother to buy their service. (Apparently, it was merely a wireless phone service from AT&T. Big whoop.)
A couple years before that, I saw a couple billboards in the Bay Area, black text on white, saying “Protect me from what I want.” Again, no information about what comp nay took out the ads, what the product or service was, whether it was a political statement, and so on. (A web search on the phrase today finds dozens of sites with lyrics from the band Placebo, but not much beyond that.)
The Seattle gay bar C.C. Attle’s reframed part of itself a couple years ago as “The Men’s Room.” They led off the remodel with a series of ads in the local gay newspaper, asking “Where is the Men’s Room?”, two or three small display ads per weeks for three months or so. For the first couple weeks, it was cute — “It’s down the hall and to the left!” — but it quickly grew stale as the weeks dragged by. (“If you can’t find the Men’s Room by now, just pee in the damn bushes!”)
Currently, there are a series of billboards and bus ads up around Seattle with the tagline “Five As One.” They feature body parts — an eye, a hand, the x-ray of a foot — split vertically into five strips and reassembled, each one coming from a different person, usually each one from a different race than the one next to it. Is this a race relations thing? (Let’s see: white, black, Latino, Asian, Native American…?) Based on the x-ray, is it something medical, maybe a uniting of five hospitals? Is it a new nightclub, or somebody’s new wireless plan? Since there is a city election coming up, does it have to do with the five City Council positions which are not up for election? Beats the hell out of me: as with the other ad campaigns, not one whit of guiding information on the ads, and even when I go to Google to search on key phrase, nothing comes up pointing to the ads.
(Update: They are apparently ads for the Seattle Supersonics pro basketball team, as one of the billboards — but only one that I’ve seen — now has a Sonics logo on it. The others are still without any identifying logo or text. Here’s an article about the ad campaign.)
I suppose you can make an argument that on some level, ad campaigns like this work, since I remember them even years later. On the other hand, I only remember them because they annoy the fuck out of me and pretty much ensure that I will have nothing to do with the product or service. Having your ads remembered only so that people avoid the products doesn’t seem like the best tactic. (Exception: I do go to C.C. Attle’s — aka the Men’s Room — once every three or four months. The ads didn’t drive me away, but they certainly didn’t bring me in, either. I go to bars in other states [and countries!] more often than I go to the Men’s Room.)
Updated on November 21, 2003
Updated on October 11, 2010
Still no luck on the “Protect me from what I want” campaign. The world may never know.
C.C. Attle’s closed on September 30. They have allegedly signed a new lease for a location on Olive Way, hoping to be reopened by the end of the year. We shall see.
Guess the “Five As One” ads didn’t salvage things for the Sonics.
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