The Enemy of my Enemy?

I don't understand why the Republicans are so opposed to socialized medicine.

If we had a nationalized universal healthcare program they could, under the guise of preserving the health of the population and conserving tax dollars, regulate all sorts of activities that current law prevents them from touching.

They could outlaw premarital and gay sex, since those are obvious disease transmission vectors.

We all know that abortion causes breast cancer.

Those big festivals that celebrate counter-culture movements, civil disobedience or play anti-authoritarian music, way to high a probability that someone would get injured or perhaps use a dangerous recreational chemical, they'd have to go.

Pornography causes all kinds of mental illness, didn't you know. And, kinky sex? Oh, lord no, someone could get hurt.

If they could find a peer-reviewed study that indicated prayer bettered one's chances in an illness they could mandate that everyone go to church, an evangelical protestant church, that goes without saying.

Never mind, of course, that cheerleading and golf are, statistically, among the most dangerous pastimes in America. Those are just too damn wholesome. Smoking would remain legal, of course, because all of the tobacco states are redder than a submissive's buttocks. And, no one ever got sick from breathing petroleum exhaust or being exposed to petrochemicals.

Really, I don't see why the republicans are against it. It could really be a boon for them and that's before considering all the money they could give to religious hospitals.

Grant me Wings that I Might Fly, my Restless Soul is Longing

Sorry to have been quiet for a bit. I'm on a six day a week show for the next few weeks and I recently had emergency oral surgery. To fill the gap, here's a piece from my old blog that I penned a few years back.



How is it that the bulk of unenlightened America has such an anemic and myopic concept of morality?

I've been having an ongoing discussion with half a dozen people about the nature of sexuality as a moral entity. In each case the discourse was prompted by a different set of circumstances: the recent Supreme Court ruling on sodomy, the Jakko trial, a lengthy and heated argument about how people of my religious leanings are going to burn eternal in a lake of sulphur and several goings on regarding who is and is not willing to have sex with me and my reciprocal feelings. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of the feeble, puritan, anti-human and polarized view of sexuality.

Most importantly, I am infuriated by the false dilemma of meaningless sex foisted upon the more progressive among us. The misconception seems to be that sex is the sole purview of monogamous, heterosexual marriage, and in the more liberal view, the domain of 'true love.' Anything outside of these situations is, by oppositional necessity, meaningless sex.

I don't buy it, not for a moment. To reduce the gauntlet of sexual possibilities to this false polarity is to casually disregard the depth and breadth of both human sentimentality and sexual variety. I will agree with the base assertion by saying that sex is a powerful and important thing. It is an act of bonding, of intimacy that is potent in its effects, immense in its scope and potentially dangerous in its consequences. Also, the best, meaning the most engaging and emotionally significant sex, is usually done in the context of an emotionally connected and monogamous relationship.

However, to infer that two people, the ‘consenting adults’ of sound byte fame, cannot come together physically for other reasons or in other contexts is emotionally sophomoric and, as per my religious disposition, potentially offensive. Two people (for that matter any number of people) can come together for the purposes of recreation or concentration, to create a bond, to understand one another, to share joy or to explore themselves with the help of another, and do so honestly and healthily without the specter of true love casting a shadow on what is an entirely natural way of engaging the world and each other.

It is precisely the range of sexual relationships that makes sex such a powerful thing and that makes it dangerous. It is this risk, the risk of emotional involvement, the risk of opening one’s self and even, yes, the risk of disease, that makes the variety of sexual experiences available to us valuable and so profoundly important.

The point is that any sexual relationship, no matter how transient SHOULD be meaningful even if its meaning is bound up in its very transience. I would go so far as to say that every such encounter has meaning whether the participants choose to acknowledge it or not but, honestly, I’m not prepared to speak on behalf of the rest of the human race.

Long rant short for those that skipped to the end. Get off your morality high horse. Sex isn’t meaningless, ever, even for those who say it is. It is profoundly important and it is he who would seek to impose his sexual standards on others that fails to understand exactly how important it is. Do what you want with who you want and don’t give anyone else any lip about it because it’s not your business or theirs. If you feel the need to indict someone else’s sexuality, then you’re probably too tense and in desperate need of a good long fuck.

On the Nature of Choice: My Aunt April

My life is about to change in a number of substantial ways, the outcome of which I cannot clearly foresee. Thus, I've been meditating at some length on choice, not the choices with which I am now faced so much as on the very substance of choice itself. While thinking on this, I realized that, when I first moved to the United States, the concept of a grocery store was new to me. (This connects, I promise).

Grocery stores, as we understand them, did not exist in rural England in the early nineteen-eighties. There were neighborhood markets, butchers, dairies, fishmongers, of course. Every town of any size had a "Grocery" but it was a small store that sold vegetables, canned goods and perhaps ice cream. The one in our town was scarcely larger than my current apartment and carried no more than two kinds of anything. It was certainly not one of the sprawling, fluorescent, warehouses that we find in US suburbs, carrying perhaps a half-million individual products stacked from floor to highest reach with dozens of varieties of anything one cares to eat plus housewares, paper goods, magazines and patio furniture. We still had a milk man, after all.

I remember distinctly when my Aunt April first came to visit us a year or so after we moved to America. She'd never conceived of such a place. She stood in the aisle of the Piggly Wiggly for twenty minutes, mouth agape, unable to comprehend the selection of salad dressing.

During my Aunt's life, English salad was livened up with one of only three things. First was white vinegar, the same kind one uses to clean a drip coffee maker. After that was Branston Pickle, a concoction of diced vegetables, spices and brown sludge that resembles a hybrid of sweet pickle relish, chunky salsa and week old ratatouille.* Finally, we had "salad cream" which is a bit like watered down Miracle Whip. I presume we only bothered to have three salad toppings because they were all so terrible that we didn't want to subject ourselves to any more such horrors.

To anyone who's gone shopping in the US in the last few decades, this is obviously not the case here. American salad dressing boggled her and not just because she presumed it was all terrible and thus had trouble imagining the depths of America's masochism. She was boggled because there were simply so many possibilities. Vinegar dressings, oil dressings, cream dressings, fat free, extra-chunky, dozens of varieties and brands and sizes of each. That's not even counting extras like croutons, sunflower seeds or synthetic bacon. My aunt, who had only ever known three such possibilities was in decision overload. She simply couldn't handle that many options.

Remember also that this was in 1985 when the salad dressing aisle was only a few feet long and offered only twenty or so choices.

I tried to count the options at the Publix across the street and I gave up at 175 when I realized that I hadn't made a dent. I paced the length of the shelves and found them to be just shy of fifty feet long, whilst taking up both sides of the aisle. That means there was enough salad dressing in my neighborhood grocery store to fill a city bus.

After more than a quarter hour staring vacant-eyed at the myriad of condiments, absolutely unprepared for the dearth of options that so often manifest in the capitalist temples of middle-class America, Aunt April simply decided that we'd skip the salad altogether.

Herein lies the problem of choosing; it's not, contrary to popular understanding, simply a matter of weighing preferences, of evaluating pros an cons. Choosing from any substantial number of options requires understanding of the items, their potential properties and knowing your preferences about them. Without these things choice becomes impossible.

More options often do not make for better decisions and, faced with a choice of any difficulty, most people will chose not to chose at all.

Yesterday's Values Living in Tomorrow's Industry

As a teen, I never experienced the restlessness of youth. I never complained to myself about the great things I should be doing. I never felt oppressed by the expectations of the world and I never chafed against authority and opportunity. The words, "until I can get out of here," were always spoken by others and not by me.

As an adult I have come to have these feelings that I lacked as a youth.

More bothersome, as I approach the beginning of my third decade, none of the people that felt and thought this way fifteen years ago continue to do so. What did they know then that they don't know now? Likewise, the reciprocal.

Missionaria Protectiva

Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teachings of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. you can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you've always known.

-- Frank Herbert

Effluvium, in List Form

A smattering of things I happen to have noticed recently:

My coffee shop has four distinct styles of patio chair, though only one style of table.

USA today is only published 5 out of every 7 days.

The Creative Loafing box across from my apartment has a theft chain but it's not chained to anything.

I currently have four pens in my pocket: one red, two purple, one green but none that are black or blue.

The sign in front of the neighboring parking lot says "Parking for Chelsea Building Only" but does not indicate which building that is. Nor is the building in question labeled as such.

Strollers have gotten steadily larger over the last 25 years. The one my mother used for me weighed about five pounds and could be folded up like an umbrella. Modern strollers are nearly the size of compact cars.

There are no red maple trees in Georgia. I don't actually think there are any maple trees at all but it's the absence of the red ones that I notice.

The apartment building next to mine is falling to ruins. The interior is condemned and the windows mostly shattered. Despite this the landscaping is continuously maintained.

Doogie Howser's journal entries are so vague that, were he to ever go back and read them, he'd have no idea what actually happened that day.

Some days it's best to just look around and save the meaning of things for another time.

Clocks

Wicked in their banality, vicious task masters, they count off neat quantities of an imaginary substance by which we are to measure the velocity of our lives. They force us to engage the world in seconds and decades rather than moments and seasons. Through them we are divorced from the rhythms of the world that made us and married to the tempo of the world that we made for ourselves, all the while leaving so much of ourselves behind.