Politics, sex and religion

My blogging has been less frequent and less worthwhile of late, I think.



Politics.

In the political realm, my take on things is pretty set. I do not look forward to seeing the redeemer fantasy figure of Barry Hussein Obamanation in the White House. John McCain, the lesser of the two evils, moves me not at all. He gets the war with Islam ok, and likes the 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights, but on almost every other issue, he leaves me unmoved...unless it's immigration, where he sucks as badly as everyone else. And his Supreme Court nominations would not be quite as tragic as Mr Audacity's.

No matter who gets elected in the Fall, I expect not to pay attention to them for the following four years. Obama has a certain AfroAmerican preacherlike rhetorical gift which distracts people from the fact that he has nothing of substance to say and apart from his biraciality is without much accomplishment. Mc Cain as someone to listen to...well, he makes W sound like Pericles. Zzzzzz.

So what's to say? How many jeremiads on the Fall of the West? Give it a rest.



Religion is a subject about which I know quite a lot. Most people I talk about it with ---most, not all-- have nothing more than a set of bad cartoons in their heads. So I avoid the subject, for fear that I will blurt out what I am thinking. If one more person tells me he's "spiritual, not religious", I may have to restore the Inquisition.

And just in case anyone hasn't guessed, I am no fan of Islam. At all. What's to love about an expansionist theocracy? If I listen to yet another San Francisco homo rave on about the evils of Christianity and then bristle into multicultural outrage when I point out to him the viler aspects of Muhammad's project...



Sex. Ah, well. Now there I could blog...except that the line between the personal and the bloggable is involved. But at least sex provokes my religious feeling: awe, gratefulness, joy, play,
the experience of another more primal world older than ego, the paradox of animality and spirituality conjoining at their peak, the transformation of raw sex into lovemaking (and back again), the direct experience of another man, ordinary and empirical and middleaged and workaday like me, as indeed breathtakingly made in the image and likeness of God.

So politics is kind of a losing game at the moment. At least, because of sex, there is some hope for religion. ExCathedra may yet survive.

Just 'cause

Black AssHoles

No, this post is not about Jesse Jackson's stated desire to castrate Barry Hussein O.

Jonah Goldberg opines on a recent story where a white civil servant in Texas, during a description of program inefficiency, referred to a department as a "black hole" and was jumped on by a black town councilllor and a black judge for being "racist". Yes, boys and girls of the 4th grade science class. Mr. Judge demanded an apology. Black assholes, both of them.

I suppose next time a department loses money and someone white says it's "in the red", that an Indian will jump up and demand an apology.

On one level, this stuff is beyond stupid. But Jonah, while finding it disturbing, does not give this PC phenomenon the assessment it deserves. Noting that its "will to power" is hidden under the guise of tolerant talk, he nonetheless underestimates its nastiness and real purpose.

I wrote about the Orwellian use of language in PC talk. And I do not think it is funny. I think that it is a form of thought control with a very specific outcome.

First, PC language creates and reinforces the notion that prior to the advent of liberal enlightenment, the culture was so corrupt and evil that all its ways of speaking have to be jettisoned in favor of the often bizarre formulations of PC. It creates a sense of shame and emotional disconnect between the past and the glorious present. Part and parcel of the liberal narrative that history is the story of Western white male Christian American capitalist greed and hatred.

People who speak their enemy's language --and PC is the enemy of the West-- lose the capacity to see and to think for themselves and indeed accept the enemy's valuation of them. It is not simply an alternative way of speaking, for example, to call Indians "Native Americans". It entrenches the notion that the Americans who "followed" them are illegitimate. Indians are not Native Americans. They were the native peoples of this place, but before the Westerners arrived to invade and conquer, this place was not America. They have become Americans by virtue of the historical fact of conquest and defeat.

The whole linguistic project is a form of war, a crypto-Marxist (Gramscian, really) project. To speak PC is to take on its form of thinking, or at the very least, to accept a kind of anxiety to please, a fear of offending, which becomes the default mind of a culture in the process of dismantling and erasing itself in order to placate its implacable foes.

Fuck it. It's bullshit.

More superslashiality

In the 2003 movie, Confidence, Edward Burns and Franky G.
Hibernian and Latin.
Ed Burns at his handsomest. Which is saying somethin.

Men in suits. Then out of them.
Slash fiction. Mmmmm.

Proof once more that even though I appear to be intelligent and deep,
I can be as shallow as the rest.
So shallow that I just post the pix but don't even write
the story. That's how men write slash fiction. :)

Issues

Chatting with a guy at the gym. He's a big friendly muscular guy with fur and tattoos and piercings. His taste in men runs to...men. He has lots of personal and work connections with all sorts of people in the LGBT world. He's bright, perceptive.

I don't know how this came up, but we got to talking about men who are homosexual in orientation but who do not identify much with the gay community. He started talking about guys he knows like that, most of whom, according to him, came out later in life and who "have issues" about their masculinity.

"What do you mean by issues?"

It seems that these guys are not comfortable with queeny behavior and will say so. Thus, they have "issues".

Here again, a man whom I otherwise quite like takes the position that having problems with effeminate behavior means having issues. I doubt very much whether queeny men who are mocking about conventional masculine, aka straight, behavior by homosexual men would be so described.

Who gets to decide who has "issues"?

Slasher Pic

There's an internet-born genre called Slash Fiction. It consists of taking same-sex characters from TV series or movies and creating romantic and sexual narratives for them. From the X-Files, for example, there were many slash stories of an erotic relationship between Agent Fox Mulder and his boss, Assistant Director Skinner. Lots of classic rebellious boy/muscle daddy themes there.

Though most of the characters in these stories are males, most of the authors, it turns out, are females.

Anyway, I recently watched The Black Dahlia, a murder mystery set in 1940's Hollywood, with Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart playing detective partners.

These two fellas, as show in the above pic, make fine fine fodder for slash.

L'chaim

Off-duty Israeli soldier offs Arab terrorist who mowed down innocent civilians in Jerusalem.
If he'd not had his gun and known how to use it to kill the bastard, more people would have died.

Let's hear it for the Second Amendment.

How I Spent My Gay Pride Day

I was working out at the gym this morning and they were showing Boys In The Band on the monitors. An odd pic for Gay Pride Day in San Francisco, but with a certain aptness for me. Whatever my issues with gay culture these days, watching that film's depiction of the desperate self-loathing and fear in those men makes the freedom that I have feel very precious. Given my advanced age, I remember what life was like when the love that dare not speak its name really did not.

Later in the day, I was on my way to spend some time with a man whom I much like. A fitting way to mark that freedom, I think. I got into the subway and the direction I was travelling in was the opposite of most. His house is west from here, the Pride parade is east. So a hundred gay men were standing on the other side of the station, heading away from me. Or me from them.

I have been hitting the weights with some vigor the last couple of weeks and it shows. Got my hair cut a few days ago. Had on jeans, sunglasses and a nice-fitting grey T shirt. I was, if I do say so myself, worth a second look. After all, I wanted to please the eyes, and more, of the fella I was going to see.

With me on the platform was a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence. Why s/he was heading away form the party I did not know. But s/he had on a particularly annoying getup: the combo of nun and drag queen that they all sport nowadays, plus, s/he wore a Catholic school girl's uniform. We got on the same car and I was aware that s/he was checking me out. Then we got on the elevator to ascend to the street and s/he stood right next to me. Again, I was aware that I was being cruised. And I decided to ignore her.

I try to be a decent guy about being cruised and to treat men who find me attractive in the way that I want to be treated when I show interest....unless a man is a jerk about it, you can decline but show respect...but today, I made a choice to ignore this one. A man dressed up like a nun/dragqueen/schoolgirl holds no allure for me, on any level.

Instead, I met an actual man, a real man who knows who he is, whose company, to put it mildly, I deeply enjoy. That is what this day is about for me.

Having a homosexual orientation is nothing to be proud of in itself; it's not an accomplishment, just a fact. But neither it is anything to be ashamed of, and I am proud both of my own success in overcoming the awful shame I felt as a young man and of those who helped make the world a place where I could do that.

That is the meaning of this day for me, one of the great miracles of my life: men loving men.

Green Apocalypse

I am watching Life After People, a speculative piece on the History Channel about how the planet would change (for the better) if the human race were suddenly to disappear entirely.

Am I being a righty paranoid in sensing a certain Green self-Schadenfreude in this undertaking? The program provides many vistas of a "recovered" Earth, a return to Eden once the evil humans are gone.

It is not until the last two minutes of the piece that one of the interviewed scientists pointed out that if there were no humans, then no matter what happened to the planet after us, there would be no one to notice it.

As one of the Seven Pillars of Liberalism, environmentalism has its necessary internal drama of oppressors and victims. In this pillar, the victim is the earth itself and the oppressors are the human race. Just as Liberalism's other six pillars are a barely disguised wish to erase the white male Christian capitalist patriotic gun-wielders, so in this culminating pillar, the whole species itself dreams its own well-justified disappearance.

Funny how this hatred of some of us ends in hatred of all of us, for our own good.

Gay = Effeminate?

Jack Malebranche makes the case that "gay" as it currently exists means effeminate. Despite the existence of homosexually-oriented men whose gender identity and presentation are similar to heterosexual men, the gay identity, he says, is essentially effeminate. Hence, he considers "gay" a slur on a man.

Despite the extremely common phenomenon of the effeminate homosexual male, both in ordinary life and in the presentations of gay men in media and literature (both straight and gay), I have resisted this notion. For most of my life, to me "gay" has just been another word, a non-clinical colloquialism, for "homosexual". All it meant, essentially, was same-sex attraction.

A thought-experiment came to me today at the gym. (The irony of the place is not lost on me.)

A homosexual male who presents as hypermasculine can be criticized and mocked by gay men for trying to appear to be something that he is not, a straight man, and it can be suggested he is self-loathing and is not authentically gay.

But a homosexual male who presents as effeminate or even hypereffeminate may not be criticized and mocked for trying to be something he is not. Even if his presentation is not appreciated, it is deeply incorrect to imply that he does not thereby belong to the gay community. No one will imply that he is self-loathing.

In effect, your gay identity can be questioned for being too masculine, but not for being too effeminate.

Does this not imply that effeminacy is essential to the gay identity, while masculinity is optional at best?

Is Malebranche right?

Eine Kleine Tanz Musik

Like most curmudgeonly types, I have a hidden ....ok, only I think it's hidden....streak of sentimentality, something I normally abhor. It's what Jung called the shadow, "the you you'd never wish to be, but are".

So here is a video that provokes my sentimental shadow. It made me smile and even brought a bit of moisture to my eyes. Sometimes human beings can be wonderful.

Part of its charm for me is that it reminds me a bit of a man I am getting to know, who, I am told on good authority, is as good a dancer as I am, but whose sheer joy in living only increases mine.

Where The Hell is Matt?

(Scroll down to where it says "view in higher quality" and click there.)

Father's Day

For my dad.

Turning Japanese

The Westernization of Japan continues apace...

Delectatio morosa

Although much of my graduate education involved reading Germans, I am more Catholic than German. So I do not so much experience Schadenfreude as I do delectatio morosa in viewing the above image of Mother Cindy Sheehan, she of the (apparently former) "absolute moral authority", campaigning to an empty street in San Francisco.

Delectatio morosa is a category in Catholic morals and means "sullen delight". It means taking pleasure in dwelling on thoughts that are immoral.

As I have blogged before, I have friends who spend a lot of time trying to be good. I will do it if I can, but don't struggle about it. For example, taking peevish delight in the pathetic end of the Sheehan woman is not something that makes me wonder about whether or not I am "a good person". I have elsewhere noted that I have no sympathy for her and have described her in voice, not print, in language that I rarely use.

She also reveals the fraud of the gender-feminist crowd, who hold that women are men's equals in every way but then, along with the genfen-led press, call on us to give extra special gooey sympathy to her because she is a "mom", and a grieving one at that.

She is, to put it mildly, pathetic. Always has been. She is a mother only a son could love.

(HT to this blog)