When I heard about the bombing in Norway, yesterday, my first comment was Shit, I hope it’s not Muslims. The person I was with said “Well, it’s not Timothy McVeigh”.
It turns out to be Anders Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian, right wing, nationalist. And, Anders Breivik, it turns out is Norwegian for Timothy McVeigh.
Like a James Bond movie, or a fireworks display, the Pride Parade starts with a bang and ends with a bang. The middle was much more prosaic; not prosaic like the Sonoma Fourth of July parade which was white bread boring prosaic, prosaic like regular people prosaic. The Pride Parade starts with Dykes on Bikes. Dykes on Bikes are famous enough so that even I, who before now – had never been to a Gay Parade – have seen dozens of pictures of Dykes on Bikes.
Still, they were a surprise. Surprise number one was that many, if not most, of them on rice-burners, less on Harleys than I had expected. Number two, there were just less of them than I expected. Number three, they soon turned into something more akin to Maidens on Mopeds. Then, rapidly, nice guys in pink shorts, holding hands. I don’t say that derogatorily, it was the most charming thing about the Parade. Just nice people saying Please accept me as I am.
There were times when the spectators were more fun than the paraders.
As an aside, it seems to me that there are two kinds of people who are here, on display. People who put together a costume or outfit to go to the parade or be in the parade and people who get out their costume. The costume, or one of the costumes, that they already had. I lived with a woman, with a spectacular body, who had what she called a cat suit; it was a very tight, black, body suit . She would get out whenever she could. Halloween? Check, wear it with rabbit ears. Costume party? Check, wear it with a white collar and black tie. San Francisco Pride Parade? I’m sure the answer would have been, Check, just wear it. End aside.
But the paraders were plenty entertaining even if they were sometimes a little hard to understand.
And then came the finale: the horsey set and the leather crowd . Both gay and straight and, to my eye at high noon, not all that appealing. But they seemed to be enjoying themselves. It reminded me of the joke; What did the sadist say to the masochist?….. Nooo!
That was pretty much the end of the parade, but it is not where I want to end the post. What moved me most about the parade, what brought me close to tears a couple of times was not the wild and wicked; it was the quiet and nice. The normal. I think that explains what is happening right now with gay marriage and the mainstreaming of gays in general. As long as they were in the closet, in the popular imagination, they could be anything. And past the popular imagination, they could be and do the unimaginable. As they came out of the closet, they began to just be other people. With problems and worries just like anybody else.
So the couple above just becomes another older, sort of overweight couple and not a couple of wackos or, maybe, not yet. The people below just become neighbors, some of who want to get married.
Maybe I invested too much in Obama changing Washington, maybe it can not be done, maybe nobody can do it, and, maybe, Obama just isn’t even trying. When he was a candidate, he ran on Change, he ran on Transparency, he ran on the Rule of Law.When asked about Bush and Iraq, he said
The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.
Now, in regards to Libya, where we spent a shit-load of money sending cruise missiles – 110 on the first day – and where we sent actual, piloted, A-10 ground attack aircraft to attack Khadafi’s forces, and where we are still involved; the Obama Administration says
The President is of the view that the current U.S. military operations in Libya are consistent with the War Powers Resolution and do not under that law require further congressional authorization, because U.S. military operations are distinct from the kind of ‘hostilities’ contemplated by the Resolution’s 60 day termination provision. U.S. forces are playing a constrained and supporting role in a multinational coalition….
This sounds like one of the Bush Administration’s convoluted justifications and, if they had said it, we liberals would have gone nuts. Now we just sit quietly. It is sad. The Imperial Presidency just keep getting more Imperial. Sometime in 2008 I am not sure where, maybe on the PBS News Hour, Brooks and somebody, probably Shields, were discussing Obama. Brooks talked about Obama and Reinhold Niebuhr and Niebuhr’s theory on power and how it corrupts. Brooks quoted Obama as saying something along the line of Power corrupts and the hope was that he would get a lot of good done before he got corrupted. Apparently not.
I started out titling this post "The Joy of Simple Language" but, in taking about it with Michele, she pointed out that I was really talking about Informal Language and, infact, what I was looking at as simple is actually complicated. I had it backwards.
I used to be in an men's group. We met every other week for years and we had all sorts of rules on how to be in our group. Among the rules was Anything the we say in the group stays in the group. When one guy told us he and his wife were expecting a baby, none of us told our significant other. Rules were rules. Eventually, we dropped all the rules except To be in relationship to what we do in the group and to each other. With no rules to slavishly follow, being in the group became much more complicated.
Language is that way.
Intuitively, we all – I – think that the language of primitive people is simple. We all know that cave men said things like Uga or Ugh and not I want to tease out the real meaning in the cave being empty. And that may be true, but earlier languages are simpler because they are more formal than our language. They have more and harder rules. Latin is almost impossibly complex but it is easy once you memorize the rules.
English – American English – is losing rules every day and it had a lot less to start with. I think that is so thrilling.
It is easy to follow a rule like Never end a sentence with a preposition, but it results in a sentence like About what are you thinking? rather than What are you thinking about? As English losses its rules, it becomes more complex as well as less formal. There is more room to play. To understand tease above, we have to see it in context. We have to be in relationship and that is the Joy.
One of the nice things about being in the hospital is having time to read. Several weeks ago, Richard Taylor sent me a list of books – he had run into – on the Civil War and that started me reading A Stillness at Appomattox.
Reading this book has been painful at times, but – mostly – a joy. It is painful because it is paragraph after paragraph and page after page of General U. S. Grant sending men into the meat grinder of battle and a joy because it shows the slow change – with so many acts of grace and horror – of Grant’s Army transforming into a winner.
But the book is primarily a joy because of the power and beauty of the words. It is almost 400 pages of poetry. Here is a paragraph from page 213:
…There had been that dance for officers of the II Army Corps, in the raw pine pavilion above the Rapidan on Washington’s Birthday, and it had been a fine thing to see; and it had been a long good-by and a dreamy good night for the young men in bright uniforms and the women who tied their lives to them. Most of the men who danced at that ball were dead, now; dead or dragging themselves about hometown streets on crutches, or tapping their way along with a hickery cane to find the way instead of bright youthful eyes, or in hospitals where doctors with imperfect knowledge tried to patch them up enough to enable them to hope to get out of bed some day and sit in a chair by the window. There had been a romance to war once, or atleast some people said there was, and each one of these men had seen it, and they had touched the edge of it while the music played and the stacked flags swayed in the candlelight, and it all came down to this, with the drifting dust of the battlefields blowing from the imperfect mounds of hastily dug graves.