Gitmo lawyering

Unsurprisingly, I agree that the lawyers who sought out Gitmo prisoners to defend pro bono do not deserve to work in the DOJ. They are not John Adams. As Powerline notes, the common bond between Western leftists and Muslim jihadis is a shared hatred of America. The Westerners' is sophisticated and masquerades as holding us to a higher standard, wanting us to be out better selves. The Muslims' is frank and clearly motivated.

A few years ago I was working for an organization which had found a wealthy donor to provide some much needed improvements to their old offices. This person was charming and likeable, extraordinarily easy to work with. And was giving substantially out of a real sense of gratitude.

But one day the donor mentioned to me, with the kind of quiet exultation of someone who has landed a real coup and was sharing their joy, that our next lunch would have to be rescheduled because they were meeting with some friends, lawyers who were volunteering to represent the prisoners at Guantanamo.

The clear assumption of the communication was that I would be impressed. I was, of course, not.

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This is not

a Unitarian Universalist service.

Nineteenth century. Cathedral of Amiens in France.

Roman Catholicism is so cool.

Queer, continued

Why do gay men who are fashion designers spend so much time dressing up women?
I really don't get it. Really. I don't.
I can't tell you how deeply uninterested I am in women's clothes.
Really. I can't.

In my Aristotelian wonderings about what gay men are for, what their purpose is, one of the themes that comes up is: decoration and ornament.



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Swedes sometimes do it right

Published Mohammed-as-dog cartoons precisely to make the point about freedom of speech, after the plot to kill cartoonist Lars Viks was uncovered in Ireland.

HT to Dissecting Leftism

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The passing of years

Today is my birthday. I had a very nice celebration. Very nice. Partly conventional, partly not. It included hot dogs and burghers (sic) ...and softball...at the Gates of Hell...in Stanford. At the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, I posed with a mummified baboon...who is older than me.

Picnic on a bench, on a blanket, under a tree to keep the rain off, in Rosicrucian Park, across from a plaque quoting the Delphic Oracle: "No one is wiser than Socrates because he knows he knows nothing."

Menu: Sandwiches of Molinari hot sausages and peppers, roasted chicken thighs, roasted beets with parsley, tortellini with sauteed vegetables, oranges, and Canada Dry Diet Ginger Ale (!).

Thanks, Boyo.
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Wow

Sometimes you give closer attention to something you take for granted and you find yourself amazed. Or in this case, appalled.

The Eighteenth Amendment. Banning the importation, manufacture or sale of intoxicating liquors.

Just think about it. They amended the effing federal Constitution to make people stop drinking.

Talk about moralistic statist intrusion and control. I guess it's more of an American tradition than I'd like to believe. I know that the Puritan impulse is strong in this country and it shows up in a myriad of ways. Nowadays among cool and groovy people who would never in a million years think of themselves as puritanical, just concerned about health and safety and the environment and the children.

Hey, good old Thomas Jefferson, friend of the French Revolution, wrote a law in Virginia that provided the punishment of castration for men who engaged in sodomy.

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Sad

I wandered onto a blog yesterday where a Catholic man who is "same-sex attracted" holds forth on the virtues of seeking sanctity through celibacy, etc. While I understand, intellectually and historically, why Catholicism can only validate traditional marriage as the place for sexuality, it always pains me to run into an actual homosexual Catholic who tries to live this out. It is in the realm of personal experience that the doctrine runs aground for me.

In this fella's case, he was wondering if he had been stunted or damaged because his father had never sat down with him and had The Talk, explaining the realities of sex. Well, my dad did just that and I remain very "same-sex attracted", so...

But what is sad is a comment he makes, admitting that language about sex being an act of love is "completely foreign" to him. In his few dozen sexual encounters with other men, he reveals that only one of them had any reason to think that he might love him. I ran across this same theme on the blog of another "same-sex attracted" Catholic who is now rather famous for his gay-defiant orthodoxy. He plenty of experience having sex with other men, but had no experience of making love with another man and could not imagine how male-male sex could possibly express love.

Well, someone is indeed stunted or damaged. That is a sad thing to hear.

I can understand why people who have no direct experience of male-male sex find it upsetting or even repulsive. As I have said, it involves physical gestures which to most people signify degradation, pain or dirt.

And I have also noted that for very many people who are heterosexual, their own "natural" gestures are often seen in a quite similar way. The paradox of seeing sex as both exciting and disgusting is hardly original. It feels almost archetypal.

I also know from experience that the repertoire of sexual gestures available to men with men is capable of a wide range of meanings, good and bad, but that love is one of them.



To continue in the Catholic mode, all of human life, sex included, lies under the sign of the Fall. The tragic element in creation is enormous and flawed humans enact flawed lovemaking. Is there selfishness, dishonesty, wrongheadness, illusion, mere mistake possible in sex? Can it be part of heartbreak? Of course. Not because it is sex, but because humans do it. But humans they are, and lovemaking it can be.

Perhaps the poor man has just never been properly kissed.

It's sad.

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Queer

When I was a kid, my maternal grandmother, "Kitty" Dowd, moved in with us after she was widowed. I liked her a lot and she liked me. She was easygoing, told good stories, smoked, and sometimes used bad language. After Mass on Sundays, she'd always check in with her bookie. She was great at aphorisms and remains the most quoted member of my family, even though she died over forty years ago.

For example, when anyone would complain about life's unfairness, she'd say, "There's no justice in this world. And good thing, too. Otherwise, we'd all be hung from the yardarm at dawn."

I do recall her looking at me one day after one of our conversations about I-don't-remember-what, and saying to me through wreaths of smoke, "Ah, but you're a queer duck."

True, Nana, truer than you knew. Or maybe you did.

I was watching a scifi program recently and the plot involved two couples. The guys are good looking guys and the women are, by any standard, very beautiful. But this queer duck realized, once again, that while the men have a vividness and three-dimensionality as physical beings --the cut of a jaw, the thickness of a shoulder, the timbre of a voice, the rhythm of a walk-- the women seem to me like talking surfaces. Shiny but without blood or fire.

And although the men are clearly entranced by them, it escapes me why that is so. One of the women is a beautiful but rather calmly masculine character, a military scientist. She at least is likeable, self-possessed and interesting. The other one was all ringlets of hair and too much smiling and blinking and a sibilant British accent and (to me) skinny white shoulders, etc. The power to attract is clearly there for the man. But not for this one. My radio does not get that station at all, one that almost all the men in history have been listening to obsessively.

Queer.

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Neither religion, sex nor politics

Canada Dry Diet Ginger Ale.
Cold, and shaken til it's flat.

Started when I had some liver trouble,
about 30 years ago,
and couldn't handle much in the way of
food and drink.

Love the stuff.
Been swilling it ever since.

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What's wrong with this sentence?*

"Up until recently, Ahmed Rami and Mohamed Omar were the only Swedes who promoted an anti-Zionist political party."

HT to Charles Winecoff.

*to say nothing of "this picture".
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