By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Earlier this month, I went back to Louisville for the first time in thirteen years. My mother still lives there, as well as my father, his second wife, and my oldest sister's family. My other sister came in from Colorado with her husband and kid. I set the "reunion" as far as possible from the landmine holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas when everything's supposed to be so happy-family and lovey-dovey that people all over the country have to get drunk to stand the sight of each other, and more than one gun goes off before you get to the pie. I wasn't going to give them a queer to aim at, even if things have changed, kind of.
As in most of the United States, the state of LGBT folks in Kentucky varies from region to region, city to city, and house to house. In Louisville, one teenaged girl I met, lured into the ROTC by promises of rock climbing trips, passed a semester or two arguing with her colonel, defending gays in the military and women's rights.
Across town, another young girl spent several weeks circulating a petition to preserve Don't Ask, Don't Tell and she's not even in the ROTC yet. She wears bits and pieces of her brother's uniform, and the two do drills when they're bored. She's my niece, and everybody says she's exactly like me. And despite herself, she liked me.
Then there's my mother. When my cousin picked me up at the airport, she told me she'd been lecturing the old dame to be more accepting, or failing that, bite her tongue. "I don't know how I'd feel if one of my kids had made that choice, but you still have to love them and welcome them into your house. And their companions, too. They're your kids, even if you don't agree with their lifestyles."
She meant it kindly, but I would have turned around and headed home right then, if I hadn't taken half a Xanax. Still, whatever she said to my mother worked. Mom didn't exactly ask after my girlfriend of seventeen years, but she did button her lip, and because I did, too, we passed our visit together in a relative truce. We went through pictures, and like the pro reporter I am, I asked leading questions, and let her chatter about whatever crossed her mind until she approached a dangerous subject.
It was what I was there for, to visit parents aging at an accelerated rate. To show my face. Which is the literal truth, especially for my mother, who can't stand the rest of me, in particular the rebellious brain packed with a lesbian lifetime.
I stayed at a hotel the first few nights where the lobby was deluxe, and the rest under construction with its long dark halls nearly deserted until a slew of visitors arrived for the Breeders Cup at Churchill Downs. What synchronicity. I ate a hamburger at the Dairy Queen, and huddled in bed. My girlfriend emailed me a post-election article celebrating the victories of "out" politicians, including Jim Gray, who was elected mayor of Lexington. I was glad things were changing in the state, even if not in time for an exile like me.
The visit with my father was calm. When I was done smiling and nodding to almost every surviving relation in Kentucky and the neighboring states, I went to stay with an old classmate who wasn't at all put off by reconnecting with a big dyke. She had one for a sister-in-law, in fact, and tells a queer-themed story about bonding with her husband-to-be at a Presbyterian youth event. After some homophobic kid mouthed off, the two exchanged glances, asking, "Do you agree with that?" When both shook their heads, no, a heterosexual romance was born.
I talked politics with her husband who teaches social studies at a high school for "at risk" kids. He said the girls were incredibly open, going around arm in arm, declaring they were lesbians, partly to provoke, partly to experiment without knowing entirely what it meant.
Queerish boys were more reticent. And with cause. When one kid from a troubled family came out as bi, his family gave him a lot of crap. A couple days later he disappeared from school, and hadn't been heard from since. Maybe the school was blamed for putting those notions in his head, and they sent him somewhere else. Maybe he got the crap beat out of him and can't leave the house.
That's the world we live in, moving forwards, sideways, and back.
In 2009, at least 22 people in the U.S. were murdered for being LGBT. Most were transwomen. Four out of five were people of color. November 20th was the Transgender Day of Remembrance.
Showing posts with label american politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label american politics. Show all posts
Monday, November 22, 2010
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
American Politics: Two Left Feet
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Some people have two left feet. America doesn't even have one, not a toenail. My latest theory is that the impotence of our left can be judged in inverse proportion to the amount of Che tee shirts worn by its proponents. And the decibel level of their response to political outrages.
When the Democrats recently forced out Van Jones as Obama's green jobs Tzar to quell Republican fury, the most I heard were squeaks from the left. Only whispers were offered in protest when Republican administrations tolerated, actually applauded conservatives who denied global warming as frequently as the Holocaust, posited a secret global government, and supported "Middle Eastern policies meant to hasten the second coming" as Michelle Goldberg notes in the American Prospect.
Why the relative silence? Especially when those revolutionary Che tee-shirts are in ample supply in the U.S.?
Because they don't indicate anything except failure, of good sense, and the imagination. What Republican would wear an image of Bush on the destroyer declaring victory in Iraq shortly before the place exploded, taking the entire region, and the American economy, more or less along for the ride? We won, we won. Kaboom. No. You wash your hands of the triumphalist image and move on.
The left, however, continues to embrace Che, who along with his bosom buddy Fidel, gave birth to an equal, if more localized, disaster. Cubans in that enormously fertile island are going hungry, and it's not all the fault of the embargo. Police profiling of black folks, even women, is as bad as in New Jersey. The lauded Cuban health care system is largely reserved for the party faithful. School kids don't have school uniforms, books. Or toilet paper. "Revolutionary" forces protect the working class by forbidding union organizing. Queers are arrested if they try to do anything outside the sphere of their protectrice Mariela Castro who defends us in a creepy, medicalized way as homossssssssexuals and transssssexuals that have to be tolerated because they were born that way.
Altogether, Cuba has become what Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez calls "a society marked by the criminalization of opinions, where even the nuts and children don't say what they think, just the drunks." Which are then arrested. After a clip was posted on YouTube of a hammered Juan Carlos Gonzalez Marcos, "Panfilo" interrupting a video interview to announce that "what Cubans really needed was grub. We're horribly hungry," the middle-aged Afro-Cuban man got two years in jail.
And despite his early, and heroic departure, Che can't be absolved for how Cuba evolved. If I remember correctly, he was the architect of the "re-education" camps for prostitutes that went on to imprison queers, other social degenerates and enemies of the revolution that now include bloggers in addition to voluble drunks.
If that's the truth, why oh why oh why do so many in the American left cling to the myth of Che as hero, using Cuba as a handy hook on which to hang all our hopes and dreams of beauty, revolution, life under a perpetually shining sun?
Ignorant? Or just lazy? For a revolution all you need is a beret, a boat called Granma, a bunch of guys with guns, pure hearts, and a couple of weeks of ripe historical conditions. Change in a democracy, especially a mediocre one, takes years of wallowing in political filth, compromise, back room deals, insults, persistence, and of course buckets of dough.
It's more entertaining, cleaner to just go out on the streets to protest for women's and queer rights. Against war and against racism. To collect money for Green Peace and animal sanctuaries. With their insistence on keeping their hands spotless, I sometimes think the left have far more invested in our Puritan heritage than the religious right.
As a result we're not even in the game. Unlike most other democracies, we have no viable Green Party or other group of the left that could manage to get more than one or two representatives in the House. We have only the centrist and center-right Democrats up against the right-wing and extreme right Republicans.
Without the counterbalance of a political left, the extreme right easily paralyzes the Republicans, and pulls the center farther and farther towards their particular brand of schizophrenic American politics which manages to be both authoritarian and isolationist, paranoid, theocratic, and popular in an elitist (racist, misogynist, homophobic) kind of way.
The only solution is to artificially create a left. Where it could come from though, is anybody's guess. A cabbage patch? Storks? Churches have been the breeding ground of the rising extremists on the right. The left has nothing similar. Social justice movements in 2009 are too fragmented and demobilized to hatch a movement, or even the left wing of a baby chick.
Some people have two left feet. America doesn't even have one, not a toenail. My latest theory is that the impotence of our left can be judged in inverse proportion to the amount of Che tee shirts worn by its proponents. And the decibel level of their response to political outrages.
When the Democrats recently forced out Van Jones as Obama's green jobs Tzar to quell Republican fury, the most I heard were squeaks from the left. Only whispers were offered in protest when Republican administrations tolerated, actually applauded conservatives who denied global warming as frequently as the Holocaust, posited a secret global government, and supported "Middle Eastern policies meant to hasten the second coming" as Michelle Goldberg notes in the American Prospect.
Why the relative silence? Especially when those revolutionary Che tee-shirts are in ample supply in the U.S.?
Because they don't indicate anything except failure, of good sense, and the imagination. What Republican would wear an image of Bush on the destroyer declaring victory in Iraq shortly before the place exploded, taking the entire region, and the American economy, more or less along for the ride? We won, we won. Kaboom. No. You wash your hands of the triumphalist image and move on.
The left, however, continues to embrace Che, who along with his bosom buddy Fidel, gave birth to an equal, if more localized, disaster. Cubans in that enormously fertile island are going hungry, and it's not all the fault of the embargo. Police profiling of black folks, even women, is as bad as in New Jersey. The lauded Cuban health care system is largely reserved for the party faithful. School kids don't have school uniforms, books. Or toilet paper. "Revolutionary" forces protect the working class by forbidding union organizing. Queers are arrested if they try to do anything outside the sphere of their protectrice Mariela Castro who defends us in a creepy, medicalized way as homossssssssexuals and transssssexuals that have to be tolerated because they were born that way.
Altogether, Cuba has become what Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez calls "a society marked by the criminalization of opinions, where even the nuts and children don't say what they think, just the drunks." Which are then arrested. After a clip was posted on YouTube of a hammered Juan Carlos Gonzalez Marcos, "Panfilo" interrupting a video interview to announce that "what Cubans really needed was grub. We're horribly hungry," the middle-aged Afro-Cuban man got two years in jail.
And despite his early, and heroic departure, Che can't be absolved for how Cuba evolved. If I remember correctly, he was the architect of the "re-education" camps for prostitutes that went on to imprison queers, other social degenerates and enemies of the revolution that now include bloggers in addition to voluble drunks.
If that's the truth, why oh why oh why do so many in the American left cling to the myth of Che as hero, using Cuba as a handy hook on which to hang all our hopes and dreams of beauty, revolution, life under a perpetually shining sun?
Ignorant? Or just lazy? For a revolution all you need is a beret, a boat called Granma, a bunch of guys with guns, pure hearts, and a couple of weeks of ripe historical conditions. Change in a democracy, especially a mediocre one, takes years of wallowing in political filth, compromise, back room deals, insults, persistence, and of course buckets of dough.
It's more entertaining, cleaner to just go out on the streets to protest for women's and queer rights. Against war and against racism. To collect money for Green Peace and animal sanctuaries. With their insistence on keeping their hands spotless, I sometimes think the left have far more invested in our Puritan heritage than the religious right.
As a result we're not even in the game. Unlike most other democracies, we have no viable Green Party or other group of the left that could manage to get more than one or two representatives in the House. We have only the centrist and center-right Democrats up against the right-wing and extreme right Republicans.
Without the counterbalance of a political left, the extreme right easily paralyzes the Republicans, and pulls the center farther and farther towards their particular brand of schizophrenic American politics which manages to be both authoritarian and isolationist, paranoid, theocratic, and popular in an elitist (racist, misogynist, homophobic) kind of way.
The only solution is to artificially create a left. Where it could come from though, is anybody's guess. A cabbage patch? Storks? Churches have been the breeding ground of the rising extremists on the right. The left has nothing similar. Social justice movements in 2009 are too fragmented and demobilized to hatch a movement, or even the left wing of a baby chick.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Reassessing Bush as America Falls
by Kelly Jean Cogswell
I was relieved to hear in Bush's State of the Union address that we had Al Qaeda on the run in Iraq, the economy was fine, even if, just a little teensy bit, for the moment, uncertain. And above all that, "From expanding opportunity to protecting our country, we have made good progress."
The speech was almost pure fantasy for a president with a 29 percent approval rating, and 81 percent of an electorate thinking the country is on the wrong track. But to be fair, I suspect that next president, faced with having made minimal progress on the same intractable fronts, will deliver the same kind of pie-in-the-sky pronouncements.
Even stiff-upper-lip Britain rarely produces a Churchill who started off one famous speech with the simple declaration, "The news from France is very bad." And it was. France had just fallen to the Germans and the Brits were left alone in Europe.
America, the land of the most gung-ho people in the world is never going to warm to a president from any party admitting we face an uphill battle managing a tanking economy, a Middle East quagmire, and faltering super powers. No, what we demand from our leaders is hope. A shining new Kennedy or Reagan.
We should remember that this trafficking in perpetual optimism that characterizes America, especially post-Baby Boom, is largely why Bush was elected in the first place. He had a charismatic sense of destiny and wore the greatness of this country in his heroic Texas swagger. Along with a few lies about WMDs, our willing wardrobe of rose-colored glasses was why he could so easily drag us into Iraq with feeble promises of a quick victory.
That same degenerate optimism is also at the root of the banking crisis. The hubris of Bush deregulating everything with the convenient credo that the market always takes care of itself was matched only by all those delusional borrowers who now want to be absolved for grabbing every dollar on offer instead of leaving a little cautious cushion for disasters, job loss, a downturn in investments.
It was a symbiosis -- the guys running the shell game, and the marks that hand over their hard-earned money hoping to make a quick buck. They're feeling lucky.
When did modesty become a dirty word? And, in that light, should we immodestly blame all our messes on George W. Bush? I'm starting to reconsider.
Even George Soros, who's no Bush-lover, wrote recently in the Financial Times that while the administration played its part, "The current crisis is the culmination of a super-boom that has lasted for more than 60 years."
Likewise, our diminishing role in the world is not only the result of Bush's tendency for preemptive and unilateral action plus nose-thumbing at the international community, but the consolidation and growth of the European Union and the rise of China as a third pole analyzed in depth by Parg Khanna in the New York Times last week.
As we get a peek behind the curtain, what we're beginning to see is that in many ways Bush merely pushed some of the dominoes that were already aligned to fall. Just not so far so fast.
Which means the news from France is very bad. Because if seven years of Bush is not largely responsible for America's current crisis, it's not enough for a president of either party just to be a hopeful anti-Bush. The situation is much more profound, and it would be great if we had a politician willing to break the news. If they've noticed at all.
Americans aren't known for their interest in international affairs, the big picture. Or even big maps. (Just where is Uzbekistan?) And much of the current slump in American confidence is due to good old dollars and cents, plus a little intuition.
We leave historical trends for academics. Even though the latest ones affect us beyond our identity as a super power with X-ray vision.
I'm not sure the downward slide is all bad. What is America anyway? Are we the land of the free? Or only the land of the super-sized fries, lending empires and international conglomerates all on their way out?
Freedom is something we do have control over. And while Bush can't be blamed for everything, the erosion of civil liberties in the States can certainly be laid at his feet, along with the Congresses that aided and abetted him. Even now, our newly Democratic congress is anything but democratic.
And then there are all the times that we Americans could have taken to the streets and didn't, preferring to sit on our metaphorical front porches and complain. Forget baseball and football. The blame game is the real American pastime. Our favorite recourse when false hope fails.
I was relieved to hear in Bush's State of the Union address that we had Al Qaeda on the run in Iraq, the economy was fine, even if, just a little teensy bit, for the moment, uncertain. And above all that, "From expanding opportunity to protecting our country, we have made good progress."
The speech was almost pure fantasy for a president with a 29 percent approval rating, and 81 percent of an electorate thinking the country is on the wrong track. But to be fair, I suspect that next president, faced with having made minimal progress on the same intractable fronts, will deliver the same kind of pie-in-the-sky pronouncements.
Even stiff-upper-lip Britain rarely produces a Churchill who started off one famous speech with the simple declaration, "The news from France is very bad." And it was. France had just fallen to the Germans and the Brits were left alone in Europe.
America, the land of the most gung-ho people in the world is never going to warm to a president from any party admitting we face an uphill battle managing a tanking economy, a Middle East quagmire, and faltering super powers. No, what we demand from our leaders is hope. A shining new Kennedy or Reagan.
We should remember that this trafficking in perpetual optimism that characterizes America, especially post-Baby Boom, is largely why Bush was elected in the first place. He had a charismatic sense of destiny and wore the greatness of this country in his heroic Texas swagger. Along with a few lies about WMDs, our willing wardrobe of rose-colored glasses was why he could so easily drag us into Iraq with feeble promises of a quick victory.
That same degenerate optimism is also at the root of the banking crisis. The hubris of Bush deregulating everything with the convenient credo that the market always takes care of itself was matched only by all those delusional borrowers who now want to be absolved for grabbing every dollar on offer instead of leaving a little cautious cushion for disasters, job loss, a downturn in investments.
It was a symbiosis -- the guys running the shell game, and the marks that hand over their hard-earned money hoping to make a quick buck. They're feeling lucky.
When did modesty become a dirty word? And, in that light, should we immodestly blame all our messes on George W. Bush? I'm starting to reconsider.
Even George Soros, who's no Bush-lover, wrote recently in the Financial Times that while the administration played its part, "The current crisis is the culmination of a super-boom that has lasted for more than 60 years."
Likewise, our diminishing role in the world is not only the result of Bush's tendency for preemptive and unilateral action plus nose-thumbing at the international community, but the consolidation and growth of the European Union and the rise of China as a third pole analyzed in depth by Parg Khanna in the New York Times last week.
As we get a peek behind the curtain, what we're beginning to see is that in many ways Bush merely pushed some of the dominoes that were already aligned to fall. Just not so far so fast.
Which means the news from France is very bad. Because if seven years of Bush is not largely responsible for America's current crisis, it's not enough for a president of either party just to be a hopeful anti-Bush. The situation is much more profound, and it would be great if we had a politician willing to break the news. If they've noticed at all.
Americans aren't known for their interest in international affairs, the big picture. Or even big maps. (Just where is Uzbekistan?) And much of the current slump in American confidence is due to good old dollars and cents, plus a little intuition.
We leave historical trends for academics. Even though the latest ones affect us beyond our identity as a super power with X-ray vision.
I'm not sure the downward slide is all bad. What is America anyway? Are we the land of the free? Or only the land of the super-sized fries, lending empires and international conglomerates all on their way out?
Freedom is something we do have control over. And while Bush can't be blamed for everything, the erosion of civil liberties in the States can certainly be laid at his feet, along with the Congresses that aided and abetted him. Even now, our newly Democratic congress is anything but democratic.
And then there are all the times that we Americans could have taken to the streets and didn't, preferring to sit on our metaphorical front porches and complain. Forget baseball and football. The blame game is the real American pastime. Our favorite recourse when false hope fails.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)