Magical Elves, sparkleponies and other assorted gay shit

Pro-gay ally NFL player Chris Kluwe’s colorfully titled book is due out next month. Kluwe earlier this month was dropped by the Minnesota Vikings but was picked up by the Oakland Raiders. I’m glad and proud to have him as a fellow Californian; Minnesota’s loss is California’s gain.

I usually comment on gay-rights issues in the news in a timely fashion, but I’ve been slacking as of late. So here I’ll try to catch up:

It was great to see basketball player Jason Collins, the first active player from one of the “Big Four” sports organizations (the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League ), come out late last month, even if there is at least a grain of truth to gay writer Bret Easton Ellis’ criticism that Collins’ treatment by the media “as some kind of baby panda who needed to be honored and praised and consoled and — yes — infantilized by his coming out on the cover of Sports Illustrated” also made Collins a “Gay Man as Magical Elf, who whenever he comes out appears before us as some kind of saintly E.T. whose sole purpose is to be put in the position of reminding us only about Tolerance and Our Own Prejudices and To Feel Good About Ourselves and to be a symbol instead of just being a gay dude.”

And I also was happy to hear the news that pro-gay ally NFL player Chris Kluwe, who was dropped by the Minnesota Vikings earlier this month (perhaps at least in part due to his vocal pro-gay-and-pro-gay-marriage stance), shortly thereafter was picked up by the Oakland Raiders.

If Minnesota didn’t appreciate Kluwe, I’m happy to have him here in California, where Kluwe already has done us some good: Kluwe and another pro-gay ally, NFL player Brendon Ayanbadejo, per Wikipedia, “filed an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on February 28, 2013, regarding Hollingsworth v. Perry, in which they expressed their support of the challenge to California Proposition 8,” which in 2008 amended California’s Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, a right that California’s Supreme Court had ruled was guaranteed to Californians by the state’s Constitution before the haters later amended it with Prop H8.

I admire the very apparently heterosexual Kluwe, who is heterosexually married and has two children. According to Wikipedia, Kluwe wrote a blog called “Out of Bounds” for a Minnesota newspaper before he quit the blog last year in protest of the newspaper’s having run an editorial in support of the euphemistically titled “Minnesota Marriage Amendment,” which, just as Prop H8 did in California, would have amended the state’s constitution to ban same-sex marriage. (That amendment failed at the ballot box in November, with the haters losing by just more than 5 percentage points, and subsequently the Minnesota Legislature legalized same-sex marriage this month.)

It takes balls and selflessness to fight for a historically discriminated against and oppressed group of people of whom you apparently aren’t a member. Kluwe did the right thing by boycotting the anti-gay newspaper.

Kluwe also has been outspoken about the facts that not all athletes are dumb jocks and that there is more to life than football, even for an NFL player.

And yeah, I’ll probably buy his upcoming book, Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities, which is due out next month.

Also this month, three states approved same-sex marriage: Delaware, Rhode Island, and, as I mentioned, Minnesota. (I find it ironic that just after the Minnesota Vikings dropped Kluwe, very possibly at least in part due to his advocacy for same-sex marriage, the state’s Legislature enacted same-sex marriage.)

True, Rhode Island and Delaware are only our 43rd and 45th most populous states, respectively, but Minnesota is our 21st most populous state, and it joins Iowa as another Midwestern state with same-sex marriage. Once the Midwest goes, how far behind can the rest of the nation be?

Finally, I found it to be a pleasant surprise to learn that President Barack Obama, this past weekend in his commencement speech to the graduates of the all-male, historically African-American Morehouse College, remarked, “… and that’s what I’m asking all of you to do: keep setting an example for what it means to be a man. Be the best husband to your wife or your boyfriend or your partner. Be the best father you can be to your children. Because nothing is more important.”

True, Obama’s wording was inelegant.* If you were a man who had married your boyfriend, he would be your “husband” or your “spouse” or your “partner” or however else you chose to refer to him (hell, call him your “wife” if you want to and if he is OK with that; it’s your marriage, not mine). But if you had married him, you probably wouldn’t still be referring to him as your “boyfriend.”

Still, I found it at least a bit encouraging for the president of the United States of America, whatever his other many flaws and missteps might be, basically state in a college commencement address before an all-male audience that marrying a member of the same sex is perfectly fine if that is what is right for the individual.

You never would have heard George W. Bush, or even Bill Clinton, utter those words at a commencement ceremony.

I noted above that Chris Kluwe is “heterosexually married.” I did that on purpose; “married” no longer should automatically mean heterosexually married; “married” should include the possibility of being homosexually married — in all 50 states and in every nation on the planet that recognizes marriage between heterosexuals.

And one day, it won’t matter; “married” will just be married, and no one will much care, if he or she cares at all, whether it’s a same-sex marriage or an opposite-sex marriage.

But it still matters now, and we Magical Elves and our allies have a lot of work to do between today and the day that it no longer matters because everyone (or at least almost everyone) realizes that each and every one of us is a beautifully unique sparklepony.

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*Slate.com’s William Saletan reports that Obama’s prepared remark was “Be the best husband to your wife or boyfriend to your partner or father to your children that you can be,” but, again, what Obama actually said was, “Be the best husband to your wife or your boyfriend or your partner.”

Saletan writes:

… But this time, the speech didn’t go according to script. Literally. Obama changed the “boyfriend” line from hetero boilerplate to explicitly gay-inclusive. He ad-libbed. And this was a heck of a time to do it. The speech was about what it means to be a man. The president of the United States, who until a year ago didn’t support same-sex marriage, has just put an official stamp of masculinity on male homosexuality. …

That’s certainly a possibility; it’s a valid interpretation, and it would be my interpretation, too, more or less, but, in my viewing of the clip of the remark, it appears to me as though Obama does stumble and/or hesitate a bit in getting the words out, with a nervous-and-unsure-of-himself-sounding inflection on the final word of that sentence, “partner,” and it’s not 100 percent clear to me whether he stumbles over these words because he’s messing them up or because he’s not sure how what he is saying — that it’s perfectly OK for a man to marry a man — is going to be received by his audience (Morehouse College, after all, is in Georgia, a state that isn’t exactly known as a gay-friendly state).

Indeed, sadly, if you also watch the clip, you will hear and see that after Obama asks his audience to “keep setting an example for what it means to be a man,” he has to pause for applause, but then, after he says next, “Be the best husband to your wife or your boyfriend or your partner,” very apparently his audience at first is silent in momentary confusion but then breaks out in some derisive laughter and mumbling and grumbling.

Indeed, in response to this very apparent derision over his remark that a man may marry a man, Obama puts his index finger up to his audience in apparent admonishment over their apparent homophobia.

As I said, we still have a way to go.

Stormtroopers gone wild!

Updated below (on Saturday, November 19, 2011)

To anyone who believes that I’ve been hysterical in my last few posts, I offer this photo from The Associated Press:

Associated Press photo

The photo’s caption reads: “A police officer uses pepper spray on an Occupy Portland protestor at Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Ore., Thursday, Nov. 17, 2011.”

Yes, that’s not water — that’s pepper spray. And clearly the young woman is such a dire threat to the jackbooted thugs who serve and protect the 1 percent that spraying her directly in the face with a massive amount of pepper spray was necessary for the stormtroopers’ safety.

Where is Barack Obama speaking out against these outrages?

Oh, right — he puts Wall Street weasels on his cabinet and makes them his advisers. He’s on the side of the 1 percent.

Face it, folks, if you haven’t already: Barack Obama just isn’t that into you. He’s not on the side of the 99 percent. He wants your money and your vote — it got him into the White House, after all – but expect only empty promises from President Hopey-Changey in return.

And the message is clear: The 1 percent decide where and when and how the rest of us can protest and demonstrate. They make sure that our protests and demonstrations are so restricted that they can be toothless at best. Our plutocratic overlords even have established so-called “free-speech zones,” for fuck’s sake. If we step outside of these rigidly, plutocratically proscribed “free-speech” lines, we will be pepper-sprayed — or worse.

Look at the news photo above and reflect upon the fact that this is the blue state of Oregon that we’re talking about. If this is what the plutocratic-protecting pigs are doing on the Left Coast, what’s next? Can concentration camps for anti-plutocratic, anti-corporate dissenters be far behind?

Update (Saturday, November 19, 2011):

If you are wondering about the young woman who took the blast of pepper spray to the face, The Oregonian yesterday posted a piece on her. The Oregonian identifies the woman as Liz Nichols, a “soft-spoken 20-year-old who’s only about 5 feet tall,” and reports of her:

Raised in Mountain Home, Ark., a town of about 1,600, she plans to stay in Portland as long as the Occupy movement is alive. She’s motivated to protest by the plight of her parents. Her mother has multiple sclerosis and her father was disabled by a back injury. They’re both surviving on his Social Security disability checks.

 The Oregonian reports of the pepper-spray incident caught by a photographer:

A police van blared a warning, telling people they risked arrest if they ventured into the street. Nichols and others stayed on the sidewalk. Laura Seeton,  a 31-year-old Portlander who locked arms with Nichols, said they had nowhere to go as people in back pushed and the riot police in front shoved back.

“It was terrifying,” Seeton said.

Nichols said a policewoman jabbed her in the ribs with a baton and pressed it against her throat. That made her angry.

She yelled at the officer, saying she was being mistreated. That’s when another officer shot her with pepper spray. A photo by The Oregonian’s Randy L. Rasmussen, which flashed across social media websites, shows Nichols was sprayed from a few feet away.

“It felt like my face, ears and hands were on fire,” she said.

She dropped to the ground, and police yanked her into their ranks.

“She was dragged away by her hair and disappeared into the black of their uniforms,” Seeton said.

Why in the fuck are our so-called “police officers” not only pepper-spraying non-threatening citizens, but also actually dragging women by their hair? This kind of police brutality is different from that practiced by dictators’ thugs how?

I also thought that I would share this cartoon on the topic of nonviolence by Ted Rall:

That’s pretty much it, in a nutshell, but also worth reading is Rall’s recent column on the topic, titled “The Occupier’s Choice: Violence or Failure.” And if you haven’t read his book The Anti-American Manifesto yet, what the fuck is the matter with you?

Time to fight fire with fire

Associated Press photo

Did you know that cops are using pepper spray against citizens who peaceably are voicing their grievances in canisters that are the fucking size of fire extinguishers?

The caption for the Associated Press photo above reads: “Seattle Police officers deploy pepper spray into a crowd during an Occupy Seattle protest on Tuesday, November 15, 2011, at Westlake Park in Seattle. Protesters gathered in the intersection of 5th Avenue and Pine Street after marching from their camp at Seattle Central Community College in support of Occupy Wall Street. Many refused to move from the intersection after being ordered by police. Police then began spraying pepper spray into the gathered crowd, hitting dozens of people” — including the 84-year-old Dorli Rainey, who has become the poster woman for the police brutality that we have seen in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The use of pepper spray on people whose “crime” is simply refusing to move from an intersection is not justified. Before you argue with me on that point, note that seattlepi.com reports:

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn on Wednesday apologized to protestors, including an 84-year-old woman, who were pepper-sprayed during a face-off with the Occupy Seattle demonstration in downtown.

McGinn said he spoke personally to Dorli Rainey, the former school teacher and activist who was photographed by seattlepi.com with red, swollen eyes just after she’d been doused with pepper spray Tuesday. The photo went international and captured an iconic moment for the Occupy movement.

“To those engaged in peaceful protest, I am sorry that you were pepper sprayed,” McGinn said in a statement. “I spoke to Dorli Rainey (who I know personally) to ask how she was doing, and to ask for her description of events.”

McGinn said he asked Police Chief John Diaz to review the police use of pepper spray and to ensure appropriate commanders are on-scene during such events. He said he did not want overly aggressive enforcement to exacerbate a situation.

He said police agreed that what happened Tuesday night was not “their preferred outcome.”

“My instruction to police and other city departments has been to protect free speech rights, protect public safety of protestors and the public, and protect other legitimate public and private uses of property,” McGinn said.

A pregnant woman and a priest were among those hit with pepper spray during a march from the Occupy movement’s current camp at Seattle Central Community College to Westlake Park. They were marching in support of protesters who were kicked out of Zuccotti Park in New York. The Seattle protesters were blocked by police officers at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Pine Street, where the confrontation took place, according to reports.

A police spokesman said Tuesday that pepper spray was used only on people who refused to disperse or who engaged in assaultive behavior toward officers. …

That obviously is a fucking  lie. We have photographic evidence that the Seattle pigs — and that’s what they are, pigs — wantonly sprayed pepper spray from large canisters all over whoever happened to be in front of them. There very apparently were no surgical strikes of pepper spray only upon those individuals who might actually have been aggressing upon the pigs. (And when a cop claims that he or she actually was aggressed upon by an unarmed citizen, take that claim with a grain of salt unless their is photographic or video evidence to back it up.)

And let’s not act like it’s only a crime if it’s the elderly, pregnant women and priests who are pepper-sprayed without very good cause. Anyone who is pepper-sprayed unnecessarily by the legalized thugs for the 1 percent whom we call “law enforcement officers” is a victim of a violent crime him- or herself.

 

The AP photo above eerily reminds me of images like these:

 

 

 

Those are photos of fascistic firefighters protecting the 1 percent hosing down civil-rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.

 

Non-violence? Bullshit.

 

When those who are supposed to protect us and to serve us — we fucking pay their salaries for them to do so — instead attack us, it’s time for us to attack back. I don’t believe in starting it, but I believe in ending it, and nothing fights fire better than fire. The only effective way to deal with a fucking bully is to give back to him what he has dished out himself.

 

TIME magazine has jumped the shark

Newsweek is probably dead.

E tu, TIME?

TIME recently put out this cover:

Uh, is that journalism or is that a fucking ransom note written by the U.S. military-industrial complex? (“If you make us pull out of Afghanistan, then the girl gets it!”)

Don’t get me wrong. I have sympathy for the 18-year-old Afghan Bibi Aisha, whose nose was severed after she ran away from her abusive husband, it is reported. And I’m happy to read the news item that Bibi Aisha is to have her nose restored, to the extent that it can be, here in my great state of California.

But when the American Empire is crumbling all around us here at home, can it really be about saving everyone on the planet?

What about the young men who routinely are hanged in Iran for having been accused of being gay?

(U.K.) Daily Mail image

Go to Google Images (images.google.com), type in “gay Iranians,” and you’ll see that most of the images are images of young Iranian men being hanged.

But that probably isn’t why Repugnican Sen. John McCainosaurus once sang, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran!” — is it?

No, he sang that tune for the military-industrial complex, because if you’re a war profiteer, you can’t profit unless there’s a war, and delivering perpetual war (1984 style) t0 the war profiteers and the corporations that benefit from war (such as how Big Oil now is in Iraq after the Vietraq War liberated Iraq’s oil fields) is one of the central planks of the Repugnican Tea Party’s platform.

Being hanged to death is, um, I surmise, a little worse than having your nose cut off, and it disturbs me deeply that Iran brutally executes young men (and older men, too, I’m sure) for being gay or even being suspected of being gay, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to argue that we should declare war upon Iran.

You have to look at the whole picture before you argue that war is the answer.

Bibi Aisha’s case is not a happy one, but to argue that many, many others should continue to die in war in Afghanistan because of her plight is, I think, to put it mildly, insane, and TIME magazine is incredibly irresponsible and sensationalistic for having put out that message. (Whether that was TIME’s intended message or not, that’s how many if not most are going to take it.)

And let’s not fucking fool ourselves:

The theocrats in the United States, most of them “Christo”fascists, would do to young women here what is done to women like Bibi Aisha elsewhere if they could get away with it.

And I’m sure that the Proposition H8 supporters would hang gay (or suspected gay men) here in the United States of America if they could get away with that, too.

This wingnut attending a recent homo-hating National Organization for Marriage (which, ironically, actually wants fewer marriages) rally in Indianapolis called for the hanging of non-heterosexuals here at home:

He appears to be smiling while his signage calls for the execution of non-heterosexuals.

Yeah, that’s what we non-heterosexuals here at home are up against.

Maybe, when we’re done “liberating” Afghanistan, and then maybe Iran, we can liberate the United States of America.

A dingbat ate my anchor baby!

Ann Cunter parodied on “Saturday Night Live” as a “manserpent”

Gee, I had thought that the cause of our nation’s problems were such parties as the corporations that evade billions and billions of dollars in taxes while we working people sure pay ours, the bloated-beyond-belief military-industrial complex that gobbles up billions and billions of our tax dollars in perpetual wars for the war profiteers while things literally crumble here at home, corporations that spill millions of gallons of oil into the ocean and then are defended by likes of Repugnican Tea Party candidate Ron Paul and Repugnican Big Oil bribe collector Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, and corporations that ran our economy into the ground through their hocus-pocus practices and then got hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money, because it’s socialism only if needy people get any money. (Wait — according ot the wingnuts, corporations are people, right?)

Oh, and corporate-caused global warming.* 

But I was wrong.

The nation’s economic collapse has nothing to do with the greedy corporate criminals (a phrase that is redundant) who are responsible even for the melting polar ice cap.

No.

It’s the anchor babies.

You haven’t heard of an anchor baby?

Well, that’s because this dire threat to the nation was just discovered by the Repugnican Tea Party (only coinky-dinkily because elections are just around the corner, you fucking cynic).

Seriously, though, how does a dire problem just materialize?

OK, true, the British Petroleum oil spill – which the Repugnican Tea Party says is no big deal stop picking on BP whom we owe an apology because picking on BP is un-American – more or less just materialized, but anchor babies have been with us for a very long time.

“Anchor babies” are babies that non-U.S. citizens give birth to in the United States of America in order, the theory goes, for their parents to claim U.S. citizenship. And the babies’ births are paid for by us, the taxpayers.

Ann Cunter cares passionately about this new-found “issue,” which is the topic of her latest venomfest.

Seriously, though, Cunter has become a fucking caricature.

Just when you thought the acid-for-blood harpy couldn’t get any more evil and vile, now she (and her scaly ilk) are after the poor, brown-skinned people’s babies.

I repeat: Babies.

Again: Babies.

Because Jesus Christ clearly taught that we should persecute babies.

Cunter’s biggest problem with the brown-skinned babies probably is that she isn’t allowed to eat any of them. And I am pretty sure that her jaw detaches from her skull and that her fangs fold back, enabling her to swallow a baby whole.

But just remember, voter, in November, that the nation’s ills have nothing to do with the white-skinned white-collar criminals who have been bleeding this nation dry for decades. (In the past 30 years, since 1980, we’ve had a pro-rich, pro-corporate Repugnican in the White House for 20 of those years, and for the remaining years we’ve had a Repugnican-Lite, corporate-ass-kissing “Democratic” president running the show.)  

No, don’t go after the filthy few rich plutocrats who are so far fucking removed from the damage that they cause the masses that you never even see them.

No, with your torches and pitchforks, go after those brown-skinned anchor babies.

Babies.

Because babies, especially those born to poor, brown-skinned parents, can’t fight back, and it takes real fucking bravery — you know, those cojones that “tea party” princess Palin-Quayle recently was talking about — to attack the weak and the relatively defenseless.

Just like Jesus would do.

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*Cold-blooded reptiles love the heat. Maybe that’s why the members of the Repugnican Tea Party love global warming so much…

Womanizing while Arab a crime in blindly-backed-by-U.S. Israel

Associated Press photos

This 30-year-old married Palestinian man, a father of two, who has been under Israeli house arrest for two years, faces a year and half behind bars for telling an Israeli woman who approached him on the street in Jerusalem that he was Jewish and single before he porked her in a stairwell.

I wasn’t planning to write about this, but this news item is so fucking whack that I have to.

From The Associated Press today:

Jerusalem – Lying for sex. It happens all the time.

Yet a married Palestinian man has been ordered jailed for 18 months for having sex with an Israeli woman after giving her the impression he too was Jewish, as well as single and interested in a relationship.

His conviction of “rape by deception” has drawn charges of racism and questions about whether courts should be delving into this fraught topic.

Saber Qashor, a 30-year-old father of two, says he was approached by the woman in September 2008 on a downtown Jerusalem street where he had parked his motorcycle, and introduced himself as “Dudu,” a common Israeli Jewish nickname.

Within half an hour they were having sex in a Jerusalem office building stairwell.

After nearly two months, he was arrested and told the woman had accused him of forcible rape. Last week, he was sentenced to prison and fined 10,000 shekels ($2,500) for “rape by deception,” an offense that may be unique to the Israeli legal code.

Rape by deception was written into the law to protect women from sexual predators, but some argue that Qashor’s act doesn’t count — that he was simply doing what so many men and women do for sex [lying]….

Having already spent nearly two years under house arrest, Qashor remains there while he pursues an appeal that his lawyer says may reach the Supreme Court this week.

The original indictment claimed forcible rape but the Jerusalem District Court accepted the sex was consensual and a plea bargain reduced the charge to “rape by deception.”

“If she hadn’t thought the accused was a single Jewish man interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have cooperated,” Judge Zvi Segal wrote in sentencing Qashor. The court must protect the public from “sophisticated and slick-tongued criminals who would lead innocent victims astray, at the unbearable price of the sanctity of their bodies and souls.”

While Qashor has readily given his version of events to the media, almost nothing is known about the plaintiff, identified only as M.T. All Israeli rape cases are heard behind closed doors, and court records are sealed. Qashor said the woman was in her 20s, but there was no independent confirmation….

Um, consensual sex between two adults by definition cannot be “rape.”

So this is what billions of Americans’ tax dollars go toward supporting in Israel: blatant discrimination based upon ethnicity, apparently.

It’s God-fucking-awful should anyone even look at a Jewish person funny, but it’s supposed to be perfectly fine when Jews blatantly discriminate against others; and if you call them on their hypocritical bullshit, they’ll call you a Holocaust-denying anti-Semite.

From what I can tell of the AP’s story, the Israeli woman was a ho. I mean, she approached the Palestinian man, and not vice-versa, and within less than an hour, apparently, he was boning her. In a stairwell.

The AP story indicates that she consented to this, and that her only problem with the torrid encounter is that it didn’t lead to, in the Israeli judge’s words, “a serious romantic relationship” – because hey, she doesn’t fuck just anyone within all of one hour! (And because that’s pretty much what all grandparents tell their grandkids when their grandkids ask them how they met, right? “Well, you know, honey, your grandpa and I met in the street, and it was love at first sight; we immediately went off and fucked in a stairwell.”)

The AP story is not clear as to whether the apparent Israeli ho’s main problem with “Dudu” is that she wouldn’t have let him bone her in a stairwell if she’d known that he is a Palestinian or that she wouldn’t have let him pork her if she’d known that he already was married with children. Or both.

But given the fact that the Israeli fascists have had the apparent Palestinian womanizer under house arrest, plan to put him behind bars for a year and a half, and the overzealous Israeli judge wrote of the “innocent [Jewish woman] victim” “led astray” by the “sophisticated and slick-tongued [Palestinian/Arab/Muslim] criminal,” costing her the “unbearable price” of the “sanctity of [her body and soul],”* it smells strongly like Israeli-on-Arab discrimination to me.

If I am right — and I almost always am – how fucking ashamed I am that my nation’s government is so much in bed with the Israelis that it even allows the Israel-first lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to use a logo that is an incredibly presumptuous mash-up of the Stars and Stripes and the Star of David:

AIPAC photo

Yes, that’s President Barack Obama, licking AIPAC’s ass, as both the Repugnicans and the Democrats do — because both parties are AIPAC’s bitches.

And we American dumbfucks (which, more and more, is becoming redundant) scratch our heads and we ask ourselves of the Arabs and the Muslims: “Why do they hate us? Why?”

It must be that they hate us for our freedom and for how we freedom-lovin’ Amuricans spread freedom around the planet like a fucking virus (such as in our blind financial, military and moral support of Israel, which can do no wrong).

There can be no other possible answer!

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*The Israeli judge’s over-the-top rhetoric reminds me of that of the crazy general in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” talking about “the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”

A decade later, Elián is still a pawn

Associated Press photo

Elián Gonzalez, now 16, is shown in Havana, Cuba, three days ago.

I remember when the right-wing, mostly Repugnican, anti-Fidel-Castro Cuban-Americans and their supporters made Elián Gonzalez, then only 6 years old, a pawn in their feud with Cuban President Fidel Castro a decade ago. (And I remember how ironic I found it that his name sounded an awful lot like the word “alien,” which he was…)

Gonzalez’ mother had tried to get Elián into the United States illegally in order to join her relatives in Miami. In November 1999, she left Cuba in a boat with Elián, who at that time was 5 years old (he turned 6 the next month), and several others without having first informed Elián’s father. She and most of the others drowned during their attempt to make it to Florida, and Elián was one of three survivors found holding onto an inner tube off of the coast of Florida. (Since 1995, U.S. law has stated that Cubans intercepted in the water attempting to reach U.S. soil may not remain on U.S. soil, but must be returned to Cuba or to a third country.)

After a protracted political and legal battle, Elián finally was returned to his father in in April 2000 – per the international law that mandated that the child, a citizen of another nation, be returned to his father, who still was residing in that nation. If you were Elián’s father, you would have wanted his return, too.

The relatives of Elián’s mother in Miami absolutely refused to release him to the rightful custody of his father in Cuba, so federal authorities, under order of then-Attorney General Janet Reno, had to force their way into Elián’s relatives’ house and take him forcibly.

While they wanted to appear to be martyrs, Elián’s relatives were simply lawbreakers, and it is reported that they tried to brainwash Elián against returning to his father in Cuba; notes Wikipedia:

On April 14, [2000,] a video was released [by Elián's mother's relatives] in which Elián tells [his father] that he wants to stay in the United States. However, many considered that he had been coached, as a male voice was heard off-camera directing the young boy.

In a September 2005 interview with “60 Minutes” after [having been] sent back to Cuba, Elián stated that during his stay in the U.S., his family members were “telling [him] bad things about [his father]” and “were also telling [him] to tell [his father] that [he] did not want to go back to Cuba, [when he] always told them [he] wanted to.”

I tend to believe Elián’s account that he wanted to return to his father in his familiar Cuba instead of remain with relatives in a strange land whom he didn’t even know, relatives who essentially were keeping him as their political/ideological prisoner — and who had the support of the right wing.

Now, had Elián been Mexican and his mother died while trying to get him across the southern border, and had he been found wandering in the desert, it would have been an entirely different story. Then, he would have been an “illegal Elián” – er, “illegal alien,” no question about it. No right-wingers would have taken up his “cause.”

But because Miami’s embittered Cuban-American community and its supporters wanted to turn Elián into a political football in their ideological war with Fidel Castro, the law was supposed to be bent to their political will, and Janet Reno and then-President Bill Clinton were demonized for only having followed the law (and common decency, which dictates that a child whose mother has died be returned to his father unless there is a very compelling reason not to do so, and a difference in political ideology is not such a compelling reason).

The Cuban government has been accused of propaganda for having recently released some images of an apparently happy and healthy teenaged Elián, but it wasn’t Cuba that turned Elián into a symbol of the decades-long cold war between Cuba and the United States – it was his mother’s relatives in Florida and their supporters who did that.

And to this day the American right wing asserts that Elián should not have been returned to his father. Yahoo! News quotes a wingnut blogger as having proclaimed:

If Elián had been granted asylum, today he would be a teenager preparing to go to college with every opportunity for success ahead of him. Instead, on the cusp of adulthood, Elián poses for propaganda photos sandwiched between Cuban army soldiers attending the Union of Young Communists congress in Havana…

The youthful Gonzalez should have been wrapped in the America flag. Instead, a boy who once represented the quest for the God-given right to be free, waves a Cuban flag symbolizing poverty, oppression, authoritarianism and misinformation.

Oh, Jesus fuck. Where to begin?

“Wrapped in the American flag”? That blogger must be a fucking virgin to use ridiculously jingoistic rhetoric like that. I mean, fuck — cue the screeching bald eagle!

Look, if Elián were an American teenager, he’d be lucky to be able to even get into a good university, and if he did, he’d probably graduate with a mountain of debt, because instead of being seen as valuable individuals inherently worthy of educating, our young are seen only as cash cows, such as for the student-loan sharks and the textbook-industry rectal rapists.

Maybe, not being able to afford college and not wishing to take on major student-loan debt, Elián would have joined the crusade in Iraq or Afghanistan for the war profiteers and the oil profiteers — er, I mean, for freeeedom — and he’d have been maimed or killed.

Or maybe he’d just have an exciting career as a wage slave for his capitalist masters ahead of him.

Oh, yeah, it’s sooooo much better here in the United States of Amurica, with our robust economy and freedom in such abundance that it’s oozing out of our asses.

As for the “If Elián had been granted asylum” bullshit, Wikpedia notes that

After Elián was returned to his father’s custody, he remained in the United States while the Miami relatives exhausted their legal options. A three-judge federal panel had ruled that he could not go back to Cuba until he was granted an asylum hearing, but the case turned on the right of the relatives to request that hearing on behalf of the boy.

On June 1, 2000, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Elián was too young to file for asylum; only his father could speak for him, and the relatives lacked legal standing. On June 28, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the decision. Later the same day, Elián González and his family returned home to Cuba.

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene. That’s good enough for me that what was done in Elián’s case was legally proper.

And it’s interesting that a wingnut would trash Cuba as “symbolizing poverty, oppression, authoritarianism and misinformation.”

First of all, since the anti-capitalist Cuban Revolution, the capitalist U.S. government has done everything in its power to cripple Cuba. To try to cripple a much smaller, much weaker nation, and then to criticize it for not being stronger than it is is insane – but of course the wingnuts are, by definition, insane.

Secondly, we have plenty of poverty here at home, and capitalist oppression and exploitation and authoritarianism, too (oppression and exploitation are OK with the wingnuts as long as it’s making someone money), and misinformation?

Oh, please, how about the ominous warnings of the members of the unelected Bush regime about “mushroom clouds” here in the United States if we didn’t nip Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” in the bud?

No, the U.S. government never is guilty of misinforming its citizens. Never.

Oh. And Hurricane Katrina.

And the Abu Ghraib House of Horrors.

And speaking of Cuba – how about that Guantanamo Bay Concentration Camp?

I certainly don’t assert that Cuba is perfect. Elián is closely guarded by the Cuban government, the media report, and I find that at least moderately disconcerting, even while, from the Cuban government’s standpoint, it’s understandable.

What I do assert is that Cuba surely isn’t as bad as all of the wingnuts paint it to be, that Cuba would be much worse off than it is now if it were opened up to capitalist exploitation as the American wingnuts want it to be, and that Cuba would be an awful lot better if it hadn’t had to endure the wingnuts’ decades-long effort to make it fail because they disagree with its government’s ideology.

All in all, I tend to believe that Elián Gonzalez is better off where he is.

P.S. I read the above-referenced wingnut’s entire nauseating piece on Elián Gonzalez. The wingnut, who, I was surprised to learn, apparently is a female, a she-wingnut, also wrote these gems: 

As Elian was placed into [his father's] arms, [his mother's] death was officially for naught.  Hope for Elian growing up liberated disappeared beneath the cold, murky waters between Cuba and the U.S. like a mother failing to find safe haven for an only child.

Wow. So it wasn’t a child rightfully being returned to his father. It was the child’s mother’s death being “for naught.” And when Cubans (especially the light-skinned, Repugnican-supporting variety) try to get into the nation illegally, it’s for freedom, you see, but when Mexicans and other undesirables (Democratic-supporting, most likely) try to get into the nation illegally, it’s only to freeload. (Please try to keep up!)

Fast-forward 10 years and take a glimpse into Elian’s life as a teenager. Instead of a Miami Dolphins Jersey, “Cuba released photos of one-time exile cause celeb Elian Gonzalez wearing an olive-green military school uniform.” Elian Gonzalez is what youthful subjugation looks like when a boy, a heartbeat from freedom, is deprived [of] liberty…

So all of those graves at Arlington National Cemetery — they died for our freedom to wear football jerseys. And apparently the U.S. military is full of “subjugated,” liberty-deprived youths, since they have to wear those anti-freedom olive-green military uniforms.

Really, everyone in the U.S. military should be wearing football jerseys — which we now should call freedom jerseys.

In Cuba, Elian is a hero. Yearly, Fidel approved celebrations marking Gonzalez’s birthday because Elian epitomizes the height of Cuban triumph over America. Lest we forget, America willingly acquiesced in the battle to grant a defenseless child freedom, choosing instead to don riot gear and send a terrified child back under Castro-inflicted bondage.

Really? Elián says he wanted to go back to his father in Cuba. And the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene… And again, it wasn’t about reuniting a child with his father — no, it was a big, bad-ass “battle to grant a defenseless child freedom” (even though the child wanted to go back home to Cuba…).

There was a “Cuban triumph” over the United States back in 2000? Really? I missed that in the news… I’d thought that Cuba was a rather small, rather defenseless nation…

And the “riot gear” — well, as the family of Elián’s mother refused to release him to the custody of his father, and as the officials who came to get Elián (only because his mother’s relatives were illegally holding him) had been threatened with violence by the family spokeswoman should they attempt to enter the home, and indeed they were pelted with rocks and bottles, it seems to me that the “riot gear” was appropriate protection and not some sign of “liberal” “fascism.”

Also, from what I can tell, contributing to the fact that the feds went to get Elián is that the local law enforcement officials, apparently in a gross dereliction of duty, had refused to do so. (Of course, as Elián was not in the United States legally and was a citizen of another nation, it became an immigration, and thus a federal, matter, and maybe it would have been illegal for local officials to get involved in taking him from his kidnappers.)

Sure Elián was scared when they came to get him — but it was his stupid fucking relatives (and those who aided and abetted them) who made that scene necessary, and I blame them, not the federal authorities who had to resort to what they had to resort to. 

As Barack Obama emulates Fidel Castro’s health care system and ferries a reluctant nation toward socialism, the scenario is reminiscent of a frightened Elian Gonzalez being wrested from the arms of liberty by an out of control federal government dictated to by a liberal American president.

Free people should take a good, long look at Elian Gonzalez and observe what our nation has the potential to become 10 years down the line if, instead of moving in the opposite direction, America’s rowboat continues to inch closer to Cuba’s shores.

Actually, “Obamacare” is much, much closer to Repugnican Mitt Romney’s health care for Massachusetts than it is anything like Castro’s health care, and how in the hell do we go from Elián Gonzalez to Obama and health care and “Obamacare”? (And hasn’t the fucktarded charge of  “socialism” been so overused to the point that it’s rather meaningless now?)

The bottom line: The Elián Gonzalez case was just another example of Repugnican meddling in a private family matter in Florida for perverse political gain – just like the Terri Schiavo case was in 2005. Just as the Repugnicans in Washington passed legislation specific to Terri Schiavo (in order to get her case kicked up to the U.S. Supreme Court — which promptly refused to hear it!), the Repugnicans in D.C. tried to pass legislation specific to Elián Gonzalez to make him a U.S. citizen – because, after all, Florida is a swing state and Florida has a lot of Cuban-American voters, and the majority of them vote Repugnican because the Repugnicans hate Fidel Castro, too.

(Passing legislation for just one person is illegal, by the way. It’s called a “bill of attainder.” Check it. Not that the Repugnicans give a flying fuck about what’s legal and what’s illegal.)

And again, it wasn’t an  “out-of-control-federal government dictated to by a liberal American president” that returned Elián Gonzalez to his father — it essentially was the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to intervene on behalf of Elián’s mother’s family, just as it would later refuse to intervene in the Schiavo case — because the U.S. Supreme Court, while it picked our “president” for us in late 2000, generally refuses to get involved in family law, leaving it to the courts below it that handle family law.

But the wingnuts are No. 1 in cheesy rhetoric — to the wingnuts, Elián wasn’t returned to his father, whom he wanted to be with, but was “wrested from the arms of liberty” (try not to choke on your own vomit there), and surely it’s clear from just reading my blog that “America’s rowboat continues to inch closer to Cuba’s shores.”

I mean, shit! To paraphrase Sarah Palin-Quayle, I can see Havana from my house!

Mississippi is still burning

Associated Press photo

Lesbian high-school student Constance McMillen was told by her rural Mississippi high-school officials that she could neither wear a tuxedo nor bring her girlfriend to her high-school prom — which the officials then canceled altogether because of her insistence that she be allowed to attend with her girlfriend, wearing what she wishes to wear. It wasn’t that long ago that mixed-race dancing was prohibited at red-state high-school proms, and the same “arguments” that were used to justify racial discrimination are now used to justify discrimination based upon sexual orientation — not only in rural Mississippi but even in the U.S. military, as the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is debated even though it clearly violates the principles of the U.S. Constitution.

If you have read me for any time at all, you know that there is a lot that I fucking hate.

I hate the U.S. military. Not the individual members of the U.S. military, necessarily — although I question how they can support the U.S. military when it has been debased into becoming little but bands of thugs for the megacorporations’ profits (bands of thugs paid for by us, the American taxpayers, and of course the megacorporations don’t pay their fair share of taxes) – but the whole damn idea of the U.S. military, with its might-makes-right, jingoistic bent. The majority of those in the military call themselves devout Christians, too, as though Jesus Christ would have had anything to do with their maiming and killing for the expansion and the preservation of the American Empire in the names of freedom and democracy — and even in the name of Jesus Christ.

Yet, as much as I never would have joined the U.S. military, opposing pretty much all that it stands for (patriarchy, violence and aggression, jingoism, misogyny, homophobia, “Christo”fascism, xenophobia, etc., etc.), I have a real fucking problem with the fact that non-heterosexuals don’t have equal human and civil rights in the U.S. military, that they can be expelled from the military or prevented from joining the military for solely who and what they are.

I never went to my high school prom, either. Not so much because I’m gay and because in the red state of Arizona in the mid-1980s there was no way in hell that I had the opportunity to go to my high-school prom with another male, but because I hate the whole concept of proms, too. I find them to be pretentious wastes of money, relics from the past. (I love the original film version of Stephen King’s “Carrie,” by the way…)

But the idea that high-school officials in rural Missifuckingssippi canceled the high school’s prom because a lesbian student wants to attend prom with her girlfriend boils my blue-state blood.

Reports The Associated Press:

School officials in a rural Mississippi county told a lesbian student to get “guys” to take her and her girlfriend to a high school prom and warned the girls against slow dancing with each other because that could “push people’s buttons,” according to documents filed [today] in federal court.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Itawamba County School District and some officials at Itawamba Agricultural High School on behalf of Constance McMillen, 18, who wanted to escort her girlfriend to the prom and wear a tuxedo. A hearing is scheduled for Monday to hear an ACLU motion that seeks to force the district to hold the April 2 prom it canceled after McMillen made her requests.

In the court documents, McMillen said Rick Mitchell, the assistant principal at the school, told her she could not attend the prom with her girlfriend but they could go with “guys.”

Superintendent Teresa McNeece told the teen that the girls should attend the prom separately, had to wear dresses and couldn’t slow dance with each other because that could “push people’s buttons,” according to court documents.

The school district last week said it wouldn’t host the prom “due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events.” District officials said they hoped private citizens would sponsor a dance. The decision came on the same day the ACLU asked the district to act on McMillen’s prom requests.

McMillen said she approached school officials weeks ago about wanting to take her girlfriend to the prom.

“I want my prom experience to be the same as all of the other students, a night to remember with the person I’m dating,” McMillen said.

The district, located in northern Mississippi near the Alabama state line, prohibits same-sex dates at the prom. The ACLU has said that violates the rights of gay and lesbian students.

The school district had not responded to the ACLU filing by [this] afternoon.

Christine Sun, a senior counsel with the ACLU’s national gay rights project, said the organization is determined to put the prom back on the school calendar.

Fulton Mayor Paul Walker said he has heard that parents are making plans for a private dance but he didn’t know the details. It’s unclear if gay couples would be welcome at that event….

Shit like this makes me wonder why in the hell the blue states didn’t just allow the red states to secede way back in the day of President Abe. (Speaking of whom, did you know that red states started seceding from the Union after his election but even before his inauguration? Um, yeah.) But then I remind myself that the oppressed peoples of the red states, without the help of those of us of the blue states, would be completely at the mercy of the mouth-breathing fucktards who dominate the red states. It’s not right to allow that to happen.

Equal human and civil rights — liberty and justice for all – just don’t grow naturally in the red states. They have to be forced upon the red states from without. It’s unfortunate that that is so, but it is the red states’ fault — for all of their talk of the founding fathers, for fuck’s sake – for their absolute refusal to live up to the American ideals that every0ne is created equal and that everyone has the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Two female students or two male students dancing at prom together would “push people’s buttons.” Oh, boo fucking hoo!

Was not the very same argument made to outlaw mixed-race dancing at red-state high-school proms past? Or to disallow non-white students to attend prom at all?

And the prom was canceled “due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events”?

Really?

Or was the prom canceled because the high school officials are a bunch of fucking homophobes and/or fucking cowards?

“Due to the distractions to the educational process caused by recent events” — that is what you call blaming the victim, who in this case is the lesbian student who just wants the equal human and civil rights to which she is entitled by the founding documents of the United States of America, including the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence (which, I understand, are being rewritten for the Texas public-school textbooks…).

Goddess bless the ACLU.

If a good number of high-school students truly do have a problem seeing same-sex couples at their schools’ dances, that’s probably because they just never see it. What you never have seen, when you see it, can feel and seem quite alien.

But it’s fucking circular: Same-sex dancing at high-school proms is rarely or never seen at most high schools, and so it’s taboo, and because it’s taboo, it is banned at many if not most high schools, and because it is banned, it is never seen, and because it is never seen, it remains taboo, and…

Constance McMillen is brave; she is a sort of Rosa Parks for 2010.

I admire her.

I love her balls.

I hope that she gets to go to her high-school prom with the person of her choice, wearing what she wishes to wear, and that by so doing, she shows her classmates what the noble American principles that the red-staters only claim to value actually look like.

In James Cameron’s magnum opus ‘Avatar,’ the Bad Guys R Us

Film review

Above: Jake Sully (played by the rather yummy Sam Worthington) inspects his brand-new “avatar” in the James Cameron epic (that’s redundant, isn’t it?) “Avatar.” Below: Jake, in his avatar, bonds with native Neytiri, played by Zoe Saldana.

James Cameron’s “Avatar,” which I finally saw yesterday (I was waiting for the crowds to die down), is pissing off everyone, right and left. Cameron must have done something right.

Being such a political creature, if a film has the least bit possible sociopolitical bent to it, I’m going to notice it right off. In “Avatar,” such a bent abounds.

Most notably, in “Avatar,” we – the United States of America — are the bad guys. Well, not we, not really. “We” as in the military-industrial complex that has come to represent the United States of America around the world is the bad guy in “Avatar.”

I have read that, unsurprisingly, the wingnuts are not happy about this, especially given the film’s wild commercial success. (Fuck ’em.)

The villains of “Avatar” are an over-the-top corporate hack and an over-the-top colonel who work in tandem – not unlike how the Catholic church’s missionaries and the Spanish crown’s soldiers worked in tandem to conquer the “new world” — to conquer the lush planet of Pandora, which has an element (called “unobtainium,” ha ha ha) that the invading Earthlings want. (The Spanish monarchy wanted gold, of course, and the Catholic church wanted converts. We’re never told in “Avatar” what practical application, if any, “unobtainium” has, so my guess is that, like with gold, “unobtainium’s” main value is that it is, um, valuable…)

To conquer the tall, blue, feline-faced, tail-possessing people of Pandora — the Na’vi — the Earthlings (whom the Na’vi call the “sky people”) decide to infiltrate them with “avatars,” biologically fabricated Na’vi bodies that are inhabited by the consciousness of human beings controlling the biologically fabricated Na’vi bodies.

Now, the Na’vi natives are a bit too accepting of these “avatars,” whom the natives know aren’t fellow natives. If you weren’t born into and raised by the tribe, why would the tribe just accept you at all as one of them? I mean, if it were clear to us human beings that some alien race were coming to us in human bodies, would we embrace these aliens in human bodies as one of us? Prolly not.

But it would ruin “Avatar” if the avatars didn’t get some degree of acceptance from the Na’vi, and so they do.

Anyway, in “Avatar” the invading Earthlings clearly are the bad guys, and while watching what’s probably the biggest, loudest scene in “Avatar,” the Earthlings’ military forces destroying a site that is very sacred to the Na’vi, I couldn’t help but think of the internationally televised so-called “shock and awe” that many if not most of my fellow Americans got off on when the unelected Bush regime (yeah, the same regime that my fellow Americans just allowed to steal the White House in late 2000) illegally, immorally, unprovokedly and unjustly invaded Iraq, which had had nothing to do with 9/11 and which of course never possessed the weapons of mass destruction that the members of the Bush regime had lied through their fangs about, in March 2003.  

Yeah, it takes a big, tough, studly nation to attack a relatively defenseless one.

In the middle of all of this, the conflict between the rapacious Earthlings, who are represented by a very American-like military-industrial complex, and the Native-American-like Na’vi (they even wear warpaint and let out war cries), is Marine Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington, who appears to be in just about every movie these days, which is OK with me, since he has a definite certain sexiness about him), who unexpectedly finds himself recruited to man an avatar. (Of course, he has to make a deal with the devil: for infiltrating the Na’vi and helping to subdue them, the wheelchair-bound Jake is promised that his paraplegia will be cured.)

As you already know from the previews, after he’s been manning his avatar, Jake changes his allegiance from the military-industrial complex to the Na’vi.

You probably already suspect that Jake ends up being the big hero of the film, and that of course he and his female Na’vi companion, Neytiri (wonderfully played by Zoe Saldana), go from their initially tense relationship (which showcases some great dialogue) to becoming lifemates.

That the white Marine, instead of one of the Na’vi natives, becomes the big hero of “Avatar” has pissed some people off, I read in today’s news. Reports The Associated Press:

Near the end of the hit film “Avatar,” the villain snarls at the hero, “How does it feel to betray your own race?” Both men are white — although the hero is inhabiting a blue-skinned, 9-foot-tall, long-tailed alien.

Strange as it may seem for a film that pits greedy, immoral humans against noble denizens of a faraway moon, “Avatar” is being criticized by a small but vocal group of people who allege it contains racist themes — the white hero once again saving the primitive natives.

Since the film opened to widespread critical acclaim three weeks ago, hundreds of blog posts, newspaper articles, tweets and YouTube videos have said things such as the film is “a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people” and that it reinforces “the white Messiah fable.”

The film’s writer and director, James Cameron, says the real theme is about respecting others’ differences….

Adding to the racial dynamic [of “Avatar”] is that the main Na’vi characters are played by actors of color, led by a Dominican, Zoe Saldana, as the princess. The film also is an obvious metaphor for how European settlers in America wiped out the Indians.

Robinne Lee, an actress in such recent films as “Seven Pounds” and “Hotel for Dogs,” said that “Avatar” was “beautiful” and that she understood the economic logic of casting a white lead if most of the audience is white.

But she said the film, which so far has the second-highest worldwide box-office gross ever, still reminded her of Hollywood’s “Pocahontas” story — “the Indian woman leads the white man into the wilderness, and he learns the way of the people and becomes the savior.”

“It’s really upsetting in many ways,” said Lee, who is black with Jamaican and Chinese ancestry. “It would be nice if we could save ourselves.” …

Yes, come to think of it, “Avatar” is basically a futuristic “Pocahontas” in which Jake Sully would be John Smith and Neytiri would be Pocahontas.

And it did occur to me while I was watching “Avatar” that it seemed off that a a white guy who wasn’t even one of the Na’vi would end up as their savior.

I understand why historically oppressed peoples wouldn’t be pleased to see a white guy emerge as the hero, but I think that “Avatar’s” surprisingly subversive message succeeds as it does because it’s the white guy who realizes that what the military-industrial complex that he has been a member of has been doing is wrong, and so he decides to fight for the other side.

And it’s not just the character of Jake whose allegiance changes; there’s the character of a great Latina fighter pilot (played by Michelle Rodriguez, of whom I’d like to have seen more of in “Avatar”) and a few others whose allegiance changes, and this kind of pop-culture image in which the “turncoats” are the heroes can’t be good for the U.S. military-industrial complex, which expects its soldiers to be blindly obedient cannon fodder who die for rich white men’s fortunes while believing that they are fighting for such noble causes as “freedom” and “democracy” and “God” and “Jesus” and puppies and kittens, for fuck’s sake.

I mean, fuck. Before “Avatar” began, I had to watch an endless fucking recruitment advertisement for the National Fucking Guard. (The recruitment ad didn’t show any maimed or dead soldiers, of course, but looked like something out of “Top Gun,” as usual.) The U.S. military-industrial complex has millions if not billions of dollars – our tax dollars – at its disposal to brainwash our young people into believing that the U.S. military really is about defense and patriotism instead of about what it really is about: war profiteering, feeding the endless greed of the military-industrial complex and the greedy fucking white men who run it and who personally profit from it.

Trust me, oppressed peoples of the world, “Avatar” does much more for your cause by having its hero a white guy — a Marine, for fuck’s sake – who realizes that he’s been fighting on the wrong side and then switches sides, than it would have done for your cause had its hero been one of the Na’vi natives.

The millions of young American males (and females) who see “Avatar” might think twice before joining the U.S. military, and that’s a good thing for a planet that probably cannot survive a World War III.

Indeed, Cameron’s intent, I believe, was to send a message of peace, and it’s whitey, with his (and her) beloved military-industrial complex, who needs to get that message more than does anyone else. Those long oppressed by whitey already know the value of peace.

The Associated Press reports that Cameron wrote the AP in an e-mail that “Avatar” “asks us to open our eyes and truly see others, respecting them even though they are different, in the hope that we may find a way to prevent conflict and live more harmoniously on this world. I hardly think that is a racist message.”

Agreed.

The AP also reports of “Avatar”:

“Can’t people just enjoy movies anymore?” a person named Michelle posted on the website for Essence, the magazine for black women, which had 371 comments on a story debating the issue [of whether “Avatar” is racist].

OK, that’s a valid question.

Although it’s a rhetorical question, the answer to the question, for me, anyway, is no, I can’t just enjoy a movie anymore.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed “Avatar.” It is a visually stunning film, and I love its profuse use of greens and blues and purples, which, actually, reminded me a lot of “The Princess and the Frog,” which, come to think of it, is a bit like “Avatar”: Both films have heroines with African blood in them (Zoe Saldana apparently has African blood in her) who meet up with bumbling men whom the heroines have to turn into heroes, and both films largely take place in green, blue and purple, swampy, lush settings.

“Avatar” succeeds on the sensory level (as it should, given the millions and millions of dollars that were put into it ) — although the ubiquitous DayGlo stuff does get a little bit tiresome after a while and although Pandora’s plethora of creatures, including its Na’vi, look way too much like Earth’s creatures, including its human beings – but sue me if I am able to enjoy a movie on more than one level.

I can multi-task; I can take in all of the technical achievements of a film like “Avatar” while seeing its obvious sociopolitical statements, statements that I can’t be accused of having pulled out of my moonbatty ass because James Cameron himself says are his intended statements.

It’s a rare film that can entertain and that can stimulate public debate on important sociopolitical issues, so kudos to Cameron for having achieved that with “Avatar.”

“Avatar” is such a cultural achievement that I have to wonder if from now on people are going to go around saying to each other, in all seriousness: “I see you.” (Even though it’s a bit cheesy, I kind of hope so…)

Yes, “Avatar” is a bit derivative of other films, not just of “Pocahontas” but also of Cameron’s past films — we even get the “Alien” series’ Sigourney Weaver as a protagonist in “Avatar” (I have to say that I found Weaver’s avatar to be a bit creepy-looking, to look a bit too much like Weaver), we get the manned robots that we saw in “Aliens,” and we even get “The Company” in “Avatar” (is the amoral, profit-piggy, generic “The Company” in “Avatar” the same one that was in the “Alien” series, I wonder?).

But “Avatar” succeeds on its own and probably will be Cameron’s magnum opus. 

My grade: A

P.S. I read a news account that President Barack Obama took his girls to see “Avatar” recently. Mr. President, I sure the fuck hope that you learned something, and that having your girls there with you drove the point home.

American Taliban (a.k.a. Catholic church) tries to sink health care reform

Reuters photo

They look the same to me: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is surrounded by clerics during his swearing-in ceremony in Tehran in August (above). Although Ahmadinejad holds the title of president, it is Iran’s clerics who hold the power and call the shots in Iran. Below is a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops earlier this month in Baltimore. The bishops’ conference is doing all that it can to sink U.S. health care reform unless its demands regarding abortion rights are met.

Associated Press photo

That a council of clerics calls the shots in the Muslim nation of Iran is ridiculed by the majority of Americans as oppressive theocracy, yet in the United States of America — “the land of the free” — we have shit like this (from The Associated Press today):

The White House is on a collision course with Catholic bishops in an intractable dispute over abortion that could blow up the fragile political coalition behind President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

A top Obama administration official is praising the new Senate health bill’s attempt to find a compromise on abortion coverage — even as an official of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops says Sen. Harry Reid’s bill is the worst he’s seen so far on the divisive issue.

The bishops were instrumental in getting tough anti-abortion language adopted by the House, forcing Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to accept restrictions that outraged liberals as the price for passing the Democratic health care bill.

Reid, D-Nev., now faces a similar choice: Ultimately, he will need the votes of a handful of Democratic senators who oppose abortion to get his bill through. Republicans hoping to block the health bill in the Senate are relishing the Democrats’ predicament….

Reid has steered the Senate bill in a direction that abortion-rights supporters can live with: allowing coverage for abortion in federally subsidized health care plans, provided that beneficiaries’ own premiums are used to pay for the procedure. But abortion opponents say his compromise would gut current restrictions that bar federal funding of abortion, except in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother….

But Richard Doerflinger, associate director of the bishops’ conference Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities, said Reid’s “is actually the worst bill” on [anti-abortion] issues….

On Friday, the bishops’ conference sent each senator a letter saying the Senate bill violates federal policy on abortion funding and must be changed. “If that fails,” the letter said, “the current legislation should be opposed.”

Reid’s bill would forbid including abortion coverage as a required medical benefit. However, it would allow a new government insurance plan to cover abortions and let private insurers that receive federal subsidies offer plans that include abortion coverage.

In all cases, the money to pay for abortions would have to come from premiums paid by beneficiaries themselves, kept strictly separate from federal subsidy dollars. Supporters say that would keep government funds from being used for abortions, except in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother as allowed under a current law known as the Hyde amendment….

Of course, there’s no question that things like Viagra and other boner-inducing drugs and vasectomies and other forms of male birth control should be covered in every health care plan, right? It’s only abortion that is the problem. No misogyny or patriarchy there!

Worst, though, is that we have Catholic clerics dictating U.S. government policy – giving a brand-new meaning to the term “American Taliban.”

Politico notes:

The big player here isn’t Reid or Pelosi but the Catholic Church, which helped get the Stupak [anti-abortion-rights] amendment into the House [health care reform] bill. Any abortion language may have to win the backing of the church for members to sign on – and the church is sticking by a tough anti-abortion stance that angers many liberals.

So the fate of health care reform is not up to our elected officials but is up to the Catholic church? Even though only about a quarter of Americans identify themselves as Catholic (and about 15 percent of Americans identify themselves with no religion at all or identify themselves as atheist or agnostic)?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: fuck the Catholic Church. That we non-Catholics still are battling these theofascists in the year 2009 is incredible.

First the Catholic church, with its partner in crime, the Mormon cult, pumped millions of dollars into a campaign of fear, hatred and lies that denied same-sex couples equal human and civil rights in my home state of California — equal human and civil rights that the California Supreme Court already had ruled belong to same-sex Californians.

Now, the Catholic church threatens national health care reform unless it contains prohibitions on abortion, even though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that first-trimester abortion is a legal medical procedure (and that later-term abortions are legal if the mother’s life is in jeopardy by the pregnancy).

If Catholics, Mormons and other “Christo”fascists want to enforce their backasswards beliefs among their own members, that’s fine – people (adults, anyway) have the option of leaving such dysfunctional, ironically anti-Christian organizations. But for the “Christo”fascists to force their backasswards beliefs upon all Americans is theocratic and is against the principles of the United States of America, which include the separation of church and state.

It’s time that we non-Catholics (and non-Mormons) do something about the theocracy that is being shoved down our throats. It’s past time, actually, to push back. 

I, for one, refuse to be dragged back to the Dark Ages.