inauguration doubletakes

Did anyone else catch Rick Warren dropping in the Shema and then, immediately after, breezing over a quote from the Holy Qur'an? (I'd chapter-and-verse it, but it's in there 114 times, last I checked.) Thoughts about the supposed inclusivity of simply saying "Jesus" in English, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic and then still identifying Him as, y'know, the one source of true teaching--plus tacking on the Lord's Prayer for no apparent reason?

How about Feinstein's dis of Malcolm X? I gasped, I admit.

And, for that matter--who else fell over laughing at Warren's...exotic...enunciation of "Malia and Sasha"? Was anyone else tempted to periodically hold up a sign that said "EXCEPT THE QUEERS" during his invocation?

...how many times can white newscasters breathlessly expound on how racism is over?

And Obama, well...hell of a speech, sir. Some nice shoutouts, some truly elegantly brutal digs at the outgoing administration, and some interesting reference choices. And a conscious avoidance of gendered language--"Our forebears," "All are equal"--through variation of traditionally epicene-masculine phrases. Nicely done and much appreciated. For that matter? I actually thought it was sweet, that he was nervous enough to stumble on the oath of office. Michelle gave him a great look when he did.

On the other other hand? Get we please, please stop with the notion that every American came from immigrants, settling this untamed land, bravely marching toward the horizon and striking out into unmapped territory to make new homes and hopes? I know it's a great image to work with, y'all, but some people were here already. For Pete's sake, can we stop erasing everyone whose ancestors managed to handle this continent just fine for a good 12,000 years before--how shall I put this--colonialist genocide reared its head? 'Cause they're still here, y'all. And some had to sit in that amazing crowd and listen, once again, and they got conveniently cut out of the picture.

Anyway. That said, I'm glad I got to see most of it, adorably-snappily-dressed Obama kids and all.

schoolyard on fire

I just don't know what to say, but, crying over it tonight, I decided it was sinful not to say something.
That's part of the trouble--I always bought into just enough of the propaganda that I could shake my head and say, well, it's just so sad. It's just a shame. If only the cycle of violence could stop. If only they'd put down those weapons. Hey, you kids, you two, knock it off.
The stories I listened to only worked if I put away the numbers, put away the proportions. And now, I just...what do you say? What do you say to this?

Nothing is not an option, when it comes to the carnage and massacre in Gaza right now.

I just want to say, to all the people demonizing Palestinians right now, saying that this was all a sinister plan to get a bunch of their children killed to make Israel look bad, that this would all just stop if they'd put down the rocks and handmade mortars and listen to reason, they're all terrorists anyhow, they'll push every Jew into the sea--how? How? What is all this "self-defense" defending against?

How could they manage? Gazans live in an open-air prison. They are literally walled-in to one of the most densely populated places in the world. Walled in. No food coming in, no medicine, no fuel, unless they break an unjust law. No leaving, not without humiliation, harassment, assault, and death. There is nobody in there who hasn't lost someone. How many of those women have not been raped? How many of those children have parents? How many Gazans had a meal this week?
They are mostly fighting with old rifles, handmade short-range explosives, rocks and slings, against one of the best-equipped militaries in the world. Don't put that fact aside. Are people in Gaza committing acts of violence that have killed innocent people? Yes. They're hurling a handful of rickety rockets over the wall. In response, they're up against fighter jets, tanks, a navy, and a well-outfitted corps of the best-trained soldiers in the world, well-fed and sharp and with access to nuclear weapons. And this military they're fighting already has them walled in and starving, their neighborhoods smoking rubble, too many of them missing limbs. Tell me this is just an eye for an eye, what a shame. It's not an eye for an eye. It's a fingernail for a torso, at best. Tell me which Gazans have fighter jets. Tell me who in Hamas, even, has a nuclear-capable military unit that could wipe out their enemy at the press of a button. Show me one Palestinian tank.

Knock it off, you kids. Just put down the weapons, no, I don't care who started it. Ahmad, put down your slingshot. Avi, put down your F-15. You're both equally responsible here.

What the hell is this? How are we saying these things? An eye for an eye? In the last eight years, 15 Israelis killed by Hamas in Gaza--real people who mattered. In the last eight years, five thousand Palestinians killed by the Israeli military. Real people who mattered. This is not an eye for an eye. This is nothing resembling an eye for an eye.

But, you keep saying, those Gazans are harboring Hamas, hiding terrorists among them! Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth, with a million people who are not allowed to leave and have nowhere to run. And they deserve death if their apartment--if they still have one--is within shrapnel range of some guy who works for Hamas or his office or the school he went to? If their neighborhood mosque has a couple members who own a gun? If they have the audacity to be on the street trying to feed their families? They're not harboring anyone. They're pressed up against them in prison.

But, but, they voted for Hamas. Tell me what you would do! Tell me! Who do you believe, who do you listen to, who do you rely on? You are walled into a prison with guns pointed at you all the time. Food is not allowed in, fuel is not allowed in, medical supplies are not allowed in. You lose count of family members violently dead or maimed. Your schools and hospitals and places of worship are destroyed, your neighborhood is full of rubble with few buildings intact, and you cannot expect to live to thirty. And you don't know any of the people on the other side of that wall.
Who do you listen to as a reliable source? The guys with the guns pointed at you, who took the food away and tell you you deserve to have nothing, but who the outside world tells you are decent folks acting justly? Or the people you're told are evil scumbags, but who provide you food, medicine, a little pride, a little order, and the promise to fight for you? Who among you, looking at your hungry, sick child, is going to listen to the person telling you that you shouldn't be allowed to care for them over the person handing you bread and antibiotics and a little civil infrastructure? Do you listen to the asshole who gives you food, or the asshole who takes it away? When you have nothing, no dignity, no hope, when you've got nothing to lose, who do you listen to? What do you think you would do differently? Do you honestly think that, with a gun pointed at your family, you wouldn't be grateful for even a vile human being who tells you you don't deserve it and points a weapon right back?
I don't think I'm that saint. I don't think you're that saint. You want to say you'd know better?

How? Who's in charge? Because in the last three days, in the name of exterminating Hamas, Israeli military bombardments have destroyed the university and the tunnels for getting food and medicine and fuel, have destroyed mosques, and have obliterated the police station. After all, if the people voted for Hamas, then any infrastructure that allows them any order or human dignity is technically a Hamas target, right? Those civilians, by having universities, police stations, and post offices, are harboring terrorists. Those people trying to smuggle in heating oil and grain are terrorists. Hell, who doesn't count as a military target? Especially when your own society conscripts every citizen into the military, and the only civilians are the ones not serving right now?

What do you expect? What do you expect them to do? You take away education, government, hospitals, civil police, anyone who can provide information or order but the gang you're supposedly trying to weaken. You take away food and water and electricity and bandages and set their homes on fire, because setting a crowd on fire to get one criminal or ten is something any reasonable person would do. You wall people in, deny them any basic order beyond your tanks, cut them off and take away any hope of a future, any way to invest themselves in building something different, the basic elements of survival--and you expect them to greet you as the reasonable person here? You expect them not to fight back, ever? You make them live like animals, and you expect them to sit down and talk about it over tea? This is not just a surgical strike on Hamas government and military installations, not packed in like this. It's collective punishment of a civilian population for voting in a way that, frankly, was hardly optional. It's teaching them a lesson, with explosions. What do you expect those people to do?

Wouldn't you fight back? If it was you? Your family? Your surgically-struck future? Your bombed-out hopes? Wouldn't you? Wouldn't you look at the deaths of 5000 against the deaths of 15 and justify some things that, on a good day in a decent place where life made sense, you would never consider? Because in the last three days they just lost four hundred more, and these were not just military targets. Without medical aid, most of those 1500-so-far wounded will die, too. What would you do? How can you just say, well, it's so sad, but if only they'd stop with those rockets. If only they'd stop fighting back and respect this situation. Everyone's lost someone over there, Israeli and Palestinian alike, but how superhuman do you expect these human beings to be? How can you pretend that nobody has a breaking point, and nobody makes ugly choices when they have nothing, and the person who enforces their having nothing is right in front of them? It's not polite. It's not pretty. And if it was my family, you are goddamn right that little old violence-hating people-loving me would have a gun in her hands, too, or at least a goddamn slingshot.

How superhuman do you expect them to be? is one question. The other is, to believe these things about these people--that this bombardment was all part of a sinister Hamas plot to sacrifice lives to make Israel look bad, that Palestinians are turning out the lights and inducing their children to cry on camera and faking injuries to pretend to the outside world that they're suffering--how subhuman do you believe these people are? How far do you have to go to believe that these people are so alien to you, all sociopathic monsters, to believe these things? That they asked for it?

Why? Because they voted for bad guys? Do Americans deserve to be walled into open-air prisons and have everything taken away, ground into the rubble and broken glass and starving because too many of us voted for George W. Bush and we put genocidal jackass Andrew Jackson on our money? French people? Plenty of them voted for Le Pen, and he's a brownshirt-wearing fascist. Italians? Berlusconi and his Roma purges were hardly a bright spot. What makes you different?
Now take away the options and stop making Palestinians so alien. What would you do? If it were Atlanta walled in and crushed like this? San Francisco? Cincinnati? Manhattan? Would you care that the people bombing your police stations and highrises and shopping centers were doing it because your elected leader killed some people? When do you draw the line? When they blow up the fire department? The tunnel where you sneak in food? Would you decide that you shouldn't fight back, with the tanks at your doorstep and the bombers overhead?

Hey, you two, knock it off. You kids knock it off. It's just so sad, it's just a shame. Ahmad, put down your slingshot and your hand grenade. Avi, put down your gunboat and your nuclear-armed fighter-bomber. An eye for an eye, is what it is. It's just self-defense.

This is being done in my name, by a state that says that anyone who questions its actions is an anti-Semite--that anyone who finds their state actions unacceptable is threatening me. It's funded with the taxes I pay to my own government, on the other side of the world. This is being done to the families of people I love. When it was my ancestors, fighting back and sometimes doing awful things in the Warsaw Ghetto, at Masada, it wasn't "terrorism," it was self-preservation. I just celebrated a holiday commemorating an outnumbered, outgunned guerrilla war against an overwhelmingly-better-armed occupier who said, hey, look, don't mind our elephants, just put your slingshot down and we'll stop setting everything on fire. We don't call Judah Maccabee a terrorist, either, but what's the difference? Tell me the difference. Because this is genocide. This is genocide in my name, in the name of a people who have always considered ourselves underdogs and who, in this one place and time, suddenly have the overwhelmingly upper hand. How have we not learned better? How does our history of suffering and extermination justify committing these crimes? How are we not the first to step up and stand against this?

I still don't know what to say. But it's unacceptable to say nothing.

To my Palestinian brothers and sisters, I am so sorry. I can never, ever be sorry enough, and my crying for your people doesn't make it better, and I'm this American girl who went to Torah school once, with a roof over her head and a full pantry, and I don't know what to say or do but to stand with you in saying this is unacceptable, and in naming it genocide.

Saying nothing is unacceptable.

wake the dead

We're coming up on the Day of Remembrance, but I'm old-fashioned: I prefer to start honoring the bygone dead here, at the sundown of the year.

It's a time of straddling and blurring lines, of the constant presence of mortality. Fertility crosses into decay, and we gather a harvest, of sunlight, of sustenance, of memory. Identity blurs and stretches and we take our false faces on and off, swirled all around by falling leaves made remarkable as they flash sunset colors in their dying moments. We take stock of a summer and autumn gasping their last and prepare for the season of cold and dark and deprivation, unpacking the quilts and sweaters in the top of the closet, drawing thick curtains, looking inward. We take a long, lonesome stairway down into the anterooms of the Land of the Dead, lighting lanterns, wary of whispering spirits long ignored. Some of us erect altars to those we've lost, offering them some of the food and memories we've gathered, celebrating them in steady flames and bright colors against the increasing outdoor gray.

There's a magic to it, here as the curtains go down on the twilit remains of the day. Looking over what's ripe and what's rotten, we take in what will keep us warm and full as best we can. We look back because looking back is a necessary step in going forward. Without that harvest, we will never leave the time of masks, the place of skulls. We will never be able to move through the hallways of the living until we look at what is dying, what is dead. Without this pause at the moment of gathering darkness, when we gather our own close to us, we remain forever in that place of whispers and illusions.
There is plenty in this hour of the dead to appreciate, plenty to live for. We can put on faces that are often truer than the ones we had before, even in their transparency, be other than what we were, explode into behavior we would never feel free to enact in the sunlight. We can embrace mystery, letting shadows and bright decoration go dancing arm-in-arm. Nonetheless, it's simply not human to live forever in the liminal. It's not a place: it's the blurred line between here and there, now and then, alive and dead.

There's only one sort of creature who can live long in that borderland. Monsters are alive and well here, half-obscured, given their only chance to roam the streets unmolested. This hour of the dead is the only time we welcome monsters into our homes and neighborhoods. For once, they're celebrated, and their uncanny presence causes forbidden thrills.
It's the end of the evening, the moment of the dead, when the lines between worlds grow blurry. And monsters run free.
In order to move on into the night, we have to look them in the eye. We have to hold our monsters close. We have to acknowledge our dead. We have to look back.

There's an old story you've probably heard, but let's look back at it. Once upon a time, a God made a new being, split it into halves, and called them Lilith and Adam. That God insisted that they follow an order: that, though equals made of the same substance, one submit beneath the other. And she refused. The dialogue is simple:
"But I made you. Do what I say."
"No."
And she refused to participate in a system that marked her as less, and moved away to another place, there to couple in unthinkable ways with forbidden partners, there to set up her own way of being, there to become a mother of monsters. But there was a price, because that God had already replaced her with a newer, less proud woman, there to be a mother, too. And all Lilith's children would be taking a world they were not promised from Eve's children, you see, by simply living. The monsters would be taking human land and human food and human work away. They would suck the very blood from human infants. Teeming and multitudinous, they could not be trusted simply to thrive harmlessly, and so they were condemned. The children of the outside, of the otherworld, of pride and wrong attractions and unacceptable sex, the children part this and part that, were condemned to death. No matter how many came to this world each day, hundreds of Lilith's monster children were condemned to die daily so that the children of Eve, the planned children, the race that behaved and stayed in the lines, could thrive instead. And their mother, the defiant first woman , was doomed to an infinite and never-ending bereavement, screeching cold vengeance in the wilderness.

Generations have heard this story told as a warning, that the Mother of Monsters and her children were out there to take anyone who stepped outside the lines, outside the city, outside the rules. This is their time, the place of outsiders and border-riders, the hour of the dead. The monsters have their dead, too, after all. They loom close at our shoulders in this one moment of the year we invite them in. Some of us, given that warning as we stand on the brink of the dark, look out on our history and our dead, and we recognize that when we are systematically stamped out for competing with real people, when we are pushed out and starved and hunted for living unavoidably outside those lines, when our place at the blurring between here and there, us and them, merits a death sentence over and over...maybe we didn't have the mother we thought we did. Maybe we were simply listening to an unreliable authority who told us we belonged underneath, and needlessly complied. Maybe when the Mother of Monsters comes to breathe down our necks, the right response is take me.

It's time to look back. It's time to embrace the monster as a lineage of the defiant oppressed made powerful, suffering heavy losses but never, ever backing down.
It's time to remember our dead. And it's long past time to refuse their place, and our place, underneath. The authority that condemns us to die for our defiance of rules we never made is not an authority worth listening to, and we do not honor those who fell before us by rolling over below our so-called betters and taking it.
Once a year, the dead rise from below and speak. We ought to learn from their example.

the sky is falling

It is time for us to acknowledge that our love is an act of war.

It seems distasteful to say. It feels wrong. Our love, our lives, our nurtured gardens and families, we say, these are not weapons. These are not acts of violence. To us, they are not.
Nonetheless, there are those who insist breathlessly, endlessly, that they are. That our families are destroying their way of life. That our existing in public shocks and harms them. That attending school, sitting in a restaurant, having to hear at all that we exist is an affront that threatens to annihilate them. And they gather their stormclouds over and over, they teach their children, they shout from the pedestals and rooftops and radio waves that we are, by virtue of drawing breath, destroying them. That we are at war, and that our heartbeats are a sword at their throats.
I think it is time to admit that they are right. Whoever started this, however much those of us who abhor war and all it means cannot go near the word, there it is: there are people, many, many people, who believe that by existing alone we wage war on them. And in response, they gather arms and preach daily that our threat must be removed by any means necessary. By their believing it, it is made so; bloodless though it may be for them, we are at war. And each of our acts of war, each exposed inch of brown skin, each held hand, each public footstep of an unacceptable body and each child raised in a home they abominate, each of our acts is met with a salvo of invective and violence, and our people die and die and die.

There is a war on, and the stakes are infinite, because the only outcome acceptable to the mustering many who believe that your breath or mine is an act of war is for us to be forever wiped clean from the face of the earth. We have to stop speaking where any of them can hear us. We have to stop being seen. We have to stop loving and conceiving and using precious resources stolen from their mouths. And in this world, as perhaps there has always been, there is the destructive power to achieve this. In this struggle, we have only two options: to prevail, or to find none of us in a position to care any more. Those who would annihilate will eventually find that they cannot exist much longer than we do, but it doesn't matter. They won't be in a position to care any more either.

There is a war on. All we can do is succeed, or find ourselves no longer in a position to care. Daring to continue living, let alone daring to speak, will be considered an act of war until there are no more battles to fight, and no one to fight them.

So let's admit it. Our lives? Our lives are an act of war. They are open defiance. They are invasion. They are insistent violation of the borders of a world that desperately pretends we do not exist. They are rude gestures and thrown rocks at the rumbling war machines of systems who choose to write us out of history, beginning only a moment ago and stretching back to the beginning of all things. By standing here and living, we defy the notion that we have no right to, and we scream out that no world where we are torn apart into nothingness can continue. Every seed we plant, lover we kiss, drum we beat is indeed a grave and mortal threat to the entire world as they know it, because our reality forces it to crash against us over and over only to find us still here. Even when we die of it, we are dead, but we are still here, we still are, we still were.

We can call it linking arms. We can call it embraces. We can call it a garden plot or a home or a marriage. We cannot concede that it is war. We cannot look at the arrows fired by our adoration of our loved ones and the mortars launched by our still-real, still-abhorrent bodies. We look into the furtive, fervent trenches dug by those who call our lives war and shake our heads, wondering what they're on about.

Here's what they're on about: they live in a world where we are monsters. They live in a world that trembles daily, because we snake our faultlines through its foundations and each time we move more crumbles and falls over the yawning edge of the flattened sea. In their world, once near us, their children can be lost to them, and just seeing us represented fills them with the rage of people struck in the face and deprived of their birthrights.
That world needs to end, and we know it. That world will end, and they know it.

There's a war on. Either we succeed, and their world ends; or they succeed, and ours does. Does it matter that we want them to go on living in our world, that our world has room for them to build cities and parks and futures? Not really. The very act of not getting to define everything for the rest of us is the end, for them. The fact that none of them would actually die, that their children would be fine and their blood unshed, is irrelevant. We can abhor and condemn violence and torture, and this too is an act of war. We can love them depthlessly as people and wish them no harm, but we cannot avoid the implications. If we are considered equals, their world is over. Our lives are the explosives that end it.

So, okay. Let's sit that knowledge down on our kitchen tables and give it a good look. There are two possible worlds: one where we prevail, and get to live side-by-side, and one where we do not, and are annihilated. And side-by-side looks like annihilation to the folks who have to live next door. There goes the neighborhood. We might think it's a really nice neighborhood to raise our kids; doesn't stop the neighbors from thinking their lives are over because we continue to exist yards away.

I say let's call down the thunders, then. Let's stand and fight. Let's own that our love is a matter of artillery, and fire salvo after salvo. Let's hold hands and kiss and fuck and dance while all over, rock shears from the cliff-faces of their shuddering world and it frays at the seams. Let's defiantly exist, exist hard, right next to them, public, brazen, beautiful. Let's drill and march and right on their doorsteps let's have unacceptable bodies and loud music and food whose aromas they find foreign and offensive. Let's fucking sing.

We can call it jubilation. They can call it war. Either way, the results are the same. We succeed, and walk hand in hand into a new world where our very existence is not considered a violation, or we do not--and are no longer in a position to care.

did someone whistle? I couldn't hear it.

It's amazing how many layers of meaning you can pack into a little sermon if you know what you're doing. I know: sermons are my stock in trade. And they're also the primary arsenal for aw-shucks just-plain-folks evangelical Republican Mike Huckabee, who stumped for John McCain at the Republican National Convention with a speech that made my jaw drop.

Let me explain why. Excerpts of Huckabee's homily follow, in fine sermon style; toward the end of his speech, he pulled out a seemingly-unrelated story, then called forth a moral and a theme, and then wove that theme back into his prior subject matter, the imperative to vote for the McCain-Palin ticket. The first parts of his oration are basically irrelevant boilerplate about how Barack Obama hugs terrorists and blushingly gives them boxes of candy. And then he gets into the oft-told tale of McCain's capture and torture, following with remarks about McCain's efforts to lift his arms and how he gave for us, so we should all be grateful. That's when Huckabee slides smoothly into Sermontown:

Allow me to tell you about someone who understands this type of sacrifice better than anyone.

McCain? No, not yet: a schoolteacher who is in no way a stand-in for Sarah Palin, a young woman who overcomes doubt and skepticism to teach people about how we ought to be more grateful to veterans like a certain J.M.

On the first day of school in 2005, Martha Cothren, a teacher at Joe T. Robinson High School in Little Rock, was determined that her students would not take their education or their privilege as Americans for granted. With the principal's permission, she removed all the desks from her classroom. The students entered the empty room and asked, "Mrs. Cothren, where are our desks?" "You get a desk when you tell me how you earn it," she replied.

And this is where, reading this aloud, I said suddenly to my partner, Oh, I hope this doesn't go where I think it's about to go. If you've spent much time in evangelical circles or surrounded by them, you'll know what I'm talking about any moment. The golden question of the moment is: how, Teacher? How do we earn our place in...the classroom?

"Making good grades?" asked one student.
"You ought to make good grades, but that won't get you a desk," Martha responded.
"I guess we have to behave," offered another.
"You WILL behave in my class," Mrs. Cothren retorted, "but that won't get you a desk either."

Being good won't earn it for you, see. You're required to work hard and succeed and follow the rules in order to show you're among the people who have a right to a desk, but there's nothing you can do--no action, no works--that can earn the desk for you. Listen to the Teacher--there's a price for the desks you can't pay. They'll be apportioned according to some other criterion. Getting warmer?

No one in first period guessed right. Same for second period. By lunch, the buzz was all over campus... Mrs. Cothren had flipped out ....wouldn't let her students have a desk. Kids had used their cell phones and called their parents. By early afternoon, all 4 of the local network TV affiliates had camera crews at the school to report on the teacher who wouldn't let her students have a desk unless they could tell her how they earned it. By the final period, no one had guessed correctly. As the students filed in, Martha Cothren said, "Well, I didn't think you would figure it out, so I'll have to tell you."

Now, this is sermon-ese for "I am about to use this character as a stand-in for a moment while she (I) hammers home the big arrow-shaped sign toward my point--her point--you know." I'm a preacher at heart, you may have noticed, and I know these things. It helps that the character is beleaguered by parents and media who don't understand, sort of like teachers who push Creationism in schools, or like unpopular political leaders we know are really misunderstood maverick heroes doing what they have to to get a message across. She'll try novel things, that teacher who isn't Sarah Palin, in order to show you the light. Nobody can comprehend the answer on their own, after all. They need someone to spell it out for them, because there's no way any of these lowly mortal students can think their way to a desk, either. It's almost like those desks stand for something all metaphor-like.

Martha opened the door of her classroom. In walked 27 veterans, some wearing uniforms from years gone by, but each one carrying a school desk. As they carefully and quietly arranged the desks in neat rows, Martha said, "You don't have to earn your desks...these guys already did. They went halfway around the world, giving up their education and interrupting their careers and families so you could have the freedom you have. No one charged you for your desk. But it wasn't really free. These guys bought it for you. And I hope you never forget it. " I wish we all would remember that being American is not just about the freedom we have. It's about those who gave it to us.

Okay, so this seems pretty straightforward, a repeat of the earlier message: freedom is dearly bought, and everything you will ever have in this country is due to our military, and you should be grateful to them for all of it. And hey! One's running for President!

Ladies and Gentlemen, John McCain is one of those people who helped buy the freedom that we enjoy and the school desks we had.

Wait, wait, hold the phone, though. That was the theme before. What were all those metaphors and allegories? Let's back up and review. Why should we be grateful to these military veterans?

"You don't have to earn your desks...these guys already did."

Your desk, your place in the room, can't be earned. You can't behave well enough to get one, work enough to get one, think enough to get one. It is impossible for you to deserve a place to sit before your teacher, see. Looks pretty hopeless, doesn't it? But wait! You don't have to earn Grace--I mean, a desk--someone else has already earned it for you. And you can have it, for free! Someone else bought the desks by sacrifice, by spilling their blood on foreign soil, so that even though you can't earn a desk, it can be given to you by your benevolent authority figure because a heroic intermediary bled to provide it for you.
Are we getting some clarity yet? Shall we break it down? Good sermons come in layers, and Huckabee is good at sermons. Here's the first layer of the story:

An innovative teacher chooses an offbeat way to illustrate to her young students that everything they have is owed to soldiers, who should be honored for their sacrifice and given deference.

Okay. Check. Here's the second layer:

Standing in front of you is a military veteran John McCain, who is like the soldiers in this story. He sacrificed a lot to provide to you, the people, your luxuries and your very way of life. He, like these soldiers, is being presented to you by a younger woman who wants to use innovative methods to showcase his worth. Honor his service by voting for him.

But we're still missing a layer. Let's back it up--who else are these soldiers like? Allow me, gentle reader, to sum up:

There's something you need, a right to be in a particular place, that you can't earn by any kind of exertion, virtue, or intelligence. It has to be given to you, but you don't actually deserve it, and left alone, you will never figure out how to get it. Luckily, someone's showed up to tell you how to get it for free. It's already been purchased by someone else, someone better, who spilled their blood in order to secure the blessing of this thing for you even though you don't deserve and can't earn it. And all you need to do is honor them in order to benefit.

Sound familiar yet? Please tell me it does. This is the doctrine of "Grace, Not Works" or "Grace Alone," a theological position expounded during the Reformation, cuddled by Calvin, and popular among evangelical Christians. It's not a desk, it's a place in Heaven. And it's not soldiers we're talking about, it's Jesus Christ. Don't buy the connection of this story as an allegory for the doctrine of Grace Alone? Here's a few ways to put it. And the guy talking is clergy in a denomination that holds this doctrine dear, so he knows what he's doing and who his audience is. Let's plug this little revelation back in to Huckabee's sermon at RNC and see what happens:

Let me tell you about a guy who can't lift his arms because he was tortured by enemy soldiers and sacrificed for your freedom. Think about it like desks in a classroom, where you can't earn or deserve a place to sit--but someone better than you or me went out there and sacrificed himself, spilled his own blood in order to dearly purchase for you your place at the table. His sacrifice redeems you when you wouldn't have been able to make it there on your own, and now you can have a desk, a place, a spot in Heaven if you just believe in and honor him.

Who's that man who sacrificed for you, who could have bought his own freedom by simply renouncing his creed, but stayed to be tortured in order to free you?

Allow me to tell you about someone who understands this type of sacrifice better than anyone.

Ladies and Gentlemen, John McCain is one of those people who helped buy the freedom that we enjoy and the school desks we had.

Has your jaw dropped to where mine was yet? Because I'm pretty sure, in this campaign where they're already painted the opposition as the Antichrist, they just labeled their candidate Jesus Christ.

olive trees

I caught the phrase just before it left my lips and was covered in shame. It was a happy thing, said to me for my whole childhood, a hopeful thing with the concrete meaning squeezed out--something to say whatever it is, it'll be better soon, we have something better laid out for us.

Every year, over dinner, we would say this. Every year, lighting candles, we would say this. In high school, we even sang it.

But looking my Palestinian sister in the eye as she recounted the uncountable sufferings of her people, the enormity of that phrase, and what it meant, punched me in the gut.

When I was a child in Torah school--I went to Sunday school at my father's synagogue, and often Mass at my mother's church--they passed the collection can every week to plant trees in Israel, on farms--settlement farms. They tried to recruit us to visit and work on the settlements, as students, as tourists, as residents invoking a mystical "right of return." They never mentioned that the land was stolen. They erased the people who lived there--our cousins!--their greatness, their pushing-aside, their murder. They committed the ultimate genocide: erasing even the truth that the dead and the living pushed out of that homeland had ever existed. And all the while we lit candles for Yom ha-Shoah and ate "Israeli food" for lunch, which was Palestinian food appropriated, repackaged, renamed.

Hearing the pain of my Palestinian sister covered me in shame for not knowing. I had supported her cause, I thought, before. But the enormity of that phrase--that hopeful phrase--had never come home before. I had been so close to saying it out loud, forgetting what it meant, forgetting its bloody conclusions, forgetting the lie of an empty land ready to walk into that it encapsulated. Forgetting that the hope it presented was the hope of stealing a home from breathing families and taking part in their brutal subjugation. Forgetting all that I had read and heard and seen of a racist, colonialist regime that used my name to justify a thousand indignities and vicious wounds to a people who never asked for it, who never did anything to us. What happened to my Jewish people in the last century, what still happens in places, is unacceptable. What we have done in return is not only inexcusable, it is, in light of our own history, incomprehensible.

I almost said it aloud, and I am covered in shame that I never saw it clearly before, that I had let it go unexamined, that I could be so insensitive on such a towering level.

I was this close, before I caught myself and thought better, my lips frozen just in time.


"Next year in Jerusalem."

things people do

NOTE: After a whole lot of busy, lately, I find myself having a profoundly rough week. It's likely going be another little while before I can bring myself to produce new stuff, or even finish what I've got in the works. So I've decided to bring in a handful of casserole posts (thanks, piny, I love the term) to cover up the shortfall so none of you think I've up and quit. This one is from November 2006, and I meant to import it over here then, but forgot in December's uproar since it was more preachy than topical. Thanks for your patience, everyone. --ll.


Life is an ungainly, terrible thing to behold.
It looks at you, without breaking eye contact, until you become nauseous, until you are desperate to break that gaze any way you can, drowning it in alcohol, burning it in exercise, whipping and sexing and pill-popping and televisioning it away in an elaborate exorcism gloriously peculiar to a people so very afraid of death.
Death is not a frightening thing. Death is stern, and death is dark, but looking Westward, it is difficult to conclude that death is anything but the fairest of all forces, the most evenhanded, the only truly reliable thing.
Death is not what we fear. We fear the moments of life before it, searing or cold, lonely, painful. We fear what our deaths will do to the lives of the living: make them suffer our loss, force them to weep at surviving us and missing us when we are gone from them. And we fear, ultimately, that death will be anything like life.
We can insulate ourselves with promises of golden mansions and green fields, but when it comes down to it, what's the fear of the Avici or Tartaros or plain old Hell but the terror that death is a continuation of life? That our lives keep mattering when we're supposed to be done with them; that we will still be ourselves; that those selves will suffer torments that we can only imagine as being like the torments a living creature may face, but worse, and for longer?
We fear change. We fear the unknown. Most of all, though, I think we fear the known. We fear life.

And rightly so. What is life, after all, but a shadowed valley that we briefly walk through between eternities doing whatever it is meat and bone and spirit do before birth and after death? What makes us think that the peculiar animation of our carbon and breath is the normal state of being?
Life is where we eat, and hunger; life is where we love, and lose; life is where it is cold, and hot, and bright, and bitter. Life is where we gamble at a vast table whose cards are our skin and whose dice are our teeth and eyeballs and hearts.
Life is where we know that we are naked, and know shame. Life is where the story starts, after all, so far as we're concerned. Life is where happening happens.

It is a terrible and awesome thing to behold, this endless cavalcade of life devouring life, of springing-up and grinding-down, of hope and harm. It's a mess. It's an explosion. It's too slow, and too short, and tenuous at best.

It's a special thing, life. It matters to taste the blood in your mouth. It matters. Life, as a concept, as a thing in us, wobbles as a newborn colt, and stumbles along; or it hammers us, as a merciless overhead sun; it never, ever makes sense. The most miserable of the dead are consumed with wishing they still had it, except the worse-off, who still think they do when it is gone. Death that looks like life is no good death at all, no more than life that looks like death.
Life refuses to make sense. No matter how much we want it to, no matter how many patterns we put to it, how many dewdrops and stars we connect up into constellations and highways and stories.
Life is not a narrative. It is not.

It is a terrible, ungainly, gorgeous thing, life.
We're lucky it ends eventually. And we're lucky to get to visit, for a while, even though birth, every time, is an excruciating thing.
We burst through blood and shouting, squirming, gasping, and we never really stop. And every moment we spend, organs and bone and blood wrapped in skin, we are attired for prayer and wonders and darkness, too.
We are here. We may as well act like the living. And that means the terror and the hiding from life, yes, because that is what the living do; but it also means looking it in the eye and meeting that gaze for as long as we can until our knuckles are white and our teeth gritting, and letting it know that we bleed, but we do not run. We know it is terrible. We know that so are we. And we go on, to eat, and to hunger; to love, and to lose; to hope, and to harm.
And we go on.

not blind, but bone-deep

Bear with me here.

I am a religious person. A lot of the things about me--my words, my values, my politics--that many of you appreciate about me come out of this, even if I don't bring it up much. The answer to "what religion, then?" is extremely complicated, and that answer has changed, drastically, more than once, though it is reasonable, as far as reasonability goes, to roughly call me an ancestor venerator. I was brought up essentially as an Abrahamic agnostic, and, following a conversion experience in my early teens, wandered far, far astray.
For right now, though, there is a safe thing to say:

I am a particular devotee of the Goddess Kapo, to whom I do far too little honor, all blessings to Her.


Religious language spooks a lot of you, doesn't it?


That's okay. Part of what I want to talk about is the inherent spookiness. A lot of us scrub our Gods clean of worry and danger and terror and awe, of weirdness. A lot of us want omnibenevolence and omniscience and omnipotence from our deities, all at once, even though these things contradict, we want someone perfect who's always there and always wants for us what we think is good for us. I disagree with the notion, but I respect it, when it comes to others' faiths; I get edgy around perfection, around the absence of the uncanny.

My Kapo, Whose I am, is not scrubbed clean of danger. In Hawai'i She is called sister to the poison Gods, Red Eel-Woman, She Who Paints the Color of the Night Sky. She is invoked by dancers and by curse-flingers, and connected to uncanniness and lightning-storms and magic and often death. Her sister is the fury of a volcano and the kind of creation that burns all it touches. And when it comes down to it, it is Red Kapo Who protects that sister Pele.
Pele was nearly sexually assaulted by one of the Gods, you see, as the story goes. The volcano, She ran, the pig-God in hot pursuit. Uncanniness saves the day; as the story goes, see, Kapo detached Her vagina and sent it flying through the air to lure and distract the offending deity, drawing Him over the ocean and sending him on a wild goose chase after a humming, speeding vulva that finally hit a mountainside with such force it left a dent in the rock and a cave locals still name after Her. So She is also called Kapo-kohe-lele, Kapo of the Flying Vagina.


This is true.
It also means, by many accounts, that if an islander dreams of a woman without a vulva, it is a portent of Kapo. It means that priestesses to Kapo must either have nonstandard genitals or a blessing of protection cast over their vulvas so She will not tear at them.
This is a thing I only learned after nearly a decade of religious devotion to Red Kapo the Eel-Woman of the Storm. I made loud noises of shock, and there was a lot of laughter. After all, I didn't go looking for Her in a book; I stumbled into an initiatory ritual in a holy grotto behind a waterfall, was bowled over and awed and overwhelmed by an experience I still have trouble describing, and then did some looking to make sure that what I had seen and felt, in those moments, matched up to what I could be told about the shrine in that spot, and Whose it was, and what She was like.
For all my neglect, She still finds ways to surprise me. And ways to knock me around. And ways to look after me.


And you're probably wondering, "Does she really buy into this? Wasn't this just a rhetorical device, this 'religious devotion to oldschool Goddesses' thing, to win an argument? Does she really structure important life choices around an obscure Polynesian Goddess Whose remaining devotees can be counted on your fingers and toes?" And I can only spread my hands and say, look, it wasn't my idea. If I were making it up, I'd come up with something much more plausible. I'd come up with a story that doesn't involve following a ghost fish to an underwater coral chapel. I'd come up with a deity you'd heard of, or claim She made me Her special anointed one, or something, or claim that teenage me, sorely lacking in emotional maturity, was instantly transformed with insight.
We found each other, and we worked something out. Gods are, among other things, ideas, and ideas need people, too.
If you want, you can take this all as metaphorical. If it makes you more comfortable. I don't really care what you call factual; I only know what's true.

And that's where we start getting at the heart of things. People often make the best metaphors about religion--metaphors about lattices of metaphors, meta-meta-metaphors--when they compare it to something else we all know well.
"How do you know what faith feels like?"
"How do you know you're in love?"
(You may have heard this elsewhere, too, with its implicit answer: "How do you know what your identity is? How do you know you're a this instead of a that?" "Well, how do you know you're in love?")
You might or might not talk to Gods who might or might not answer back. It's your business, not mine. I can't know what it's like for you, and you can't know what it's like for me. Why? Well, how do you know whether or not you're having a spiritual experience? What's the difference between doing a mundane thing like cooking or ploughing or hiking, and doing it religiously? What's the difference between a loss and a sacrifice, a poem and a hymn? How do you know you're in love?


For me, love informs my faith, and faith informs my love, see. Because I try to treat a deity with love, and hope for love in return. Not endless blessings, or miracles, or sacrificed oxen, for that matter. Love. I think of parents, and siblings; sometimes loving means not saying "yes." Sometimes loving means moving in a way that makes no sense. Sometimes love sits battered in the face of endless disappointments and confusions, but love doesn't care. Love is stupid. Love is a wonder. It has no idea how to bow to what's good for us, or nutritious, or wise; it sings another language, one full of need and connection and burning. No one can convincingly tell you what it will be like, should be like, and it's every time unique, and it never cancels out other love, different love, love elsewhere.

See?

It goes both ways. Because in love, I speak the language of religion. I say, love has sacrifices in it. I hear, if it doesn't bleed, can you trust it? Most of all, I don't expect it to make sense. Nobody can effectively say, "You can't feel that love, because it's not a good idea, because it doesn't make sense, because it doesn't follow the rules." It stays. The feeling stays, in the face of logic, of evidence to the contrary, to everything. It comes from somewhere deeper, somewhere made of tendons and arteries and contradictions and needs. It's a connection that doesn't care whether or not it makes sense. It's bigger than that. You're in love, or you're not. Only one way to know for sure.

I prefer a Goddess Who doesn't make sense. I prefer wondering why eels, and why someone as obsessed with getting the world to hug each other was claimed by a Goddess whose jurisdiction involves a lot of terrifying things, a sister to poison, a hisser-in-the-night. And it doesn't matter what I prefer, anyway, after all--can you decide not to be in love? I prefer a religious life that insists that multiple contradictory truths can coexist, and that the facts are another matter for other purposes, that lets the sacred stay weird.
I prefer to remember that love, like faith, is not tidy, is not a well-scrubbed construct of quartz and white light. It's a mess, a seething, toothy mess; it's worthy of awe, and terror, and wonder. It's worth bleeding for. It's something bigger than anything that can be cleaned up or discussed comfortably.
It's spooky. Certainly it's dangerous. It changes what you are by its simple presence, and by the risks and vulnerabilities it demands. It changes everything, but not how anyone expected. It connects things. And if Love conquers all, it frequently does so armed.


St. Valentine's Day's origins acknowledge this. Its Christian origin-legend is about bucking government control for romance, about risking lives to marry people forbidden their unions, about martyrdom for the sake of connections that exist and throb and grow in spite of the laws and bonds and weapons in their way. The scaffold of Lupercalia it's built on was a Roman fertility-festival involving wolf-howling priests anointing naked young men in sacrificial blood and sending them out to run the city, whipping the women they wanted to be fertile with, restoring the life of the city's foundations with death and bloodstains and outdoor, frantic, ecstatic sex. It wasn't always greeting cards and pink ribbon.



Sacred isn't always pretty, but you always know it when you feel it, the way you know your own skin. You know it the way you know you're home.
How do you know you're in love?

things we should have learned in elementary school

So let me just get this straight.
In a conference speech, the Pope chooses to quote a Byzantine emperor, specifically a quote saying Islam brought nothing into the world that was not "evil and inhuman" and implies strongly that it was only spread by, and is inherently characterized by, violence.
Then some people get upset. Those crazy Muslims, always being upset over hurt feelings for nothing!
So the Pope is pushed to apologize. What does he say? He's sorry people reacted so badly to what he said; he's sad that his remarks were misinterpreted; while he chose to quote that passage in a major speech in front of an audience, including the "evil and inhuman" part, it was just a quotation, it doesn't necessarily reflect his personal views; and he meant no offense, so he hopes Muslims worldwide can just be calm and reasonable and not crazy at him, since he has respect for their "ador[ing] the only God."

I hate that sort of "apology," profoundly. "I'm sorry you took offense at my actions" or "I'm sorry you reacted badly" or "I'm sorry you feel hurt by what I did" is not, repeat not, the same as "I'm sorry for what I did" or "I apologize for what I said." "I'm sorry you were offended," passive voice, no subject, is different from "I'm sorry I offended you." It admits no wrongness and no fault; it takes no responsibility; and, more importantly, it's disqualified from being an actual apology because there is no implied promise to change anything. It's fundamentally not an apology. It's going through the motions of an apology so you can say, "Look, I don't know why this guy is so unreasonable. I said 'sorry.' Technically. I'm sorry, world, that you have to deal with this person's craziness."

The Pope is an educated man who is very aware of his huge influence. He knew exactly what he was saying, he chose the extremely offensive mediaeval quotation out of many thousands of others, and he did so with full knowledge of the repercussions, knowing full well how far those words would go, who would hear them, the ways in which he officially speaks, in large sections of the public mind, for Christendom. He knew what the implications were. Still, Benedict didn't apologize for anything other than the bad reactions of other people to his perfectly innocent use of the terms "evil and inhuman" in a widely-disseminated public speech, with a sort of wide-eyed, "Golly, guys, I don't know why my quoting some guy in a little ol' chat would bug anyone, but if anyone were bothered by neutral words on the nature of reason and religious violence, well, I'm sorry to hear about that, and I hope those people won't get all nasty about it, which I would never imply is their basic nature. I was just quoting someone who said it was. Never expected anyone to hear about it." And yet, funny enough, the news coverage is all about how oversensitive those Muslims are, again, for being bothered by this. He claims he was just trying to start a reasonable conversation about violence. If that's so, why did he start the conversation without Muslims present, and start it by claiming no violence on his own tradition's part, provoking them with grave insults, and claiming it's their special sin?
It's like walking up to a guy and saying to the person next to him, "Hello. I hear that Joe kills kittens and his mother is a whore. Why do you think that is?" And if Joe gets angry, the excuse is, "Well, look, I just wanted to start a conversation, based on mutual respect. And I said I heard your mother is a whore. I was citing someone else. I said hello. Why are you--hey, look, bystanders, I'm sorry Joe's upset by what I said. I just wanted to talk to him about kitten-killing."

(I shouldn't have to say that I don't condone any of the more violent protests that have occurred this week. That goes without saying, as it ought to go without saying in regard to the other more-than-a-billion Muslims who aren't doing anything of the sort.)

What the Hell is the man trying to accomplish, here, anyway?


Edit: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2006/09/18/unapologies/ I'll clean up the link in a bit, but it looks like I'm not alone in thinking this isn't actually an apology at all. too bad the comments thread is turning into an argument over whether or not the "evil and inhuman" thing is actually true.

on the nutritional value of trolls

So, in duking it out with one of the anti-marriage-equality trolls who hit Feministe a month or so ago, I crystallized an argument I'd been meaning to make for a long time and hadn't quite articulated. Fitzie, bubbelah, wherever you're trolling, I hope you appreciate that you gave a marriage-equality activist a hand up in making her arguments cohere.
The distilled problem is the difficulty I have with the phrase "traditional marriage"--and all the arguments that go, "all throughout human history, marriage has..."
It hasn't, kiddo. It's varied vastly, place to place, time to time. "Religion" doesn't claim it as one way--even within one given religious tradtion, there's huge variation and development, and the distances between prescription and description when you're trying to figure out what our collective ancestors did is vast. (Compare same-sex eroticism in the early Sufi community despite official condemnation of same among contemporary Muslims, for instance, or the massive gay subculture in 1920s New York.)
What these arguments are about are "my religion," "my culture," and "my history," as opposed to yours, which it's better than. How do we know it's better? It's more prevalent right now. Why's that? Because "my" culture is borne by people more powerful than "yours," as things stand, right now. And why are they more powerful? Because they killed a lot of your ancestors, mostly.
So how's it boil down, oversimplified? Your ancestors killed mine and changed their cultural norms, disrupting their societies and causing them to change to adapt to rules, some of which indeed work for you, but which aren't necessarily good for them because human societies differ. Who's asking who to "redefine marriage"? Who's asking for tradition to be abandoned, family structures to alter, religious values to be put aside? (This is a general "my" and "your," of course; being mixed-race, part colonized, part colonizer, my ancestors are responsible for doing this to my other ancestors, a lot of the time.)
These arguments were framed in that particular thread as yet another "poor little oppressed us, you're trying to force us into this grand social experiment where you redefine marriage to mean anything you want. Without my particular standards, there can't be any standards at all, and you'll dismantle the institution 'marriage' itself, thus dissolving society, because you have no values and think everything is relative." And any arguments trying for, I don't know, nuance, were ignored.
It's not a defensive stance, no matter how it's framed. It's not "please leave my cultural values alone," because nobody is asking them to dissolve their marriages, reorder their families, change their church ceremonies. Nobody's even really demanding that given denominations, say, change their teachings on queer issues. They're just asking that other versions be allowed to exist, too, and treated equally. And these folks argue that that mere fact of coexistence will obliterate them, because that's where the argument falls apart: it's not defensive at all. It's offensive. It's an attempt, either knowing or unknowing, to wipe out other sets of cultural norms.

So, well, I called bullshit.
It went something like this:

Whose traditions? I know a goodly number of my ancestors belonged to cultures where marriage was not held to be strictly between a man and a woman as you’d define them. Even given that your culture dictates the tradition that one man and one woman [is] the only acceptable form of marriage, and those two people are involved for childrearing, and other people aren’t involved in that–even given those premises–why are your traditions, your culture, and your family structures better than mine?
Why is it that my culture might suggest that adults other than the parents ought to be involved in helping raise children, which ought to ensure multiply-gendered adults in the family structure no matter who the parents are, rendering your point about isolated same-sex pairs moot? Why should I listen to your cultural values, which apparently dictate that if one biological parent leaves their spouse, the other is all alone to raise the kid, instead of our model, where enough people are involved to *really* think about the children–not to mention caring for the grandparents? Why should I throw away centuries or millennia of precedent for transgender social roles and same-sex committed relationships that have worked for my ancestors for your traditions, which relegate the people who need those cultural spaces to the margins? What’s wrong with my family, and what makes yours so much better?
And why, you might ask, don’t *I* try to force *you* into conforming to *my* cultural values?

*******
(later, after a total nonresponse:)

You still haven’t addressed basic flaws in these arguments. Would you disallow infertile heterosexual couples from having their marriage recognized? Couples who don’t want to have children? Couples who’ve had hysterectomy, vasectomy, or similar procedures? Would you ask that the intersexed not be allowed to marry, as many of them cannot ‘produce offspring’ and/or don’t tidily fit into your system?

[...]

And you still haven’t answered my question as to why your traditions are better than mine or anyone else’s. Or, for that matter, why yours are better than those of mainstream Protestant Christian organizations like the United Methodists and United Church of Christ, let alone the Unitarians and the Metropolitan Community Church, let alone the majority of American Jewry, leaving entirely aside religions neither Jewish nor Christian, for the sake of simplicity? If those denominations are performing marriages to both same-sex and heterosex couples, why are some of the marriages they perform and bless not good enough for government recognition? Do you believe that some religions or sects ought not be honored equally under the law?
Come on–address even a little of this, please. The list goes on over here, too.

*******
(and again, none of the points are addressed, because, well, he's a troll:)

You’re not listening[...] I’m not throwing out history or precedent or tradition. I’m pointing out that there are more histories than yours. I’m pointing out that I’m not ‘redefining’, but rather, that there are a whole lot of people on this earth, and a whole lot of traditions, some going back millennia, that use a different definition of ‘marriage’ than you do, and you still haven’t provided any good reason to pretend they don’t exist and make everyone use the definition you and yours use.

You haven’t addressed any of the questions I posed. You evaded all of them by insisting that to suggest that there are other definitions of what constitutes marriage means throwing out any defintions at all, or that suggesting there are other kinds of marriage than your tradition’s version equals claiming anything can be a marriage–which is not, indeed, what I’ve asserted. You haven’t dealt with the question of the numerous Jewish and Christian organizations who don’t seem to feel that same-sex unions are objectionable or counter to Biblical authority. You haven’t dealt with the question of the numerous heterosexual couples who cannot have children and whether or not they ought to be allowed marriage. You devalue the families who adopt. You refuse to deal with intersexed people, let alone the transgendered. In short, I’ve brought up factual things that exist, and asked you your opinion of them; and you’ve covered your ears and eyes because you don’t seem to want to acknowledge their existence. This convinces me that you’re not serious about this debate in the slightest; you’re not even participating in it.

Some of us have long histories that involve traditions different from yours. Some of us have ancestors that were doing same-sex unions when Paris was a collection of huts and New York was a grassy field and the Hebrews were still slaves in Egypt. And by all accounts, our societies worked just fine, and the disruption of people insisting on your traditions have thrown them into chaos. Why should we participate in your grand social experiment of forcing everyone into cisgendered heterosexual unions, instead of honoring them for those who want them and making room for the minority who don’t? Why should we stop honoring members of our communities who we value just because you don’t? Why should we throw away our history and our precedent just because your relatives showed up at our doorsteps and forced us to redefine marriage in a way that served you–at times, yes, selfishly and inhumanely?

Our standard explicitly states that family is important and that children ought to be raised in stable homes by responsible, loving adults, and it works for us. Just because you choose to redefine ‘family’ to mean only what your kind of family is, why make the rest of us come along? We have institutions, too. We have cherished families, histories, and ‘biological’ realities. And we’re not asking you to change *your* family. So are you going to answer any of these questions, or are you going to keep sidestepping, compadre?

And that, as they say, was that. My interlocutor's arguments are available at the link, of course; it was sort of hopeless. But that's not the point; the point is, I finally nailed this part of my own argument down. I'm tired of this being framed as a religion v. secularism debate or a tradition v. innovation debate. It's not, not always. For a lot of us, it's our own traditions, own own societies' once-places for us, being taken away by, yes, "foreign invasion"--by cultural imperialism. And it's time for us to take that discourse back. This isn't just an issue of church-state separation--it's also an issue of religious equality and cultural hegemony. And those of us being figuratively shoved out of our own houses and being pushed into, say, an atheistic-nontraditional camp just because we don't agree with one religious sect of one culture's traditions? We. Are not. Pleased.
Even when we're friends with a lot of those atheists and nontraditionalists.

lay wrench upon the come-unfixed

Now that the day has passed, it's no longer as much of a disrespect to Dr. King to point out one of his movement's--and his--greatest failures, which is the unavoidable side-effect of pointing out one of its--and his--great heroes.
Which is to say, all due--and that's a great deal of--respect to the Reverend Dr. King, but do yourself a favor and do some searches on the name Bayard Rustin.

When we deify our heroes, we make them harder to emulate. We all come from somewhere, and we all make mistakes, and that doesn't make any of us incapable of great work for our fellows. No one is perfect, nor is anyone an island, and it's the collective work of the lot of us that will make the difference in the face of a world against whose slings and arrows none of us can prevail alone. How many times have you heard someone say, Well, I'm not Gandhi. Or, It's not like I'm Mother Teresa. Or, especially in this country, Who do you think I am, Martin Luther King?

No. You're you, as wondrous and flawed and sacred and fucked-up a person as any of them were. They, like you, ate and swore and lied and ached and fought and sighed and laughed and used the bathroom and stumbled over and over. They utterly depended on the support and labor of many others whose names we don't remember so well. And elementary-school encapsulations aside, you and I know full well that having a dream isn't enough and never was. We canonize people who've broken the barrier of denial and put their entirely human strength into moving the world, and in the process fictionalize them, box their messages in tiny civics-class soundbites, make them legends who were never Us. Who're over, who don't breathe any more, who sit on pages and pediments to be dusted off once a year at best and paid lip service to. One of my credos, as a proud member of the Religious Left, is the old saying, when you pray, move your feet. Sometimes that's the sly shuffle of a satisfied dancer, sometimes the march of many united, sometimes the elegant tango hisses and angry stomps and familiar footfalls in the hallway that make love and family and frustration and forward, but the movement has to be there, and the movement has to keep moving.
The "Civil Rights Era" is a nonsense meant to allow us to sit on our laurels and look back as a time when everything got better than worse. Well, it's got some more bettering to do. And if my heroes are human, I can learn both from their triumphs and their mistakes.
My dance, as far as I can dance it, as far as I can march it, wants everyone on board who wants in. As Desmond Tutu said: "All. All, all, all, all, all. All."
Or, if you prefer Allen Ginsberg: "America, I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel."

e'en

The year is dead. Long live the year.
As we harvest what's left of the daylight and prepare for the dark time ahead, let us put up stores of joy and comradeship and family, of sex and storytelling and just causes, of reunions and friendly partings and every last glowing sunset of this sunset of the year.
Put them up and hold them tight, and remember that while at the year's darkest we open presents, that's just to tide us over for the opening of the brand new spring to come, just a little longer, just a little longer.
Let us remember those gone before us, and let them go kindly and with love, even as we hold close those still with us. And let us not forget that it's just before the leaves fall that they break out in breathtaking color.
It's time for warm ovens and woodsmoke, for shivering and shuddering, for candlelight and moonlight, for sleet and wind and the shaking of the secure. It's time for quaking. It's time to cover some faces and show others brighter. It's time for losses and lessons.
Honor to our ancestors and our beloved deceased. May our holidays be just chill enough to bring us closer together.

hit the road, jack

Spokane

I have a strange relationship with the highway.
I ache for it, sometimes, need desperately to get out on it, but I shudder at going too fast, and my shoulders tense up into stabbing pain, and I’m troubled by what the highway means. Still, opening out on the blacktop, stopping in random places and breathing them in before continuing, it’s a peculiar love affair and has more than a little to do with running away.
It’s almost as conflicted a relationship as I have with my country, which I love, which I’ve been considering with increasing seriousness fleeing for shelter somewhere else, somewhere, ironically enough, less dangerous, less exhausting, less likely to cause me to lose perspective and give in to despair. So it’s funny that I found myself on Interstate 90 at midday on Independence Day, fighting it out with the early July sun and all alone in a metal cocoon ready to hash it all out.
We used to call my car the Mighty Chariot, for the drag races I’d won as a teenager and certainly not for anything I’d done with young women in the passenger seat during those same years. It’s a station wagon, and it’s got a big dent in the side that’s my fault, and I pat the dashboard when it performs especially well. We’ve been close since I was sixteen, and though I’m notoriously nervous about machines, I sometimes forget, on long trips, that we’re separate. I used to hate driving. Moving that fast with my feet off the ground terrified me, and so did relying on machinery I couldn’t watch work, but familiarity breeds many things besides contempt.
The highway’s a weird non-place, all about being on the way to somewhere, never about being anywhere, and you start to see cars as people, not as vehicles with people in them. That Chevy over there did a thing, not the Chevy’s driver. That pickup over there is being a jerk. And there’s tribes.
I cannot leave behind my fear of the squad cars, as they dart in and out of traffic as great fish, as wolves dividing a herd. It is unreasonable, it is paranoid, but I still get shaken every time I see a police vehicle, even one I know for certain is helping people, even one I know is helping me. Ever since one bad night, I just freeze up, even when I know rationally I’ve got nothing to hide or worry about.
The highway’s a strange place, but I’m on it, at the northeast extremity of Washington State, headed westbound for friends who wait where the sun sets. Out here, I’m reminded of eastern Oregon, which is much alike and hard to distinguish if you put photos side-by-side, and I think, I could do this. I could come out here and wear sturdy jeans and drive a beat-up pickup, I could bale hay and be tough as my old tomboy days and find myself a cowboy hat to fit my outsized head. This out here, though I fled it for the city, this is familiar, this is standard. I could come out here, I could come stay by these ragged fenceposts, I could belong to this land if it weren’t for the people in it, who I know are good folk but who don’t know I am.
Highways like this, I used to run alongside, for hours and miles at a time, and I knew all of the ranches by sight, back there. I used to drive out with my camera and find old trees that cast interesting shadows. I quit piano lessons to learn to care for livestock, once, and that might be part of why I never became the musician my brothers did, and might, really, be part of why I carry a first-aid kit today.
Maybe, I think to myself, still wanting to pull over and buy a hat somewhere for no good reason, maybe I’m just going through my horse phase.

Somewhere near Sprague

The sun is blazing directly overhead in a vast and gauzy sky, and it’s dry enough to crisp the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The flat horizons on all sides just disappear into vagueness instead of going up the way I expect them to, unlike anything except my memories of driving out West in our minivan when I was six and staring out the window at endless expanses of Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa. That way, I think, that just keeps going till Canada. That way is the Columbia and then it keeps going, all the way to Utah. That way’s the Rockies, and that way’s the Cascades, too far to see. There is no way to appreciate how many shades of brown and yellow and gold and tan and buff and taupe there are until you’ve been out to the high desert, this part sectioned off into huge rectangles and occasionally irrigated. I let it all blend together, only stopping once to pull over and ask a couple changing the tire on their camper if they need a hand. They tell me no, and I stroll back along the shoulder to my car, grasshoppers the color of everything else swirling around my feet. There is a clunky old cell phone lying in the gravel by the edge of the pavement, and I give it a glance before leaving it face-up for the crows to enjoy.
Traffic slows to a crawl for something that involves multiple squad cars and an ambulance, and a bearded biker in his goggles and leathers waves traffic around it. On the back of his black leather vest is a yellow cross and the legend, TRIBE OF JUDAH JESUS CHRIST IS LORD. As I pass, I see the paramedics and police bent over a man prone, in biker clothes himself, and then it’s all moving again.
The radio in Eastern Washingston is something else. If it’s not country music with bad reception, it’s about God, and only one version of one God in particular. I listen to a sermon about how the best part of being a Christian is the gifts you get at the end, that really, it’s all about knowing for certain that in exchange for your—it’s left indistinct, but participation, at least—God has promised some nice things for the end, which is around the corner, fine things. I find myself wondering if this preacher has ever loved his God for anything but the Cracker Jack prize at the bottom of Creation, and the country song that comes on about how God will turn His face from us and give up if we don’t leave Him in the Pledge of Allegiance sets me wondering. Can’t we do better than this, I argue aloud with the radio, thinking of Rabi’a’s torch and bucket. Surely we can do better than this.
I tune in to another long sermon, holding with it for a while, enjoying the reverend’s gravelly voice. He goes on about how yes, when God promised Abraham a blessing on his seed, that was fulfilled through Christ’s act of mercy, but that’s not all, that’s surely not all. In Abraham’s children, in this man’s scripture, God’s blessing was also expressed in, as he says it, the tribe of Abram’s “military intervention” into the affairs of Sodom and Gomorrah, the “liberation” of its people. So do we, as heirs of Abraham, he says, have a responsibility to do the same. “The English-speaking people of the world,” he says, are the true and only heirs of Abraham, and to them falls blessing and burden. Christ’s grace is well and good, but how can we, as “the only nation in the world powerful enough to project freedom wherever we choose,” not intervene militarily as Abraham did, given the opportunity? I wonder about his phrasing, his citation of our power as evidence of our being the true heirs of the Hebrew legacy, about his choosing to say that we go where we choose, not where God chooses. I seek along the tuner band until I find another country station. Let’s roll, America, sings a man who no doubt wears a big hat, ‘cause God is on our side. And I think not of Rabi’a, but of Lincoln, who could not dare to make such a claim, who prayed that we would find it in ourselves to be on His side instead. On another station, the only woman I’ve heard all day prays that women all over the country will learn to be more loving to their husbands, be more obedient to the Word as it applies to serving a man “no matter the cost,” and I have to swallow, hard.
It becomes apparent that many of these radio men talk more about America than about their God, and I’m not sure what that means—about this nation, not the Kingdom of God, about our promised glories but not about the poor, or the sick, or the naked. One of them calls Social Gospel a blasphemy, but explains himself in kind tones, and I find myself at a loss.
They are all of the radio stations, this deep into the steppes and scrublands, and I continue to listen.

George

I pull off of I-90 into George, Washington, remarkable only for its too-cute name and the nearby Gorge Amphitheater, home to concerts that seat thousands and near nothing else at all. In central Washington, the farmland competes only with tawny hills, and this close to the river, those hills crumple the landscape and cradle little pull-offs like George not lovingly, but without rancor. Stopping my car in the lot of the shiny new gas station, directly across from the beat-up one with the case of ice for sale, I drag my red bandanna off my head and around my neck like a kerchief, ready to make it a dust mask. The taqueria I was hoping to hit has closed for the holiday. I have been at this intersection twice before in my life: once, on my way east the day before, to gas up my car and lift the hood to make sure that my CHECK ENGINE light didn’t mean anything in particular, just another pretty Latina on the way to somewhere else, not yet in today’s disguise, the wind tugging at a suede A-line the color of the landscape. Once, more than three years ago, in the middle of the night, returning from a concert at the amphitheater, my friends asleep in the back and too high to care, my girlfriend crumpled over her seat and looking serene despite the fight we’d been in before she dropped off. I had waited a while before I realized that I needed to pump my own gas in this strange state, and when I got out to operate the nozzle, there were two girls from my hometown in the next car, sweaty, tired, amused. Both times I used the beat-up gas station, and deliberately.
Today, I take a deep breath of the dusty wind and find that I cannot shake my desire to find a cowboy hat. The general store down the way looks promising, and I pull into its parking lot, walk in looking absurd, don’t find what I’m looking for amidst the work gloves and dry goods and packaged snacks. I say howdy to the bespectacled blonde woman at the register and pay for a tamarind soda and a Pepsi that was on sale, trying to be polite. GOD BLESS AMERICA, says her t-shirt, and her husband, a vast and ruddy fellow with a white beard and leather pate, wears one to match. It appears to be his picture on the donation can by the till, which proclaims that someone’s house burned down, and I hope it’s not these sweet folks, but that’s the way of things now and then. I wish her a happy Independence Day and wander out, stopping by the van in the parking lot to read their menu, all in Spanish. They serve lengua and cabeza, so they check out, and I surprise myself by not attempting any Spanish when I order. Perhaps it’s out of embarrassment; all the men ahead of me are old migrant workers, stocky and windworn, like all of the Mexican families in the dusty lot a few yards away, looking at tractors all lined up like it’s market day. There is no sales tax on my tacos, and I eat them quietly, in the closest thing there is to shade. Every other business on the block—which is to say, every other business here, since everything else in sight seems to be gas stations, tractors, or housing—is out of business, their spaces for rent, some still with Hallowe’en decorations up. Nowhere to go but the fields, which stretch unavoidable in all directions, dry and brown. Popping the cap on my soda with a multitool from my emergency kit and slamming the hatchback shut, I put my car into gear, put my sunglasses back on, and get back on the highway, jockeying for position with boat trailers and pickups, leaving George behind.
I had told myself no more stops, but I’m in no special hurry. and I take an exit where the sign tells me there’s a viewpoint. It’s a shelf of basalt out over the gorge, and below me is the Columbia, much nearer her source than I’m used to, impossibly blue between brown-gold banks and steep cliffs the color of tobacco and sunsets. A sere wind takes all the moisture out of my mouth and nostrils and I ponder just following the river back to its mouth where I came from, but the highway map doesn’t agree with that notion. I pour out water from my canteen and bow, but when I take a drink, it’s hot and bitter from two days in the car.
It’s time to get back on the road, time to keep moving and know that I’ll see this river later, at a less young place, where it’s fed by another river I love.
I refuse to turn off again when I see a sign for the petrified ginkgo forest, but I do leave the window down all the way to Yakima.

Iron Horse to Snoqualmie Pass

As the land shrugs and folds and finds itself a coat of pine, I can see the jagged teeth of the Cascades coming up ahead, and here in the foothills with one foot in the desert and one in the Ponderosas and volcanoes I find myself thinking, home. I was born on the Chesapeake Bay, thousands of miles away, but I have only one blurred memory of that place; I insist on thinking of this as the land the birthed me, that shaped me. These mountains, this indifferent sagebrush, this is my homeland. For all my railing, this is my homeland, this is where I come from. This is a place I understand.
No matter where I go in the world, no matter how many places adopt or astound me, I cannot escape that.

Snoqualmie to Seattle

Higher up in the pass I pull over into a ferny trailhead and call a friend for directions to his place, and the police pull up in a white SUV meantime, waiting for me to produce a recreational pass, break into a parked hiker’s car, or be on my way. I choose that third option after relieving myself courtesy the Forest Service, but when the turnoff finally comes up, I’m blocked by a semi and miss the exit.
There is nowhere to turn around, so I just keep going past all these places named by people who aren’t here any more. Sammamish. Issaquah. I only stop for gas before blazing across the Mercer Island bridge, level with a glittering lake, and into Seattle proper with daylight to spare. I find myself performing too much at dinner, not appreciating my friend, who I’ve missed, nearly enough. I’m itching for the road again, telling myself it’s just because I’m tired and sore and want to get back to my own bed, or get back in time to meet friends on the rugby field, or have my own radio stations back when I press the preset buttons on my console. So I excuse myself, and hug goodbye for now, and promise to come back soon.

Seattle to the river

As I pull away from Jess and her work friends and the brightly-colored house she’s taking care of, I light up a cigarette, put on the radio, become briefly lost in the north of Seattle before I finally muddle my way to I-5 and begin to glide the overpasses of downtown. The sunset is winding down, and fireworks begin to launch over the bay, and I get a long glimpse of the Space Needle, lit up and somehow kind for all its World’s Fair alienness, somehow warm, a flag flying from its point, dominating the skyline out my right-side window. The interstate takes me past the stadiums, lit up red, white, and blue; across the Sound I begin to see the flashes of distant combustions, and I begin to rethink my troubles with the rockets’ red glare.
After last year, standing in choking gunpowder smoke, fireworks a weapon against me as I tried to read a Declaration of Independence nobody seemed to recognize, I turned my back on fireworks. Portland’s display began behind me as I left a perfect viewpoint, walked across the Hawthorne Bridge shaking and near tears, and drove home to write bitterly about my grief for the nation. The flashes of light I had seen before, and now the wonder of it, the thirty seconds of ooh and ahh before they became repetitive, that had been taken, too: the bombs bursting in air, for me, had become just another glory in our ability to blow up other folk, a lightshow to celebrate hubris and distract citizens from their history and rights.
I don’t sit still for them, this year. I hit the road, south on I-5, thinking I’ll ignore them and take advantage of everyone else’s foolishness to make good time on the highway. As darkness falls, I begin to see them, to the left and to the right, multiple displays simultaneous as I pass through them, like the storm-chasing I used to do in the desert back home, heat-lightning making white whole sections of the sky. From backyard and city center, over wood and water, blossoms of color, silent, exuberant, behind hills and tucked in bays, cascade on all sides and sometimes directly above. As I listen to a radio report on the latest Nobel Peace Prize and grassroots activism in Kenya, every township sends up fountains of shivering light. There is no time to stare at any, as I barrel through the night at a mile a minute. Just pockets and showers and moments, pink cauliflower and hissing undulation and the knowledge that a thousand thousand towns out there in the dark are doing the same, and I forget, for a while, about nation, about this pride in a country, just seeing human beings tossing aloft tiny starscapes and saying, here I am, here I am, here I am. Tacoma. Olympia. Sleater-Kinney, Pe Ell, Kalama, Vancouver. As the darkness grows and the lights begin to fade, getting toward midnight, NPR becomes staticky and indistinct, and I push a tape into the player, turn it up to compensate for the age of the cassette.
Hold me closer, tiny dancer, croons Elton John, count the headlights on the highway, as I count the endless litany of truck stops and Food Next Right and Portland, 64 Miles.
Here I am.
Here I am.
Here I am.


Happy Fourth of July.