Tax Day Tea Party Protests

You’ve got to give it to the media: they have been putting up a strong fight to de-legitimize the Tea Party Tax Day Protests. They’ve called the participants extremists, Republican tools, crazies… and still, people came. I was one of the nearly 10,000 people at the St. Louis protest Wednesday. While the atmosphere wasn’t as intense as the protest February 27th (after all, that protest was a close-knit 1500 people) it was still exciting and I think everyone left feeling proud to be American.

The media obfuscates the intentions of the protests, saying that they were only about taxes or anti-Obama rallies. MSNBC, the beacon of truth, said on television today that it can’t believe people are protesting having taxes taken from their paychecks when so many people are without jobs right now.

I can’t speak for every person at every Tea Party, but most of them were average Americans who had never been to a protest before (they had a show of hands) and were just fed-up with spending that won’t be paid for generations. (Essentially stealing from our grandchildren.) THAT is what the tea parties were about: a demand for effective policies to get us out of the crisis without putting our country at a disadvantage. Grassroots activism, like Tea Parties, is exactly what the Right needs now. These were average Americans, fighting the good fight, practicing their right to assemble.

Juvenal and the Juvenile

Courtesy of Eve Samborn, we have this amusing satire on liberal “tolerance.” Assuming, that is, giving new meaning to Juvenal’s adage that difficile est satunam non scribere, “the difficult thing is not to write satire,” that satire need not be intentional. In response to College Republican’s “Conservative Coming out Day” (an admittedly absurd event, with all due charity to our younger brothers in the faith), Ms. Samborn is rather upset that conservatives would dare compare their plight to that of homosexuals:

At best, the chosen event name represents gross negligence. At worst, it misappropriates the term “coming out,” a long-standing rhetorical symbol of gay liberation, to serve a movement that oppresses and marginalizes the LGBTQIA community. This linguistic theft is both offensive and morally wrong.

And by golly, she means it. Your humble servant offered this waggish reply:

The author’s appropriation of the word “oppression,” historically used to describe enslavement, systematic violent repression, or denial of basic citizenship rights such as the right to vote, is patently offensive when used to describe the conditions of gays in our society. The author’s implicit contention is that not redefining marriage to suit every possible carnal configuration which wishes to win legitimacy in our society is equivalent to the Black Codes or the Fugitive Slave Laws. By belittling the historical struggle of African-Americans, women and others for basic rights the author is obviously harboring crypto-racist and crypto-misogynistic tendencies.

Ms. Sanborn is simply part of a general trend in gay rhetoric to convert inconveniences into necessities. Bob and Ted, great guys though they are, have to draw up a contract if they want to divide their property between them or explicitly declare who has to be at whose deathbed. But waitaminnit–Jack and Jill get all that in a package deal with that ceremony down at the courthouse! Therefore–ohmygod–Bob and Ted are oppressed! Nevermind they have the same rights as every other citizen, are probably generally more affluent than many minority groups in our society, get the perk of having an average of thousands of sexual partners in their lifetime, and yes, even have the right to marry, as our culture understands marriage. Our definition just doesn’t happen to recognize their carnal preferences.

The false equivocation of anti-gay marriage laws to anti-miscegenation laws (though Ms. Samborn does not spell it out) is absurd. Anti-miscegenation laws were not predicated on a certain definition of marriage, but on a certain conception of race. It was our understanding of race, and not our understanding of marriage which changed and was recognized in Loving v. Virginia. Loving did not require any new conception of the sexual roles in marriage–it just required the casting away of absurd ideas of racial purity.

Green Action Drowns Polar Bear, Enjoys It

Studlife reported Monday that over the past weekend, thirty-five Wash U students (most of them members of Green Action) piloted seven vans to Washington, DC, to attend Power Shift, a national environmental lobby conference. According to Mapquest, Washington is 867 miles from St. Louis. That makes a round trip 1,734 miles, and seven round trips 12, 138 miles. For some perspective, that is 49% of the Earth’s circumference at the Equator. Green Action literally drove half way around the Earth to attend this conference. If the vans were getting 30 mpg (an unlikely figure indeed), the trip would have generated approximately 3.55 tons of CO2. I think I know what to get Green Action for the next gift-giving holiday. You might think I’m being too harsh, that although it smacks of hypocrisy, the lessons acquired at the conference probably outweigh the tons (!!!) of carbon Green Action generated. Perhaps… but I also happen to be on the Power Shift email list, and thus received an email from Power Shift organizer Jake Brewer informing me that I could watch the proceedings of the conference, live, “from the comfort of [my] laptop” at www.powershift09.org/live.

What sort of karma could possible atone for such hubris? Well, this is certainly a good start.

Transparency

Obama has talked
(Constantly)
about Transparency.

But the Facebook grassroots campaign and the “openness” of the new administration seem to be a thing of the past. Immediately after being elected, Obama hedged on his promises to do a great number of things quickly within his first term. His “transparency” allowed only 4 reporters to the re-do of the oath Wednesday. Only one outlet was given an inauguration interview: one that donated to his campaign. Does this sound like Change and Transparency?

But this is not the first time a leader has come in with promises of Change, promises to fix a broken economy. To change the standing of a people’s in the international world. Think of 1933 Germany.

Transparency was the unique promise Obama gave to the American people: we could follow the change in our country like we were a part of it, somehow. It was part of the reason Obama became the media’s darling. Now that the campaign is over, so is that Transparency. But people are still following, some blindly, without thought to the Change within Obama himself and all his previous promises.

Right now, the only transparency for Obama are ice sculptures like the one Wash. U. commissioned for its campus.

Obama Ice Sculpture

Could Local Currencies Strengthen Local Loop Businesses?

Here is an article from the inimitable Distributist Review about the E. F. Schumacher Society, which tries to promote a localist vision of economics. (Schumacher is probably best known for his work Small is Beautiful, which was influential in the early environmentalist movement.) One of their more interesting projects has been BerkShares, a local currency in Berkshire, Massachusetts.  The basic model of local currencies is that the consumer purchases BerkShare-dollars for 90 cents per dollar, while participating local businesses accept those dollars for full value–translating into an instant 10% discount on all purchases from local businesses. As long as the BerkShares stay in the local economy, everybody wins, because businesses can in turn purchase needed products with BerkShares.

I think such a program would be easily applicable to St. Louis neighborhoods like the Loop. A system of “LoopBucks” offered for 90 cents to the dollar would help strengthen an (already palpable) sense of economic localism.

Greece “Solidarity Protest” in Loop Turns Violent…

I find this odd on so many levels. First of all, I don’t know when we started caring what happens in Greece (don’t we have enough ill-concieved home-grown martyrs?), but apparently we have a critical mass of domestic pseudo-anarchists who can whip themselves up about whatever strikes their fancy. Secondly, why exactly does a “solidarity protest” have to involve blocking traffic, and apparently cursing and assaulting police officers? (Is anyone else reminded of that short Wendell Berry poem which consists entirely of: “Stop killing / or I’ll kill you / you god-damned murderer!”)

Of course, KTVI only interviews the po-pos, so who knows if this was an incident of police brutality itself or not–certainly the protestors get pretty rough treatment in the video. But it seems likely enough that this whole incident can be chalked up to an outbreak of  soixante-huitard “propaganda of the deed.”

Eighth Issue of Pornographic Magazine Released on Campus

X Magazine, a publication of the Student Forum on Sexuality, which recently paid some $10,000 to bring sex columnist Dan Savage to campus, has just released its eighth issue. The issue includes graphic illustrations of sex, including masturbation and oral sex. The issue includes articles on the recent STL Naked Bike Ride (an event of the infamous FBC) as well as a consideration of “facials” in pornography from the standpoint of Kantian ethics. Surprisingly, the author, John Torrey, has qualms: “Nevertheless, a woman’s face is not somewhere for sperm to be placed all willy-nilly.” A truly decorous sentiment, John.

Further prurient interest can be satisfied by contacting: washusexuality@gmail.com

Nothing Says “Christ Child” like an Abortion under the Christmas Tree

I think it’s fair to say the the secularization of Christmas is complete.

Graduate Seminar at Vanderbilt University

Ran across this description of a seminar at Vanderbilt University, once home to John Crowe Ransom and the Fugitive Poets:

ENGL 310-01 Seminar in Shakespeare
Topic: Shakespeare and Sexual Ideologies
Kathryn Schwarz
(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)
The works of Shakespeare have often provided a symptomatic focus for theories of gender and sexuality. From the rise of academic feminism, through the debates between feminists and new historicists, to the evolution of psychoanalytic, queer and performativity theories, Shakespearean criticism both reflects and contributes to the emergence of new methodologies in literary critical discourse. Assumptions concerning the canonicity of Shakespeare and the Shakespearean work as a kind of Trojan horse, authorizing approaches that might, at least initially, be resisted as marginal, “too political,” [Don't worry: the classics will have a place in academe as long as they can be coopted to sneak ideologies into academic "research."] or otherwise threatening to disciplinary conventions. [Is that a Freudian slip, or are those conventions livelier than I thought?] [...] How do the “transgressions” of feminine characters, ranging from transvestism to illicit sexuality to inappropriate authority to acts of political and domestic violence, authorize feminist readings that challenge misogyny on its own grounds? [...] In what ways do responses to the Sonnets reveal both intersections and conflicts between gay studies and queer theory? [And here I was, not even knowing the difference. I feel awfully silly.]

Mumbai attacks and their relevance for the US

Though the attacks in Mumbai carry none of the hallmarks of Al Qaeda (aside, that is, from indiscriminate murder), the focus on attacking foreigners (and Jews–not Israelis, just Jews) seems supiciously like a tactic they often use, of attacking foreigners abroad as a prelude to attacking them at home. There are even some hints at what this might be a prelude to. (I remember an analyst on Fox News–whose name unfortunately escapes me–mentioning also that AQ tends to attack in times of political transition. An attack soon would certainly help them set the tenor for the Obama administration.)

And I hope the Buchananite, “blowback” folks are taking notice. I mean, clearly if India stopped being such a passionate supporter of Israel and scaled back their “imperial” ambitions abroad, Islamic terrorists would have no reason to attack them, right?