Dov's Artist Blog

Thursday, January 26, 2012

The Dubious Value Of Bullies In The Pulpit

As it becomes increasingly

possible that Newt Gingrich can be the presidential nominee of the Republican Party, you naturally have to wonder what a man who is patently morally bankrupt has to offer that could bring him to that point. Much of it can be explained in a single word:

Balls.

I’m rather fond of the song This Magic Moment. For Gingrich in the run up to his so-called victory in South Carolina, his “magic moment” was at the beginning of a debate when he was asked about his adulteries and he chewed a new anus for the questioner. How dare you ask a man who attacks gay marriage because he claims it is an assault on traditional marriage when he has just been exposed as someone who asked his wife for an open marriage? How dare you ask a man who persecuted President Clinton’s adultery through the national upheaval of

an impeachment hearing when he himself has notoriously abandoned ill wives to have splashy adulterous affairs?

But attack he did. And it’s attacking he loves to do and it’s attacking that people love to see him do.

The presidency has

been called “the bully pulpit.” But when Teddy Roosevelt applied that label to the presidency, he meant by bully “excellent” and not the sense we have of a coward who finds someone weaker to pick on. But to the bully pulpit now aspires Newt Gingrich who wants nothing more than to be the Bully In the Pulpit and indeed he has been the bully on the campaign trail.

I know a lawyer who has made a career of being aggressive. And people want their lawyer to be aggressive. But aggression is not a one size fits all solution for human relationships. When somebody does nothing but shout other people down, those people find ways to ignore the shouter or to write back to the shouter so they don’t have to treat him with ear plugs.

So, not only is unbridled aggression counter-productive because people simply stop listening, but it is simply not the appropriate tone to take with all situations. Consider the President addressing Congress. Should the image he presents be, “I don’t take prisoners ever. So just shut up and do what I tell you.”

Well, with an attitude like that, even his own party will jump ship. Need proof? Think Nixon. People in the other branches of government like to

think that all three branches have power. They will not make a career of jumping to the President’s tune. There’s got to be more in it for them than being told, “Good boy. Now roll over and play dead.” After all, most Congresspeople want to be president themselves some day. So full submission is not a natural posture for them.

And foreign leaders.

It may be that we need to put a strong face in front of our adversaries: Iran, North Korea, China, maybe even Russian. But do you think Canada

is really going to like be treated like a lapdog? George W. Bush made Tony Blair his lapdog and destroyed his career in the process. It was embarrassing and took one of our strongest allies and made it largely un-American. And that takes skill.

So, if Gingrich the campaigner is anything like what we could expect in a President, kiss your butt goodbye. He would be a nuclear war just waiting to happen.

I don’t believe he has a real chance at being elected, but if anybody wants to make the Mayan prophesy for the end of the world come true a few months later, Gingrich would definitely be your man.

He is one scary dude.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

If You Skin The Cat, Don’t Complain About The Bus Driver

Without naming names, one of my children complained to me repeatedly about the mean bus driver she had to deal with on her daily trips to school.

My child was even then a person of great precision in her use of language and she gave me in great detail the arbitrary and grumpy nature of the bus driver who was making her mornings and afternoons unnecessarily unpleasant. Having grown up in a household that cherished civil disobedience, she was not particularly civil to the woman in question and she was undoubtedly disobedient. And so, in order to show her scorn for the bus driver, while the bus was in motion, my child would stand in the aisle of the bus, put her hands on the adjacent seats and do the gymnastic maneuver known as “skin the cat.”

And, of course, the driver called her on it.

I pointed out to my child that I could step up to the authorities and complain about the rude and arbitrary way the bus driver was treating her, but not until my child’s behavior had been absolutely exemplary for a considerable period of time and the driver was still maltreating her.

That day never came. Ironically the day that did come is that the driver’s husband became a lodge brother of mine and I got to know the driver myself on a personal level.

And while I could see that she was tired, stern, and grumpy, much of the time, she wasn’t exactly Atilla. So, it became apparent to me that the disrespect between her and my child had been a self-feeding mechanism and my setting the standard necessary for me to lodge a complaint cut it off. In any case, I heard nothing further on the subject and when another lodge brother of mine became my child’s driver, they got along famously.

And that would have fallen off the edges of my working repertoire of recollections but for another incident with another child of mine recently. My middle son, Michael, as readers of this space are aware, had a difficult life before he and I met, not long after his 15th birthday, but he was fortunate to have a network of friends and friends’ parents who stepped into the breach and gave him safety and acceptance. One of these was a particularly handsome and incredibly intelligent young man of whom I was only dimly aware, but who was to Michael, very

important. The first time I saw him, Gabriel by name, was when Michael took his best seating passes for his High School graduation and gave them to Tom and me, leaving his other supporters and adherents to sit on the wooden bleachers lining the side of the gym where Michael’s ceremonies were. Michael had been officially designated the class clown and his adherents in the bleachers, including Gabriel, having already graduated the institution and being safe from discipline, were really whooping it up at the ceremony, just barely inside the border that would have had security escort them from their seats.

So that was my introduction to Gabriel, one of a small group of Michael’s hyper-rowdy friends.

Well, Gabriel went off to college and after having ingested substantial quantities of illegal

substances, managed to get himself a license as a Registered Nurse, enabling him, after considerable difficulty in a tough economy to land himself a job in a hospital in Elmira, New York, about an hour’s drive west of his native Binghamton. Since all of Gabriel’s friends are in Binghamton or nearly so, Gabriel thought it best to get himself an apartment in Binghamton and endure the commute to Elmira.

The day that Gabriel moved into his apartment, he had something of a move-in party with his friends, a party which was apparently noisy enough to disturb his neighbors considerably and the cops got called. Fortunately, the cops were only aware of noise and alcohol and they persuaded the partiers to tone it down a bit.

And that, seemingly, was the end of the deal. Except that shortly thereafter, Gabriel’s girlfriend was on break from school and spent a couple of weeks living with him, again an unremarkable event.

Gabriel was therefore shocked when a couple of months later he received an eviction notice from the landlord complaining of his noisy parties (plural, you will note) and his unauthorized roommate.

While the core of the accusations were based loosely on true events, the accusations themselves, were false and, so far as Michael and Gabriel could ascertain, based on nothing but Gabriel’s upstairs neighbor having taken a disliking to him.

Gabriel complained to Michael who, unsurprisingly, said to Gabriel, “Speak to my dad.”

It turned out that Gabriel was looking to move out and get a fresh start without the problems of having a grumpy neighbor, but he was concerned that if word got back to his employer in Elmira that he was thrown out of his apartment for being a rowdy tenant, that it would not sit well with his employer and his job could be in danger. He therefore wanted to fight the situation to clear his name.

However, I was aware that Gabriel had not completely given up on ingesting funky substances and it was of far greater concern to me that if we fought the eviction, word of that could get to his employer and have far worse consequences. So, under the circumstances, my advice to Gabriel was “Do go gentle into that good night.”

Just quietly move and put the incident behind you.

Because you can’t really complain about abuse of authority if the person

in authority knows or may know that you’re standing in the aisle of a moving bus and doing skin the cat.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Because Romney Is Icky

And so you may

ask why in the same week that it was revealed that Gingrich wanted an “open marriage” with wife number two and we can reasonably conclude that Gingrich would cheat on the presidency with the same gay abandon that he routinely cheats on his wives, why in the world did he win the South Carolina Primary?

Well, for starters, you kind of have to muck around with the word “win.” Let us recall that with Gingrich “winning” 40% of the South Carolina primary, it means 60% of South Carolina voted against him and there is little wonder why.

There is nothing appealing about this man. And for the hard core evangelicals of South Carolina, Gingrich’s laissez-faire attitude towards his marriage is not sufficiently offset by his taking a stance (like all the other Republican candidates) against gay marriage. Of course, he’s such a flippin’ hypocrite on the subject of marriage, given his history, that it’s hard to listen to him on that subject at all.

And you will

note that a few days before, it was not Gingrich whom the evangelical pastors endorsed, but Santorum whose own showing was pitiful, but put together with the other candidates still comes to a resounding “No!” on the subject of Gingrich.

Are the other candidates just spoilers? It is said that the Republican Party machinery wants Romney, but I’ll be dashed if I know why. The man is

only genuine about one thing: being a total phony. There is not a thing in the world he has ever stood for that he at some other time has not at least equally loudly stood against. This is not a matter of acquiring more “nuanced” understandings as some of our other candidates have said about reversals on their stances. This is about a man who claims to have a deep inner personal reason to claim both A and not-A depending on the ways the winds are blowing at the moment.

In other words, he’s a blow hard.

I don’t

even trust those grey sideburns of his. I’m increasingly convinced he’s the only man on the planet to bleach his sideburns grey so that he will look a little less like Buzz Lightyear and more like a president. In truth, to me, he always looked like a used car salesman and I never ever believed a thing he had to say.

And as the campaign goes on – and on – and on, Romney remains completely out of control when it comes to being that sublime douche bag, namely, Romney. When he said, “I’ll bet you $10,000,” it was an insight into the real man. He is fabulously wealthy and no, we are not merely criticizing him for being successful. We are criticizing him for (1) being predatory, (2) having no clue what it is to need something you can’t afford and (3) being a total bullshit artist about it all.

I have nothing against his having a lot of money. But when he, to the manor born, claims that he is this simply working stiff, oh, please, give me a break!

But no, the South Carolinians did not like Gingrich and they did not like

Santorum and by the way Ron Paul was running too. So they used Gingrich as a protest vote against Romney.

Why? Well, Santorum is an idiot; Paul is a weirdo; and Gingrich at least says some of the stuff these people want to hear. So, were they really voting for Gingrich or against Romney?
Definitely against Romney!

Why?

Because Romney is just icky.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Why Steuben is Fabulous

In 1979, recently

liberated from my life with folks – well, thrown out of my parents’ home, in fact, I was strolling down Fifth Avenue when my fiancée led me into the Steuben store and I, for the first time in my life, came to appreciate the amazing beauty

of crystal in the hands of a true artist. I saw a number of pieces I admired, but first among them was a very simple yet very beautiful and unmistakable rendering of King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, plunged into a crystal stone. On a practical level, it was a letter opener and its sheath, but on the abstract level, it was the very embodiment of beauty.

Some years later, I bought one. It sits next to my computer monitor and delights my eye on a daily basis.

In short, it’s fabulous.

What I didn’t realize at the time was just why that manufacturer of art glass was called Steuben and just who Steuben was. Had I known, I might have taken it as a warning.

In fact,

the art glass we call “Steuben” and pronounce stew-BEHN comes from a factory in Corning, New York where a glass factory was set up bunches and piles of years ago, taking its name from the County in which it was located: Steuben County, New York.

The County, in turn, was named for Baron von Steuben who pronounced

his name “fun SHTOY-ben” and was not just any old great hero of the American Revolution. It was von Steuben who showed up at the tattered American army at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777, saved the troops from themselves, drilled and trained them, turned them into an army, and devised and wrote the basics of American military doctrine for the next thirty odd years. He was a brilliant commander, brilliant not only in military tactics, but, more necessary to the moment, brilliant into turning a ragtag bunch of guys who didn’t know diddly squat about military training into a cohesive army that would actually have a shot at winning a war against the world’s then great super power.

Had there been no von Steuben, we would probably have London as our national capital.

Nice, you say, but so what? Well, it’s the reason that von Steuben showed up in Valley Forge that winter that is simply too delicious to omit.

Although he was recognized throughout Europe as a military genius, they would have none of him because he was as gay as a picnic basket. When he arrived at Valley Forge, he came with his boyfriend, a lad of 17, whom folks choose to refer to as von Steuben’s secretary, but who, while performing the traditional secretarial functions of the era, more importantly performed the traditional secretarial functions of a good many other eras as well. As the old saying goes, “No secretary is a permanent fixture until screwed on the desk.”

Those who seek to disparage von Steuben point out that he had a thing for young boys. But in so doing, they fail to notice that von Steuben’s boyfriend was two years older than a typical bride of the same era and of the same age as New York’s current age of consent for either sex. So, when talking “young,” you really do have to factor in the 18th Century idea of young.

But, in any event, when we take a look at the not yet extinguished

controversy in America about gays in the military, we must take into account the simple fact that if George Washington had not allowed gays in the military, there would be no military into which to allow them.

Of course, even if we were still under British rule, they could still have founded a glass factory in Corning which would produce simply fabulous pieces. We’ll never know.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Still Lonely After All These Years

On the night of June 27, 1969, a bunch of tired-of-being harassed Drag Queens stood up to the New York City Police Department and shouted “enough!” almost accidentally giving birth to the Gay Liberation movement. The ensuing riot began the long transformative phase of American society that has brought us to the point that I live in one of the handful of states that will allow me to marry the man I love, but will not allow us to file joint-married Federal Tax Returns or receive any of the other 1,000 benefits of federal law exclusively reserved for men and women who are lawfully married to persons with whom they do not share gender identification.

Currently 53% of Americans favor allowing gay persons to marry within their own
gender. That is not to say that currently 53% of Americans find homosexuality itself as normal as left handedness – less common, but not a sign of disease or moral corruption. I don’t know what percentage of Americans think my type of people are not degenerates – whether it be more than 53% or fewer. From what I can tell, the 53% by and large represent people whose view it is that it is none of their business what their next door neighbors are doing in their bedrooms, just as it is none of the neighbors’ business what they are doing in theirs.

So, while we gay folks are clearly on the upswing in winning the political battle, we still have a long way to go in winning the cultural battle, the battle of people simply not caring what kind of person we find attractive.

Just concluded is the season of office parties and I attended a rather large one recently, catered in a lovely facility. My client, Bill, the host of the party, introduced me to his kid brother, Steve.

Not long after that introduction, Bill was asking Tom and me how the wedding plans were coming. I told Bill, “Well, we got the platform built. We got the pergola erected on the platform, and in the next few days or so, Tom will get the steps built. One of Bill’s other co-workers, Seamus then piped up, “When’s the wedding?”

I responded, “Cinco de Mayo.”

Seamus then went on, “Oh, how cool! Are you going Mexican with the whole thing?”

“Just the reception,” I responded. “We’ll play it straight for the ceremony, but we want the reception to be a big blow out party.”

At this point, Steve, who had been listening very attentively to the whole proceeding, asked, “Who’s the lucky girl?”

Bill, Seamus, and Tom and I kind of stared at Steve for a moment. Then, recovering his composure, Seamus said, “They are!”

Steve was still confused.

Tom and I held up our joined hands. “We are!” we proclaimed.

Bill and Seamus politely excused themselves to go freshen their drinks and Steve kind of skulked along with them.

Then, Steve returned to Tom and me and sat himself down. “Sorry about that,” he began. “I thought I was the only one here.”

And because gay folks are so often so careful about who knows and who doesn’t, I could see the worry cascading off his shoulders as he sat down to chat with Tom and me, a couple of guys who most certainly must have shared some of his life experience.

As, of course, indeed we have.

I went over to speak to Bill and Seamus a few minutes later and said to Bill, “Your
brother just came out to me in the most charming way.”

And Bill kind of sighed and said, “It’s very hard for him. Nobody else in the family knows.”

And damn if that isn’t a story you just hear again and again and again. The other night I heard about a father who adored his son’s boyfriend for eleven years, but went to his grave refusing to acknowledge that his son and the young man in question actually were boyfriends. Of course, the old man knew the truth of the situation, but being unable to hate the son-in-law he loved, he chose to ignore that he was his son-in-law at all.

How incredibly sad that is! And how lonely!

And it’s not just the culture of the necessity of bearing children to make our parents into grandparents. I have four children myself, two of them home baked, two of them adopted. So, from me, my mother is not lacking for grandchildren, gay as I am. But in other families, I would be regarded as not having provided my mother grandchildren at all. In such families, if I’m gay, I don’t count.

And for folks like Steve, it’s a terrible barrier. Not only are they cheated of being able to be honest with the people they love, but the people they love are cheated of loving them honestly.

In this, I am reminded of a line from the I Have A Dream speech. Dr. King said:

“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

Dr. King did not say that in his dream only the sons of former slaves would be enabled, empowered by the new freedom, but so too would the sons of former slave owners. In other words, the bigotry enslaves not just the object of the scorn, but the bigot himself.

Steve’s mother loses out because she doesn’t actually know her son and to the extent that she doesn’t know her son, he doesn’t have a son. She can’t share in his life because she has closed his life off to her.

Of course, Steve is lonely. But the crying shame of it is that his mother is also lonely and doesn’t even know it.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Dov’s 200th Blog Entry: Attack of the PAC Men

Born in 1955 as I was, it is perhaps unsurprising that I should have such vivid memories of

electoral politics in the 80’s and 90’s, a period that until now, was considered the absolute depth of depravity of national politics, most particularly presidential politics. There were three elections in particular, those of ’84, ’88, and ’92 that were correctly regarded as absolutely stolen by the winner.

At the heart of it all was the endlessly corrupt Chicago

Democratic machine. Illinois had long since ceased to be the land of Lincoln, the land of the Republicans and, Chicago, the home of big labor, was the keystone of Democratic Party power. There were, of course, other hot spots throughout the nation where one party rule was so effective that one couldn’t get any job in government without belonging to the dominant party. Indeed I lived in such a spot in the early 90’s. But election corruption was so widespread in ’84, ’88, and ’92 that it was an absolutely open secret and Staten Island in particular was noteworthy for more votes being cast by dead people than by living ones.

The system was beyond broken. It was broken beyond all hope of repair.

Yes, such was

the state of our country in 1884 when Grover Cleveland stole the election

from James Blaine, when Benjamin Harrison stole the election from Grover Cleveland in 1888 and when Cleveland stole it back from Harrison in 1892.

But the fundamental difference between the incredible corruption of presidential politics then and now is that back then everything the parties were doing to steal the elections was illegal. Nowadays, however, the laws themselves have become so corrupt that the most effective methodologies for stealing elections are completely legal.

And if

you want a really good lesson in civics that explains the legal

ways for stealing elections, I commend to your viewing both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, hailed by both civics teachers and television critics as the only clear explanations of the current nonsense that our election laws have become.

The problem, of course, is with campaign funding. Direct funding of a candidate’s campaign involves disclosures of who gave what to whom and, by implication, who bought what level of influence. Along came “political action committees,” actually a very old institution, but in their original guise were actually things like trade associations that gathered funds to educate the public about themed issues, such as environmentalism or free trade, embryos’ rights, or women’s rights. But in time, folks began to understand and appreciate that these committees answered to no one and could do whatever they wanted, particularly in their latest incarnation, the “Super Political Action Committee” or “Super PAC.” Individual politicians began to understand that there was no law that a PAC or a Super PAC had to be issue oriented and it could instead be candidate oriented as long as it had no formal ties with the candidate or, as the mantra we have heard a great deal of lately, it does not “coordinate” its efforts with the candidate.

And so the Super

PACS are clearly coordinating their efforts with the candidates, pious assertions to the contrary notwithstanding and the presidency most of all but lesser offices as well are practically being auctioned off. I shan’t fill you in on the gruesome details. That’s what the Good Lord invented Stewart and Colbert for.

But it is a sorry comment indeed that our only defense against these things is a couple of comedians.

And, in truth, I know who has got to be laughing the hardest of all:

Yep.

Grover Cleveland.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

When Gingrich’s Hit Men Came To Town

The Gingrich hit men have now released a 28 minute video called When Mitt Romney Came To Town, viewable here. And, being a student of Michael P. Carlos, I look at it with a jaundiced eye, but I know underlying the slick filming, the endlessly depressing soundtrack, there is a truth about American venture capital. I have many reasons to dislike Mitt Romney and I have made no secret of the fact I do.

But the thing that the film really highlights is the fact that regardless of whether Mitt Romney is or is not the predator the film makes him out to be, the fact is that such raiders do exist and capitalism is amazingly out of control in this country.

Well, perhaps “amazingly” is a bad word choice. The Reagan administration and both Bush administrations were pledged to making the very highest echelons of capitalism rich beyond their wildest dreams and no administration has the nerve to really fight this fight – certainly not Gingrich, the sponsor of this particular purported exposé.

Fact checkers have found the actual incidents set forth in the film are either grossly exaggerated or from a time after Romney was no longer in control. So, we can’t use this film as any kind of reliable document of what venture capitalism is in America.

Of course, it wasn’t meant to be. It was meant to be a massive attack on Romney for the purpose of elevating Gingrich’s standing.

But we should not allow the motive behind the falsifications in the film to obscure the underlying truths it presents of companies that are indeed in the business of ripping apart other companies and selling off the pieces that are worth more individually than as a part of the greater whole.

For those who, like me, are fans of the film Pretty Woman, there is no secret in this process and no news in it either. And, indeed, the character Richard Geer plays in that film is of a man who hires a whore to be his companion during the final week that he is to make a kill in such a deal, but finds in a very real sense that he is the whore in doing the dealing. He is fabulously wealthy beyond any normal person’s dreams, but learns from his whore that he has been so busy with strawberries and champagne that he had forgotten the joy of walking barefoot in the grass.

Eventually it is that pleasure in the grass that teaches him that there is something to be said for using his capital for rebuilding the company he had been poised to take apart.

But there is another metaphor in that film as well. We are told that the first company he disemboweled was one owned by his father and that the destruction of the company was his way of giving expression to the anger he felt against his father for a cold childhood. And that is the other message of the film about predatory capitalism, that it is a form of patricide.

The venture capitalist who employs what Romneyists call “creative destruction” are in a very real sense living and reliving the myth of Oedipus who killed his father and bedded his mother. And, to quote a song lyric, “When he learned what he had done, he tore his eyes out, one by one, a tragic end for a loyal son who loved his mother.”

Seen that way, the protagonist of the creatively destructive capitalist is the
capitalist himself, but as the Gingrich hit piece reminds us, it is society as
a whole that suffers with the inevitable destruction of hundreds of domestic jobs, sometimes to send them abroad, sometimes to abolish them altogether.

What is the answer? Perhaps there is no answer. Perhaps there are laws like the anti-monopoly laws of the end of the 19^th Century that need to be
passed to abolish or at least make vastly more difficult this process.

But, in the end, it really is about greed. And while our society piously claims it dislikes greed, in truth it strongly admires it. I have written in this space, for example, about the endlessly spiraling need to buy more and more Christmas presents. That is a story of greed and about a society that encourages it. And as long as we continue to encourage greed at the lowest echelons of society, of course we are going to promote it at the top as well.

So, to quote another song lyric, “teach your children well.” Live greed and teach greed, cherish greed and
promote it, and the only thing you will do is enable somebody else to be better at being greedy than you are.

And that is the tragedy of Mitt Romney. He’s really, really good at being greedy.

And as much as Americans want to hate him for it, their real problem is that they really admire it and want to emulate it.