Month: April 2009

Beijing, China, 6.40 am

… should be to cease to exist. I'd like to second everything in Jamie Kirchick's piece in the WaPo yesterday, not least because I've written a few versions of it in the past myself. There is something worrying about gay groups that continue to exist even after their raison d'etre has evaporated. Their longevity suggests a deep liberal fallacy: that they exist not to correct formal inequality but to wage a constant campaign of victimhood.

You see this in the Human Rights Campaign, a group that just bought and built a huge building in downtown Washington, as if it planned to be around for ever. Sometimes, I wonder if they actually delay laws being passed – or invent irrelevancies like their darling federal hate crimes law – so they can keep their jobs and stay in existence and throw pop concerts and sell candles and get invited to White House cocktails.

In my view, once the government treats gay citizens the same as everyone else, we should close down the movement and get on with our lives. Full marriage rights, the right to serve the country, police forces that take crimes against gays seriously (not the hate crimes canard), the same employment protections as others and, er, that's about it.

Wouldn't it be great not to have a gay rights movement? Maybe before I kick the bucket, I can do my best to bury it.

Not so long ago, the Palinites were rallying round Levi Johnston when questions were raised about how he got a job. An ADN columnist reflects on what happens if you cross the governor:

Sarah Palin released a statement to the nation accusing the father of her grandbaby of not caring about the well-being of his child. How will Tripp feel the day he learns his grandmother publicly attacked his father? This is family, for goodness' sake. What won't Palin do to anyone getting in the way of her political ambition? If the 18-year old father of her grandchild isn't off-limits, nobody is.

The governor ends her attack on Levi by saying, "Bristol realizes now that she made a mistake in her relationship and is the one taking responsibility for their actions."

There you go, Tripp. Your grandmother wants the world to know your mother considers your father a big mistake. Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!

"[M]uch of what passes for intellectual life on the right is a product for local consumption only, like those Argentine-made television sets that could exist only behind the old Peronist tariff walls. Unlike Hayek and Friedman, it has no impact at all on the thinking of those not already committed to the ideology from which it emerges. It's a sorry situation, and it has very ominous real world consequences: It means that conservatism as a body of ideas will not attract the best minds among the young and open, in the way that it was often able to do in previous generations," – David Frum.

Psychology Today explains:

Subclinical narcissists are happy. They are less likely to be depressed, sad or anxious, and rate their subjective well-being more highly. They're less reactive to stress, and recover more rapidly from it. Mild narcissism also seems to help people recover from accidents or other trauma—it gives them an unrealistic sense of their own invulnerability, and they believe that they will be able to handle whatever else life throws at them.

As one researcher put it, being somewhat narcissistic is like driving a huge SUV: You're having a great time, even while you hog the road, suck up extra resources and put other drivers at higher risk. A narcissist can be hard to identify, in part because he is likely to be much more fascinating than you would expect for someone so self-absorbed, and in part because you wouldn't think someone with such self-regard could be so defensive and needy.

Of course it also applies to people with really important hair as well.

A haunting short chronicling one day in the life of La Chureca, “the trash dump community of Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, captured by six filmmakers in March 2008 over the course of one day… from sunrise to sunset.”

Day of Light from Love Light & Melody on Vimeo.

This point is worth recalling:

let's drop the idea — pushed hard by Beck himself — that he's simply a modern-day Howard Beale, from the classic film Network, just an angry, I'm-mad-as-hell everyman lashing out at the hypocrisies of our time. Nonsense. Beale's unvarnished on-air rants from Network targeted conformity, corporate conglomerates, and the propaganda power of television. ("This tube," he called it.) Beale's attacks were not political or partisan. Beck, by contrast, unleashes his anger against, and whips up dark scenarios about, the new president of the United States. Big difference.

It's also striking to me that Beale's frustration was a long, long time coming. This has erupted in three months. And in protesting fiscal recklessness, there is no clear attack on the people who actually brought us to this sorry state: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. If they were burning effigies of Bush to protest the massive debt we now face, I might take their good faith more seriously.

The de-listing of all gay books is, apparently, a "glitch". It did seem too bizarre to be a conscious policy.

He's throwing a tantrum, like so many on the far right:

“We tried to defend the unborn child, the dignity of the family, but it was a holding action,” he said. “We are awash in evil and the battle is still to be waged. We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles.”

I'd say he's only partly right. I don't see the younger generation believing that abortion is a no-brainer; most see it as a tragedy that should nonetheless remain a choice in the first trimester. Abortion rates have indeed gone down since the 1980s. So has crime. Divorce rates have leveled off and are in a small decline. In the White House, we have a model black family. Gays, if only Dobson could see it, have matured, entered the mainstream, embraced institutions like the military and civil marriage; drug use is down.

I could go on. Of course, among those parts of America most beleaguered by some of the problems Dobson sites are red states, where his brand of Christianism still dominates.

The boomers keep fighting the war between the 1960s and the 1980s. What they don't seem to have absorbed is that the younger generations have taken many of the gains of the 1960s – more equality and freedom for women, racial minorities and gays – and integrated them into a mode of living that is neither counter-cultural as such nor old-school. It's a more humane, more inclusive and more small-c conservative culture. For some of it, we can thank those who worried about the dangers of social and sexual excess. And for the rest of it, we can thank those sane liberals who didn't throw the liberty out with the license.