Month: October 2009

A reader writes:

I read your post and watched the video about the Solomnese email urging us to hold our judgment until 2017. Your comment that HRC should change their name to the Gay Rights Campaign reminded me of my early days out of the closet.  I had never heard of HRC when I first came out, but eagerly embraced the equality logo.  I put a sticker on my car and wore a cap because I saw it as a way to let other gays know I was one of them while flying under the heterosexual radar. 

Most straight people have no idea what the anonymous yellow and blue symbol means and certainly don't see it as representing the gay rights movement.

In other words, the sticker and cap were tools for me to remain partially closeted.  I could tell myself I was out and proud without ever letting a heterosexual know I was gay.  Today, sitting here at work with a picture of my husband on my desk, I can hardly recognize that person.

Thank God.

Obama To Enter Diplomatic Talks With Raging Wildfire

Peter Beinart jumps aboard the Petraeus-for-president meme:

Pundits have mused about the Eisenhower-Petraeus comparison before, but the Afghanistan slugfest gives it new relevance. In the late Truman years, MacArthur, Joseph McCarthy, and the rest of the Republican right wing were a bit like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck today. They succeeded in bloodying the Democrats and scaring the country about overseas threats. But their overseas warmongering and domestic radicalism made them too extreme to ever win national office themselves. Ike was different. He exploited the right’s hysteria, and yet sailed above it at the same time. […] Parties that have grown narrow and extreme tend to spiral downward until they nominate someone who is not beholden to their narrow, extreme base. That person has to be so popular that he or she can defy the normal rules about how candidates get nominated. Right now, David Petraeus is the only Republican who fits the bill.

I sure can see the potential here. But, ahem, how do we know that Petraeus is, or will be, a Republican? Does anyone actually have evidence of this? Or is all this speculation based on the stereotype that military = Republican?

This is a little cheesy but I loved every minute:

God bless Cleve Jones.

And know hope.

My bad. No one can complain about being fragged because they'd be dead. I meant hazed or harassed. But it makes that email all the more chilling. And, in my view, far too gloomy about the next generation, and far too dismissive of the professional caliber of straight soldiers. Of course they can handle it. And so will the gays. With honor and fortitude, as they have in the past, but from the end of the ban on, with honesty and respect as well.

Just not your own.

The Obama administration's gay spokesman, Joe Solmonese (who moonlights as the head of the 25 million member Human Rights Campaign) got a little, er, candid on CNN on Sunday. Here's his view of those 3,000 at the swanky black tie dinner on Saturday night as compared with those 75,000 (or thereabouts) in the streets the next day:

[P]erhaps the crowd at the dinner last night was a little bit more politically aware and had a better sense of maybe, you know, what's at stake and what needs to be done.

Perhaps. And perhaps they're so hungry for access, power and Washington inclusion they've forgotten who they're supposed to be working for. Remind them, will you?

Jonah Lehrer posts an article of his that was slated for the pages of the January Gourmet:

Most things in life become more automatic with time. This, after all, is the gift of experience – it allows us to pay less attention, so that we don’t have to think about maintaining our balance on a bicycle, or shifting gears in a car. But with cooking the opposite happens – the more time we spend in the kitchen the more we notice. The act is intensified, layered with new subtleties. The first time I cooked beef stew, I was merely obeying a recipe, counting off the minutes until the mirepoix was sweated and the meat was seared. But now I don’t need the clock – I’ve learned how to smell the dark sugar of cooked onions, how to see when the stew is viscous with the richness of bones. The dish is the same – beef bourguignon is too perfect to ever change – but my sense of it has become much richer.

This is the moral of the kitchen: even the most mundane rituals deserve our attention. And maybe they deserve it most of all. To cook is to insist that every hunger is a potential occasion, not just for something delicious (because deliciousness can be easily bought), but for that quality of experience that comes when the flame is on high and the last knob of butter is being whisked into the sauce. The tough meat is finally tender and there’s the pile of parsley, waiting to be sprinkled over the stew. It’s all so fleeting – the food will soon be eaten, the mess will be cleaned up tomorrow – but Virginia Woolf was right: “Of such moments the thing is made that endures.” We have taken a need and made a meal.

Oakeshott said some of this famously before:

Oakeshott contends that the essence of an accomplished practitioner’s skill cannot be conveyed to a neophyte through explicit technical instructions, but instead must be learned tacitly, during a period of intimate apprenticeship…

To offer a concrete example, the rationalist cook is oblivious to the years that the skilled chef has spent establishing intimate relationships with his ingredients and tools, and tries to get by in the kitchen solely with what he can glean from a cookbook. As a result, he botches most of the dishes he attempts. However, his repeated failures typically do not lead him to suspect that his fundamental method of proceeding might be faulty. Instead, each disappointment only spurs the rationalist to search for a new, improved, and even more “rational” book of recipes.

Despite that modus operandi being no more workable in political activity than it is in cooking, Oakeshott points out that rationalism has had its greatest influence in the arena of politics: “But what, at first sight, is remarkable, is that politics should have been earlier and more fully engulfed by the tidal wave [of rationalism] than any other human activity. The hold of Rationalism upon most departments of life has varied in its firmness during the last four centuries but in politics it has steadily increased and is stronger now than at any earlier time.”

"People in Muslim countries object to the self-interested, hypocritical, and threatening policies of the US, while at the same time they reject the extremism and violence of al Qaeda. They dislike both the US government and al Qaeda. We are both destructive in their eyes. We have both killed many innocents. We are both sources of hardship, danger, and instability in Muslim societies. If a way forward is to be found, it must begin with a genuine appreciation on the part of US officials of how Muslim citizens view the United States and its actions," – Brian Tamanaha.

She will vote the Baucus bill out of committee but is undecided on the final bill. Ezra Klein celebrates:

Health-care reform will now pass its fifth and final committee. It will have a high-profile Republican supporter in the Senate. There are compromises left to be made, and bad days left to be endured, but health-care reform has the votes. It has them in the House. It has them in the Senate. It looks to have enough of them, in fact, to overcome a filibuster. That is to say, it looks to have enough of them to actually become law.

More reax here.