Category: The Dish

In the years I have lived in America, South Africa has gone from being an apartheid state to one where its gay citizens now have more civil rights than they do in the U.S.

There goes my Oscar party invite.

Greg Djerejian begins to see the contours of a sensible bipartisan deal at home:

The good news is that the last best hope for Iraq might well involve a mixture of policy positions some of which are popular with Democrats and others with Republicans. For instance, the Democrats (not to mention quite a few non-ideological Republicans) will find engaging Syria and Iran in high-level, direct talks of interest. In addition, an attempt to provide deeper autonomy to the main Iraqi groups in relatively secure, organized manner will appeal to leading Democratic foreign policy players like Richard Holbrooke who have been influenced by Les Gelb’s calls for an Iraqi confederation. Republicans, on the other hand, will find talk of bolstering the remnants of central authority in Baghdad of interest, so as to keep alive the prospects of a unitary state, as well as increasing troop deployments in Baghdad, so as to not have to rotate forces out of Anbar Province.

And both Democrats and Republicans will find some common ground with regard to embedding more U.S. military advisors with Iraqi units to enhance the training and equipping effort, hammering out an oil revenue sharing protocol among the key Iraqi constituencies, working to better disarm and disband the militias, more attentively monitoring growing Turkish-Kurdish tensions, and more comprehensively backstopping national reconciliation efforts.

I’m afraid the disintegration has gone too far to stop now, but one more attempt to prevent complete hemmhoraging is certainly worth trying.

Shanghai, China, 10.34 am.

The right does it; the left does it. What’s so bad about Harry Potter?

Devo’s "Whip It." No idea what’s going on. But the song’s a classic. And those hats …

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A self-respecting African-American writes:

"We do not need protection.

There is not one individual on this planet who can make a black into a n***er. We can only do that to ourselves. Yet aided and abetted by fear of the right and largess from the left some are all too happy to be accomplices in their own demise.

This is where gays got it right. There was a time when queer was a harsh pejorative for homosexual. But instead of trying to force people into using convoluted phrases such as "the Q-word," they embraced the word queer. Gays stole it from their enemies, waved it like a captured war flag which they then strung from the standards of pop culture: Queer as Folk. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. By flogging it endlessly they took away its intended sting. So, then, go on and call a gay queer. At worst they will laugh and shake their heads. At the least they may say: "yes, thanks."

Acceptance of the word does not end homophobia. It does not stop the hate mongers from trying to inject bigotry into the Constitution. However, unlike some in the black community, upon mention of the once dreaded word gays will not drop into a fit of histrionics.

Of course, by bowdlerizing the word, I do what the writer wishes I didn’t. But I’m not black; and that word is too toxic for me. As for the q-word, I can understand the idea behind coopting it. But it doesn’t coopt me. I prefer to think of myself as a fag.

The more I think about it, the more this seems to me to be a huge issue. If Republicans want to rescue conservatism from its corrupt image, they might follow Ronald Reagan’s advice and tackle it. This last election saw only a few seats change hands. Here’s some hard data on the House:

In five midterm elections since World War II – in 1946, 1958, 1966, 1974 and 1994 – the president’s party lost more seats in the House than the GOP did this year. The losses in two midterm years were comparable to this year’s, while in eight they were smaller. On the Senate side, the president’s party lost more seats four times, the same number once and fewer seats 10 times.

The most common comparison to 2006 is 1994, the year of the last "wave" election, when the GOP picked up 55 House seats, nine Senate seats and control of both houses. But political scientists are divided on whether 2006 stacks up to 1994.

Judging by the number of seats gained, 2006 clearly does not, but other figures suggest it does. The average vote received by the Democratic candidate in the nation’s 435 congressional districts was 55 percent this year, compared with 51.6 percent for Republicans in 1994, according to Andrew Gelman, a professor at Columbia University.

That should surely have translated into a landslide victory. It didn’t because of gerry-mandering. Much of it has recently been done by the GOP, but the Democrats have been complicit in the past as well. With that in mind, here’s a bleg. What can feasibly be done about it? Or is the entire system too complicated to be fixable?

A reader writes:

I’m curious how your HIV status has affected your philosophical development; perhaps you‚Äôve addressed this elsewhere. Your mention of it in your book made me remember how my HIV diagnosis changed my perception of religious conservatives.

When my new partner and I decided to get tested in 1990, I went to our campus health clinic and was shunted to a small office containing a severe-looking grandmotherly counselor. She was obviously uncomfortable with the topic, the procedure and openly gay men, and I was uncomfortable with her prominent crucifix necklace and Jesus-themed knickknacks on her desk. She drew blood and gave me the perfunctory lecture on safe sex, and sent me away to await the results. Ten days later, I sat down with her to open the lab report.  It was negative, she said (as I expected). She then gave me another perfunctory admonition about safe sex, while I was imagining she wanted to tell me that I had narrowly escaped God‚Äôs wrath. I went home to await my parter to share the good news. 

About an hour later, I got a frantic call from the counselor; she insisted that I come back over to her office that minute, and that she couldn’t tell me why over the phone. It was past closing time at the clinic, but the doors were still open, and she was seated in her office. She was holding my lab report, and her hands were shaking and she had been crying. She had misread my report; she had never had a positive patient before, and she had mistakenly sent me off thinking I was negative, and now had to call me back and tell me the mistake. She tried to explain her error, but broke down sobbing. So there I was, in the first few minutes of HIV+ life, and my first task was to hug and console and administer Kleenex to this chubby, sobbing, crucifixed heterosexual. I assured her I was going to be fine, and that it was a simple mistake and it was her first time, and soon we were both hugging and sobbing and pulling Kleenex. A doctor hovering outside finally knocked on the door and asked if we were ok, and she called out "Yes, I think I’m going to make it".

In many ways, my session with her was a real gift. At that moment, it made me realize that I just might have prejudged this woman, and perhaps she truly was concerned for me, and that perhaps I was the bigot. It also forced me to realize that being HIV+ didn’t give me even a temporary license to wallow in my own problems and ignore others. Somehow, being prodded at that moment to care for this stranger and comfort her was the best therapy possible.

I ran into this woman about three weeks later at the checkout counter in the drug store. We were both a little uncomfortable, and I watched her reaction as she looked down and saw the box of condoms in my hand. She smiled and gave my arm a little squeeze and said, "You two be careful, now".

I still think Ratzinger might be beyond redemption, though.

A psychological analysis of "reaction formation."