America The Unfriendly, Ctd.

It may be worth noting that all the examples of brutal treatment I’ve aired on the Dish are occurring with respect to legal immigrants or tourists at airports. The trouble with the current immigration debate is that the anger at unrestricted illegal immigration across the Mexican border has been diverted in many cases to the legal immigrants who are actually trying to play by the rules and who bear the brunt of popular frustration. There is a huge difference between a gay couple trying legally to fly to and from, say, Europe and the thousands of illegal immigrants coming in illegally from Mexico. The same goes for all the H1 visas, or artistic or cultural exchanges which are also under siege. So the Dobbs rage often does nothing actually to stop the big illegal flow, while adding to the incredible frustrations, cruelties and indignities of legal immigrants or tourists or temporary visitors. I guess you take your anger out on those you can. But it is a form of anger; and it is affecting the image of the US; and it is preventing the good sort of legal immigrant from even trying.

The Philly Debate and the Polls

Why no effect on Clinton’s national numbers? Mark Blumenthal explains. For my part, I’m just relieved that the real Hillary Clinton is now at least being debated. If Democrats want to nominate the most divisive, partisan and calculating candidate, the one least likely to win over independents, they’re welcome to. But with eyes open, please.

JPod And Torture

An astonishing confession of ignorance:

As universally understood, torture is the infliction of physical injury through the application of physical force.

No: this is the universal definition of torture under US law, and the Geneva conventions:

severe mental or physical pain or suffering

This standard has been the case since the Second World War. The argument that no permanent or even temporary physical injury means no torture is a canard, once deployed by the Nazis. Here is their defense of "enhanced interrogation" in 1948:

Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement.

The US rejected such cant and condemned those guilty of using the Bush-Cheney methods to death. It tells you all you need to know about some neoconservatives that they now side with the arguments of the Gestapo against the arguments of the US to defend their own willful ignorance and power.

“My Brother, Larry Craig”

James Alison, a man of the Gospels in every sense and an English gay Catholic priest, is always worth listening to. This lecture, "Love Your Enemy: Within A Divided Self," is particularly sharp. Money quote:

For people like me, Senator Craig is, in a very obvious sense, an enemy: he has been a solid functionary of the system of hatred which has used people like me as a wedge issue to frighten people into acquiescence with other, and far more serious forms of evildoing. A system of hatred which is, thank heavens, far less strong in this country now than it is in the United States, and far less strong than it was in this country as recently as fifteen years ago. I say this, since there is an obvious sense in which I, as a child of my culture, am tempted to rejoice in the discomfiture of my enemy, to depict Senator Craig as the “not me” which gives me a tidy little identity. It was in this context that I was very moved to read a piece by one of the gay-bloggers in the US, fairly shortly after the Craig story broke, which helped remind me of the truth of the Gospel.

This blogger, whose name I cannot now remember, showed me something which enabled me to see sameness rather than difference.

He pointed out that Senator Craig was born in 1945, in rural Idaho. When he was ten years old, in 1955, there was a scandal in Boise, the Idaho State Capital, not too far from where young Larry lived. It was the big tabloid gay scandal of the 1950’s, coming just as America was in the grip of the McCarthy witch hunts, themselves helped along nicely by at least two self-hating gay men, “killer fruits” as Truman Capote wrily called them: Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover. It was revealed that in Boise, of all unlikely places, there was a network of public officials and influential citizens employing the services of a group of rent boys. Well, you can imagine what sort of impact the news of all this, the sensation of it, the hatred it revealed, might have had on a ten year old boy. It might well have taught him that if he wanted to grow up being good, then the one thing, above all else, that he was not, was gay (or whatever approximation to that word existed in his milieu at that time). A boy like that might well have been taught by his culture, just as he came close to puberty, simultaneously who he was, and who he was not; and faced with any little boy’s desire to grow up to be good, he may have been locked into a form of denial and self-hatred which could then perpetuate itself for many years thereafter.

Now you will notice that I have used the subjunctive form, “may”, and “might”, throughout this description, because I don’t know Senator Craig personally, nor, I suspect, did the blogger who pointed out these background dates and events. But as I read the blog, I did remember a ten year old boy whom I knew in this country, fifteen or so years later, and so already in a much easier cultural climate, who found himself impossibly riven between the growing knowledge of who he was and the absolute cultural imperative that he not be that thing. Even in the much easier cultural climate of Britain in the early seventies that little boy came as close as dammit to opting for public “goodness” and success, denial and dishonesty, instead of the long route through the mystery of forgiveness and integration which was later offered to him by the Catholic Faith.

That little boy is of course myself, and what the blogger did for me was open up the possibility of my seeing Senator Craig not as an enemy, but as someone like me, riven by the same things I am riven, driven by the same things as those by which I am driven – “mon semblable, mon frère”.