A Little Ray of Sunshine in the Midst of Ugliness

     Pardon the digression, but I'd like to mention a sign of hope I've encountered recently.  I was watching the TV commercial put up by thetruth.com inviting us all to vote on the question, "What's the ugliest truth?"  a) "Big Tobacco's products kill 1075 people every day;" or b) "Big Tobacco's products kill 137 people a day from second-hand smoke."  I was curious to see how people were voting, given the fact that it's currently politically incorrect to suggest that people can actually be responsible for their own problems, so I took a look at their website.  I expected to see that most people were dazzled by the big number and were voting that the 1075 dead per day was the simple ugliest fact of the two choices.  In the commercial itself the people shown reacting and voting seemed split.  But once I got online I was gratified to see that the "second-hand smoke" answer is getting roughly 3 times the votes as the "1075 people every day" answer.  In fact, of all the possible voting possibilities from all their crazy commercials, that answer is running second, as of today, June 5, only to the ugly fact that methane is in cigarettes and also in dog shit. 
     What this means, to my pleasant surprise, is that a hell of alot of people, roughly 3 out of 4, are actually capable of grasping that those 1075 people are choosing to smoke, and that it's uglier that people die from second-hand smoke than that people die from smoking by their own choice, even though that's the smaller number.  It's a red letter day for human intelligence.

Run It Up a Flagpole and See If Anybody Salutes

     They say that the average human being only uses 10% of their brain.  Which is probably a hopeful overestimation.  Operating on the principle that what you're aware of, you're forced to deal with, the average human being plays it safe and only sees what they want to see.  A fraction of Truth X is plenty for any drone to deal with.
     The rainbow flag, the so-called "pride flag" of the gay rights movement, was designed by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker in 1978.  It originally had 8 colors but was redesigned down to 6 colors for production reasons.  The rainbow flag is meant, with 6 colors, to symbolize diversity.
     However, given the fact that the human eye can distinguish anywhere between 100,000 and 10 million different colors, depending on which scientist you ask, I wouldn't call 6 colors much of a symbol of diversity.  But I guess it at least puts the gays 3 colors up on the red white and blue of the greater American society, and 4 colors up on the Jerry Falwells' black and white.

Look at Me. I'm a Stranger in Paradise.

     Back in the 1970s, when the gays were first starting their coming out campaign, they used to say that hiding the truth forced a person to be a liar and a deceiver.  The observation was true enough as far as it went.  That was a great first step.  Too bad they took that one tiny step and stopped.  They should have immediately gone deeper.  They could have immediately dealt with the one thing about them that people find most offensive--what their traditional anonymous culture forces gay men to be.  Namely, sex-obsessed and shallow.  If they had, then maybe conservative people would be willing to take them more seriously when they clamour to be Scoutmasters.
    In an underground culture, if other people know who you really are, they can blackmail you.  They can betray you.  So anonymity ensured their protection.  Unfortunately, it also made it impossible for a culture for homosexual men to develop past a very limited point.  If all you can have is what this guy looks like, right now, then of course the culture developed abnormally far in the one direction it was able to develop.  Appearance became all.  Sexual encounters with strangers became all.  The anonymity of the underground culture made homosexual men promiscuous and appearance-obsessed.  Take promiscuity and shallowness out of the average gay man and what's left?  Not much.  That's the stereotype of the Western "gay" man in a nutshell.  And it's not just a stereotype.  But it isn't inherent either.  It's culture.  The honor of an individual man can hardly be taken into account in a culture where nobody really knows anybody else.  A culture can't emphasize a thing which can't exist in it.
     For almost 2000 years the Christian taboo has worked successfully, whether the Jerry Falwells were conscious of what they were doing or not, to keep homosexuality from taking an honorable public form.  There's nothing in its current dysfunctional form which the Jerry Falwells can't explain away.  Gay culture in its current form is not a culture for men.  No man would crawl to another man who doesn't know, or care, whether he's honorable or not.  The ancient Greeks would puke.  Anthropology proves that it isn't inherent for homosexual men to be either promiscuous or shallow.  Pointing out that fact would seem to be an obvious next step.  So why hasn't it yet been taken, 44  years after the Stonewall riots?
     In all fairness there have always been better individuals, who managed to live honorable lives despite the Jerry Falwells' best efforts.  But that fact is exactly what proves my point.  I can't fathom why those better individuals of today don't simply say, "This is all just beginning.  The denizens of the old-school anonymous culture belong in an underground with the rest of the junkies and whores--and it's time to be about the hard work of creating something honorable to replace it." 

Testify!

     On May 17 a piece appeared in the New York Times concerning the recent outbreak of a new strain of bacterial meningitis among gay and bisexual men in New York City.  The reporter chose to focus on the night he accompanied a doctor who was vaccinating men in a gay sex club called Paddles in Chelsea.  Unfortunately, true to the currently fashionable politically correct assumptions, there was nothing in the piece which put the promiscuous conduct of the men who frequent such clubs in any kind of context.  The flavor of the piece is rather changed if one vital fact is taken into account--that it isn't inherent for homosexual men to be promiscuous.
     What I found much more interesting than the particular piece itself were the comments in response to it online.  I read through over a hundred of them.  There were several comments criticizing the men's sexual conduct--but mostly from women.  There was only one comment, out of all the ones I read, which was made by a man identifying himself as gay, and criticizing promiscuous behavior.  He stated that the sex club was part of the  "seedy underbelly of the gay community," and that "some of us don't live our lives this way."  Hallelujah! 
     Now if only such a statement by a gay man would appear someplace where the housewives in Iowa might see it, it would be the dawn of a golden age for some of their sons.

Return to Lancaster County

    In a previous post I made the statement that watching the gays and the Jerry Falwells fight their quaint old hidebound fight was like a trip to Lancaster County, but that in all fairness the Amish, with their practice of rumspringa, showed more subtlety of mind than the gays and the Jerry Falwells put together.
     Over the weekend I watched some of the series "Breaking Amish," and I'm embarrassed to have to admit that I may have been simplistic in making that statement.  I may have overestimated the Amish, I'm afraid.  In one episode somebody asked one of the young rumspringers something like, "Are you running away from being Amish?"  The girl replied, "I just want to do my own thing."  Which was funny, because the lion's share of the series consists of watching Amish kids go out and become American-style trained apes circa 2013.  Right down to the stylish clothes, the tattoos, and the drug abuse.  If that girl any more did her own thing she'd crawl off on her hands and knees and join the Moonies.  Maybe it's a sort of dirty trick the Amish play on their young people.  Maybe rumspringa consists of letting them go out there with no money or support, land with the scum of the "English," get the shit scared out of them, and run back home, never knowing that there were actually more than two options.  A semester of college would have given that girl a little different perspective than she gained from hanging around with the bimbos in a club.  But college takes money....  So I revise my previous statement.  If the Amish are consciously aware of what they're doing to these kids, then and only then are they more subtle of mind than the gays and the Jerry Falwells.  If they're unconscious of it, then I'm afraid they're just an exotic version of the same old thing.

The Emperor is Naked Already

     The Jerry Falwells like to say that the acceptance of homosexuality in our society is proof that our society is corrupt.  I would revise that statement.  I would say that the acceptance of homosexuality in its traditional dysfunctional Western form, which is a transitory cultural form not more not less, without any true honest examination whatsoever from anybody of the implications of that fact, is definitely proof of our society's corruption.
     On Tuesday Delaware became the 11th state in the United States to legalize same-sex marriage, which means that over one-fifth of the country's states have now allowed their codes of honor to be swayed by any fashionable wind that blows.  I certainly believe that on the one hand homosexuals should have the same right to be stupid and get away with it as everybody else, and that in a democracy the majority should rule.  But on the other hand I have to wonder why freedom of speech, a vital treasure of our democracy, didn't prevent such an oversight years ago.  It's been 44 years since the Stonewall riots and to this day not one person, coming from any position whatsoever, has publicly pointed out the simple fact that nobody knows what homosexuality is, and that maybe we should slow down and do it right.  Which to me is way more interesting than any mere question of marriage rights could be.

Get Thee Behind Me Satan

     For several years I had the pleasure of subscribing to the magazine "Biblical Archaeology Review," which in addition to the interesting articles about archaeology had an added bonus which I always enjoyed.   On a regular basis the magazine would publish a letter to the editor from some outraged Jerry Falwell cancelling their subscription because something, usually a photograph, was unfit to be in their Christian home.  It was usually a photo of a young female assistant working at a dig in the heat of Israel in shorts and a skimpy T-shirt that would set them off, but once it was a picture of an ancient statue of a female nude on the cover, and once it was a picture of an old bearded Israeli archaeologist at a reception shown with a drink in his hand.  Oh my God!  The reader was always beside him/herself that the magazine wasn't published according to born-again Christian standards.
     Which was all pretty humorous given the fact that the editor of the magazine, Hershel Shanks, was Jewish, and nowhere did I ever see anything printed in that magazine promising anybody a rose garden.  Mr. Shanks apparently found the letters funny himself because he printed alot of them.  It was their outrage that was funny.  They didn't simply write in with something like, "Thanks, but unfortunately my religious beliefs don't quite mesh with the spirit of your magazine, so sorry, I'll have to cancel my subscription."  Their letters made it sound like Mr. Shanks was an insidious secret devil-worshipper or something and they were mightily proud of themselves for not being fooled. 
     I have all the respect in the world for Lynyrd Skynyrd's "simple man."  I grew up in a small town and I love that type of guy myself.  But I think these people might be taking things rather over the edge of simplicity and into simple-mindedness.  Where I come from we call a guy like that "all hat and no spurs."  Or I always preferred "all heart and no brains."  Call me crazy but I don't think I'd want such a person to be my son's Scoutmaster.