Watching the Wheels

--Ernie and Burt, Jack Hunter 

Time was not passing...
it was turning in a circle 
--100 years of solitude, 
Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

I think I'm dumb 
Maybe just happy 
I think I'm just happy 
--Dumb, Nirvana 

Things they do look awful cold
I hope I die before I get old 
--My Generation, The Who
 ____________________

I blame Marlo Thomas.

Her 1960's agitprop album, "Free to Be ... You and Me" was the incipient kernel for the misbegotten plant we call "gender-neutrality", one aimed at the obliteration of our very real differing gender orientations, a castration in the best liberal sense which tells you that it is for your own good, or better, someone else's good who has been oppressed by someone who is not you. But you will pay for their oppression through a disseminated socialized and internalized guilt and enforced genuflection.

Not that there weren't other actors besides Thomas on the social engineering stage -- an army of them. This week's The New Yorker cover brilliantly depicts the outcome of 50 years of The Message, the Supreme Court caught like deer before the t.v. lights having been railroaded like the rest of us into its recent decision on DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act).

Mr. Potato Head was part of it -- what was he? Ostensibly a "he", the spud came with with handlebar mustache, cherry red stick-on lips and high heels. He was transgendered, before genetic-engineering was even cool. Then there was the Playskool bus, with pop-out, gender-neutral passengers, all having round peg bottoms to fit into the same seats. No one "belonged" in the front or back, you see?

I have been raised amidst this vast experiment, yet in neither racial nor gender relations have we achieved harmony. Oh, but the message was hammered into our subconscious diligently and incessantly, until we started college and were told how to free ourselves from the bondage of our biology and rail against a stifling patriarchy and see homosexuality in Huck Finn and every Shakespeare play. If we could contort our minds to follow Lacan and Foucault, our lives would be superior to those that went before.

Only, it didn't turn out that way. The problem is, our animal impulses did not change because of the French structuralists, and those who claimed to integrate the messages did not create a more functional symbiosis with their partners; often, quite the opposite.

Despite our shortfalls we call it progress, and would now feign to export what we do not know. Three Cups of Tea assures us we are raising the status of women in our current war zones. Although movement is not always progress, one risks being called "Old School" if one questions change -- the most damning label of all in our youth-besotted culture.

If not caught up in the Twittermania over the changes -- any changes -- one risks becoming seen as the sort of person who watches the Delltones on Public Television fund-drives -- hopelessly mired in the ever-receding yesterday. Fustain, and worse, a person who uses the word "fustian" (Like, TOTALLY uncool.)

Social media demands an ever-present "now"; publish several Tweets a day or perish. Even the blog, which aspires to analysis -- though to the daily news treadmill -- is becoming passe. Ephemerality is the future, as we devolve into twitchy, itchy paramecia skittering hither and thither at the latest update, eliciting a concomitant quick reaction (shock/praise/disgust...)

Maybe we are limning down to just three emotions, to align with our truncated verb tenses: happy / mad or sad, for a past/present or future. Nuance is lost, and everyone wants to be an instant wit, but we have few Dorothy Parkers or Oscar Wildes amongst us. Mostly, we have harridans who scold with more or less finesse, to the march of the incessant news feed.

We mainline our news from outlets that deliver what we like to hear. When the New York Times recently ran an expose of the abuses of the federal Pigford farm giveaway program -- a subject which the late conservative blogger Breitbart had correctly heralded -- liberal mouthpieces were aghast. How could the NYT betray its liberality by presenting ... The Facts? News has become partisan, and if it favors a conservative position, it will be buried by the liberal press, and of course, vice versa. Not that there wasn't Yellow Journalism before, but the demands of the the immediate news feed makes anything approaching thoughtful insight less and less possible.

We are seeing the fruit of Thomas's plant in recent motions like the rescinding of DOMA and the move for women in the Rangers and the SEALs and the Combat Arms, in general. This is the new social frontier we are told and as such, we must reach it.

We derive value from championing the designated underdog, and it matters not whether this favoritism is for the greater good. In Syria, our sympathy is for the rebels (we like rebels, unless they are rebelling against us); in DOMA, we must allow for gay marriage, and in the military, women must gain a false parity with fighting men.

"The Disempowered" are our modern Golden Calf, and the liberals feel very smart when they worship at their feet. The engineers lay in their agenda like a stealth missile. Gay marriage is inevitable; after all, we have been watching media depictions of gay couples for well over a decade, so even if we do not live on the Coasts, the behavior seems de rigeuer and the institutionalization of it, a foregone conclusion. Our men have become metrosexuals and emo boys before our eyes.

We are barraged by studies of falling marriage rates and rising out of wedlock births. We are told that soon, the XY chromosome will become passe, and women will no longer need men -- the crowning achievement of the feminist project. While imbibing these messages, the groundwork was being laid for same-sex marriage: If no one else is getting married, well, at least homosexuals who wish to marry will fill in the void.

Before you label me a meanie -- of course gay couples should be allowed to marry. Married couples have more stake in their neighborhoods and communities. If you want stability and safety, nurturing stable households would be a good start.

If we were reasonable people we would recognize the biological imperative that a certain percentage of people will be homosexual and some will wish to marry, so it would be mean and primitive to disallow such committed partnerships from enjoying all of the benefits which accrue to a hetero married couple.  However, that end could be achieved by a civil marriage, without impinging upon church doctrine. We would construct a legal partnership bestowing rights of inheritance, shared work benefits, and every other thing a hetero married couple enjoys. And if you find a religious doctrine that sanctions homosexual marriage, go to that church. Case closed.

But for the government at the state or federal level to coerce churches to marry gay couples is patently absurd. If the church dogma sees homosexual pairings as disordered behavior, why would gay people cleave to a myth which does not recognize them? They will not be validated by invalidating the scripture. Further, such coercion would be a violation of the Church and State divide.

So that is a gloss on how we went from G.I. Joe to this No Man's Land. Did our tinkering with gender identification influence the current calls for total gender integration in the military? Certainly, and we will pick up the final "women in combat" installment soon.

[On a personal note: as I have recently stood back from the incessant tirade that is today's news cycle, I'm feeling a new fondness for Voltaire's simple dictum to tend to our own gardens. More thoughts on that later.]