Walks Like a Duck

 --graphic from RAW friend Alan Cring 

Because you can’t starve us out
And you can't makes us run
Cuz we're them old boys raised on shotgun
And we say grace and we say Ma’am
And if you ain’t into that we don’t give a damn 
--Country Boy Can Survive, Hank Williams, Jr. 
_____________________

Everything represented in the media comes with spin engineered to make the viewer feel one of the basic emotions (sad/mad/happy). Concomitant with this is the catharsis achieved by feeling like one is among the elect for understanding and identifying with the right side (the side to which one chooses to cleave.)

What masquerades as debate today erupted this week over a television character's opinion that homosexuality was disordered behavior, akin to bestiality. The media feigned at being aghast, stating that this point of view was "un-Christian". 

Sadly, no: In fact Mr. Duck was echoing exactly the Christian party line. In fact, it forms one of the pillars of belief in our main faith system in the United States. The problem is, proclaiming one is anti-homosexual is a bit embarrassing today when government agencies are recognizing homosexual partnerships as being a valid route to conferring employment benefits and inheritance. It is a bit démodé, quaint, to be polite.

The offending character was the patriarch of the Robinson family, a redneck family represented by a group of ZZ Top look-alikes who supposedly represent the Tea Party archetype in rural America. To some, they are subjects of derision, others doubt their veracity. Still others identify with them, and find kinship with their guns-and-god stance. Why did some t.v. executive feel these American Taliban look-alikes would make for good programming?

Further, why does anyone watch this? Is this a subtle joke, reflecting America's zealotry and in this way, kinship with the Taliban, back at us? (That seems too subtle a project.) Is it a bone thrown out to the marginalized backwoods of America, egging them on to be just who they are, then flogging them when it seems appropriate to do so? 

Is this spectacle a cultural expiation on a grand scale? Is wearing Mossy Oak tree bark the new scarlet "A"? In a theatrical biblical flogging, Mr. Duck the elder has been banished from his eponymous program -- ostracism and scapegoating for the new American project.

Whatever the Ducks are, the patriarch exactly voiced not just Right-wing zealotry when he disparaged homosexuality, but in fact the stance of mainline Christianity vis-a-vis homosexuality. As the late Christopher Hitchens wrote, you either are or you aren't. Cafeteria Christianity is no Christianity at all. 

The text for Christians, the bible, is clear in its stance against homosexuality. Therefore -- why would someone be ostracized for being Christian? Or are we so hypocritical that we hold these views, but may not voice them? Does constitutional freedom of speech no longer cover freedom of speech and religion?

Just last week it was reported that a Presbyterian minister was defrocked for wedding his gay son to his male lover. Show me the mainstream Christian church that marries gay couples and I will agree that Mr. Duck Sr. is being un-Christian. Until that day, he is being exactly Christian, and being ridiculed for it. Were he in a Brooks Brothers suit at the Washington National Cathedral, no one would bat an eye. 

New Yorker satirist Andy Borowitz hops on by writing in his fake story, "Scalia Calls 'Duck Dynasty' Decision Unconstitutional": 

He warned that the suspension of the "Duck" star would have a "chilling effect" on freedom of speech in America: "If Phil Robertson can be muzzled for expressing this perfectly legitimate view, what's to prevent the same thing from happening to, say, a Justice of the Supreme Court?

But Borowitz's attempt at satire is not. Mr. Robertson's "perfectly legitimate view" is not only that, but it is the raison d'etre for his hiring by A & E, and the exercise of those American rights which he is supposed to embody (free speech and religion).

It is completely disingenuous to feign disdain over his doctrinal thinking. It's a travesty for the media to yank us about, and for us to spend time doing anything but feeling disgust for the tripe we are mainlined on network t.v.

U.S.A. -- Ducks are us.

Handsome Harry

[Note: This is a belated OP- LP post. 
We will have another post up later.]

It resembles him. Still, I remember him as handsomer.
To the point of illness: that's how sensitive he was,
and it illumined his expression.
Handsomer, he seems to me,
now that my soul recalls him, out of Time
--Aboard the Ship, C. P. Cavafy

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all 
--Hamlet (III, i), Shakespeare  

"Oho!" they cried, "The world is wide,
But fettered limbs go lame!
And once, or twice, to throw the dice
Is a gentlemanly game,
But he does not win who plays with
Sin In the secret House of Shame." 
--The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde
 ____________________

Handsome Harry (2009) a quiet but powerful film which didn't get much play, but it deserves to be seen.  It is the story of a brutal act committed by three Electronic Technicians in the Navy during Vietnam wartime and how this violence has played out in each of their lives.

The plot revolves around the titular Harry, who is charged by the dying ET Thomas (Steve Buscemi) to ask for forgiveness from a fellow, Kagan, whom they severely brutalized while in a drunken fervor. Harry initially tells him not to be a "pussy" and to suck it up, but the layers of Harry's involvement and complicity are slowly revealed as he pursues the truth of the attack.

The origin of the violence resides in each man, dis-integrated in his own way, living within a more or less comfortable rationale to make life bearable. All the men had married a "nice"  woman, and had one child, but their bow to conformity did not provide consolation. The repercussions from the brutality meted out 30 years ago upon one of their own has haunted each man, but we discover the first cause in Harry himself.

As Harry visits each ET like an amateur sleuth, he is pulled from his safe, low-affect existence; repressed emotions will eventually out.

Spoiler alert: Harry cannot accept the passion he enjoyed in his forbidden relationship with Kagan, and so has lived the life of a semi-recluse and sexual neuter.  His example suggests that we don't know how to live with the raw power of eros, and so prefer to sublimate it. Harry's love is so strong and "disordered" (for one who sought to be a priest at one time) he must disfigure it, and by smashing it he disallows it into his realm.

He will only live his title ("handsome") in the rugged figural and superficial sense. By maiming Kagan he maims his psyche, while remaining handsome in the sense of Wilde's "Dorian Gray" -- the sense which our society most sanctions.  Under his surface calm, Harry is a roiling soup of contradictions.

"Handsome Harry" is a fine character study of a group of adolescents growing into men which grinds to its inexorable and ambiguous ending. Have you ever witnessed or participated in an action which required the suppression of your moral instinct, especially in the service?

Busted

So why don't you stay for the night? Or maybe a bite?
I could show you my favorite obsession.
I've been making a man with blond hair and a tan
And he's good for relieving my tension
--Sweet Transvestite, Rocky Horror Picture Show
_______

This is getting tijious, to use the southern phonological [tedious].

"Senator Larry E. Craig (R-ID) pleaded guilty earlier this month to misdemeanor disorderly-conduct charges stemming from his June arrest by an undercover police officer in a men's restroom at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, a court spokeswoman and the senator's office said yesterday (GOP Senator Pleaded Guilty After Restroom Arrest .)"

Apparently, the news just trickled down to the Senate. The Singin' Senator recently paid $500 in fines to Hennepin County and was placed on one year's probation beginning August 8, 2007.

Three-term Senator, Craig, 62, was a member of the Singing Senators barbershop quartet, which broke up when member John Ashcroft became the singin' Attorney General, and ran unsuccessfully in 2002 to become the GOP whip. A pity, that.

"While he was being interviewed about the bathroom incident, Craig gave police a business card showing that he is a U.S. senator. 'What do you think about that?' Craig asked the officer." Yawn. Just another hypocritical, anti-gay rights, pretty face from the Republican roll call.

If Craig doesn't run again, (former Governor Jim) "Risch has said he is interested in Craig's seat."

One has to be careful about the wording of these things.

--Lisa