Mubarak is digging in determined to hang on to power no matter what. He is now at war with his own people (the very definition of a tyrant).
I wonder if any Western leader could get away with a speech like his yesterday. Here is the opening line of that speech:
I am addressing the youth of Egypt today in Tahrir Square and across the country. I am addressing you all from the heart, a father's dialogue with his sons and daughters.
The word "paternalism" immediately comes to mind. It must have sounded galling to people struggling so hard and risking so much to be treated as adults and as equal citizens. You can read the full text of the speech on the BBC here. It does not get any better with further reading.
This tiny little insignificant blog stands with the people of Egypt as they struggle to claim their own history after watching it or suffering it for so long. I wish them every success as their struggle appears to be entering a critical phase.
May the Great Sphinx of Giza at long last greet a dawn where the sun rises no more on any pharaoh, emperor, foreign conqueror, sultan, imperial colonist, or dictator, but on a free people.
The Union of the Two Lands, the national emblem of ancient Egypt and the world's first national emblem. Hapi, the hermaphroditic god of the Nile, appears twice, tying the lotus of Upper Egypt in a knot together with the papyrus of Lower Egypt upon the hieroglyphic sign for "unity." It appears here on a monument to Pharaoh Ramses II (1279 - 1213 BC).
This year marks my 20th year living in New York. I've now lived in New York City as long as I lived in Texas. This is also the 10th anniversary of the worst single calamity in the city's history, the September 11th attacks. I'd rather not commemorate it with a series of angry/ sorrowful rants.
I want to do a series of posts on my adopted city using some photos that I plan to take myself. I plan to borrow Michael's digital camera (or maybe purchase my own by that time), and take some pictures around town of neighborhoods and landmarks. The weather's just too cold right now, and my time is limited, so I'll put it off for the summer.
There is now a struggle over how David Kato's murder is to be understood. The Ugandan police, in moves strikingly similar to what police departments once did routinely in this country thirty years ago, is explaining away David Kato's murder with a "gay panic" defense, that he was murdered by a man he had hired as a prostitute. Somehow, this story, if true (and I think not; it's too clumsy and too obviously self-serving), is supposed to absolve Uganda's religious and political leadership (and their right-wing American backers) from their responsibility for creating the toxic atmosphere of paranoia and hysteria that puts the lives of Uganda's small LGBT community in great peril. We're supposed to assume that there was absolutely no connection between a major national tabloid putting Kato's picture on it's cover page under a banner headline that said "Hang Him!" and his murder a week or so later. We're supposed to assume that there is no connection between the unhinged and violent rhetoric of American evangelicals like Scott Lively, and the even more violent and unhinged rhetoric of their Ugandan followers and Kato's murder.
Fr. Mark Harris has some good commentary on the struggle over Kato's legacy, but what's really fascinating is the war going on in the comments thread. There's more fighting in the comment thread here. Yours truly freely fesses up to jumping in there and duking it out.
In one sense, the Phobes are right. David Kato had it coming. He was not a nice man. He did not play nice. Far from being a civil-at-all-costs Anglican, he fearlessly challenged the conventional wisdom of his country, calling people out and calling them names. He dared to live openly as a gay man in a country that wants to criminalize people like him. He knew he was in a minority, a tiny hard-pressed despised minority, but he dared to tell the majority of his countrymen that they were wrong. He paid for it with his blood.
As far as I'm concerned, there is no middle ground in this struggle. One side wants freedom and dignity for sexual minorities. The other side wants all sexual variation purged from the face of the earth. It doesn't matter if the means are the violent and final means used by Kato's murderers, or somehow "curing" the homosexual, the end result is the same. Same sex people and same sex attraction are exterminated.
Michael and I have made a nice home together over the last 7 years. I'll do what it takes to defend that home. I'm not going back to the bad old days without a fight. I'll do all I can by any means necessary to keep the clock from being turned back.
And there is no shortage of people who want to turn the clock back for sexual minorities, and then some. Take a look at what's making its way through the Iowa House.
This movie has long been a favorite of mine, and has been on my mind lately.
It was filmed in the summer of 1974 all on location in Nashville and used a lot of the local population as extras. Many of the actors wrote and performed their own music. On the surface, it's another showbiz yarn of the kind Hollywood has produced for decades. There are the brave and plucky strivers on their way up, and the stars always anxious about finding themselves on the way down. Usually those stories are set on Broadway or in Hollywood. This one is set in "the Hillbilly Hollywood," Nashville, center of the Country Western music industry. On a deeper level, the movie tells a story about that combination of talent, celebrity, money, and politics that is American public life, and about its effects on the lives of individuals and on the country as a whole.
Altman used a large ensemble of actors playing a group of characters whose separate lives and ambitions gradually weave together toward the movie's climax. Altman's very novel techniques of fragmentary dialogue and editing make the story a little hard to follow at first, but we quickly find ourselves riveted by what unfolds before us. The story reveals itself through momentary glimpses into the lives of several individual people. Each of those people is a fascinating story in themselves.
The movie opens with Henry Gibson playing a very established Nashville star, Haven Hamilton, who despite his professions of political neutrality, is very transparently politically ambitious. Lady Pearl, played by Barbara Baxley, is the divorced Hamilton's companion. She owns and runs one of the larger and more famous night spots in Nashville, and ruefully obsesses over the late Kennedy brothers. The songwriter Ronee Blakely plays the physically and emotionally fragile grand diva Barbara Jean, who is very loosely modeled on Loretta Lynn ("fragile" is one word I'd never use to describe Loretta Lynn). Barbara Jean's spectacular entrance in the movie, and her even more spectacular exit, bracket the film's whole narrative. Allen Garfield plays Barbara Jean's over-protective, controlling, and even bullying husband-manager Barnett. Karen Black plays Connie White, a star of mediocre talent who is Barbara Jean's bitter rival. Barbara Jean has two obsessed fans who follow her throughout the movie and come together dramatically at the end. One is a soldier just back from Vietnam named Glenn Kelly played by a very young Scott Glenn. The other is a sad and mysterious loner named Kenny Frazier played by David Hayward. There is the sad and troubled country-folk trio, Bill, Mary, and Tom. Bill, played by Alan F. Nichols, and Mary, played by Cristina Raines, are having a severe crisis in their marriage. The source of their trouble is the third member of the trio, Tom Frank, played by a scrumptious young Keith Carradine. For all of his political posturing (and ambition), Tom is a cold hearted narcissistic scoundrel, a womanizer and a backstabber. He's carrying on an affair with Mary while bedding down with about 3 other women in the movie. At the same time, he's trying to set himself up independently and at Bill and Mary's expense. There are the strivers. A young waitress in an airport diner named Sueleen Gay (played by Gwen Welles) aspires to be a big time diva, but has no talent. When Sueleen's big moment of opportunity comes, she ends up painfully humiliated. Robert DuQuoi plays Wade Cooley, the cook at the diner who is Sueleen's close friend and protector. Barbara Harris plays an aspiring young singer-songwriter named Winifred who ditches her brute of a husband. He chases her throughout the movie, and we get little glimpses of her determined struggle for success. It is only at the end of the movie that we finally hear her sing as her big debut opportunity lands so suddenly and unexpectedly in her lap. To her great credit, she is ready for it. Among the agents of power and money is local businessman Del Reese played by Ned Beatty as an affable good-ol'-boy cynic. Lily Tomlin plays his wife, Linea, a gospel singer who has her fidelity problems despite her devotion to their 2 deaf children. John Triplette (played by Michael Murphy) is a political operative from California for the mysterious presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker. He's a cold calculating smooth-talker who feels nothing but contempt for the local people he must recruit into the campaign. Comic relief comes in the form of a "BBC reporter" (most likely a groupie) named Opal played by Geraldine Chaplin who always interrupts at the most awkward moments inserting herself among the celebrities.
Yes, it's a big cast, and that's not even all of them.
Here's a sample of the movie that begins with Opal having a drink with Lady Pearl who gloomily remembers those Kennedy boys:
We see Bill confessing to his sadly correct suspicions about Mary. Mary and Tom are in bed together while listening to a tape of him singing. Then we see a beautiful and poignant sequence showing Sunday morning in Nashville and many of the characters in church. The scene underscores the role of religion as a sustaining force for people as individuals and communities. Sadly, it also shows religion as a very divisive force. Spouses are shown in separate churches. People are separated by sectarian, racial, and class differences in their respective churches. Then Opal waxes poetic in a junkyard in a hilarious scene that follows. Winifred still grabs that opportunity to sing even though no one can possibly hear her over the Nascar races.
Here is another splendid sequence with a taste of some of the magnificent musical performances in this movie. Ronee Blakely plays Country diva Barbara Jean performing at Opryland.
This movie came out in the immediate wake of Watergate, and was released the year the Vietnam War ended. The movie refers to them obliquely, especially at the end. The violence and assassinations of the 1960s make their appearance at the end of the film. Assassinations perhaps are the ultimate intersection of celebrity, power, obsession, and paranoia, so this movie suggests. This movie is about that tangled mix of yearning, preconception, possibility, and reality that is present in so much American public life. Sometimes, all of those things come together, but more frequently, they collide. The movie very strongly suggests the ability of power and money to manipulate those yearnings to fulfill ambitions for domination. People's hopes and dreams become turned against them in a siren song intended to lead them on. In the last 35 years or so since this movie came out, those basic insights only grew more true. Perhaps that is the source of this movie's continuing power and resonance.
Perhaps this deserves a separate post and more attention:
There are so many Americans and so much American money involved in this. I agree with Rachel that perhaps our government should be taking the lead in this situation.
It appears that the Ugandan police are changing their story about David Kato's recent murder (another press report here). They've dropped the botched robbery plot, and now appear to be creating a "gay panic" story. That's the old saw about the faggot who had it coming because he made a pass at the murderer. That might play well with the Ugandan public (well, maybe most of them, but not all); but, that's a line of defense that no Western jury would buy anymore, not even in Mississippi. I'm dismayed, but not surprised. Police, district attorneys, and defense attorneys in this country used that same story for decades when gay men were murdered. They stopped using it only when juries stopped believing it was a legitimate excuse to murder anyone.
What I find striking is the broad silence about Kato's murder on the right side of the fractured Anglican Communion (Kato was Anglican). So far as I know, no primate or bishop who signed or endorsed the Jerusalem Declaration has made any public statement about Kato's murder. Archbishop Orombi of Uganda remains silent, as does "Archbishop" Robert Duncan of the splinter Anglican Church in North America. I hope that silence is out of embarrassment. I'm sure they are thanking God that the turmoil in Egypt knocked the story of Kato's death out of the headlines (Rachel Maddow's promised in-depth story of Kato's death got preempted by accelerating events in Egypt).
The only ones I know who are speaking out about Kato's death from the right are extremists and the anonymous paranoid ranters who lately have been dominating the comment threads on Father Mark Harris' blog, Preludium. I should think they are only compounding the embarrassed silence of the right wing leadership.
Scott Lively, a man who I hold indirectly culpable for Kato's death, hasn't backed down a bit. He recently issued this statement:
"These revolutionists of Sodom, who march triumphantly through all the major cities of the western world to flaunt their defeat of moral law, and who hold both Hollywood and the heart of America’s president in their iron grip: These very same zealots have fixed their malevolent gaze on Christian Uganda. [snip] There is indeed evil in Uganda today, but it is not the reaction of Christian and Moslem citizens to the rape of their culture. It is the pink-gloved hand of western powers that are cutting the throat of Africa’s most God-fearing country, and one of the world‘s most promising Christian democracies."
And here is a small sample from one of the anonymous ranters on Father Harris' blog:
That it is not Christian Ethics 101 to turn the tragic death of a man in Uganda into a cause? That it is not ethical to say that a man as killed because of Gay hate, when one does not know this for sure? That it is not correct to say that Christians who appeal to marriage as the teaching of Christ are on a slippery slope to violence against practicing homosexuals? but in fact love them and defend their civil rights even as they believe Christ calls them to a different life in Him? What we have observed instead is a kind of inversion of 'Pharisee self-righteous' condemning.
No wonder the bishops are keeping their mouths shut and hoping this all blows over.
We don't forget our dead. David Kato now sadly joins the ranks of Harvey Milk, Fanny Ann Eddy, Matthew Shepard, the victims of the Upstairs Lounge fire, and legions of others in our too-large necrology.
The other side may claim martyrdom, but their roll of those who died at the hands of the heathen liberals is blank.
ADDENDUM:
President Obama pointedly referred to David Kato's death, without naming him, at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning. Bishop Gene Robinson urged the President to mention David Kato, and the plight of Uganda's gays and lesbians in his speech. The National Prayer Breakfast is presented by The Family, the powerful right-wing religious group that is largely financing the anti-gay campaign in Uganda.
UPDATE:
Rachel Maddow finally did her report on Kato's death last night. She proposes, I think very plausibly, that so much of this trouble is driven by impending national elections in Uganda. She also points out that the Ugandan police publicly dismissed any suggestion that Kato's murder was motivated by hatred even before they had begun their investigation (sounds so much like any police department here in this country about 30 years ago).
The Step Pyramid and Tomb Complex of the Pharaoh Zoser at Saqqara in Egypt, ca 2650 BC.
Entrance to Zoser's Tomb Complex with the Step Pyramid, Saqqara, Egypt
The Step Pyramid and Tomb Complex of Pharaoh Zoser is history's first major masterpiece of architecture designed by the first recorded master architect, Imhotep, the king's minister of public works. Stonehenge was still under construction when this pyramid, the first in Egypt, was completed. Imhotep's accomplishments were so celebrated in ancient Egyptian memory that later generations worshiped him as a god of medicine and the arts.
My thoughts and prayers are with the Egyptian people as they struggle valiantly to write a new chapter in the long history of their country, a country as old as history itself. I wish them success in their fight to take control of their own destiny, and to emerge at last out of the shadows of pharaohs, foreign conquerors, emperors, caliphs, sultans, imperial colonists, and dictators.
I have no idea what will ultimately happen, but I wish them well.
The Union of the Two Lands, the national emblem of ancient Egypt and the world's first national emblem. Hapi, the hermaphroditic god of the Nile, appears twice, tying the lotus of Upper Egypt in a knot together with the papyrus of Lower Egypt upon the hieroglyphic sign for "unity." It appears here on a monument to Pharaoh Ramses II (1279 - 1213 BC).
