Recently it involves piles of grading, last classes, final exams, term papers to grade, and lotsa meetings. I don't usually get a chance to show my face around church until 4th Advent. It looks like this year will be no different.
Sorry this blog has been so sparse lately, but I hope to have more frequent posting in time for Christmas.
Monday, December 10, 2012
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Comment Notice
Because of the flood of commercial spam for the Xmas season, the comment section now accepts only registered users, including open IDs, but no comments marked "anonymous." The junk is taking up too much space.
I don't want to resort to one of those eye-test word verifications to make sure comments aren't coming from robots.
I don't want to resort to one of those eye-test word verifications to make sure comments aren't coming from robots.
Saturday, December 8, 2012
The Supremes to Decide on Marriage Equality
The Supreme Court decided to hear arguments on 2 cases affecting marriage equality: Hollingsworth vs. Perry which challenges California's Proposition 8 banning same sex marriage, and United States vs. Windsor which challenges the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).
I have a bad feeling about this.
What does it say about the current state of the Supreme Court that we know with reasonable certainty how 4 of those Justices will rule, even before the arguments are presented? Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and probably Chief Justice Roberts will almost certainly vote against marriage equality. Justice Scalia has practically announced his intentions since the Lawrence vs. Texas decision that ended the criminalization of gays and lesbians in which he was the most strident of the dissenters.
Justices Sotomayor, Ginzburg, Kagan, and maybe Breyer might be reliable for a favorable decision, but that is not certain.
As usual, it all boils down to Justice Kennedy.
There is the possibility that the Justices could void all the existing policies in the 9 states that have marriage equality (an extreme measure that could have unintended consequences such as calling into doubt the Loving vs. Virginia ruling that voided state anti-miscegenation laws). More likely, they will simply leave the status quo in place by saying that states do have a right to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. Both of those outcomes would be enormous setbacks that will last for decades.
It is also possible that whatever the ruling on Proposition 8, it will apply only to California (which raises the question of why they wanted to hear the case in the first place) and rule on DOMA separately.
It is also possible that the Court will throw out both California's Proposition 8 and DOMA and state unequivocally that 14th Amendment protections apply to gays and lesbians and other sexual minorities, that LGBTs are indeed full citizens of the United States and as such, should not be subject to any disabling or discriminatory legislation.
I'm not optimistic about that last outcome. Whatever the decision, it's a safe bet that the Court will vote its usual 5-4 split. The days when Supreme Court Chief Justices worked for consensus on the bench are long over.
The Supreme Court is as starkly divided as Congress, reflecting a sharply divided electorate. There are 2 opposed and perhaps irreconcilable visions of the United States in conflict. One is the USA as a white Christian republic where enfranchisement is a privilege. The other is the USA as a cosmopolitan secular democracy where enfranchisement is a right. My loyalties are firmly with the latter.
EXTRA:
Linda Hirshman at The New Republic says that we should indeed worry about the Supremes taking on these cases. She points out that Bowers vs. Hardwick, which was a devastating loss for gay rights upholding state sodomy laws, was a reasonable gamble that lost 5 to 4.
It Must Be Christmas ...
The commercial spammers are getting very aggressive. Thanks be to Blogger for their spam detectors and for comment screening.
Here American Christmas gets the satire it so richly deserves.
Yes, I'll have something to say about the Supreme Court, but in the meantime, I have to go to work.
Here American Christmas gets the satire it so richly deserves.
Yes, I'll have something to say about the Supreme Court, but in the meantime, I have to go to work.
Friday, December 7, 2012
Pearl Harbor Day
I remember today my Uncle Jim (James E. Cory) who was a Marine stationed on the Arizona that morning. He was there when the bombs hit, and lived to tell about it.
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Oscar Niemeyer
The great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer died yesterday at the age of 104. A former protege of Le Corbusier, Niemeyer perhaps more than any other 20th century architect made International Modernism into a power style after World War II. Until the end of the war, modern design was largely confined to commercial and domestic architecture. You could use as much sheet glass and reinforced concrete as you wanted on a private home or a business, but city hall needed columns. The combined forces of Hitler and Stalin killed off classical architecture, poisoning it as any kind of viable public architecture for generations to come. Niemeyer shaped modern design to fill the vacuum in public architecture left by the destruction of classicism. Niemeyer made great progress in solving the conundrum of how to make modern design -- the creation of the modernist project to collapse the distinction between form and meaning through reductivism -- articulate public meaning.
It turns out that political leaders of all types from British MPs to Chinese cadres loved this new style, especially as Niemeyer developed it into a magnificent ceremonial architecture, still with lingering memories of the old classical order (the ghosts of those columned peristyles persist in Niemeyer's buildings in Brasilia). The new International Modern style said "Progress!" and "Science!" and "Technology!" The new style was as grand as the old, and seemed to look forward into a promised future rather than back into a glorious past.
Niemeyer was one of the original architects of the United Nations HQ in New York (together with Le Corbusier and Wallace Harrison). The UN Building was the first use ever of International Modernism on a large scale to house a major public institution. Governments and businesses everywhere immediately took notice when the buildings were completed.
The project that will forever be associated with Oscar Niemeyer is Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, and the largest and most ambitious project of International Modernism; an entire capital city built from scratch.
Juscelino Kubitschek became President of Brazil in 1956 and decided to fulfill an old ambition written into Brazil's 1891 constitution, to move the capital out of Rio de Janeiro to a place in the interior close to the center of the country. Kubitschek wanted to build a new capital city in the middle of the Brazilian interior. He wanted that new capital built in a new forward-looking modern design. After a competition involving over 5000 entries, Lucio Costa was awarded the commission to design the new city's layout, and Oscar Niemeyer received the commission to design and build the city's major buildings. For the first time ever, an entire capital city would be designed and built using the International Modernist style. Brasilia would be Niemeyer's most famous and important accomplishment. The city center was completed and ready to be occupied in 1960.
I must admit to very mixed feelings about Brasilia. First off, I must confess that I've never been there. I know the place only from pictures and second hand accounts. Even so, to me the city now looks very dated. Few things age more poorly than Visions of Tomorrow. Niemeyer and Costa followed Le Corbusier's lead in city planning. Everything would be planned around the automobile, just as in Le Corbusier's Voisin plan and in his idea of The Radiant City. That idea of planning cities around cars is itself very dated. Today, Brasilia is a notoriously hostile city to pedestrians as a result, and it's not that much more friendly to drivers with its broad boulevards and multi-lane highways constantly choked with traffic. As beautiful as Brasilia can be, it is not very kind to the people who live there. It also doesn't help that it is in so remote and isolated a place in the Brazilian interior, miles away from the nearest town of any consequence.
Dated as Brasilia is, some of its original state buildings designed by Niemeyer have held up remarkably well over time, and are still gratifying.
EXTRA:
Brazil says farewell to Oscar Niemeyer.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
AIDS Day
Today is World AIDS day
Below is an encore of my post from December 4, 2010:
... down the old All-American memory hole along with a quarter million dead.
I'm reading David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives again after more than ten years. The passage describing Peter Hujar's death from the disease is more powerful than I remember. What a writer! and with only a limited education! Wojnarowicz never finished high school. His first hand account of the AIDS catastrophe will bring back a flood of memories for those who lived through it. It certainly did for me.
I'm amazed at how thoroughly the whole disaster has dropped off the radar. Everyone assumes that it is "over." It is "over" only in the sense that the threat of nuclear war is "over." Now, it seems to be in the process of being forgotten, perhaps deliberately. HIV infection rates among young gay men in New York are on their way back up as safe sex becomes so passe.
I cannot help but wonder how different the public and official response to the disease would have been if it swept through the affluent suburban white population. All men may be created equal according to Mr. Jefferson, and they may be officially equal in the eyes of the law, but they are certainly not equal in the eyes of government policy or their neighbors. AIDS first struck in this country in the midst of a still much despised minority, gay men.
Wojnarowicz reminds us of just how bad the response was for the first 10 years of the epidemic. There was the official policy of malign neglect by the Reagan and Bush I administrations (at the time, Haiti had a more enlightened and successful AIDS policy). There were all the stories of panic. William F. Buckley (who usually knew better) proposed tatooing HIV positive gay men. There was Proposition 64 out in California to quarantine all gay men in internment camps, cooked up by paranoid cult figure Lyndon LaRouche and enthusiastically endorsed by Congressman William E. Dannemeyer. The Catholic Archdiocese under Cardinal O'Connor successfully blocked efforts by New York City's public health department to promote safe sex practices. There was the constant distinction in political rhetoric and in the commercial media between "innocent" AIDS victims and "others" (i.e. gay men). The most famous of all of those "innocent" victims, Ryan White insisted, to his credit, that all AIDS victims were innocent.
I can remember when those diagnosed with AIDS were immediately cut off by the insurance industry. Many who had been successful affluent professionals died in poverty, as well as in agony, because of these policies. I remember that my mother had a terrible time for awhile finding health insurance because she was in a profession with so many gay men, physical therapy. Her employer's health insurance company cut everybody off, and it was a long time before they found another provider. I remember when legions of newly uninsured gay men found themselves admitted to Saint Louis City County hospital where they were treated very badly by a hostile staff. They found themselves prey to religious fanatics and petty criminals encouraged by the hospital staff. There was only a handful of doctors in Saint Louis prepared when the epidemic hit the area, and a smaller number willing to play the system to keep their patients out of City County and to get them cared for. To their credit, Saint Mary's Hospital in Saint Louis had a resident immunologist who prepared his staff for the disease, and was ready when the epidemic struck. Barnes Hospital had good care provided you had a doctor willing to work the system to get you in (Barnes was notorious for turning away the uninsured in those days).
Then there were all the landlords in Saint Louis evicting AIDS sufferers and the HIV positive. I remember Father Charles Bewick, an Anglican priest from London recently fired from the Anglican Institute in Saint Louis (and recently hired by my parish as an assistant priest) founded Open Doors, the first advocacy group for housing AIDS sufferers in Saint Louis, and perhaps one of the first such groups in the country. He faced torrents of abuse from landlords and property owners, and he suffered from the disease himself, but, he never backed down, and succeeded in keeping at least a few from living in the streets.
I consider myself to be very lucky. I continue to test negative for the disease. I certainly lost a lot of friends, but I never lost partners or family to the disease.
The response of the gay community at first was not quite the heroic one we've come to believe. The first response was denial. There were accusations that the disease was everything from a media hoax to a genocidal government conspiracy. Those now legendary support and treatment groups were the creations of desperate necessity. It soon became clear that there was no help coming from a hostile public or hostile government who would have been only too pleased to see the disease rid them of a nuisance population. AIDS sufferers were sitting ducks for all kinds of quacks and frauds. Wojnarowicz writes about his dying partner, Peter Hujar, requesting to be driven out to a "doctor" out on Long Island who treated dying AIDS patients with injections of typhoid. Wojnarowicz's account of the trip out to that "doctor" is harrowing.
Desperation drove the aggression of ACT-UP in its early days (Wojnarowicz was a member and participated in some of their confrontations). The famous/ notorious ACT-UP strike on Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York that disrupted a Mass was seen at the time as self-defeating over-reach by the group. In retrospect, it may actually have been a breakthrough. It sent a clear message to a lot of people beyond the cathedral walls that those in positions of power and responsibility would not be safe from ACT-UP or other activists. If activists are willing to hit the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, disrupting Mass in the cathedral, then why should Pfizer or Glaxo or Blue Cross or the Centers for Disease Control, or the federal government assume that they would be safe from them? These extreme acts (the most extreme was probably throwing cremated remains on the White House lawn) eventually kicked the ogre in the shins with sufficient force to get his attention and to make him rethink his policies. A lot of people fought hard (and died hard) to win those government programs and insurance reforms for the treatment of AIDS patients. Even the medication "cocktail" had to be fought for. It was the creation of only a handful of researchers, and then there was a long hard fight to make it affordable and available to anyone beyond the most affluent.
So, now we assume that AIDS is "over." Far from it. The disease is only on stand-by. The creators of the cocktail are quite clear that they have not invented a cure. They've only delayed an inevitable death sentence. People still die from the disease. It is no longer the immediate death sentence that it once was. We now talk of living with the disease, but most who have it will eventually die from it. That happened to my good friend John Boone over the summer. He had the disease for years and was on extensive medication that kept him reasonably healthy.
Just because we're tired of hearing about the wolf doesn't mean he's not still at the door trying to get in and kill us all.
Now it appears that the face of AIDS has changed its color. It is no longer exclusively a disease of gay men. White gay men were the public face of the disease for a long time (never mind that it affected minority gay men disproportionately). Around the world, the disease overwhelming affects heterosexuals and is passed through heterosexual sex (especially in Africa and increasingly in southern Asia and eastern Europe). Another very despised group disproportionately affected is intravenous drug users. AIDS forces societies into very existential ethical questions: what to do with undesirable and superfluous populations. People of decency and good will are rightfully horrified that this is even a question.
"Normal men do not know that everything is possible," said David Rousset, a journalist and survivor of Buchenwald.
Peter Hujar, photographed shortly after his death by David Wojnarowicz, November 26, 1987
Below is an encore of my post from December 4, 2010:
AIDS Disappeared
I'm reading David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives again after more than ten years. The passage describing Peter Hujar's death from the disease is more powerful than I remember. What a writer! and with only a limited education! Wojnarowicz never finished high school. His first hand account of the AIDS catastrophe will bring back a flood of memories for those who lived through it. It certainly did for me.
I'm amazed at how thoroughly the whole disaster has dropped off the radar. Everyone assumes that it is "over." It is "over" only in the sense that the threat of nuclear war is "over." Now, it seems to be in the process of being forgotten, perhaps deliberately. HIV infection rates among young gay men in New York are on their way back up as safe sex becomes so passe.
I cannot help but wonder how different the public and official response to the disease would have been if it swept through the affluent suburban white population. All men may be created equal according to Mr. Jefferson, and they may be officially equal in the eyes of the law, but they are certainly not equal in the eyes of government policy or their neighbors. AIDS first struck in this country in the midst of a still much despised minority, gay men.
Wojnarowicz reminds us of just how bad the response was for the first 10 years of the epidemic. There was the official policy of malign neglect by the Reagan and Bush I administrations (at the time, Haiti had a more enlightened and successful AIDS policy). There were all the stories of panic. William F. Buckley (who usually knew better) proposed tatooing HIV positive gay men. There was Proposition 64 out in California to quarantine all gay men in internment camps, cooked up by paranoid cult figure Lyndon LaRouche and enthusiastically endorsed by Congressman William E. Dannemeyer. The Catholic Archdiocese under Cardinal O'Connor successfully blocked efforts by New York City's public health department to promote safe sex practices. There was the constant distinction in political rhetoric and in the commercial media between "innocent" AIDS victims and "others" (i.e. gay men). The most famous of all of those "innocent" victims, Ryan White insisted, to his credit, that all AIDS victims were innocent.
I can remember when those diagnosed with AIDS were immediately cut off by the insurance industry. Many who had been successful affluent professionals died in poverty, as well as in agony, because of these policies. I remember that my mother had a terrible time for awhile finding health insurance because she was in a profession with so many gay men, physical therapy. Her employer's health insurance company cut everybody off, and it was a long time before they found another provider. I remember when legions of newly uninsured gay men found themselves admitted to Saint Louis City County hospital where they were treated very badly by a hostile staff. They found themselves prey to religious fanatics and petty criminals encouraged by the hospital staff. There was only a handful of doctors in Saint Louis prepared when the epidemic hit the area, and a smaller number willing to play the system to keep their patients out of City County and to get them cared for. To their credit, Saint Mary's Hospital in Saint Louis had a resident immunologist who prepared his staff for the disease, and was ready when the epidemic struck. Barnes Hospital had good care provided you had a doctor willing to work the system to get you in (Barnes was notorious for turning away the uninsured in those days).
Then there were all the landlords in Saint Louis evicting AIDS sufferers and the HIV positive. I remember Father Charles Bewick, an Anglican priest from London recently fired from the Anglican Institute in Saint Louis (and recently hired by my parish as an assistant priest) founded Open Doors, the first advocacy group for housing AIDS sufferers in Saint Louis, and perhaps one of the first such groups in the country. He faced torrents of abuse from landlords and property owners, and he suffered from the disease himself, but, he never backed down, and succeeded in keeping at least a few from living in the streets.
I consider myself to be very lucky. I continue to test negative for the disease. I certainly lost a lot of friends, but I never lost partners or family to the disease.
The response of the gay community at first was not quite the heroic one we've come to believe. The first response was denial. There were accusations that the disease was everything from a media hoax to a genocidal government conspiracy. Those now legendary support and treatment groups were the creations of desperate necessity. It soon became clear that there was no help coming from a hostile public or hostile government who would have been only too pleased to see the disease rid them of a nuisance population. AIDS sufferers were sitting ducks for all kinds of quacks and frauds. Wojnarowicz writes about his dying partner, Peter Hujar, requesting to be driven out to a "doctor" out on Long Island who treated dying AIDS patients with injections of typhoid. Wojnarowicz's account of the trip out to that "doctor" is harrowing.
Desperation drove the aggression of ACT-UP in its early days (Wojnarowicz was a member and participated in some of their confrontations). The famous/ notorious ACT-UP strike on Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York that disrupted a Mass was seen at the time as self-defeating over-reach by the group. In retrospect, it may actually have been a breakthrough. It sent a clear message to a lot of people beyond the cathedral walls that those in positions of power and responsibility would not be safe from ACT-UP or other activists. If activists are willing to hit the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, disrupting Mass in the cathedral, then why should Pfizer or Glaxo or Blue Cross or the Centers for Disease Control, or the federal government assume that they would be safe from them? These extreme acts (the most extreme was probably throwing cremated remains on the White House lawn) eventually kicked the ogre in the shins with sufficient force to get his attention and to make him rethink his policies. A lot of people fought hard (and died hard) to win those government programs and insurance reforms for the treatment of AIDS patients. Even the medication "cocktail" had to be fought for. It was the creation of only a handful of researchers, and then there was a long hard fight to make it affordable and available to anyone beyond the most affluent.
So, now we assume that AIDS is "over." Far from it. The disease is only on stand-by. The creators of the cocktail are quite clear that they have not invented a cure. They've only delayed an inevitable death sentence. People still die from the disease. It is no longer the immediate death sentence that it once was. We now talk of living with the disease, but most who have it will eventually die from it. That happened to my good friend John Boone over the summer. He had the disease for years and was on extensive medication that kept him reasonably healthy.
Just because we're tired of hearing about the wolf doesn't mean he's not still at the door trying to get in and kill us all.
Now it appears that the face of AIDS has changed its color. It is no longer exclusively a disease of gay men. White gay men were the public face of the disease for a long time (never mind that it affected minority gay men disproportionately). Around the world, the disease overwhelming affects heterosexuals and is passed through heterosexual sex (especially in Africa and increasingly in southern Asia and eastern Europe). Another very despised group disproportionately affected is intravenous drug users. AIDS forces societies into very existential ethical questions: what to do with undesirable and superfluous populations. People of decency and good will are rightfully horrified that this is even a question.
"Normal men do not know that everything is possible," said David Rousset, a journalist and survivor of Buchenwald.
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