While that gay quisling group, GOProud, that wants to bleach the rainbow flag, dominates the news, the gay future is quietly being created in, of all places, the still very gay hostile South.
It turns out that the city with the highest number of gay families (couples with children) in the USA is not New York or San Francisco, but Jacksonville, Florida.
Where the public face of Gay Lib has always been white, male, and affluent, the reality behind that face was always much more minority and poor (even among white gay boys, there are a whole lot more of them from blue-collar backgrounds and in low income jobs than most people assume). The majority of gay families in the USA are Black or Hispanic or mixed race, female, low income, church-going, and living in the South.
If everyone is supposed to pack heat to protect themselves from each other and from their own government, then I have an idea. Let's save ourselves a whole lot of tax money and get rid of the police, and while we're at it, let's just go ahead and get rid of the whole justice system, all of it from traffic court to the US Supreme Court. Let's go back to precivilized days when disputes and offenses were settled by vendetta. Revenge is so much more emotionally satisfying than justice anyway.
The World Book Encyclopedia and Coronet Films. That was my education.
Thank you Sweet Jesus I lived long enough to see something like Wikipedia! A lot of good information constantly under review, constantly being expanded and updated, it can't help but get better (and it has). And, it's all for free!
My inner educator and my inner Anarcho-Syndicalist couldn't be happier!
Striking sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968; their slogan on the signs, "I Am A Man," was their own creation.
Speaking of civility, here's something you don't hear anymore, a real fire and brimstone sermon about social justice. Strong stuff. I doubt it would pass the civility test, and I doubt King would care.
King believed that economic justice was crucial to social justice, that political democracy meant nothing without economic democracy. He maintained close ties with organized labor (especially with Walter Reuther of the UAW). He delivered this sermon just days before his murder. He had just arrived in Memphis to support a strike by city sanitation workers over dangerous working conditions. Two workers were killed by malfunctioning trucks, the object of worker complaints for many years. Their deaths caused 90% of Memphis' almost all black sanitation workers to strike.
Here is an excerpt from that sermon in which Dr. King applies the parable of Dives and Lazarus:
You know, Jesus reminded us in a magnificent parable one day that a man went to Hell because he didn't see the poor. And his name was Dives. There was a man by the name of Lazarus who came daily to his gate in need of the basic necessities of life. Dives didn't do anything about it. He ended up going to Hell.
But there is nothing in that parable that says that Dives went to Hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came before him talking about eternal life. And he advised him to sell all. But in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery, and not setting forth a universal diagnosis.
If you will go on and read that parable in all of its dimensions, and all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took place between Heaven and Hell. And on the other end of that long distance call between heaven and Hell was Abraham in Heaven talking to Dives in Hell. It wasn't a millionaire in Hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn't go to Hell because he was rich. His wealth was an opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus.
Dives went to Hell because he passed by Lazarus every day, but he never really saw him. Dives went to Hell because he allowed Lazarus to become invisible. Dives went to Hell because he allowed the means by which he lived to outdistance the ends forwhich he lived. Dives went to Hell because he maximized the minimum, and minimized the maximum. Dives finally went to Hell because he wanted to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.
And I come by here to say that America too is going to Hell, if we don't use her wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell. I will hear America through her historians years and years to come saying, "We built gigantic buildings to kiss the sky. We build gargantuan bridges to span the seas. Through our spaceships we were able to carve highways through the stratosphere. Through our airplanes we were able to dwarf distance and place time in chains. Through our submarines we were able to penetrate oceanic depths."But it seems that I can hear the God of the universe saying, "even though you've done all of that, I was hungry and you fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not. The children of my sons and daughters were in need of economic security, and you didn't provide for them. So you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness." This may well be the indictment on America that says in Memphis to the mayor, to the power structure, "If you do it unto the least of these my brethren, you do it unto me."…
Hat tip to the Brian Lehrer Show and this short segment which is well worth listening to.
I've been to Florence twice now, so I figured it was time to read E.M. Forster's A Room With A View while I was on vacation, a very short novel. I found that whole lost Edwardian English world of niceness-and-propriety-at-all-costs to be excruciating. I quickly figured out that's what Forster intended, and warmed to the book. I ended up liking it very much and finding it very moving, even though it describes a world and a set of issues so very different from ours.
Here is a scene from the 1985 movie version of the novel, a very dramatic and very key scene in the novel. Our heroine, Lucy Honeychurch, becomes the unwilling witness to a murder in the Piazza Signoria. Young George Emerson rescues her.
I suppose it's inevitable to find movie versions of stories to be disappointing, but I think the Merchant Ivory team lost the whole thread of the story in the period costumes and magnificent setting. In the novel, the scene takes place at twilight. Lucy has just bought a set of photo reproductions (significantly all of famous nude paintings considered disreputable by respectable Victorian English opinion). The anonymous man is murdered during a quarrel over money, very much as the movie shows us. Lucy in the movie is very much as I would imagine, but George in the novel is very different from the poised figure in the movie. In the novel, he is very young, and much more visibly lower class (certainly far below Lucy's social station). George in the novel is indeed very gallant as he is in the movie, but much more shaken and anxious. He throws away the photos much more impulsively in the novel, and his tone with Lucy as he tries to explain that something has "happened" to both of them is much more anxious and even desperate. George is just as fresh and uncertain as Lucy is. The whole novel is about the two of them "coming of age," leaving behind the fancies of youth for the much graver matters of adulthood. The murder in the Piazza is the beginning of that process for both of them.
Aesthetics (personified by Florence and Italy) plays a very large and challenging role in the novel. The English tourists and ex-pats are very proud of their erudition and taste in matters of art, and yet Forster describes their living quarters as dark, cramped, and even tasteless. The Reverend Mr. Eager, rector of the English church in Florence (where I attended evensong on my last visit), is a ferocious Pharisee in the novel, a ruthless enforcer of social norms, and frightfully bigoted despite his fluency in Italian. The other cleric, the Reverend Mr. Beebe, is quite a bit more liberal and approachable, but is in the end, just as committed to enforcing social convention as Reverend Eager. Their tastes in art run to very "safe" mediocrities like Alessio Baldovinetti, and others perceived at the time as "safe" like Fra Angelico. Giotto is just tolerated, while Donatello and Michelangelo are unspeakable (precisely because they arouse strong emotions, especially sexual ones). The Beautiful for them, and for conventional English society, is a retreat, a refuge from the mess (and the demands) of life. Forster makes it clear that all of these people miss the point of Florence and of its art. Art is not supposed to be an escape from life and its demands, but a portal back into them, a way of returning to life with eyes refreshed and opened a little wider. Lucy and George do figure this out on their own. They get to the heart of the matter by trial and error in a way that all of the erudition and pedantry of their fellows completely misses.
The other thing that I found so remarkable about the story is Forster's generosity toward almost all of his characters. Even cads are granted their moments of sympathy and genuine feeling. Lucy's awful supercilious fiance Cecil Vyse acts unexpectedly nobly, and we feel real sympathy for him when Lucy breaks their engagement.
A badly decayed painting of the Nativity by Alessio Baldovinetti in Santissima Annunziata in Florence whose background landscape plays a large role in Forster's novel.
ADDENDUM:
Here is one of my favorite paragraphs in the whole book:
The Piazza Signoria is too stony to be brilliant. It has no grass, no flowers, no frescoes, no glittering walls of marble or comforting patches of ruddy brick. By an odd chance -- unless we believe in a presiding genius of place -- the statues that relieve its severity suggest, not the innocence of childhood nor the glorious bewilderment of youth, but the conscious achievements of maturity. Perseus and Judith, Hercules and Thusnelda, they have done or suffered something, and, though they are immortal, immortality has come to them after experience, not before. Here, not only in the solitude of Nature, might a hero meet a goddess, or a heroine a god.
