alias Bruce.

The George Zimmerman Trayvon Martin acquittal takes the anger of we black men

to a whole new level.

Me, I am so angry right now that I barely know how to write how angry I am. I am so goddamned angry I could spit hot nails and then take a boiling bath to cool off. I am so angry I could make a movie about 10 million black men going out and buying handguns and starting target practice collectives. And it would be a documentary.

That's what happens when six people on a Florida jury conclude that a white man can seek out, pursue, antagonize and then shoot to death an unarmed black boy but not be guilty of murder or manslaughter. While 200 million white Americans, whether they are outraged at the verdict or not, still feel entitled to walk around in public with a feeling of relative safety.

Whether George Zimmerman had been acquitted Saturday or not, most white people would and do still expect to be able to go to the store on any given night and walk down the street with their Skittles and iced tea without being hunted and/or shot, whether by the police or by a wanna-be cop. And most black and brown people, especially black and brown males, do not.

And now that Trayvon is the latest of us to be waylaid with impunity while white people – including those with sympathetic or even passionately empathic intentions – will still get to drop by the convenience store without thought of being racially stalked, I as a black man feel a plume of rage that gives me empathy for your average volcano. Multiply that by millions and you can do the emotional math on what churns in the innards of black males nationwide.

I am angry that any white person anywhere in the United States of America can wake up in their bed this morning and believe that anything about their life as a white person, anything at all, is normal: the way whites can hurry down the highway without fearing that their mere whiteness will get them "accidentally" shot in a car search by a race-conditioned state trooper instead of simply being fined for speeding; the way whites can innocently and thoughtlessly walk through a department store without thinking about how their mere whiteness might get them followed by a race-trained store detective; the way whites can wait for friends in a hotel lobby without any thought of how a race-trained guest might take their mere whiteness as a cue to approach them and ask for help with his bags; the way whites fail to suffer consequences for their whiteness in airport security lines and on planes and hailing taxis and waiting to be seated in restaurants and walking the thin roads of the suburbs and ex-urbs and ex-ex-urbs of an America that has made an industry of perpetual flight from brown faces and brown bodies. I am angry beyond belief at the casual, bloodless manner with which so many white Americans can, with no intent or awareness, stroll through a landscape of brown blood.

And more than anything, I am angry about being angry.

I am angry that I need to write this to you. I am angry that I am driven to take time away from the infinite beauty of being alive – and the preciously finite moments of my life – to respond to a nation that will not leave me alone, a country that forces me into hand-to-hand and eye-to-eye combat for the mere ability to be who I already am. As if being myself is a privilege granted by white consent and not a right. As if entrusting my blood pressure and risk of heart attack and stroke and premature death to the pre-set dials of America's racial machinery is something I should expect and accept. As if my entirely natural rage at this lifelong bloody gear-mashing is the thing that's abnormal.

I am angry that time after time, day after day, year after year, I am called away from the simple and peaceful act of being the person I am by large and small acts of war. "Hey!" says the landcape of white presumption. "Look up from where you're standing in that perfectly burbling trout stream so I can call you 'nigger' from a passing car. Hey! Look away from the sweetness of your dinner date while I march you past nice empty tables and seat the two of you next to the kitchen and force you, once again, to think about race when it is the last thing you want to think about. Hey! Quit feeling unwatched as you wait for the 'walk' sign and I lock my car door at you. Hey! Let me interrupt your casual and comfortable speaking of proper English by letting you know how bizarre it is for me to hear a black man talking that way. Hey! Stop composing that piece of music in your head for a second so I can re-inflame your awareness of how afraid I am that you'll rob me here in this hallway. Hey! Drop those Skittles and stop that conversation on your cell phone so I can chase and kill you because of who I think you are."

I am angry that I have to walk around with a particular and situationally-triggered kind of anger that white people are spared. Take it from one who knows: I wish such anger upon no one. But I am furious as hell at its selectivity, at the way a certain kind of anger can break into my house late at night or suddenly turn a relational traffic light red or bring a scream into any song I write at any given time, while in a certain skin-filtered way a white person can roll over unawakened in bed or drive on through the intersection or continue on with their music uninterrupted.

The very same is true of the anger of a woman to whose experience I as a man am blind. Or a gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered person. Or a Palestinian person. Or a person who is in the United States illegally.

And if you deny the realities behind this anger, too bad for you. Because if you yourself are not angry on this day, you are the one with the problem.

Marriage equality wins here in Maryland.

Finally, my home state of Maryland has stopped waffling on the right of gay people to marry.

On Tuesday we citizens overrode an attempt to defeat by referendum a state law allowing gay marriage. We are one of several states that made Tuesday a historic day for upholding marriage equality.

As I and many others keep saying, opponents of marriage equality are so strident and desperate precisely because they know in their bitter little hearts that the struggle for marriage equality is ultimately going to prevail. If this reactionary desperation sounds familiar (think defenders of slavery, defenders of denying women the vote, defenders of racial segregation) it's because it is. Nobody is quite so mean as the eagerly privileged when they see their privilege slipping away.

I'm proud of the 52 percent of fellow Maryland voters who stood up for marriage equality.

The 48 percent who voted against it? I'm not so proud of them.

The good news: Obama won. The bad news: Obama won.

The good news: Because President Obama won on Tuesday, we will not have 4 years of serial liar and cold-blooded cad Mitt Romney's hand at the tiller of the corporate state. This will be good for people who, say, would rather not lose their health coverage the moment they are diagnosed with a pre-existing cancer; or who aren't fond of the idea of a federal government sympathetic to denying women contraception; or who suspect that 30 years is long enough to disprove the idea that lowering taxes on the rich creates jobs and opportunity for working people; or who think that gutting FEMA and cutting government regulation of industry might not be such a good idea in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy and the mounting deaths from weak food and drug safety standards; or who would prefer that the White House not consort with the most wildly racist, misogynist, and homophobic constituencies in America.

The bad news: Because President Obama won on Tuesday, we will have 4 more years of crafting secret kill lists that include U.S. citizens; 4 more years of the National Defense Authorization Act and its spectacular violations of our privacy and civil and human rights; 4 more years of ducking anything like serious health care reform; 4 more years of automatic coddling of Wall Street and other corporate autocrats; 4 more years of gorgeously passionate presidential speeches followed by reliably craven inaction or betrayal; and 4 more years of kowtowing to the bullies of the Republican wing of the Corporate Party, which has already begun with Obama's I'm-so-much-nicer-than-you stance toward obstructionist Republicans in his victory speech, and his (heh-heh, it's a joke) offering to wash their cars and walk their dogs if they'll only push him around just a little bit less.

Foamy the Squirrel on Gay Marriage

Foamy the Squirrel shows Barack "now that I've thought about it..." Obama how to grow some, uh, nuts on the issue of gay marriage.

 

Thanks to Tina at The Agonist for sharing Jack Cluth's video. 

The problem with the Catholic Church isn't Catholics. It's the Catholic Church.

ITEM: At her mother's funeral last week, in front of all of the mourners in the cathedral, the daughter stood before the priest to take communion. The priest looked at her, covered the wafers with his hand, and told he could not give her the body and blood of Christ because her lifestyle is a sin in the eyes of God. See, her partner of 20 years, who was standing beside her, is a woman. They're lesbians. So this bigot dressed up as a man of God devastated her and her entire family in their hour of deepest grief. And he then, without warning, skipped the burial. His name, because he deserves for it to be printed here, is Rev. Marcel Guarnizo of St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Gaithersburg, MD. If there is any justice in the Universe, he will come back in the next life as a gay man. Not that we have any way of knowing his orientation now.

ITEM: After a years-long struggle, Maryland finally legalized gay marriage this week. Amid the battle, a top public figure declared that churches should never have to grant marriage rights to gays. Who was this? Why, Edwin O'Brien, the former Archbishop of Baltimore, who was recently promoted to The Vatican.

ITEM: In one of the largest Catholic churches in my hometown of Rochester, NY, a large number of parishioners broke away when the established parish, backed by threats from the Archdiocese bosses, forbade recognition of gay unions or of women taking charge in the pulpit. The breakaway church is now a large and thriving Catholic congregation – Spiritus Christi Church – that celebrates gay unions, has a strong woman reverend in the pulpit, and runs a slew of health and service programs in neighborhoods and in prisons. (Pop quiz: which church – the Archdiocese-approved sanctuary of bigotry or the rebel house of open-hearted love – do you think Jesus would prefer?)

I have an old friend who was raised Catholic and whose mother was devout in her faith and her dedication to her congregation. One of the things I learned from watching her, as I have also observed in every other religion I have personally witnessed, is that the most corrupt, destructive, and amoral force in religion is generally the bosses and the operatives, not the parishioners. Name the issue affecting Catholicism, for example – divorce, contraception, gay rights, abortion – and polls show that rank-and-file Catholics are light-years ahead of the robed and brutally hypocritical executives who run the corporation. Which is why ordinary Catholics are among those supporting the gay rights law that Baltimore's Catholic CEO promises to torpedo.

Like leaders of other global enterprises, church rulers are resolutely bringing up the rear when it comes to matters of societal morality.

Memo to gay marriage opponents:

Go ahead and waste your precious years on this earth fighting gay marriage if you want to. Poison yourself with meanness. Suffer in fear. Bring discredit and shame upon the God you claim to follow. Bash your head against the thickening foundation of gay rights until you've beaten yourself senseless. It's your life to waste. 

Allowing gay marriage is going to be the law of the land. You cannot stop it, and you're in hysterics because you know you cannot stop it.

Last week my state, Maryland, became the eighth – with many more to follow – to legalize the right of gays to marry. The meanest of the mean, like you and the Cardinal of Baltimore, now promise to give voters the opportunity to re-lower themselves into the dark ages via a referendum on repeal. Ultimately it won't matter. No matter the number of state referenda to repeal or not, no matter the outcome of the inevitable ruling by the current Supreme Court, in the end, no matter how long it takes, as with slavery and denial of women's voting rights, the irrefutable movement for plain fairness in marriage will prevail, both in jurisprudence and in practice, in Washington and in your town.

There is not a damned thing you can do about this. So go ahead and choose to piss away the gift of your own humanity if you like. It's your life.

I'm making changes

to this blog.

You may have noticed it's been more than two months since I last posted. I'm just not into continually opinionizing right now. There is an entire online culture that opinionizes in the continual present tense: "Here is what I think about what just happened in (insert political entity here)." I don't see it doing us much good. Certain things are true, and they will remain true until we act to change them, and until we do, opinionizing once a week about the same truths is like shouting at each other weekly that the sky is blue.

Truth: The United States is a corporate monarchy in which the state has been purchased in service of monopoly capitalists.

Truth: Elections will remain a sham as long as private money is allowed to dominate them.

Truth: Privilege and continued combat among we non-plutocrats -- by race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability and other distinctions -- is the best divisive tactic the ruling class has at its disposal. If not for this, we'd have stormed the Bastille long ago.

We know these things. What we need to do is change them. There is more than enough repetitive stating of the obvious already. That's one reason I'm changing the blog.

Another reason is that my life has grown. I'm a working musician, a perfoming poet, an author working on my next book, and a person like you who walks around seeing and hearing stuff I sometimes want to share because it helps me become more aware of life, period.

So you'll see a lot more here than you've seen before. Sure, it will include political opinions, but it will also go further.

I can't tell you yet where this will go. But in the coming weeks you and I will both start to find out.

Wisconsin, unions, and the limits of lies.

Today's absurdity comes from Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who said on Meet the Press on Sunday in response to President Obama's remark about Wisconsin's attempt to scuttle public employees' collective bargaining being an attack on unions:

"I think the president should be focusing on what we're doing in Washington. When the president talks about Wisconsin, I think that is really inappropriate."

Senator Graham didn't get the joke: a representative of the Washington-rooted Money Party – which is busy these days trying to hide its Big Business Insider agenda by shouting about Main Street and dissing government – now telling the president to stop caring about the country and to focus on the Beltway instead.

It was a ridiculously cheap shot by Graham. But it points to the nasty jam in which the Money Party finds itself: being driven to more and more extreme anti-average-American positions by the storm troopers for the corporate right, AKA the Tea Party. Increasingly, the GOP has to choose between spitting in the faces of working (and unemployed) Americans or being spat upon by the Tea Party mobs who make up the party's most vocal base. What's a respectable corporate shill of a senator to do?

For now, mainstream Republicans are straining nationally to try to demonize targets that they hope the overall electorate won't sympathize with: gays, illegal Mexican immigrants, government employees. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's attempt at trampling the collective bargaining rights of public servants tries to play on antipathy toward ostensibly spoiled-rotten government workers, and even that isn't going so well: Tea Partiers have had to be bused in to try to counter the huge pro-union crowds with (smaller) contingents of let-'em-suffer anti-demonstrators.

Obama's going on record against Wisconsin's union-busting is nice, if a little too easily calculated. He really had little choice; after freezing federal employee wages and using his State of the Union address chiefly to suck up to the private sector, Obama's silence on the Wisconsin Massacre would have crucified him with unions who are already deeply disappointed with his presidency.

The bigger questions, as before, are, 1) How long can Republicans lie to the Tea Party and lie to level-headed working-class whites without losing credibility with either or with both? and 2) When will both Dems and Repubs be forced to confront the economic reality of a nationwide depression on the state level, requiring more courageous federal intervention than either party has bargained for?

There is much more to the sadness of the latest SCLC debacle

than meets the eye. Yes, it's heartbreaking enough to see the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization that won the great victories of the black civil rights movement, devolve to a tiny den of infighting, alleged fiscal wrongdoing, and incompetence. On that front, the latest headline news is that Rev. Bernice King, daughter of original SCLC leader Martin Luther King Jr., has now said "No, thanks" to the presidency of the organization, a post to which she was elected in 2009. She has kept her public explanation circumspect, but it's clear that she wants no part of the SCLC until it gets its act together.

But that is just the top layer of the dysfunction. The fact is that Bernice King is no plum find for any civil rights organization in need of leadership. Her association with anti-gay-rights leaders and events is something of which any civil rights organization ought to be ashamed. The SCLC, for its part, is no better: it has been, at best, deafeningly silent on issues of gay rights, and has sometimes been downright hostile, as in its 2009 move to oust its Los Angeles chapter president after he publicly supported gay marriage.

The SCLC has become a throwback: a cadre of old-fashioned black clergy with backward ideas and a shortage of both acumen and imagination. The truly sad story is not that Bernice King has ditched the organization her father led, but that both Bernice King and today's SCLC are so bitterly disappointing to her father's legacy.

Happy New Year. I didn't mean to take this long

to blog again, but somehow I just haven't been into opinionizing. I've been writing poems and playing drums and taking care of my sick (but now healthy) cat and otherwise keeping myself occupied with the sorts of elemental things that are not subject to debate.

Of course, in the (welcome) exit from 2010 there are plenty of things that are subject to question and worth a quick look back:

President Obama and his party took a "shellacking" in November not, as house-trained pundits have been fond of saying, because they overreached, but because they underreached. On health care (e.g., public option), on jobs, and on oversight of the banking sector, the Dems and Obama repeatedly came to the table predisposed to fold on issues on which they enjoyed a solid majority in the polls. Rather than use public opinion as a negotiating weapon against hard-nosed Republicans, Hopey and Company foolishly telegraphed their concessions before bare-knuckle bargaining could even begin. Result: a lousy health care compromise that forces citizens to buy crappy coverage from a ruling private sector; a stimulus package big enough to be expensive but too small and timid to jump-start jobs and increase economic security; and banking policies that flush billions of taxpayer dollars down Wall Street toilets while making "too big to fail" institutions even bigger and more vulnerable to future hubris and ruin. So the political right is angry and emboldened, the center is despondent, and the left is furious and defiant. Nice going, Prez.

The Obama tax deal was an obscenity, reflecting, again, the conciliator-in-chief's inability to fight for what the nation needs. The deal's endorsement by Bill Clinton -- the president who brought us triangulation, NAFTA, welfare reform, and continued deregulation -- was thoroughly unconvincing.

The repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell was a genuine victory, and one worth celebrating. It is nice to be able to say, in the year 2011, that one more version of Jim Crow has lost some of its legitimacy. I believe Obama sincerely wanted this, and what made it doable for a politician of his pliancy was the repeal's practical appeal. As was the case with racial segregation during and after World War Two, the easiest (and therefore first) breach in gay segregation is the practical matter of making all possible bodies available to a strapped American military. Only the most hardened bigots (and craven sycophants to hard-right mobs) in the House and Senate were willing to stand against the clear-eyed declarations of top generals that barring gays is militarily stupid and humanly unjustifiable. The necessity of repeal exploited a huge Republican weak spot -- Repubs were caught between fire-breathing conservatives and the military brass -- and it played into Obama's preference to let problems work themselves out rather than fight battles.

The ratification of the START Treaty is a joke, putting the phony stamp of mutual restraint on a U.S.-Russian nuclear arsenal sufficient to destroy mankind many times over.

The case of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange is where criminal prosecution and opportunistic politics meet. The timing of the Interpol warrant and the Swedish charges stinks to high heaven. If you think this sudden fervency for Assange's prosecution is purely about justice for women, I have a bridge I want to sell to you. At the same time, the case highlights the need for sexual assault to be taken seriously, as neither a tool to "get" a political dissenter nor fodder to preemptively make him a martyr. As I've said before, Assange is an object lesson in the danger of building an activist organization around a cult of personality. Successors -- and there will be successors -- will learn from this. I am beginning to think that the next truly potent movement against corrupt American political authority -- in the wake of the last one, which happened in the 1960s and 70s -- may be the cyberleak offensive, which exploits a quiet but profound vulnerability of modern capitalism: the ruling elite's dependence upon information technologies in which skilled outlaws have cultivated a decided advantage. Wouldn't that be something: the Halliburtons and Goldman Sachs and their government minions meeting their downfall not in street riots but in guerrilla cyberwarfare.

More soon.