Dear Senator Schodorf,
I thought you were a person of integrity who, when push came to shove, would do the right thing despite the potential political consequences. I really honestly thought you were more reasonable, more moderate, more caring than your vote on the anti-gay marriage amendment has proven you to be.
You say that your vote was because of the “huge number”of your constituents who back it. I know your constituents. I am one of them. I know that not nearly all of us support the amendment, and that, indeed, some of your constituents are actually gay. Has it occurred to you that perhaps the reason more of us did not scream our opposition is that your leader in the state senate pushed through a vote before reasonable public input could be allowed? Has it occurred to you that you could have – no should have – done something to stop this absolute abuse of the legislative process?
We’re not talking about some little piece of tax legislation that may cost a few people a few pennies. We’re talking about a massive attack on a despised minority that will probably cost many real people their civil rights. The irony of this vote taking place so close to the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. should be lost on none of us. Kansas’s anti-gay marriage amendment, that you voted “yes” to, is what he would have called “difference made legal.” That is, it is the very definition of injustice.
Hiding behind what your constituents seem to want is no excuse. It’s either shorthand for “I’m afraid I won’t get re-elected,” or it’s simple cowardice in the face of Joe Wright and Terry Fox. You are elected to the state senate to, among other things, show leadership to your constituents, not merely to always blindly follow their will. If you were merely an agent of the majority, there would be no need at all for representative governance; all legislative matters would simply be decided by plebiscite. A majority of your constituents may support this amendment. But if they do, the majority of your constituents are bigoted and wrong. It’s your job to have the integrity to tell them that.
Remember that in the South before the Civil war, and for many years afterward, slavery was considered a long, proud Southern tradition. Consider that for a hundred years after that blacks were still considered not worthy of equal treatment. Gay Americans may not be barred from sharing water fountains and lunch counters with heterosexuals, but then, sexual orientation is not so obvious as skin color. The discrimination this legislation represents is not different in kind nor intent than Jim Crow. It is meant to deny basic rights to a certain segment of the population. And that is wrong. It is un-American.
Whatever your actual motivations were to vote “yes,” your actions were discriminatory. You should be ashamed of yourself.
Sincerely,
T.S. DeHaviland
“I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant and fill it with a desire for vengeance” – Isoroku Yamamoto
When Admiral Yamamoto said these words after he lead the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he said a good deal more than even he knew. Granted, the Leviathan America had its destiny suggested in its very DNA: incredible diversity; incalculable resources; an ambitious, upstart populace. But from the ashes of December 7, 1941 emerged not just a powerful and greatly democratic nation, but an embodiment of Nietzschean will-to-power, a nation so completely avaricious and so rigidly moralistic that it would doom not just itself, but much of the rest of the world as well.
Like most Americans, I have a passion for things that are old and inefficient. Unlike most of us, though, my inspiration lies in outmoded objects and buildings, in places and artworks, not in obsolescent lifestyles and ideals. Long past the point of embarrassment, America is stuck in a perpetual adolescence, unable to deal with inevitable change, arbitrarily enraged and sentimental, moody and inflexible. We do not allow ourselves the sophistication and nuance of thought to understand or even be interested in the rest of the world; indeed, we lack the very perspective to do so, yet we sit in constant and ill-informed judgement: the U.N. is evil, the French immoral, the Muslims hopelessly godless and un-Christian. We are vehemently rebellious against our authorities, yet, we parrot all their tired old bromides when asked to explain our God or Law.
I’m convinced that this perpetual adolescence is the result of our success. Western Europe was devastated by two world wars and brought into adulthood by seeing all its cultural and colonial accomplishments explode into the Holocaust. The Europeans, for as frustrating as their realpolitik and slow, discursive decision-making processes are, are at least grown up enough (or grown cynical enough) to know that they cannot possibly hope to fix all the world’s problems or be all things to all nations. They have taken the lessons of capitalism gone wild, through the tulip craze and the paper craze and the spice craze, and reined it in. They have finally decided, for the most part, that perhaps certain moral issues are simply not the business of the state.
Americans, in essence, simply don’t need to grow up politically. Our mythology of a perpetual frontier and our ideology of Horatio Alger, our desperate clinging to the image of the Marlboro Man astride his horse, perpetually young and healthy and fit, perpetually the indestructible Maverick, overpowers the reality: the western U.S. sucked dry by too many people and too little water, the frontier dotted with Big Box stores, the cowboys inexperienced and underpaid and moving on to real work long before they could ever develop cancer of the lung. We buy it like we buy the happy Wal-Mart employees in the commercial, reciting the Wal-Mart cheer, never too broke to pay the gas bill. Americans, even if we have been too broke the pay the gas bill, have always felt rich, or at least felt we could be rich despite our rags. We are forever the 14 year-old kid who still thinks he can be a rock star.
What shame, what devastating shock, will hurtle us into national adulthood? If Europe is any indication, it won’t be anything so small-scale as 9-11. If the Great Depression didn’t do it to us, the only way our myths will be challenged would be through something like a South American-style currency collapse coupled with an indefinite drought of oil. We’ll notice but carry on if prices merely rise, but if cars stop running, look out. What has to happen isn’t some mamby-pamby reconsideration of who we are. What needs to happen is a crisis, a reordering of basic values. If things continue the way they are now, it might happen sooner than we expect.
I’m in the company of some artsy, geeky, intellectually insatiable folks, right? Then I’d like to pose another question, if I may, for the betterment of our inner-philosophers who can’t help but peruse certain axiomatic questions that engrossed Plato, Tolstoy, and Bell in kind.
When can art be called “good art”?
An art historian whom I asked this question had never had occasion to make such a judgement, miraculously. Therefore, a definition of “good” was somwhat meaningless. To him art is significant for its anthropological clues, exceptional for its timeliness, exquisite for its societal parity.
A poet to whom I asked this question thought good art exhibited some kind of technical feat. To him, ideas may be artful but are not “good art” until the craftmanship flickflacks your head with whiplash.
I confess that my own definition of “good art” is a formless, primordial goo. And I don’t know that if I shackled down a denotation that it’d necessarily be for the better. Right now all I think is that “good art” renews experience. How it does that or through what means, is up in the air for me.
Anyone else care to add another perspective?