Succinct

Last night I heard the most succinct, eloquent summary of the gay marriage issue on one of my favorite shows, The PBS Newshour. The guest, a woman, said that the problem is a result of the fact that the federal government has abdicated its responsibility to take any decisive action, which leaves the states scrambling. Back in the 1990s, Bill Clinton penned the madness into law with the marriage defense copout. What that legislation mandated is simple: the federal government will not make any decisions on the gender composition of a legal marriage because it doesn’t want to interfere with legislation made at the state level. Furthermore, the states don’t have to agree with one another, or defer to one another; therefore, a marriage that’s legal in New Mexico is not necessarily so in Maine. Instead, we can wage war on a regular basis, state by state. We can pit friends and neighbors and co-workers against one another each and every election season, and we can spend millions and millions and millions of dollars doing so. I was so thrilled to her the guest on last night’s show sum it up so clearly. So thrilled, in fact, that I almost lost sight of the fact that the subject was not gay marriage but the latest immigration fascism from the state of Arizona.

The border

I guess election season really is right around the corner, since the immigration drum is being beaten so hard I can barely hear myself think. I’m not very well versed in the issue, but I’ve never let that stop me from mouthing off and I see no point in starting now:

• Were the American Indians the first people here, or were there others before them whose history has been erased? If they were the first ones here, they should have the final word on who stays and who goes.

• Isn’t Mexico beautiful? The food is good and cheap, and the people, they’re so nice.

• My people came to this country from Ireland, and did not receive what I’d call a warm welcome.

• It should be illegal to live in Arizona unless you work for the park service. There’s almost no water so they’re sucking several other Western states dry. When do I get to vote on whether or not they receive federal aid? I don’t think they should. In fact, I think they should be arrested for water crimes.

• Clearly, Mexicans created the drug problem in the U.S.

• If you’re a homo, know this: we’re on sabbatical this time because the anti-gay account has been overdrawn by the political strategists. We’ll be on the ballot again, soon enough.

• If people come up from Mexico and they don’t do all the proper paperwork, how do they get jobs? And where?

• Teaching children in the U.S. two languages – English and Spanish – would make our country smarter. That’s because learning a new language – regardless of the language – requires using a part of your brain not used otherwise.

• Really, what’s wrong with detaining people – even if it’s just pulling them over on the highway – because of what they look like? I look gay, so I think it’s perfectly understandable that parents get nervous when I’m around their children, because we all know gay folks are child molesters.

• I’ve read in the history books that large parts of what is now the Southwestern part of the U.S. was Mexico not that long ago.

• I think all of us – regardless of the groups to which we belong – should know what it feels like to be on a ballot, to be voted on by your friends, neighbors, co-workers. There’s nothing quite like it.

• If all the minorities refused to be pitted against one another for the sake of short-term gain that usually turns out to be fake anyhow, man, I only have two words for what that would be like: game over.

Testify

I will not deny that I thought it was thoroughly entertaining to watch the Wall Street criminals forced to appear before Congress and explain how they were earning millions while the rest of the country lost jobs, homes and health insurance. It was good television. Go get ‘em, Barney Frank! Kick some serious ass, Chuck Schumer! These impeccably dressed frat boys had robbed us blind, I recall thinking, and now they’re on the hot seat.

Except that they’re not. The news channels are abuzz this morning with lots of talk about the CEO of Goldman Sachs, who is testifying today. Will his testimony be reconciliatory, or will he come in fighting? My guess is that Goldman Sachs is as sinister as the rest of them, with its terrifying connections to all sorts of governmental entities, including the White House. So today the CEO will take his seat and there will be a lot of indignation thrown at him and we’ll all have a good time watching the news this evening. And then tomorrow, back to business as usual.

So if I were advising the CEO, here’s what I’d suggest: Seat yourself and thank everyone for the invitation. Then, beginning with Alabama, go through each state in alphabetical order and announce the amount of contributions each member of Congress has accepted from Goldman Sachs. Once you’ve reached Wyoming, shift to the White House. Then, invite questions and comments.

That would be my advice if I were asked, which, of course, I was not.

A good book

Well, I did it: Last week I finished Anna Karenina. This book and I go way back, so my sense of accomplishment is probably a bit out of proportion. This book was assigned reading for a course I took in 1987, 110 years after its completion. Why, I wondered, is any book 800 pages long? And what, I wondered at the same time, could a dead Russian guy from the 1800s possibly have to say about anything that matters?

A lot.

So here, from someone who left college more than two decades ago, are a few not especially original comments about the novel itself. There are many weighty, worldly themes woven in and out and across and above and beneath the actual story. And the weaving is done in a way that I, as a confirmed language slut, find breathtakingly beautiful. But Anna Karenina’s secret sauce, if you will, is this: the fucking is endless. The characters in that storyscape are not at all shy about getting into one another’s pants. The way it’s described takes a little getting used to – Vronsky, for example, is often described in terms of “his urgency,” and “flushed” is not an uncommon description of Kitty. But, just like today, when the sex is forced to fit into the narrative confines of conversations both internal and external, pandemonium is not far behind.

And that, for the most part, is what I like about this book: at more than 130 years old, update the names a bit – almost everyone in the book is named, to one extent or another, Alexander or Ivan in three or four variations each – replace the incessant exchanging of hand-written notes with e-mail, replace the servants, and there are lots of them, with administrative assistants and convenience store clerks and other groups we like to degrade as a matter of course, swap out Countess Lydia Ivanovna and swap in Elizabeth Dole or Kay Bailey Hutchison and the novel could easily serve as a template for the nightly news. That amazes me.

So that’s what I was left with, basically: we have not changed at all. We perhaps haven’t regressed, but if Tolstoy’s text is any barometer, we haven’t moved forward either. When it comes to horsing around, the women in the novel are held to a very different set of standards than the men, which makes me wonder, as I have for years, why everyone doesn’t just get it over with and become gay. In a way that’s eerily familiar, the characters who populate the novel are on the verge of financial ruin – some closer than others – but the party continues, and these people, trust me, are lavish. In fact, it isn’t until page 669 of my copy that anyone even mentions that her cash supply is dwindling. And once it is mentioned, it’s quickly forgotten because there are parties and dinners to plan and host – kind of like our mortgage blindness, I think, our love of SUVs as the world’s oil supply declines, our institutionalized hatred of public transportation, which inspires us to continue building highways in spite of the doom that’s sure to follow. But here’s my favorite, from page 324: “Levin was struck especially by one little detail. The old peasant used the thinning of the rye as fodder for the horses. Many a time when Levin had seen this valuable food wasted he had wanted to have it gathered up, but had found this impossible. On this peasant’s fields this was being done, and he could not find words enough to praise this fodder.” I was shocked to read that, because I’d come to believe that “green” farming practices – or even “green” gardening practices – were invented right here in Portland, Oregon just a few years ago.

Two movies

This week I watched two very interesting movies. The first, which I saw at the neighborhood theater with two of my favorite neighbors, is a smoky little love story called A Single Man. The second, which I was mesmerized by on Wednesday evening, is Away from Her.

I’ve confessed before and I’ll confess again: a film critic I am not. Ignoring that very basic fact, here’s what I have to say.

The movies I saw this week had a lot in common. They were both based on written works, one by Christopher Isherwood, the other on a short story by Alice Munro. They were both filmed beautifully, I think. A Single Man is set in early 1960s Los Angeles, porn of sorts for the mid-century devotees. Away from Her takes place, and was shot, I presume (I couldn’t read the credits due to contrast problems) in the early 2000s in Canada. It was bright, cold and stark, not only visually but thematically as well. They’re both relationship stories: the central relationship in one film happens to be two men, one dead, one alive and – do the math – single; the other, a married hetero couple, half of which is in the early stages of decline.

And then, in both movies, other people show up. That’s where the two movies part ways, one meandering gently along, the other anything – and everything – but.

I think both movies were well worth the time and thought they required. My initial response to A Single Man was that it wasn’t very good, but it was one of those movies that came to me throughout the following day in unexpected ways, and so I altered my opinion accordingly. Plus, Julianne Moore was in it, so if 100 points are perfect, there’s 50 of them right there. I don’t read reviews of movies until after I’ve seen them, so I’m not going to spoil it for anyone who may see A Single Man, but here’s a hint: If you see it, try to guess what profession the director was in before he made this movie. I haven’t read any reviews of Away from Her. I’d like to read the short story first, because I’ve never quite understood Alice Munro, so maybe experiencing her work in reverse – from the screen to the page – will lead to a breakthrough. One thing about the movie, though, is this: I ordered it through Netflix. The strange thing about Netflix for me is that I add movies to my list and then, by the time they arrive in the mail, I’ve generally forgotten why I picked it. And, almost without exception, that is fine with me.

Stranded on Earth

The timing couldn’t have been scripted better: today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, and the news is still obsessed with the airplanes sitting on the ground at airports around the world, where they have been forced to yield to the aftermath of what blasted out of the surface of our most adolescent continent, Iceland. For some reason I really enjoy the stranded traveler stories. A couple of years ago, when several inches of snow – relatively speaking – shut Portland down, the people interviewed at the airport and the train station amazed me. How dare my travel plans be interrupted by snow? It’s the holidays! One particularly obnoxious woman from Salem, who had been stuck at Union Station for two days, announced she was never going to come to Portland to see the symphony again. It’s really interesting when travel problem stories have a trans-Atlantic angle. I’ve spent time in Europe, and in my opinion they’re as flawed as the rest of us, but they are almost without exception far more dignified on camera when their flights are cancelled. The people from the U.S., of course, whine and bitch and moan and talk about how “frustrated” they are. And, in keeping with the formula for these stories, one woman burst into tears while showing the reporter a picture of her two children, whom she hadn’t seen in a couple of weeks because she and her husband were stuck in France. It’s really difficult for all of them, she sobbed. Poor things. And finally, now that the safety issue seems resolved, it’s on to the money angle. How much is this costing? How long will it take to recover? Who is to blame? All of which makes me wonder, what are we going to do when we run out of gas, when we have to ration things like oxygen and water? Now that will be truly frustrating. Happy Earth Day!

Blood numbers

The weekend got off to a very good start around here when the current issue of Mother Jones landed in the mailbox on Friday morning. I’m not normally into math stories, but the one I read this Saturday morning is an exception. So here, from the cover story, are some numbers: in 1965, the year before I was born, there were 3.3 billion people in the world. By 1983, the year before I graduated high school, that number was 4.7 billion. And by 2009, the year after I quit drinking, there were 6.8 billion of us.

I really try to resist reciting chunks of other people’s text, but I do love a good paragraph. Like this one, compliments of Mother Jones:

The United Nations projects that world population will stabilize at 9.1 billion in 2050. This prediction assumes a decline from the current average global fertility rate of 2.56 children per woman to 2.02 children per woman in the years between 2045 and 2050. But should mothers average half a child more in 2045, the world population will peak at 10.5 billion five years later. Half a child less, and it stabilizes at 8 billion. The difference in those projections—2.5 billion—is the total number of people alive on Earth in 1950.

Sort of takes your breath away, doesn’t it? At best – assuming that the fewer mouths to feed, the better, which is in fact my assumption – we’re going to add at least 5.5 billion people over the course of one brief century. How, I wondered on Saturday morning, is that possible?

Then it occurred to me that it happened in families like mine, times many millions more. My parents were married six years after there were 2.5 billion of us; in 2050, the last of their six offspring will turn 80. It happened like this: My father had one sister and one brother. My mother had one sister. In little more than half a century, those five individuals – my blood aunts and uncles and my parents – put 21 additional people into the system. And most of us have added two or more on top of that.