I always knew I was gay. People often ask, “how could you know before you were ever with a woman?” “The same way you always knew you were straight,” I say. But the truth is that kids don’t think in terms of gay or straight. They are who they are. So, I knew as much that I was gay as straight kids knew they were straight. Labels didn’t apply yet. It only became an issue in the teenage years and beyond. I desperately tried to be like everyone else, to the point of going overboard.
In the 1970s-90s, it was something to be hidden if I wanted to be a successful lawyer, if I wanted to fit in, if I wanted to get into the right social and professional crowds. By the late 1990s, the gulf between who I was and who I pretended to be was wider than the San Andreas fault (gee, I hope that the fault line is wide, or I bungled this analogy). I was tired of the schism, and so tired of the inevitable lies that somehow never fooled anyone, that I was willing to give up some measure of “success” and “acceptance” for peace of mind and peace of being. That’s when the journey toward self-acceptance and family acceptance began. A long, winding road, filled with pot holes, and yet, at various critical points, surrounded by warmth and beauty.
Today, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the military must end “don’t ask, don’t tell”. Last week, New York legalized same-sex marriage. A recent poll reported that more people in the country support gay marriage than not.
Still, I am not equal in the United States of America, the beacon of liberty to all nations. But I am closer to equal than ever before.
I just hope that there comes a time when people wonder why there ever was a need to fight for equality — for anyone, anywhere.
TLP (the little prince, my son) checked out a library book on fishing. We had to read about each fish, length, weight, best bait and whether the species would put up a fight. Also we had to go through the various baits (it WAS a how-to book, after all) and the only thing I could add was when we got to fly fishing. I told him we could go on the Orville’s Fly Fishing School website (I silently prayed it had not gone into Chapter 11 or dissolved).
When it came time for me to read about a fish that was a pesky fighter, I recounted my family’s trip to San Francisco, circa 1968. Mom and Dad took us to eat at the Fisherman’s Wharf, which — at that time — was an exotic dining destination. My parents were dressed in evening wear, so I presume that after dinner we were being dropped off at the hotel with a sitter, but I can’t remember. I do remember fishing for our dinner and Dad’s having caught a pesky, fighting fish that flailed in and out of his tuxedo jacket. Mom and Dad must have eaten that fish (I think we kids stayed with hamburgers).
That was the first and last time we went fishing with Dad or anyone. Too traumatic. If TLP wants to go fishing, Uncle HOSOB (husband of sister of blogger) or Cousin Gentle will have to take him. Thinking back 43 years ago, I am still traumatized.
I hopped a cab tonight because I really, really, couldn’t deal with the humanity that crowds the subway. Well, actually, it was late enough that the trains wouldn’t be crowded, but still. There was a chill in the air (frigid, perhaps) and I needed to get home. A long-ish day. Not like the “old days” but then again I am not in my 20s or 30s any more (barely still in my 40s).
The cab driver was talking on the phone. His driving skills were basic: if your foot is not on the gas (accelerating in a way that gave a born-and-bred Manhattanite motion sickness), then your foot must be on the brake.
Ok, so I needed him off the phone and off the gas pedal. Hmmm. I struck up a conversation.
“Where are you from?”
“Sudan.”
“What do you think of the elections?”
“I don’t think it will change much. There will be fighting.”
“Are you from the north or the South?”
“North. Independence won’t change anything. People will fight each other now in the South. Many different peoples.”
“Same problem in the North?”
“Government there is strong. So, no fighting in north.”
I offered “brutal” as a more apt description.
He said, “way of life there, not here.”
I had no response to that simple statement of relief and admiration for this country. I asked him what he thought about Egypt.
“Now the world knows what has been happening there.”
I was silent. Maybe I should have known before. I just didn’t think about it.
He offered up, “no one speaks to police. too much bribes and danger. not here, government is less corrupt.”
I had never thought of our government in terms of lesser corruption. Not the superlatives we were raised to expect of our government. But he meant it as a true compliment.
My world view, turned on an incline — “less corrupt” as a compliment and an ideal.
I am following the events in Egypt. As I understand the situation, there was long simmering unrest about the irreversible decades-long slide into poverty and human indignity.
Then, the harshness of life for one-third of the country crossed a line. People took to the streets no longer fearful of the repressive regime because there was nothing more to lose.
I hope, naively for sure, that there is an orderly transition to representative government. But not a government that looks like ours; the government must be authentic and legitimate within Egyptian history and culture.
I think about these protesters and then I think back to the 2000 election in the US, where the voting irregularities, and finally a Supreme Court decision, effectively awarded the election to George W. Bush even though Al Gore won the popular vote. Americans didn’t take to the streets. Why? Because we were rich, comfortable and had too much to lose by unrest. Hey, I was angry but I didn’t really do anything but talk.
If we knew then what our nation would look and feel like 8 years later, would we have, should we have, taken to the streets to protest the fraud and the Supreme Court’s ruling? Still, probably not.
And even thinking we might trivializes the determination and the courage of the protesters who are standing up against poverty, repression and hopelessness.
Benjamin Franklin, a rock star of his generation, said, when signing the Declaration of Independence, “United we stand, divided we fall.” Our founding fathers and the colonies, united, defeated a great and mighty empire.
Throughout our brief yet notable history, the cities of our nation were known for the dog-eat-dog way that fellow citizens treated their neighbors, eschewing the cornerstone of religious faith, all the while claiming to be part of the most upright of Christian nations. But, outside the cities (or so I would like to think), neighbors helped each other and generations of families lived together, all working to keep everyone afloat. Maybe it is the romantic myth of the heartland. But, I am buying it, lock, stock and barrel.
Today, we live in a society where people are more worried about their morning lattes than they are about ending our two wars, reducing our crushing debt and the stopping all politicking, all of which threaten to bankrupt out nation.
There is no silver bullet cure for our woes.
I heard today that people say that the Congress should not have saved the 300,000 teacher and firefighter jobs because their unions are too strong and teachers earn too much for doing too little. Ok, so, make the unions feel some pain, but does that justify keeping the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans? The illogic is frightening and delusional.
So the great experiment started in 1776 is rounding the drain because of greed and me-first-middle-and-last mind think.
Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I will forgo my Bush tax cut that I never wanted and didn’t need to pay for health care and to start reducing the deficit.
How about this: we make giving up the tax cuts voluntary. Just like the optional $1.00 gift to Wildlife Preservation (or is it public campaign finance?) on our tax forms. Just put a line item on the 2010 tax return that says, “This is how much more you would pay if the Bush tax cuts lapsed. Do you want to pay this amount (a) to reduce the deficit, (b) to pay for health care for the uninsured or (c) 50% to each?” and publish the list of people who contribute to these funds.
Maybe neighbors will embarrass neighbors into paying the money (because if you’re not on the list, either you’re selfish or you don’t make enough) or we have a pledge drive and use positive peer pressure.
Either way, Mr. President, I am with you for letting lapse the tax cut I never wanted and our nation couldn’t afford.
by Paul B. Farrell Market Watch
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Commentary: How: Gold. Tax cuts. Debts. Wars. Fat Cats. Class gap. No fiscal discipline
“How my G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy.” Yes, that is exactly what David Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece, “Four Deformations of the Apocalypse.”
Get it? Not “destroying.” The GOP has already “destroyed” the U.S. economy, setting up an “American Apocalypse.”
Yes, Stockman is equally damning of the Democrats’ Keynesian policies. But what this indictment by a party insider — someone so close to the development of the Reaganomics ideology — says about America, helps all of us better understand how America’s toxic partisan-politics “holy war” is destroying not just the economy and capitalism, but the America dream. And unless this war stops soon, both parties will succeed in their collective death wish.
But why focus on Stockman’s message? It’s already lost in the 24/7 news cycle. Why? We need some introspection. Ask yourself: How did the great nation of America lose its moral compass and drift so far off course, to where our very survival is threatened?
We’ve arrived at a historic turning point as a nation that no longer needs outside enemies to destroy us, we are committing suicide. Democracy. Capitalism. The American dream. All dying. Why? Because of the economic decisions of the GOP the past 40 years, says this leading Reagan Republican.
Please listen with an open mind, no matter your party affiliation: This makes for a powerful history lesson, because it exposes how both parties are responsible for destroying the U.S. economy. Listen closely:
Reagan Republican: the GOP should file for bankruptcy
Stockman rushes into the ring swinging like a boxer: “If there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt … will soon reach $18 trillion.” It screams “out for austerity and sacrifice.” But instead, the GOP insists “that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.”
In the past 40 years Republican ideology has gone from solid principles to hype and slogans. Stockman says: “Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses too.”
No more. Today there’s a “new catechism” that’s “little more than money printing and deficit finance, vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes” making a mockery of GOP ideals. Worse, it has resulted in “serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy.” Yes, GOP ideals backfired, crippling our economy.
Stockman’s indictment warns that the Republican party’s “new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one:”
Richard Nixon’s gold policies get Stockman’s first assault, for defaulting “on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world.” So for the past 40 years, America’s been living “beyond our means as a nation” on “borrowed prosperity on an epic scale … an outcome that Milton Friedman said could never happen when, in 1971, he persuaded President Nixon to unleash on the world paper dollars no longer redeemable in gold or other fixed monetary reserves.”
Remember Friedman: “Just let the free market set currency exchange rates, he said, and trade deficits will self-correct.” Friedman was wrong by trillions. And unfortunately “once relieved of the discipline of defending a fixed value for their currencies, politicians the world over were free to cheapen their money and disregard their neighbors.”
And without discipline America was also encouraging “global monetary chaos as foreign central banks run their own printing presses at ever faster speeds to sop up the tidal wave of dollars coming from the Federal Reserve.” Yes, the road to the coming apocalypse began with a Republican president listening to a misguided Nobel economist’s advice.
Stage 2. Crushing debts from domestic excesses, war mongering
Stockman says “the second unhappy change in the American economy has been the extraordinary growth of our public debt. In 1970 it was just 40% of gross domestic product, or about $425 billion. When it reaches $18 trillion, it will be 40 times greater than in 1970.” Who’s to blame? Not big-spending Dems, says Stockman, but “from the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.”
Back “in 1981, traditional Republicans supported tax cuts,” but Stockman makes clear, they had to be “matched by spending cuts, to offset the way inflation was pushing many taxpayers into higher brackets and to spur investment. The Reagan administration’s hastily prepared fiscal blueprint, however, was no match for the primordial forces — the welfare state and the warfare state — that drive the federal spending machine.”
OK, stop a minute. As you absorb Stockman’s indictment of how his Republican party has “destroyed the U.S. economy,” you’re probably asking yourself why anyone should believe a traitor to the Reagan legacy. I believe party affiliation is irrelevant here. This is a crucial subject that must be explored because it further exposes a dangerous historical trend where politics is so partisan it’s having huge negative consequences.
Yes, the GOP does have a welfare-warfare state: Stockman says “the neocons were pushing the military budget skyward. And the Republicans on Capitol Hill who were supposed to cut spending, exempted from the knife most of the domestic budget — entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects. But in the end it was a new cadre of ideological tax-cutters who killed the Republicans’ fiscal religion.”
When Fed chief Paul Volcker “crushed inflation” in the ’80s we got a “solid economic rebound.” But then “the new tax-cutters not only claimed victory for their supply-side strategy but hooked Republicans for good on the delusion that the economy will outgrow the deficit if plied with enough tax cuts.” By 2009, they “reduced federal revenues to 15% of gross domestic product,” lowest since the 1940s. Still today they’re irrationally demanding an extension of those “unaffordable Bush tax cuts [that] would amount to a bankruptcy filing.”
Recently Bush made matters far worse by “rarely vetoing a budget bill and engaging in two unfinanced foreign military adventures.” Bush also gave in “on domestic spending cuts, signing into law $420 billion in nondefense appropriations, a 65% percent gain from the $260 billion he had inherited eight years earlier. Republicans thus joined the Democrats in a shameless embrace of a free-lunch fiscal policy.” Takes two to tango.
Stockman continues pounding away: “The third ominous change in the American economy has been the vast, unproductive expansion of our financial sector.” He warns that “Republicans have been oblivious to the grave danger of flooding financial markets with freely printed money and, at the same time, removing traditional restrictions on leverage and speculation.” Wrong, not oblivious. Self-interested Republican loyalists like Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner knew exactly what they were doing.
They wanted the economy, markets and the government to be under the absolute control of Wall Street’s too-greedy-to-fail banks. They conned Congress and the Fed into bailing out an estimated $23.7 trillion debt. Worse, they have since destroyed meaningful financial reforms. So Wall Street is now back to business as usual blowing another bigger bubble/bust cycle that will culminate in the coming “American Apocalypse.”
Stockman refers to Wall Street’s surviving banks as “wards of the state.” Wrong, the opposite is true. Wall Street now controls Washington, and its “unproductive” trading is “extracting billions from the economy with a lot of pointless speculation in stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives.” Wall Street banks like Goldman were virtually bankrupt, would have never survived without government-guaranteed deposits and “virtually free money from the Fed’s discount window to cover their bad bets.”
Stage 4. New American Revolution class warfare coming soon
Finally, thanks to Republican policies that let us “live beyond our means for decades by borrowing heavily from abroad, we have steadily sent jobs and production offshore,” while at home “high-value jobs in goods production … trade, transportation, information technology and the professions shrunk by 12% to 68 million from 77 million.”
As the apocalypse draws near, Stockman sees a class-rebellion, a new revolution, a war against greed and the wealthy. Soon. The trigger will be the growing gap between economic classes: No wonder “that during the last bubble (from 2002 to 2006) the top 1% of Americans — paid mainly from the Wall Street casino — received two-thirds of the gain in national income, while the bottom 90% — mainly dependent on Main Street’s shrinking economy — got only 12%. This growing wealth gap is not the market’s fault. It’s the decaying fruit of bad economic policy.”
Get it? The decaying fruit of the GOP’s bad economic policies is destroying our economy.
Warning: This black swan won’t be pretty, will shock, soon
His bottom line: “The day of national reckoning has arrived. We will not have a conventional business recovery now, but rather a long hangover of debt liquidation and downsizing … it’s a pity that the modern Republican party offers the American people an irrelevant platform of recycled Keynesianism when the old approach — balanced budgets, sound money and financial discipline — is needed more than ever.”
Wrong: There are far bigger things to “pity.”
First, that most Americans, 300 million, are helpless, will do nothing, sit in the bleachers passively watching this deadly partisan game like it’s just another TV reality show.
Second, that, unfortunately, politicians are so deep-in-the-pockets of the Wall Street conspiracy that controls Washington they are helpless and blind.
And third, there’s a depressing sense that Stockman will be dismissed as a traitor, his message lost in the 24/7 news cycle … until the final apocalyptic event, an unpredictable black swan triggers another, bigger global meltdown, followed by a long Great Depression II and a historic class war.
So be prepared, it will hit soon, when you least expect.
Dominick Dunne was a writer of some repute early in his career. A career which careened out of control from drugs and alcohol, if I remember correctly. A person of power and privilege was the main suspect in his daughter’s murder and the suspect eluded conviction, as Mr. Dunne maintained, precisely because of his power and privilege. He then became a TV personality doing exposés on the “unsolved” crimes committed by the rich and powerful.
Dominick Dunne’s death has gone relatively unnoticed, more unnoticed probably because Ted Kennedy died hours earlier. What a strange juxtaposition. One man, a TV personality driven by never having gotten justice for his daughter; the other, a child of our American aristocracy and leader of a political dynasty who was responsible for a woman’s death and at the scene of another’s rape.
In these last few days, our leaders have gently referred to Ted Kennedy’s “transgressions” as they eulogize the liberal lion of the Senate. I keep thinking of Dominick Dunne.
I loved Ted Kennedy’s politics, but I am still working through my issues with all of these days of mourning. Was the nation better served by his service in the Senate or would his being held to account for his behavior have made us the more perfect union we desire? I keep thinking about the pledge of allegiance: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands: one nation [under G-d] with liberty and justice for all.”
