The Thomas Chronicles

I wrote most of this while the fires in Southern California were burning out of control from Malibu to Tijuana. I wanted to publish this that week, but I didn’t have time to finish it properly for publication. Regardless, I think it’s still worth publishing though the danger to the region has diminished.

****

“Is this what I think it is?”

A thin film of gray matter lightly crusted my car. This is unlike the usual grime that had settled eons ago on the outer shell of my vehicle like cheap powdered cosmetics, which I’d like to think of as a baseline from which to build all other friendly particles that happened along the way; this is an entirely different matter. Much like piece of pottery in a kiln being heated then cooled then heated again, the crust above the paint-job of my car had been heated and cooled and heated again through the wisdom of the elements and protected my precious paint job from the vagaries of life. This gray interloper was of a much less permanent nature.

I heaved and blew across my windshield. The gray matter moved.

“My Lord,” said I, “The ashes have flown this far?”

Being naturally negligent of cleanliness with respect to my beloved yet valiant Japanese model car, this time I wanted this gray trespasser to be wiped off my car like a layer of grease off a pizza. After getting in, I flicked on my windshield wipers. The gray matter instantly turned into gray mud.

This first happened Monday morning, and there are many miles between me and the fires raging in Malibu and Magic Mountain and San Diego. Perhaps I’m making mountains out of molehills since the crust was actually very light and the mud not very thick; however, their existence on my car over 30 miles away speaks to the enormity of this fire.

Then it occurred to me that maybe the gray matter dusting my car could have been what’s left of someone’s book, or his home, or his clothes; perhaps someone’s most precious belongings sat on my car and I didn’t even know it.

****

It’s now Tuesday evening as I scribble these thoughts. An odious reddish gray pigment stains the sky and spreads out across the oceanic horizon into wherever that might end. It is incredible to me that a fourth of the California coastline is engulfed in flames, fires exploding like blast furnaces in the depths of Hell’s Inferno and here I sit along the coast safely lodged in between the fires. The satellite photos of Southern California’s coast this afternoon looked like the ash-end of a cigarette, except the cigarette happened to be a state.

Earlier in the morning on my walk to work I crossed through a neighborhood street that happened to be closed off to all but foot traffic. I have worked in a Southern California beach community for the past few years surrounded by multi-million dollar homes of incredible variety and quirkiness. I’ve passed a home that exudes Parisian quaintness; another could only be described as a large tugboat in the shape of a two story house.

As I made my way through in the eerie orange light of the morning with the vague nondescript weight on my lungs, I felt I was Vincent Price in one of his old black and white horror movies. It was about 8:20 in the morning, the kids on the street where off to school and the parents were probably off to work somewhere. They were nowhere to be seen but the evidence of their existence was everywhere.

A tether ball pole stood listless at the center of the street with the ball and tether being nudged by the winds. A soccer ball, a hockey stick, neatly arranged metal tables and chairs littered the concrete path like a social gathering in full swing minus the people. Like Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth , I strolled among corpses, graves, dangling vampires and skeletons. These were Halloween decorations, of course, and not at all the ghastly ghouls of the living dead.

Even still, in the sickly red morning glow it was unsettling…

It was some time during the summer of 2005. Half the year was over and President Bush had just won the election the previous November. The country was just beginning to really feel the fatigue of the Iraqi war, even as Leftist senators, congressmen and organizations continued to hammer the President on the missing WMD’s. At some point during this miasma of shouting accusations, the President introduced a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage.

At the time, I thought this was a peculiar non sequitur given the severity of the forces arrayed against us. Iran was in the incipient stages of obtaining the bomb. China was becoming bolder in challenging us on the high seas and pressing Japan’s airspace. Russia was tightening their energy noose around Eastern Europe and parts of Western Europe.

So, out of all the things the President could discuss— from Iraq to China, from illegal immigration to social security— he wanted to propose a Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage? I scratched my head.

“He’s not serious, is he?” I asked a friend.

“Marriage is one of the most important sacraments there are in the Christian faith. You damn tootin’ he’s serious,” he responded.

Hmmm…

I recalled during President Bush’s presidential debates with Senator John “F” Kerry that he believed in the sanctity of life, that gays should be treated with “dignity and respect”. If giving people, gays in particular, “dignity and respect” meant denying them what is granted to everyone else, what did he mean by “dignity and respect”?

* * * *

Flash forward a few years. The proposed constitutional amendment fell flat on its face, the Iraqi war goes on with swings and roundabouts, the President is still besieged and governmental scandals abound.

This past August we saw the once mighty “Family Values” champion fall from his pedestal. I’m speaking, of course, of Senator Larry Craig, who was at one point one of the most influential senators of the Republican Party. Before the reports of his indiscretion reached the ears of most Americans, the sonic boom you heard was all the Republican senators running away from him.

Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney called Senator Craig’s actions “disappointing and disgraceful”. This is the same man who had appointed Craig Senate co-chairman of his presidential campaign and glowingly praised Craig’s “Family Values” ethic. But almost as soon as reports of his arrest were made, Romney distanced himself and remained elusive about his association. Now, almost no conservative is willing to touch Craig with a ten-foot pole.

What was his crime exactly?

He tapped his foot. He rubbed his hand under the stalls. That’s it…

… for tapping his foot and rubbing his hands on the bottom of a restroom stall, an entire life is destroyed? Senator Craig is now virtually exiled from the Republican Party and from the fundamentalist Christians he once represented. Did I think he solicited gay sex in the stall? Probably. But this leaping hysterical reaction from the conservatives troubles me.

All this because there was just a hint that he was, God forbid, gay.

This is the approximate point when it started to really dawn on me. The conservatives and the fundamentalist Christians, even some of the liberals, really mean it when they say they want to outlaw homosexuality and reinstate the Sodomy Laws. Up to this point, I’ve always rationalized and puh-poo’d the assertions of gays who said that the fundamentalists Right are out to get them. I’ve always taken that to be a hysterical Leftist reaction that always seems to accuse conservatives of being evil.

But this is where this axiom applies: You ain’t being paranoid if they’re really out to get you.

Being a Christian myself, I began really sit up and take note of what conservatives and fundamentalist Christians say about gays. And my goodness. You would think by hearing Christian conservatives talk that all the ills of America these past few years is due to our tolerance of homosexuality.

Gay bashing has almost become per forma.

For a Christian conservative to show he’s true-blue, a real conservative Christian, the Real McCoy, he’s got to bash gays somewhere in his statement. From Sean Hannity to Anne Coulter, from Hal Lindsey to Jerry Falwell. It was not long ago, last year I think, when all the conservative pundits used to make the stipulation that they don’t care whether so-and-so is gay or not. It was their political stances they had issues with. Now, most of those pundits— with the notable exception of Bill O’Reilly— have forgone this stipulation. They delve in whole-hog, hands and feet first, into accusing homosexuals as being disgusting, degenerates, immoral, and perverted, etc, etc. The fact that they make almost no attempt to hide their hatred is troublesome. They must think the nation is heading in their direction or else their opinions wouldn’t be expressed so frankly… and perhaps they’re right.

Because one of my main avenues of study is in the End Times prophecies, I’ve come across many Christian movies and documentaries discussing the Apocalypse. In virtually every documentary, every movie, the people producing the movie went well out of their way to denigrate gays, often in complete non-sequiturs. Because of its uniformity in these films and in the media, one might be tempted to say that to be a Christian, you must hate gays.

I am thinking of this one Hal Lindsey article in particular, called “Jesus—king of hate?” It addressed how Christians are being persecuted in a similar way to the early Christian Church. While reading his opening paragraphs, I kept saying, “Yeah, that’s right.” And, “Yep, that’s true.” Then I felt as though I’ve been suddenly slapped by a wet noodle when he made a 90 degree shift into outright gay bashing. The non-sequitur was just too jarring.

In making the point of Christian persecution throughout the world, he gave these examples:

…since the Caesars claimed deity, it became an act of treason to claim that Jesus was the supreme Lord above him. Two thousand years later, the Bible and Christianity are facing the same charges for basically the same reasons.
Except it’s even more irrational today than it was in Roman times. At least the Romans believed in an “afterlife.” So in their minds, they were being excluded from an eternal reality.
In the West, the biggest persecutors of Christians don’t even believe there IS a hell, but they are still furious at being excluded from it. Now that is irrational – wouldn’t you agree?
A website called Frontline Fellowship that keeps track of such persecutions worldwide noted the following cases. In Sweden, a Pastor in his 70s named Ake Green was sentenced to a month in prison for offending homosexuals in a sermon.

In Canada, Hugh Owens was prosecuted for placing a small ad in his local newspaper. In it, he responded to all that he had been forced to observe during homosexual pride week. His ad simply listed four Bible references.

From these references, he put an equal sign to a drawing depicting two men holding hands. Then he superimposed over this drawing the universal red circle with a slash through it. Before one could even be offended, one had to first to look up the references in the Bible.

But somebody took the time necessary to look it up, be offended and file a complaint. As a result, Owen was charged with a “hate crime” and fined $4,500. The newspaper was also fined.

In New Zealand, two Christian videos that questioned safe-sex slogans and exposed the link between AIDS and homosexual behavior were outlawed by the New Zealand Parliament.

Dianne Haskett, the mayor of London, Ontario, Canada, was fined $10,000 for refusing to proclaim a “Gay Pride Weekend.” After she lost her case in Canada’s courts, she resigned as mayor rather than be forced to proclaim the event – just three weeks before Election Day.

In another incident related to Christophobia,…

In Hal Lindsey’s attempt to assert the beliefs of Christianity and to, in a sense, disprove the base accusation in his title, that Jesus Christ is “the king of hate,” he intimated that it is really okay to hate homosexuals. If you take his article at face value, he implied that Christianity not only condones such beliefs, he implied that it is a tenet of the Christian faith. Logically speaking, if he wanted to disprove the terrible accusation of the secular progressives that Jesus Christ is “the king of hate” and assert the opposite, homosexuals would have to be non-humans for him to make his argument, complete persona non grata as human beings.

But his underlying assumption is that it is right and proper to deny gays the status of human beings. I find it particularly offensive that someone would advocate and propound hatred in the name of Jesus Christ, even as he tries to argue the opposite, as though Christianity commands Christians to hate gays and deny them their right to exist.

It is much more convenient to pile your sins on the scapegoat and drive it out of the village than to confess them and build a character, eh?

Believe me, I’m not casting moral aspersions. This is true for you, me and Adam.

****

Allow me to get down to particulars. Anyone with a lick of honesty can see that a little four year old boy sneaking into his mom’s closet and putting on her lipstick and clothes is genetically predisposed to homosexuality, or if he’s naturally effeminate even before he’s hit puberty, you kind of get the idea that he’ll like other little boys and not little girls. A four year old has not been indoctrinated into anything, hasn’t been corrupted into anything. It’s just the way he’s been made. This is a point so obvious that my needing to explain it shows the degeneration of our reason.

Because gays are intrinsically born liking members of the same sex, one cannot mount the argument that they have chosen this way of life anymore than one can argue that one gets to choose how many fingers and toes one has. Once you’ve assented to the fact that homosexuality just is, an honorable honest man must treat them as a human being, not as some aberration of nature, as many conservatives are prone to do.

Or allow me to word this in another way. It is almost inconceivable that a man would choose, of his own free will, to be gay in today’s world. Almost from birth, he is reviled, kicked about and spat on by society, especially if he is effeminate. Even with today’s level of tolerance, which is not saying much, homosexuals are forced into small insular communities of other homosexuals because of the persecution of broader society.

In other words, they live the lives of exiles. In ancient times, the worst conceivable punishment for any individual would not be death but utter exile. It was a fate worse than death because, as any trained psychologist would tell you, a man who is cut off from his own society will go steadily mad. An exiled Russian living in and among only the French or an exiled Briton living in and among only the Sudanese will be quite mad.

This is the current disposition of many gays I’ve known. They are outcasts, and yes, some of them are quite mad. Again, I find it inconceivable that anyone would willing choose such a life without it be intrinsic to their being and nature.

Since the defeat of the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, the Right has since proposed to seat a whole Constitutional Convention to ram it through.

Think this one through.

The Right’s hatred of gays is so vehement they are willing to open Pandora’s Box and allow the Leftists to re-write our entire system of government. Once that Convention sits anything that comes out of that Convention will be the law of the land. American sovereignty, our peculiar democratic republican form of government, all our freedoms could be flung gleefully away as long as the Fundamentalist Right can legislate homosexuality out of existence.

The heat coming from the Right on this issue goes well beyond just morality. If this were righteous indignation coming from religious conviction, where is their heat concerning pre-martial sex, divorce, adultery, greed etc?

I find the Right’s vitriolic hatred of gays very reminiscent of Islam’s hatred of Israel. Both deny the right of the other to exist. The mere fact of their being somehow threatens them, Israel for Islam and homosexuals for the Fundamentalist Right. It is utterly irrational, but there it is.

* * * *

Some conservatives I know mount the secular argument against gay marriage because “it weakens the institution of marriage.” According to my conservative acquaintances, marriage should exclusively be between a man and a woman because opening the doorway to gay marriage unleashes whole sets of wanton behavior and because it would be contrary to traditional family values. Some of these conservatives even concede to the fact that homosexuality is genetic. Unstated but assumed in this idea is that the existence of gay marriage threatens and undermines heterosexual marriage.

I don’t find this sort of reasoning very persuasive or compelling. It is like saying the existence of an apple undermines the existence of an orange when the two can exist contentedly in entirely different spheres.

Like so much of our discourse recently, the debate on this matter attempts to force one into an “either/or” box. Either heterosexual marriage is legal or homosexual marriage. This binary box that people try to paint you into is ludicrous off the top. I don’t think homosexual marriage would have any bearing whatsoever on the state of heterosexual marriage. One does not negate the other, nor does it threaten it. They’re just apples and oranges.

While the national debate of gay marriage was well underway, I remember hearing some pundits making the point that Western Civilization was built on the family. The family is the basic building block that ties together and shapes a nation and a culture. To admit gays into normal society makes a mockery of this basic building block.

On this point, I couldn’t disagree more.

A nation and a culture are its relationships. I believe that the Greek philosopher Plato was correct and our modern ideas of family values are dead wrong. Plato wrote all those long ages ago, that “Friendship is the school house of all virtue.” It was the intense friendships between George Washington and Lafeyette, between John Adams and Franklin, and countless other friendships that launched our great American Republic—not their love of family, but the love between friends. Family does not make someone virtuous; frankly, that speaks to only the fertility of two able parties.

As late as the 1980’s in America, lifelong friendships were ubiquitous. Everyone had a friend or two in whom they could give their unguarded trust and loyalty. It was common for people to meet their friends in grade school and to have that friendship span the entire breadth of their lives. Men would gather on the lawn or porches and discuss religion, history and politics, and women would have their “coffee clutches” where the women would meet and gossip.

This was the way the world was in our not-so-distant past. Now, I don’t see many intimate friendships at all, but temporary alliances arranged at work or school. The proof is in the pudding. I don’t know of single instance of anyone I’ve known my entire life where the “friendships” don’t die when the “friends” no longer see each other on a regular basis. I’ll wager that whoever is reading this knows precisely what I am talking about, and if he is a counterexample to my generalization, he is a very lucky man indeed.

I think you can actually chart the decline of civil society with the death of friendships.

As it stands now, most people don’t even recognize true friendships when they see it. Most will mistake it for a homosexual relationship, and they’ll thus deride it and belittle it even when the two men could be a straight as arrows. I’ve seen it time and again.

Another secular argument against gay marriage says that legalizing this form of marriage will open the door to bestiality and every kind of freak show. Under rational circumstance I wouldn’t give this argument the dignity of a rebuttal because it’s too disgusting. It is disgusting because of the causal ease in which people equate homosexuals with one of the worse forms of insanity.

The only point of contention is whether marriage can be defined as between a man and a woman, or just between two consenting adults. The point of the contention is not the introduction of inter-species relationships, nor is the point about opening up polygamy.

* * *

Back during my years in college I ran in artistic circles. I knew a host of writers, painters, wannabe philosophers, and musicians. Quite a few of them were homosexuals, many of them weren’t. But as a generalization, in my experience, gays are perhaps one of the most creative, intelligent and (most certainly) expressive sector of our society. I fail to see the threat to society coming from a gay man doing oil paintings in his home, or a gay man sprouting abstract, esoteric philosophy to a group of other gays.

I’m sorry I don’t see it. As far as I can see, the only reason for the animus against gays from the Right and elsewhere is good old-fashioned bigotry…

… and bigotry, I think, is a very ugly thing.

It’s taken me a while to really see it but it’s better late than never. I think the fundamentalist Right really means what they say about gays. Immediately after 9/11, Jerry Falwell blames gays for the attack. When “moral leaders” speak of declining moral values in today’s world, they will invariable discuss the hideousness of our tolerance for gays.

You know you’re in trouble when a major national party has as one of its platforms the denial human rights to a subset of human beings. It has echoes of Nazi Germany, and that just doesn’t sit well with me. Many conservative proposals along these lines are a step down a path I don’t think we should take.

As Spencer Tracy said in Judgment at Nuremberg, the line you do not cross is to knowingly send an innocent man to prison.

“If he and the other defendants were all depraved perverts - if the leaders of the Third Reich were sadistic monsters and maniacs - these events would have no more moral significance than an earthquake or other natural catastrophes. But this trial has shown that under the stress of a national crisis, men - even able and extraordinary men - can delude themselves into the commission of crimes and atrocities so vast and heinous as to stagger the imagination.

A country isn’t a rock. And it isn’t an extension of one’s self. It’s what it stands for, when standing for something is the most difficult! Before the people of the world - let it now be noted in our decision here that this is what we stand for: justice, truth… and the value of a single human being!”

As you can see, I’ve recently changed the “look and feel” of my site. The image isn’t an original from yours truly, but it seems apropos for the times we live in. Today (Saturday) as I looked out the door, I saw a sight you don’t usually see in Los Angeles. Large heavy dark clouds drifted overhead and the ground was wet from last night’s rain. You could smell the sweat of the desert clay fresh from the downpour. Like so many times these past few years, a weighty ominous feeling seemed to press down on me; the clouds reflecting my mood or my mood reacting to the rain clouds. I don’t know which.

Oftentimes I feel as though we’ve been cut adrift from our moorings and we’re drifting out into some vast unknown ocean leading somewhere or nowhere but knowing it could only end in tragedy. I’ve been silent these past couple months on this blog because I bemoan the state of America. I know with certainty that I am powerless over the destiny of the America I so desperately love, the America that I barely recognize anymore, now falling, so fragmented from her former glory…

… and yet there is still hope…

If God watches the watchmen, the watchmen do not watch in vain.

Earlier this week I decided to study at the local cafe. It’s a small establishment populated with wide-eyed college students and your typical rebellious artistic characters with more color in their hair than on their canvases. This place seated at the corner of our local community college is where I go to become anonymous, read and study. Most of the students are hunched over their triple-shot lattes, high on caffeine and mental overload, and they speak in these low secretive hushes. At times I get the sense I’ve just entered a library despite the constant 80’s and 90’s music playing over head.

I ordered one of my iced Americanos with a dash of vanilla syrup and settled comfortably at a long, diner-like counter with my book when snippets of a conversation next to jarred me from my book. They sat at a smallish, round glass table; a black woman and a white man.

I was content to ignore them and delve into my own studies, but that wasn’t going to be an option. The woman had a piercing voice that sliced neatly through the near silence. Half the cafe couldn’t help but hear them.

In the snippets I couldn’t ignore, I heard the man say, “I don’t think I’m bad looking. Why won’t you even consider me?”

His pleading set off a thirty minute tirade from the woman. She stirred in a mixture of hardcore emasculation, gratuitous cursing and sprinkled it with a racist victimology; all of which had the subtlety of a sledgehammer. She presented it all as her being cute and witty, and she wanted to show him that she’s a really strong woman. It was understood between both parties that she was above reproach because a) she was black and b) because she had ovaries. Her behavior was justified by who and what she is. Period.

It was one of the worse examples of feminist, multiculturalism gone Frankenstein.

Around twenty minutes into her tirade about his apparent idiocy and the idiocy of others, with her screeching over and over, “But I don’t understand!” I had the gumption to turn around and see just what this lady looked like. She wasn’t particularly beautiful, quite ordinary actually, and I noticed her seated flush and ramrod against the back of her chair with a self-satisfied half-grin on her countenance. The white man’s face was flushed red, unbelievingly still pleading for this woman’s favor even as she rained insult upon insult on his head.

I am saddened to say that this incident is far from unique. In fact, I see incidences similar to this every day. In movies, on TV shows, commercials, at work—virtually every level of society.

The issue of race aside, have we ever stopped to think what kind of society we are propagating when we we produce metallic, almost psuedo-men for women and then hold up that attitude and behavior up as the ideal feminine beauty? I find nothing feminine about it. I do not find it beautiful.

And what kind of men are we producing who squirm and whimper at the rapid insults of a woman? Is this kind of behavior attractive or sexy or desirable in a romantic partner? We see in movies and TV shows and in real life that the insulted male party, as incredulous as it seems, is expected to praise the woman for treating him like dirt. In modern-speak, she’s just being “strong”.

Cable TV’s number one show, The Closer, comes to mind. Here is a woman who deceives everyone, emasculates every man she confronts and everyone man under her command, and the TV show presents that as being sexy with her sweet Southern accent… Egads!

Another good example, if you can call such things “good”, is this supposed family fun movie called Ella Enchanted. It hit the theaters a few years ago, and it was billed as a family movie full of wonder and magic, but instead, viewers were be treated to two and a half hours of Anne Hathaway’s tongue-lashing belittlements at her Prince Charming. I turned it off half way through, especially when Mister Prince Charming showed delight in her obvious willfulness.

Did we ever stop to think what would happen if we reversed a patriarchal society into a matriarchal society? It would have to be uniformly hostile to the masculinity in all its forms.

Masculinity and manhood has degenerated down to dumb, grunting, violent human beings by popular culture. You will quickly come to the conclusion from watching an hour’s worth of TV that manhood is to be measured in the potential or active amount of violence one can inflict on other people. What we watch matters. I know of a whole host of young men who view violence as the measure of their manhood. How could they not? What else in their world tells them otherwise?

The only kind of men that gets semi-decent treatment are the feminine men (not effeminate, but feminine). Throw a dart on the movie screen. Chances are that the male protagonist of the story will be feminine. Tobey Maguire, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Luke Wilson, Ryan Phillippe, and Leonardo Di Caprio to name a few. With a few exceptions, the only masculine actors left on the silver screen are aging giants of the old guard, waiting to be retired. (Is it just me or are our modern male actors always skulking around with pouty faces, all grimace and frowns, as they go around whacking people? And these are the action “heroes” filling our stadium theaters?… oh joy…)

I’m sure the John Wayne’s of the world— the John Wayne’s who in real life bathed his children, raised them, wouldn’t utter a curse word in front of women and children, who drove the speed limit because men just don’t endanger the lives of others— I’m sure those kinds of men are still around. They’re just keeping their heads low to keep it from being lopped off.

You know, come to think of it, the next time I go to a cafe, I’ll be sure to plug my ears with an iPod and just enjoy my book and my Americano. I’m no John Wayne, but I think it’ll also be wise for me to keep my head low…

(More ruminations next week…)