Jeremayakovka

A Sadistic Thought For This Weekend's Ex-Gay and Ex-Ex-Gay Conferences

As already referenced more than once, diametrically opposed conferences on homosexuality are being held this weekend in Irvine, CA. The larger, longer, and more longstanding one is for those seeking a heterosexual life animated through the Good News of Jesus Christ. The other, lesser one is for those who have tried that route and found it impossible. The one tries to save people from homosexuality; the other tries to save people from being saved from homosexuality.

While more sympathetic to the aims of the former conference, I am also not signing up for it. I can't shake the temperamental, freethinking and freewheeling skepticism which took me, first as a young adult, away from heterosexual norms, and then when more mature directly back to them. This has nothing to do with denigrating the core Christian essence of the evangelical conference, nor with denigrating religion generally. Nor, for that matter, with embracing a supposedly more "tolerant" interpretation of religion that accommodates (or even celebrates) homosexuality.

While coming forward about being, what other people call, "ex-gay" (a ridiculous label, if there ever were one) if I have any message to preach, any principle (let alone, light) to prize, any faith to profess, they're not so much those of Jesus Christ as those of the one French marquis who still boasts marquee-name recognition:

Let no one accuse me of being evil's apologist; let no one say that I seek to inspire wrongdoing or to blunt remorse in the hearts of wrongdoers: my sole purpose throughout these endeavors is to articulate thoughts which have gnawed at my conscience since I was first able to reason; that these thoughts might be in conflict with the thoughts of some other persons, or of most other persons, or of all other persons except me, is not, I believe, sufficient reason to suppress them. As to those susceptible souls who might be "corrupted" by exposure to my writings, I say, so much the worse for them. I address myself only to men who are capable of examining with an objective eye everything before them. Such men are incorruptible.
-- Donatien Francois Alphonse de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom

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If I were in Irvine today, I'd be shuttling between the two gatherings with a sign reading: XXX-Gay Curious?

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(Is any of this surprising? Seemingly unnecessarily? Even tortuously complicating? Ah, Gentle Reader! Expect nothing less from a blog that takes after Vladimir Mayakovsky and Franz Kafka.)

Coulter Blows Her Nose With Liz Edwards's Hankie

Ann responds to Liz here, in one part, quoting Democrat strategist Bob Shrum in his new book, No Excuses:

[Kerry] was even queasier about Edwards after they met. Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he'd never told anyone else — that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he'd do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade's ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the same exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before — and with the same preface, that he'd never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn't pick Edwards unless he met with him again.

Previous: "Boo Frickin' Hoo, Liz"

Rhymes With Conservatism

Gabe on the importance of earnestly studying poetry.

"My Name Is Sue, How Do You Do?"

The other day I posted about both Exodus International's Freedom International conference now underway in Irvine, CA and the Ex-Gay Survivors' Conference about to get underway, also in Irvine. One is a longstanding, evangelical Christian gathering that offers people who are, or who consider themselves, gay or lesbian, etc. a new (heterosexual) life through Jesus Christ. The other is a more recent and concerted effort to keep gays and lesbians, etc., or people who consider themselves gay or lesbian or etc., gay or lesbian. Or etc.

I wonder if there'll be any interaction between the two gatherings this weekend, and if there is, whether it will be, uh, fruitful. Maybe this Johnny Cash classic will break the ice.

Boo Frickin' Hoo, Liz

* Updated *

(7/4) Brent Bozell: "Elizabeth Edwards Favors 'Rage'"
(7/1) "Edwards Eye For The Straight Guy"
(6/28) The AP  does the Edwards' and DNC's dirty work, gets fisked (see below)
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This is news?

Yesterday Elizabeth Edwards publicly appealed to Ann Coulter to stop couching political criticism of her and her family in the form of personal attacks. She appealed as the mother and the wife that she is, although not as the lawyer and seasoned national campaigner that she is -- and as the First Lady that she would like very much to become.

Contending that Coulter's criticisms diminish the level of political debate, Edwards attempted to single out one of the most -- perhaps the most -- widely-read and influential political satirist of our generation for being better at what she does than just about everyone else in the business. As usually happens when she's on the MSM's hot seat, Ann's ripostes were downplayed or ignored.
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Let's get a few things straight, Liz:

* Ann's a satirist -- she does what she does with humor, hyperbole, and invective. That's her job, her duty, her calling, her raison d'ecrire.

* Ann's not running for office, doesn't hold office, has never held office. She has no real, enforceable political power -- not the kind of power that you and your husband are seeking and have already (during his term as Senator) enjoyed. Your style and your ruses should be of more concern to the public than Ann's, starting with your soft Southern voice whose posed politeness positions itself as if beyond reproach. I didn't describe your face in a previous post as "equal parts Mona Lisa and Joseph Stalin" for nothing.

* The faggot "rehab" joke from last March, the one referencing your husband, was a deft comic intervention having to do with the (ab)use of language and with shabby moral standards that permit a self-incriminating gay-hater (actor Isaiah Washington) to skirt the consequences of his actions by trying to pin the blame on "alcoholism." (Mark Foley did something similar when his sins went public. Both stink for it.) But a conservative who draws attention to the general state of our political culture can't count on receiving even-handed treatment alongside a liberal who appeals for sympathy when it's suggested he shares traits with one or another "identity group" -- can she?

* Since you don't like the attacks Ann directs at you and your family, Liz, you're demanding she perform her punditry as if strict laws against libel existed here in the U.S. the way they do, say, in Great Britain. Those laws don't exist here, not because our political culture presumes we will conduct ourselves with the restraints they impose. Those laws don't exist here so that we are free to act without their restraints. I venture that if American libel laws so permitted, you'd leap at the chance to try Ann in court. But you can't try her in court, so you're attempting to try her in the court of public opinion.

* Earlier this year when career leftwing pundit Molly Ivins died -- Molly Ivins, who had pilloried the president in two bestsellers, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush and Bushwhacked -- Molly Ivins, who succumbed to breast cancer, which you've been diagnosed with -- Bush made sure to praise her quick wit and her commitment to her political beliefs, to the point where they would be missed (!). The target of Ivins's calls for impeachment said that he respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words, and her ability to turn a phrase. Liz, if you and your husband think you have what it takes to be presidential, take a cue from someone who has experience at it.
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Previous:
"'Ann of Arc' and 'International Ann Coulter Day'"
"Elizabeth Edwards Awareness Month"

Related:
Josef K's 8-minute video deploring John Edwards's epithet "bumper sticker" to describe the war on terror.

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* Update *

The MSM is as boring as it is annoying.

The AP's Nedra Pickler gets a byline for reporting Coulter's suggestion that she wished [Edwards] would be "killed in a terrorist assassination plot." and that this supposed incivility is directly boosting contributions to the Edwards campaign.

The AP glosses over the fact that Ann did not express a specific desire of hers that Edwards be assassinated. While referring to specific, demonstrated desires by those who so loathe the Bush Administration that its officials be assassinated, she implied clearly that should she demonstrate such a desire towards a Democrat she would, in terms of precedent, be doing nothing out of place or egregious. She did so to make a sarcastic point that surpasses the limits of what our current political culture permits (or does not permit) her (or anyone) to say when criticizing John Edwards, but which it permits in criticsms of Dick Cheney and of the president.

Expressed desires to assassinate have become so common in our political culture that the MSM  -- those paid professionals who set, or should set, our political culture's tone -- routinely ignore them as unworthy of scrutiny or censure. Assassination desires against this Bush Administration have been extolled as cinema and as rap music and have been attempted at least twice by real terrorists, as well as by the one who tried to have an ex-president (this president's father) assassinated. No doubt they will be expressed by those who would like to see the next and/or soon-to-be former President of the United States assassinated, regardless of his (or her) political party.

While drawing sensational attention to herself, Ann was also calling substantive attention to our political culture. It's one that has allowed the expression of such -- not just criminal but evil -- desires to become acceptable. Regardless of the direction in which her invective was aimed, she was giving active expression to the passive frustration people of all political stripes feel at an American political culture which has forsaken its obligation to identify and insist upon such standards -- standards which should hold for all of the people all of the time.

It's unfortunate that liberals can't get (let alone enjoy) the humor in Ann's recent defense of herself and her work. Even President Bush from time to time laughs at himself in front of liberals, including when he's sitting at the same table as his most dogged critics. There just seems to be no point in sharing humor with liberals. As Christopher Hitchens has said, if you have to explain why it's funny, then it's no longer a joke.

After throwing their remote controls at their TV sets and after electronically donating to the Edwards campaign, liberals should thank Ann for her dedication (no matter how ironically, provocatively, and even negatively expressed) to fairness, intelligence, and morality in American politics -- specifically in American political commentary and even more specifically in the MSM.

If the Edwards campaign is so lagging in fundraising that it has to rely on compromised reporting about Ann Coulter for cash influxes, how tired and exhausted must it be? Yowza! Yowza! Yowza! They shoot silky ponies -- I mean, horses -- don't they?

Were Orwell alive today, would he shake Ann Coulter's hand? Of course not! He'd be too busy applauding her.

Oh! And I was going to have some comments about that other Democratic presidential candidate,  Hillary Rodham Clinton, but it turns out that were she to become president you might expect to be audited by the IRS if you use the word "dyke."

Hit Iran and Gaza Now

Two recent articles about the two most critical theaters in the Middle East:

* Stefania Lapenna's summary statement on reoccupying Gaza:

Mainstream media and world political leaders failed to consider the fighting among terrorist factions in Gaza as "civil war"-- though they are more than willing to use it in reference to Iraq. Notwithstanding, Western nations -- Europe (and Italy) on the forefront -- are urging an international 'peacekeeping' force. This proposal would put Israeli soldiers' lives at risk only to protect a death cult society who voted for its own disgrace.
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* Norman Podhoretz's methodical case for bombing Iran:

[T]he plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force--any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in 1938.

Since a ground invasion of Iran must be ruled out for many different reasons, the job would have to be done, if it is to be done at all, by a campaign of air strikes. Furthermore, because Iran's nuclear facilities are dispersed, and because some of them are underground, many sorties and bunker-busting munitions would be required. And because such a campaign is beyond the capabilities of Israel, and the will, let alone the courage, of any of our other allies, it could be carried out only by the United States. Even then, we would probably be unable to get at all the underground facilities, which means that, if Iran were still intent on going nuclear, it would not have to start over again from scratch. But a bombing campaign would without question set back its nuclear program for years to come, and might even lead to the overthrow of the mullahs.

Exodus International's 2007 Freedom Conference

* Updated *

Exodus International's 32nd annual Freedom Conference kicks off today and runs through July 1 in Irvine, CA. For those who don't know, Exodus International is dedicated to introducing its members to the teachings of Jesus Christ, to turning people of all ages away from a gay or lesbian lifestyle and toward forming committed, monogamous, heterosexual relationships, marriages, and families.

I'm happy to tip my readers to this year's Freedom Conference, not because I'll be attending (nor, for that matter, addressing it), but out of goodwill to its Executive Vice President, Randy Thomas, who has flown across the country to help lead it. Randy and I have had the opportunity to become acquainted this year. He's a good guy with a lot to say. I'm sure he'll be saying a lot in Irvine this week.

Since coming forward this spring with some critical comments about the gay community and my one-time place in it, I have found that with only one exception gay men -- those I knew long ago, relatively recently, and/or to whom I decided this year to introduce myself -- have shunned me. At first it was disheartening and disappointing. Now I see it as instructive: for one who's not "in the church" the gay community can be uncharitable, inhospitable, and un-gay (as in, not fun).

You shouldn't have to be a born-again Christian to be capable of recognizing the positive force of Christianity, and of religion generally. Just last week I went on the road to attend a very meaningful event at an Orthodox synagogue in Los Angeles. So best wishes to all the attendees and presenters at Exodus International's 2007 Freedom Conference -- we're not on the same road but we're kind of headed in the same direction.

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* Update * (6/27) Little did I know that a "counter conference" will take place this weekend, also in Irvine, run by "ex-ex-gay" activists -- i.e., people who understood themselves as gay, lesbian, etc. who became "ex-gay" and later became "gay" or "lesbian" again (and have remained so). All this would be funny except that, as I know from experience, real lives are at stake. Here's an open letter addressed from its leading organizers to Exodus International. May more light than heat be generated this weekend.

P.S. If you're new to this site, and have strong opinions on gay and lesbian issues, please sample my "Gay/Lesbian" category before you go. Thanks.

Testimony From A Concentration of Camp Survivor

For Gay Pride Day:

In the French Quarter there are several queer bars so full every night the fags spill out onto the sidewalk. A roomful of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out. Fags are ventriloquists' dummies who have moved in and taken over the ventriloquist. The dummy sits in a queer bar nursing his beer, and uncontrollably yapping out of a rigid doll face.

-- William S. Burroughs, Junky

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Check out what Gabe wrote in the Comments section. (Thanks, Gabe!)
MB gets personal. I reply.

Into The Heart Of Primo Levi's Darkness

* Updated*

This post is a minor reflection offered in anticipation of the Fourth Annual Ariel Avrech ZT'L Yahrtzeit Lecture, to be delivered this Sunday at Young Israel of Century City (Los Angeles, CA). Professor David Shatz will be speaking on "Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and the Problem of Evil." I'll be there.

Update (06/19): Ralphie posts his summary of Prof. Shatz's lecture at Kerckhoff Coffeehouse.
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By his indispensable works Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening, The Drowned and The Saved (and many more), Italian Jew Primo Levi ranks in the forefront of those who attempted to give literary expression to that ring of Hell on Earth known as Auschwitz. Levi was by trade a chemist who came of age, if not without a literary temperament, then apparently without literary ambitions. Yet through a dreadful and formidable combination of fate, history, and willpower Primo Levi, the nice Jewish boy from Turin, eventually became, as he is known today to millions, "Primo Levi" -- the world-class memoirist, novelist, poet, and essayist.
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Like most Jewish concentration camp survivors of a literary bent, Levi was far from a literal believer. Instead he essayed, for better or for worse, to recover traces of revealed truth through his own historical, and scientific investigations. His empirical method attempted to sketch (literally) an enlightened schema over the darkest reality of the univers concentrationnaire. This schema appears as the frontispiece to Myriam Anissimov's Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist: between two poles of experience -- "Job" and "Black Holes" -- stretch (or rather, bulge) four literary contuinua: "salvation through humor," "man suffers unjustly," "man's stature," and "salvation through understanding." Several writers or personalities populate each continuum -- for example, Shalom Aleichem (humor), Paul Celan (suffering), Joseph Conrad (stature), and Charles Darwin (understanding).

What sticks in my throat most, Gentle Reader, about Primo Levi is the poetic legacy he bequeathed in "Almanac." It's the last piece he published during his lifetime, dating from January 1987, a few months before he died under mysterious circumstances (either by accident or by suicide). Ms. Anissimov describes it, almost pithtily, as a farewell to the world, a farewell in the form of a prophecy, proclaimed by a follower of the Enlightenment who detested both prophets and their prophecies. "Almanac" strikes me as the admission -- by a rationalist, a scientist, a humanist -- of the eternal presence of evil, of man's agency in propagating evil.
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Almanac
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The indifferent rivers
Will keep on flowing to the sea
Or ruinously overflowing dikes,
Ancient handiwork of determined men.
The glaciers will continue to grate,
Smoothing what lies beneath them,
Or suddenly fall headlong,
Cutting short fir trees' lives.
The sea, captive between
Two continents, will go on struggling,
Always miserly with its riches.
Sun, stars, planets and comets
Will continue on their course.
Earth too will fear the immutable
Laws of the universe.
Not us. We, rebellious offspring
With great brainpower, little sense,
Will destroy, defile,
Always more feverishly.
Very soon we will extend the desert
Into the Amazon forests,
Into the living heart of our cities,
Into our very hearts.

- from Collected Poems

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This oblique measure of moral honesty, of the Timeless shooting (seeping) through the Temporal may be Levi's truest, if inadvertent, literary legacy.

Older Poem - "Naomi"

Naomi
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my heart
torn from
her breast
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The Heart of Germanness

Heartpiece
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ONE: May I put my heart at your feet.
TWO: As long as you don' t soil my floor.

ONE: My heart is pure.
TWO: We'll see to that.

ONE: I can't get it out.
TWO: You'd like me to help you.

ONE: If you don't mind.
TWO: It's my pleasure. I too can't get it out.

ONE: (CRIES)
TWO: I'll take it out by surgery.
What do I have a penknife for.
We'll get this in a minute.
To work and not despair.
Well, it's done.
But this is a brick.
Your heart is a brick.

ONE: But it beats only for you.
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- Heiner Müller (1929-95)
from Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, Carl Weber, ed.

Israel, The "Peculiar Heart" of Europe

If the Jews, even after Europe so tragically failed them, nonetheless kept faith with that European cosmopolitanism, Israel, their little homeland finally regained, strikes me as the true heart of Europe--a peculiar heart located outside the body.
- Milan Kundera, remarks while accepting the 1985 Jerusalem Prize

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 7) - "San Francisco Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful"

Dear Lawrence,
San Francisco is here. Wish you were beautiful.
love,
Jeremayakovka
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Like a war criminal "exposing" past infamies in the service of his horrid cause, long after the fact, long after remorse or retribution or even right recall are possible, mumbling bumbling memories to keep from nodding off, let alone for anyone else's enlightenment (or rather, entertainment) or like a soggy, sorry drunk kneeling in his puke on the stoop of a church basement as the town's last AA meeting of the evening is wrapping up, last month the last big Beatnik left standing, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, related:

Before things went bad [in the late 60s], everything was light, in both senses of the word, light physically in the sky, and also in the sense of light versus heavy. After that year, everything got heavy. Things just degenerated more and more. I think it was that summer [of '67, the "Summer of Love"]. It's so long ago. I'm looking through the wrong end of telescope. It's hard to differentiate one year from another.
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Here's the most incriminating gem Ferlinghetti related:
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What if we're all wrong?

- Allen Ginsberg (below, left) to Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
at the Human Be-In, Hippie Hill, Golden Gate Park
San Francisco, California
Summer 1967
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On Obscurity (The Obscurity Of The Once-Bright)

Chuang Tzu and the Butterfly

Chuang Tzu in dream became a butterfly,
And the butterfly became Chuang Tzu at waking.
Which was the real—the butterfly or the man ?
Who can tell the end of the endless changes of things?
The water that flows into the depth of the distant sea
Returns anon to the shallows of a transparent stream.
The man, raising melons outside the green gate of the city,
Was once the Prince of the East Hill.
So must rank and riches vanish.
You know it, still you toil and toil,—what for? 

- Li Po

On Fame

On Fame
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Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy
To those who woo her with too slavish knees,
But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease;
She is a Gipsey,--will not speak to those
Who have not learnt to be content without her;
A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper'd close,
Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her;
A very Gipsey is she, Nilus-born,
Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar;
Ye love-sick Bards! repay her scorn for scorn;
Ye Artists lovelorn! madmen that ye are!
Make your best bow to her and bid adieu,
Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.

- John Keats