Pesach Time is Here, Happiness and Cheer

Happy Passover, y'all! That's right, it's everyone's third-favorite Jewish holiday (after the chocolate geld and dreidel spinning of Chanukah, and of course the drunken Deuteronomically sanctioned cross-dressing of Purim) once again. This means two things. First, Christian-y people will soon be nomming on ham, feasting non-ironically on mixed meat and dairy, coloring eggs, and exchanging rabbit inspired goodies to celebrate the pagan fertility rites that mark the coming of Spring the resurrection of their favorite lord and savior on Easter, Jesus H Christ! [JC's famed last supper was in fact a Passover seder, for those who've yet to make that connection.] Secondly, it means liberal-type goyim (Christians and other such non-Jews) are clamoring for their fill of seders, matzah, and anything Jewish.

See, within the liberal portions of American society, Judaism is probably the only religion deemed acceptable by the secular set. As much as fallen Catholics might pour scorn on the faith of their births, most would never dream of doing so to Judaism. This is probably because Judaism, as it is practised by the majority of its believers in the States (aka: Conservative and Reform Jews), is a relatively liberal, social justice minded, forward thinking faith in most ways. There just isn't that much there for anti-religious types to get all worked up about, foreskin slicing aside. Jews in American society have often been some of the country's brightest cultural lights in academia, the arts, business, science, and so on. And despite some notable outliers, Alan Greenspan and the anti-religious Ayn Rand being two examples, they have often been the sorts of people liberal minded Goys really really like. Plus, Jews can still be Jews without really practising Judaism, which makes them the post-modern secularist's dream come true.

Americans love an underdog. Scanning the last two-thousand years of Western history, one would be hard pressed to find a group more consistently and repetitively oppressed than the Jews. Across Europe they were subject to repeated expulsions, massacres, forced conversions, and a whole host of really atrocious shenanigans. Consider that Magna Carta, that first bloom of liberalism in England in 1215 CE, was followed only 75 years later by the expulsion of all Jews from English soil for 350 years. What a downer! No need to really explain the next thousand or so years of anti-Jewish treachery. Long story short, the Jews are history's underdog par excellence. This means all Americans who have shed the anti-semitism of their forebears can really appreciate the Jews, and love to try and identify with them. Hey, the SS would've gone after me, too, donchaknow? So, in wedding the underdog motif with the identity-victimization motif, there is just so much for non-Jewish liberals to really latch onto and try to claim as their own, that it proves very difficult for us/them not to try and do so!

Which is silly, for a lot of reasons. Much as we might admire Judaism and our Jewish pals, non-Jews can't really often become Jews. We've all seen that twit Charlotte trying to give up  Christmas presents Jesus for her hunk of brisket on Sex and the City, so most good goys now understand it is a club they'd have a hard time joining for the long haul. Which means, as the next best thing, the annual Seder that President Obama has now established as White House tradition will surely be the progressive gentile's dream social invite for many years to come. Hurrah, haroset!

Happy Passover, Jews, and to all you Christians out there: have an appropriately miserable Holy Week!

Now bring them the finest muffins and bagels in the land!

I imagine Pelosi, Obama, and company will have mornings somewhat like this on Monday:



And perhaps it's just the rose-tinted glow of victory, but I am feeling very upbeat about the health bill after tonight. It's not anywhere near my ideal vision, as my last post explained, but it is definitely a giant piece of social progress. That article from the New Republic has definitely helped allay my natural first impulses toward left-wing bewilderment.

Kudos to Comrade R for originally posting the TNR article.

Health Care Reform Once and For All

Oh, so we're hours away from the big vote on the big health care reform bill that the big man B. Obama has been bigging up for the big first year of his presidency.

If it passes, that is pretty big.

I have to comment on it. I really do. My take: better than nothing, though like my big man Paul Krugman at the NY Times, I'd have preferred a Medicare for all universal health insurance program like most countries have. We could've divvied it up by state if necessary to make us all feel happy and federal. That was never really on the table, however. Cowardly Democrats. Or maybe they aren't cowardly, they're just not all that left-wing (philosophically speaking), at all. Perhaps that's an illusion that I have wished to project onto them. Yeah, definitely.

As this British dude says: Americans are not used to the idea that politics can't be bipartisan, if we expect our parties to have actual policy disagreements and differences in ideology. So, grow up and stop getting hysterical about the two parties disagreeing. They agree on far too much already. Also, wanting universal healthcare doesn't make you a socialist, anyway. (And I'm serious, read through the wikipedia article. Then compare that to the Democrats. Please.) David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party of the UK, isn't a socialist, even though he (claims to) strongly support a completely state-run system of healthcare. I won't go through the "if this were Europe, we'd all seem far-right" argument. That British dude did, so if you clicked the link you'll have just read it. Also, it's had its time, and comparisons with Europe just piss off Americans and make me seem like some naive starry-eyed Europhile. Please, plenty of them bitches hate them some Muslims, so I'm jaded about those Europeans, too. Rascally buggers.

I'm just saying: we agree roads, air traffic control, fire fighting, policing, education, in some places water/gas/electric, are things that government should make sure we all have as a part of our input to the common pot of goods that would be too expensive or complicated to purchase as individuals. Health care is the same deal, the end.

And please, someone, introduce me to one of these Americans who Obama keeps saying are so satisfied with their current plans. I've never met a one.

Alice and, tangentially, American sincerity.

This weekend I took a trip to the movies (or cinema, if you like) and saw the new Alice in Wonderland. It was great, though I think it could have been even weirder and darker, if only Disney had allowed Tim Burton to go all the way with it. There were some pretty excellent bits of humor, both light and dark, and I encourage you all to see it for yourself.

My favorite one liner in the whole film:
Alice is speaking with her potential future mother-in-law, who poses the question, "Do you know what my greatest fear is?"

To which Alice slyly but with a tone of earnestness replies, "The decline of the aristocracy?"

At which point I snorted loudly in glee, but think I was the only one in the theatre who got the joke and/or found it amusing. This is because I'm a dork, and have spent too much time in the UK. Oh yes, I am a show off, too. Disney may have released the film, but Alice (both the books and this rendition) is undeniably British and I'm glad the film and its dialogue weren't completely run through the American sieve. That at least that little bit of totally non-American repartee made it past test-audiences and the editors (films are often edited differently for different countries) warmed the cockles of my heart. Yes, the cockles.

It got me thinking, though, and please do follow this little trip down my stream of conciousness. The longer I am away from the roast beef of jolly old England, the more I notice that my sense of humor just doesn't play as well this side of the Atlantic, and I think I know why. To make a sweeping generalization, Americans are, if anything, a sincere and straight-forward bunch. Sincerity is great and all, but it means one can get away with a lot less in the name of humor, especially in everyday settings. Dark, dry, biting wit just doesn't usually fly. It's unfortunate, for me, because it is the humor I like best and (I like to believe) excel in. That it is so often misinterpreted and/or lost on others hurts. It hurts because it makes me seem like a jerk when I'm just trying to be funny. It hurts most of all, however, because these 'others' are so clearly wrong.

It's Only Natural!

'Americans are so weird.'

A blunt and simple judgement pronounced by a dear friend, and Canadian, last week in New York's Central Park. The source of her consternation? No, not the Tea Party 'movement', nor our remarkable religiosity in the face of science, nor even our stubborn (and sometimes paranoid) clinging to the remarkably wasteful $1 bill despite the US Mint's best and most creative efforts to break us of the habit. Well, ok, she did remark on the last one in addition to the ugliness and drab uniformity of US paper money.... that, however, was not the source of her pronouncement of Americans as plainly weird.

No, the source of her befuddlement was the sight of a runner who had just bounded past us on a freezing cold day, his feet shod in little more than a thin black layer of some sort of composite material that seemed a strange cross between foot-condom and mitten-esque hospital-footy. Luckily, I had read about this trend and was able to dispatch with her confusion, if not her incredulity, post haste. Its proponents purport that, by mimicking the running conditions of early humans, we can minimize stress injuries and maxmize performance. Now, I'm no physiologist, so am not really qualified to contemplate the merits of this argument, of which there are many. However, I can also see how wearing shoes (something that humans have done for quite a long time) might have advantages as well, especially given the hyper-ergonomically engineered footware available to the modern runner. Sure, we may have spent a good deal of our early evolution running around barefoot, but it's not impossible that shoe wearing has not subtly influenced our ped-evolution in the meanwhile. Peruse the "paleao diet" for another example of the "if the cavemen did it, it must be good for us, because that's how we evolved" thinking. The cavemen also endured brutish existences and often fell victim to toothaches. I think you see where I'm going with this.

This, to me, represents simply one more manifestation of our society's pre-occupation with trying to discover, and then embrace, all that is 'natural' and (implicitly) better for us. The proponents of organic food, despite considerable evidence to the contrary, insist that organic veg is more healthful. I'll grant it is less environmentally destructive, but de facto more healthy? Probably not. Anyone who has been to a Whole Foods Market can see this trend in all its consumerist glory. Whole aisles devoted to homoeopathic 'remedies', with absolutely zero basis in reality. Hyper-diluted  (sometimes tens of thousands of times!) rose-hip water, while perhaps more natural than human engineered chemical compounds, will do nothing for your health beyond the placebo effect. It may be more natural than aspirin, but I'm still going with aspirin for my headache, thanks very much! Chemotherapy might be horrendous to endure, but it saves lives. The bottom line: natural does not necessarily equal better.

Which all makes the obsession with doing, eating, drinking, and being "natural" kind of funny. If you shop at Whole Foods, live in Brooklyn, and run through the completely human created landscape of Central Park.. well, all the homoeopathic remedies and foot-condom running in the world isn't going to give you some mythic natural existence. Appreciation of nature and respect for the natural world is crucial to our survival as a species, but consumerist attempts to live some faddishy faux-naturelle lifestyle do not necessarily represent any step in that direction.

Also, it just makes you seem weird to Canadians, which is quite the feat.

Everyone Counts

This year brings a new decade (sort of) and with it a brand new census! Yes, the great counting of America means short questionnaires will soon be arriving in people's mailboxes and on their doorsteps. The necessity of the census, and all the positive consequences of it being conducted accurately, are well known and unnecessary to explicate. Equally well known and unnecessary to examine is the insanity that bubbles in the bosoms of your more conspiratorially minded, far-right, anti-government town idiot in reaction to this simple, non-invasive exercise that actually makes government MORE representative of all, even idiots like him. (And its always a him.)

The census reminds us of our common membership in a political community, and as such can bring up many questions about how we choose to identify ourselves within that community.

For example, LGBT issues and the census have been intertwined, and have hit facebook (or my facebook, at least) with a vengeance. I've been repeatedly invited to the group/page/event/whatever that beckons me to support some sort of petition on Change.org (a website that seems to mimic the Obama campaign's fonts and such..) and to check out "Queer the Census", a project of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, to get a question about sexual orientation added to the NEXT census, in 2020. So many of my facebook friends like this, that facebook has even taken it upon itself to "suggest" these things to me.

No, thank you.

For one, this is an intrusive and unnecessary question. The census doesn't ask about my religion (nor should it), so don't ask me about my sexuality. I suppose knowing how many LGB people there are would make it more obvious why marriage inequality and other discriminatory legal regimes are unfair. Other than that, I don't see any pressing need or reason to include a question of sexual orientation on a census form. It really is none of the state's business who I, or anyone else, loves or what we do in our bedrooms or elsewhere. Not to get all Glenn Beck on you, but the Nazis were also overly interested in finding out the sexuality of the citizenry. It just isn't information the state must, or even should, have. I for one would decline to answer.

Which brings me to another point: asking this question on the census would provide data that no statistician of repute would consider representative of the full array of sexuality present within such a large and complex society. Not everyone will answer the question, others will lie, others (such as minors) will go uncounted. You're not going to get really great data this way, so it seems more like you'd be including the question on principle, rather than on pragmatism. I'm all for principles, but when there are other compelling reasons NOT to include this, the principles don't seem all that compelling.

Finally, while I don't believe anyone can, via strength of will or effort, "change" their sexuality, sexuality is not like one's biological sex. [Which can, through strength of hormone injections and a skilled surgeon, be changed, sort of.] To troupe out the well-worn "Sex and Gender 101" clichés, sexuality is: fluid, evolving, exists along a spectrum, and is ascribed meaning and identity implications by a given society. Before the late 1800s, homosexuality as we know it was unthinkable. This is not to say that same-sex physical and/or romantic relationships didn't exist before this time, but simply that there was no conception of a stable identity category based around who one chooses to sleep with and/or fall in love with. Even up through the mid-20th Century, in Western societies at least, sexuality was something you did, not something you were. So, it seems to me, to ask questions about your "sexual orientation" on a census form would be to ignore both contemporary sexuality/gender theory, and also the bulk of historical and sociological evidence which shows us that sexuality is not so neat as "Check Box A for Straight, Box B for Gay..." and so on. How to account for the self-identified lesbian who is currently dating a man, or the asexual, or the bisexual who by the time the next census comes around will call themself gay, or the man-who-has-sex-with-men who is married and thinks of himself as straight? The variation even across one individual's lifetime is so great, that it seems to me that a decennial census would not really provide a meaningful representation of a whole society's sexuality.

So, I understand, my liberal minded people, I really do.  Everyone wants to say "We're here, we're queer, get used to it." This just isn't a very good way of doing it. Rather than "queering" the census, providing three sexual categories in which one must shove oneself seems to me rather un-queer and regressive. Sexuality is simply too complex, and intensely personal, a phenomenon to be captured accurately or appropriately by a one page census form.