Brace yourselves

Despite all the worry about the fabric of time and space ripping apart and all, we survived the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider.

Saints be praised, we managed to pull through the unholy joint appearance of Liza Minnelli and Bret Michaels on the same stage!

Tonight, however, I'm locking myself in a bunker with a year's worth of canned goods, festooning myself with rosaries, and keeping my eyes peeled for radioactive mutants. For I see, thanks to TPM, that tonight Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin will meet. Whether this confab will result in sufficient right-wing distaff nutbaggery to achieve apocalyptic critical mass remains to be seen.

For those of you walking around on the surface when the earth crumbles under the density created in Minnesota, don't complain that you weren't warned.

Making women feel bad about about themselves since 1886

Back in high school I worked at a book store that was in its death throes. I had a lot of down time, and so I spent hours leafing through magazines from our shelves to pass the hours. (Yes, I know I could have been reading Great Literature, or something. Sue me for being human.) In addition to beginning a raging addiction to X-men comic books (such that I was able to grouse that the various recent movies tinkered blasphemously with the "real" storyline), I read a lot of women's magazines. (Yes, yes. How cliche.)

From this reading, I was able to glean some handy tips for conditioning my hair, the ability to name the full pantheon of supermodels (this was during the early 90s, back when the concept of the supermodel was considered culturally relevant in some way), and the realization that women must remain in a constant process of self-modification in order to keep men satisfied. Everything from head to toe must, it seems, be kept glossy, firm, toned, smoothed, lifted, high-lighted or buffed. Our friends at Cosmo, of course, keep their readers up-to-date by telling them all the different ways they should be looking better than they do.

To which the single best response I have ever read can be found here.

In which I take pride in my church

From CNN:

Los Angeles Episcopalians elected an openly lesbian bishop late Saturday, the denomination's news service reported.

The Rev. Mary Douglas Glasspool, 55, will become the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church since Gene Robinson took office in New Hampshire in 2004, if she is formally approved.

Good. After the ridiculous, mealy-mouth moratorium on the election of gay/lesbian bishops was lifted at the last General Convention, it was only a matter of time before another openly gay, partnered bishop was elected. I am pleased that the time in question was no brief. Congratulations to Rev. Glasspool.

Speaking of mealy-mouthed:

The archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican Communion, issued a statement Saturday saying that Glasspool's election "raises very serious questions not just for the Episcopal Church and its place in the Anglican Communion, but for the Communion as a whole," according to the Episcopal Church's Web site.

No. Actually, I don't this raises any new questions at all. I think it just reinforces what we already knew, which is that the Episcopal Church in America is not going to be held hostage to the social mores of Communion's arch-conservative factions.

In searching around the Internet tubes, I came across a mostly good commentary in the Telegraph. (The author is far too snippy and presumptuous with regard to Gene Robinson, one of the most gracious and big-hearted people I have been privileged to meet.) One point the author makes that bears a bit more context is this:

If archbishops in Uganda and Australia feel that, in all conscience, they can't be in communion with the new suffragan bishop of Los Angeles, because she has a live-in partner who happens to share her gender, then I'm pretty sure that doesn't deliver us Armageddon, a final doomsday battle between good and evil, from which Christ will emerge with his righteous elect. It gives us Anglicans who don't agree. Big deal. Small schism, not many killed.

Uganda? I should be grieved by a broken communion with Uganda? This Uganda (h/t Andrew)? The one with this horrid law? I think it's interesting that on one side of the "don't agree" schism we have a church promoting the full inclusion of gay and lesbian people, and on the other side we have a church that thinks we should be imprisoned and killed. You tell me which is more Christ-like, and you'll pardon me if I don't much time in sackcloth and ashes mourning the loss of communion with the likes of them.

I applaud the diocese of Los Angeles. I roll my eyes in the direction of Canterbury. I turn my back on Uganda.

The joy of "Glee"

I've been looking for an excuse to write about Glee for a while now. Luckily, the LA Times has a an interview with star Lea Michele, and voila! An excuse.

I love me some Glee. During my family's visit, I prevailed upon my (straight) younger brother to watch it. After taking in several episodes on Hulu, he agreed that it's a good show. He also noted that it is "incredibly gay." (Hence my irritation at those Yes on 1 ads during the commercial breaks.) And, indeed, it is incredibly gay. Not only is it a musical, complete with boisterous song and dance numbers as narrative elements, but it has a surpassingly gay character in Kurt, played by Chris Colfer (who is also gay).

Kurt is obsessed with fashion. He covets the female parts in the songs he sings. He records his own version of Beyonce's "Single Ladies," and teaches the football team to do the dance. And he's in love with the male lead. He is very, very gay.

But, unlike the mincing grab bag of stereotypes Jack in the minstrel show Will & Grace (which had a good first season, then got a lot worse very quickly), Kurt is written like a real person. Jack was a compendium of ticks and gestures, drawn to conform to a straight person's idea of an over-the-top gay man. Self-obsessed, shrill and promiscuous (though a surprisingly lousy dresser), he was unlike anyone I'd ever actually met.

Yet, as fey and stereotypical as Kurt is in a lot of ways, the writers invest him with actual dignity. They do him the service of making him nuanced. He can be petty and vindictive, but he's also been given numerous opportunities to demonstrate courage and integrity. In particular, his scenes with his father are a welcome departure from the tired "macho dad, duplicitous gay son" trope. The depth of the writing and performance save him from caricature.

Besides all that, Glee is a hell of a lot of fun. I am going to let my own inner stereotype out long enough to clap my hands with childlike... glee at this:

You've got a big, all- Madonna episode coming up next year?

I'm doing six Madonna songs, some of which will be mash-ups. We're doing a lot of her most popular songs but ranging all the way from early Madonna to most recent Madonna. Amber [Riley] and Chris [Colfer, who play Mercedes and Kurt] are doing something really cool together, but I can't give anything away.

Oh, goodie.

Finally, and not entirely apropos, I have a question for you straight guys out there. Maybe I don't know what counts as "beautiful," but the following quote gave me pause:

That's what I try to do with Rachel. Rachel will never be popular because her looks aren't considered beautiful, and when I was in high school it was the same for me. I didn't get a nose job, and every single girl around me did. Therefore, I was out. I was not cool.

Rachel isn't beautiful? Really? Am I thrown off by the remarkable talent and charisma of the actress? Help me out here, guys. Is this woman really not beautiful?

Well, crap. Now I want to contribute to the DNC

Oh, sweet mother of mercy.

I am trying really hard to stay strong in my commitment to withholding cash from the DNC until they start getting more attentive to gay rights issues. But, as I live and breathe, the Republicans seem hell-bent on making me change my mind.

Via TPM:

The NRCC has been quick to attack Tennessee state Sen. Roy Herron, who has emerged as the Democratic candidate for the seating of retiring Blue Dog Rep. John Tanner -- and along the way, they seem to be using some rather interesting rhetoric.

[snip]

Over the course of the past week, the NRCC has mounted a series of attacks on Herron that taken together could suggest they're trying to say that Herron is gay or effeminate.

To be perfectly honest, I think the bulk of the complaints against the NRCC are pretty thin gruel. There may be some dog-whistling going on, but I think it requires a lot of inference to make a case that there is overt gay-baiting at hand.

However, there is this:

Seré has sent out some press releases since then, such as "See Roy Run...From His New-Age Liberal Values," attacking Herron for opposing a ban on adoption by gays, and having been endorsed in his gubernatorial campaign (which he dropped out of when the House seat opened up) by a local gay newspaper. [ed: emphasis wearily added]

It is important to remember that Sere [Blogger won't let me make that little accent mark] is not a local politician from Tennessee. Dude is the spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. So, an official with a national organ of the GOP thinks the fact that the Better Half and I have the Critter is something to be attacked. It is not enough that the Republicans are rabidly opposed to expanding my civil rights, but they think I should lose the right to raise kids to boot.

In the end, it will be the actions of [lower digestive apertures] like Sere that have me rushing to cut another check to the Democrats. No number of polite (but dogged) phone calls can possibly equal the power of the louses on the other side.

Dept. of Meaningless Gestures

A couple of years ago, the Dixie Chicks took home a boat-load of Grammy Awards for their album "Taking the Long Way." Now, I love the Dixie Chicks, and lots of their songs are on my iPod exercise playlist (which I load with tunes I enjoy enough to distract me from the fact that at some point in my life I turned into the sort of person who runs for pleasure, an idea I had long considered anathema). I also think their treatment at the hands of the conservative shrieking class is instructive, given the relative innocuousness of their comment about George W. as compared to a lot of the invective being hurled at President Obama. (Someone let me know if there have been massive protests against John Voigt, complete with burning DVDs and death threats.) However, nobody but the very most credulous viewer could interpret their sweep of the Grammys as anything other than a political act by liberal music industry types. As a testament to the quality of their album qua musical production, it was pretty meaningless.

It was in a similar vein that Al Gore (and, similarly, Melissa Etheridge) took home Oscars for "An Inconvenient Truth" the same year. Appearing on stage with Leonardo DiCaprio, his win was so foregone I'm amazed any of the other nominees bothered to stay in their seats when it was announced (assuming there was an open bar somewhere they could have been hitting instead). Now, I'll admit I haven't actually seen "An Inconvenient Truth," but if I'm right it's essentially nothing but Al Gore and his PowerPoint presentation about global warming. If you don't endorse his worldview, it's very hard to justify that being the best documentary on offer that year. (Speaking as a recovering fundamentalist Christian, I thought "Jesus Camp" was a much more illuminating film. For those of you who were rooting for it to win, perhaps I can interest you in a bridge for sale in Brooklyn?)

Now, I was neither surprised nor bothered by this win. Hollywood is not exactly bashful about its politics, nor does it shy away from rewarding mediocrity when it feels inclined to congratulate itself for said politics. (See also, the worst Best Picture winner ever.) Despite my skepticism regarding the subject matter, what's the point in being annoyed? Again, only the most naive viewer could miss the political nature of the win, reflecting the well-known biases of the people who did the voting.

Where am I going with all of this? Well, I see (via the Atlantic's politics page) that a couple of conservative Academy members are grousing about Gore's win over at Pajamas Media. They think it should be rescinded. And I think they are being ridiculous.

This is an Oscar, for crying out loud. (Admittedly, as Academy members they presumably take it more seriously than a mere awards show fan like me.) It doesn't mean that "An Inconvenient Truth" is right, merely that a bunch of people in Hollywood think it is. This conclusion should have been obvious at the time, and nobody honestly thinks Tinseltown has suddenly gotten either more skeptical or less liberal with the advent of "Climategate."

After all, it's not like we're talking about an award with any real meaning, right?

All buttoned-up

A slightly odd article in Slate about how shirts with the top button buttoned signify a retarded person. I mean, yes, it's true (in movies if not in life), but doesn't really seem article-worthy.

The author, June Thomas begins with this anecdote:

While out on an errand not long ago, a woman stopped me at a crosswalk and asked what day it was. An odd question, but even odder was the way she asked: She crouched slightly as she spoke, even though we were the same height, and her words came out slow and overpronounced, as though she were taking a sobriety test. I answered—I'm a helpful sort—and turned away. But before I could leave, she reached out and said, "Good job!" in a peculiar sing-song voice. She seemed perfectly normal, well-dressed and with a male companion in tow. It suddenly struck me that she thought I was developmentally disabled. But why? When I got home, I stared at the mirror for a bit and found my answer: It was that interval between seasons when it's breezy but still too warm for a coat, so I'd donned a cardigan and buttoned my shirt all the way to the top. This was unwise. A fully buttoned shirt is the universal costume symbol for special.

(As an aside, see the last sentence as an example of what I argued earlier - that any well-meant word used to replace "retarded" will become pejorative).

A weird inference to draw. Might it not be the case that her interlocuter was mentally retarded, even if she "seemed perfectly normal"? (As I've written elsewhere, while my son does not look quite normal, his condition is also not as dysmorphic as other conditions that actually cause much less severe retardation - I could easily see people looking at him and thinking he was a bit funny-looking, but that nothing was wrong.) After all, if one really wants to know what day it is, one usually would choose to ask someone who is not mentally retarded. Also, couldn't it be the case that this woman have had any other reason for thinking the author was retarded?

However, one thing Thomas said struck a chord with me. It's her explanation of why this has become a such a cultural signal:

Cory Monteith, who plays Glee's singing quarterback, Finn, offers insight into the possible origins of this peculiar shirt style. In a "Behind the Glee" featurette, he says that when the other glee club members put on buttoned-up polo shirts and suspenders for the wheelchair number "Proud Mary," it's an "hommage to how Artie likes to dress himself—or how his mother likes to dress him." Eyrich says the mom thing was Monteith's "own perception" rather than her or Murphy's concept, but it is astute. One reason developmentally and physically disabled people dress differently from their peers is that their mothers play a big role in their wardrobe choices. Parents are more resistant to changing styles, and they're more likely to stick to stores like JCPenney rather than venturing into Hop Topic—so a kid like Artie would likely look out of sync with fashion.

I'm not sure if this is why the top-button-buttoned specifically seems to have become a symbol (I mean, most moms are aware of this signal, or it would be an ineffective signal). But I was actually thinking about this in terms of haircuts. I was wondering to myself why it is that most of the mentally retarded people I see have, well, bad haircuts. And the answer recently that recently hit me was what Thomas has come up with. I cut my toddler's hair at home. And, quite frankly, a haircut given at home to someone who can't sit still is not usually the height of fashion.

So I may not be able to do anything about that. But I do plan to have my toddler son, when he's old enough, help pick out clothes for my baby. My littlest guy has suffered, and will suffer, enough indignities in life. He does not need to go around dressed as his mother sees fit!