Sunday Drive: Bless the Beasts and Children

For all the people of Ukraine, young and old.

What I Say:  I don't suppose in all my life before the past week that I ever spent a total of 15 minutes thinking about Ukraine.  But since Putin sicced his troops on Ukraine, I've watched at least 50 hours of war coverage, maybe more.  And I've spent many hours reading various op-eds and commentaries on the war, principally from U. S. and U. K. news sites.  It's getting to be a bit much, a psychic overload, but one can hardly look away from this wrenching, history-making drama playing on all our screens in real time.

I know my truckbuddies don't need me to narrate a daily account of the war news, and perhaps my opinions about it are not really necessary in the grand scheme of things, either.  I suppose mainly I'm just talking to myself, "thinking out loud," as it were, on this blog.  It helps my mind to get things off my chest this way.  M.P. from day one imposed a strict ban on talking about the war because it makes him too upset for words.  (We have spoken briefly about a few headlines, but not for long.)  So the Blue Truck is my outlet for things I just need to say to someone.

One thing I do want to say right now is that among the many commentaries I've read is a continuing strain of shifting the blame - this is all Biden's fault, or Johnson's fault, or the West's fault.  One European columnist went on at length about how it's all Angela Merkel's fault for trying to keep open a "dialogue" with Putin for many years, instead of somehow "confronting" him.

In other words, it's everybody's' fault except Putin's.

Make no mistake, my friends:  Putin is the sole and efficient cause of this war.  He and no one else gave the orders for his armies to invade Ukraine, an independent state he had already taken bites out of before.  He did not have to do it; nobody made him do it.  He wanted to do it, and did do it entirely of his own evil will.  This fact is so obvious as to need no explanation.  Do not let anyone tell you different.

Putin is Hitler's evil son, a bloody murderer whose name will be accursed for all time to come as one of the greatest enemies of the human race.  And don't call him crazy or mad - that's excusing him.  A crazy person does not know the difference between right and wrong, and hence cannot be found guilty of any crime, including murder.  Putin is not crazy; he is evil.  This war was his free choice.  He may well have numerous lackeys and lickspittles to use as tools to accomplish his schemes, but he is the autocrat ordering his troops into a peaceful nation's territory, he is the one responsible for around-the-clock shelling of homes and schools and hospitals and apartment buildings; he is the fiend-in-chief at the top, ultimately directing his soldiers to shoot women, children, and babies in cold blood, and then walk away, leaving the still-living wounded to die in agony.

Putin is a mass murderer, a remorseless bully on a colossal scale.  Only force will stop him.  But the West cannot use force against him without throwing all of Europe and North America into another world war.  Must we destroy the free world in order to save it?  Our hearts break for the brave, defiant Ukrainian people and their undaunted Zelensky, a champion of freedom for the ages - but we simply must not let our emotions run away with us.  To expand Putin's war to a wider battleground would kill many more people, and perhaps not even save Ukraine.  Cool heads and clear minds are needed now, no matter how our hearts ache.

I do not know how it will all end; but we must never forget who willed this horror into being.  It's no good for armchair generals to say now, "Oh so-and-so should have done this or that or the other thing."  No, nobody knew that Putin would do this horrible, unthinkable thing; not one of these pious, oh-so-smart pundits forecast the storm before it broke.   Remember that.

The record will show that the democracies before this war, as before Hitler's war, did all that they could to keep the peace by reasonable means, by dialogue, by compromise, by friendly engagement and encouragement in the direction of peaceful relations.  That was a good thing, the right thing to do.  As one of my college professors said, talking about international relations, "As long as people are talking to each other, they aren't shooting at each other."  

But there is no reasoning with the Devil.

Fake cover of Time magazine, by artist Patrick Mulder.
Click to enlarge.

Update, 3/6/22, 8 p.m.: President Zelensky in his nightly address to his people vehemently condemned the callous murders committed by the Russian invaders. Excerpt:

Today is Forgiveness Sunday. A day when we always apologized. To each other. To all people. To God. But today, it seems, many have not mentioned this day at all. Have not mentioned the obligatory words: "Forgive me." And the obligatory answer: "God forgives, and I forgive." These words seem to have lost their meaning today. At least in part.

But we will not forgive hundreds and hundreds of victims. Thousands and thousands of sufferings. And God will not forgive. Not today. Not tomorrow. Never. And instead of Forgiveness, there will be a Day of Judgment.

We will not forgive the destroyed houses. We will not forgive the missile that our air defence shot down over Okhmatdyt today. And more than five hundred other such missiles that hit our land. All over Ukraine, hit our people and children.

We will not forgive the shooting of unarmed people. Destruction of our infrastructure. We will not forgive. Hundreds and hundreds of victims. Thousands and thousands of sufferings. And God will not forgive. Not today. Not tomorrow. Never. And instead of Forgiveness, there will be a Day of Judgment. I’m sure of it.

We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will punish everyone who committed atrocities in this war on our land. We will find every bastard who shot at our cities, our people, who bombed our land, who launched rockets. There will be no quiet place on this earth for you. Except for the grave.

Here is the speech, with English subtitles. His righteous anger is a powerful thing to hear.

-----

Today's Quote: What Kind of Country Are We?

Time cover, issue of July 2, 2018. Click to enlarge.

Karl Vick of Time magazine poses the question:

Presidents have many jobs, and one is telling us who we are.

For the first 240 years of U.S. history, at least, our most revered chief executives reliably articulated a set of high-minded, humanist values that bound together a diverse nation by naming what we aspired to: democracy, humanity, equality. The Enlightenment ideals Thomas Jefferson etched onto the Declaration of Independence were given voice by Presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama.

Donald Trump doesn’t talk like that. In the 18 months since his Inauguration, Trump has mentioned “democracy” fewer than 100 times, “equality” only 12 times and “human rights” just 10 times. . . .

A week after his return from the June 12 summit with North Korea’s dictator, family separation dominated the national conversation like no other political story since former FBI chief James Comey was shown the door. A steadily building wave of revulsion washed over the political spectrum, from MSNBC to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal to Franklin Graham and into the White House living quarters, when a spokeswoman for the First Lady said she called for “a country that governs with heart.”

Which leaves us facing a question: What kind of country are we? The world has been nervously asking that since November 2016. And while Trump ultimately capitulated on the forced separation of children, his new order suggested that families would be detained not only together, but perhaps indefinitely. For many Americans, the forced separation of immigrant families left them looking into the void from which the brutal policy emerged: the dark space left by the words Trump does say. . . .

What values does America’s billionaire President embrace in place of the Founders’? A kind of gimlet-eyed competition. Trump purports to run the country as a business, the most meaningful metric being exports vs. imports: if you have more than your counterpart, you’re a winner, and the other guy a loser. But even in the bloodless world of accounting, “goodwill” has a place on the ledger (the left side; it’s an asset) and the U.S. may be writing down a loss. Its economy is strong. The people pitching up at its borders surely count as proof of that.

It was Alexis de Tocqueville, the French observer of the early American character, who recognized the danger of placing too much value on business, law and order at the expense of the higher values. Warning of the country’s obsession with material gain and the enforcement of order necessary to pursue it, he wrote, “A nation that asks nothing of its government but the maintenance of order is already a slave at heart.”

Which is why the test posed with Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy is as much about our future as it is about the tragedy of the families separated by its implementation. Trump may have backed down on the specific practice of family separation, but the larger question remains. In the balance between the integrity of the U.S. border with Mexico and a parent’s love for a child, where will we come down?

“Without a Border, you don’t have a Country,” the President wrote on June 19. Everyone knows that. The question is, what kind of country?

The photographer who took the photograph of the child explains the background of her story:




What I say: If this misled, misguided country does not repent and shed the cruel, uncaring, unjust evil twining about its heart, and quickly, it may be in store for a terrible retribution at the hands of Fate. For as everyone knows: What goes around, comes around.


Those who yearn for a truly "Christian nation" had best examine their own hearts and heed these words of warning:

Matthew 25:31-46 King James Version (KJV):

31 When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:

32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:

33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:

42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:

43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

More on Marriage, aka The New Normal

Your Head Trucker is still pinching himself to be sure that last Friday's marriage ruling is really and truly real. I guess it must be, though, with all the conservative heads exploding up and down the country. To give just one example, Time magazine just published an essay by "crunchy conservative" writer Rod Dreher bemoaning the fact that orthodox Christians must now "learn to live as exiles in our own country":

For one, we have to accept that we really are living in a culturally post-Christian nation. The fundamental norms Christians have long been able to depend on no longer exist. To be frank, the court majority may impose on the rest of the nation a view widely shared by elites, but it is also a view shared by a majority of Americans. There will be no widespread popular resistance to Obergefell. This is the new normal.

Apparently, Dreher thinks all the real Christians left standing should go out and build their own private little communities in the woods, like St. Benedict, where they practice complete holiness to their hearts' content, 24/7.  I wonder if that means no phones, no lights, no motor cars, not a single luxury?  Good luck selling that new monastic plan, bud - which presumably includes jumping into a thornbush every time an erotic thought pops into mind, like the devout Benedict.

Dreher is, however, honest enough to make these admissions:

Social and religious conservatives must recognize that the Obergefell decision did not come from nowhere. It is the logical result of the Sexual Revolution, which valorized erotic liberty. It has been widely and correctly observed that heterosexuals began to devalue marriage long before same-sex marriage became an issue. The individualism at the heart of contemporary American culture is at the core of Obergefell — and at the core of modern American life. This is profoundly incompatible with orthodox Christianity. But this is the world we live in today.

Christianity is profoundly incompatible with individualism? Um, yeah, if you live in some kind of kinked-up theocratic dictatorship, I suppose - which is no doubt exactly what Dreher and his ilk would dearly love to impose on all the rest of us. And why not, if only they could? Notice Dreher's profoundly egotistic sense of ownership (emphasis mine):

But orthodox Christians must understand that things are going to get much more difficult for us. We are going to have to learn how to live as exiles in our own country. We are going to have to learn how to live with at least a mild form of persecution.

Excuse me - just whose country is it, anyway? I thought Mr. Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal - not just the Christians, not just the orthodox, and certainly not just the dudes who are so tight-assed righteous they squeak when they walk. Dreher and company do not have the title deed to America - it belongs to all of us.

Which some folks in Texas are still having trouble understanding - quite a few small-town Baptist county clerks still think they and their church own the place, and are refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, because Bible. 

Marriage map of Texas from the Dallas Morning News.

The ACLU of Texas has a hotline you can call to report any difficulties in obtaining a marriage license: 1-888-503-6838, Monday – Friday from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.

But even out here on the prairies and plains and deep in the piney woods, they are coming around, one by one.  Because Constitution, as Senator Elizabeth Warren explains:

In America, because of our Constitution, senseless discrimination – discrimination that demeans the worth of our neighbors and our coworkers and our family members – cannot survive when it is brought out of the darkness. It has never been easy for us to shine the light on such discrimination. But when we see it, when we stop looking away and finally acknowledge it, it is never long before we formally recognize what is compelled by our Constitution. We recognize what has always been there: equality and dignity under the law, for all Americans, no matter who they are.

And here is a very timely history lesson for everyone, courtesy of the irrepressible Matt Baume:




Update, 7/1/15: The Dallas Morning News has posted another interactive marriage map of Texas counties:

Newsbites, 3/22/14

Just getting caught up with the news here after being out of town for a few days.

Clarissa Dickson Wright, fondly remembered as one of the Two Fat Ladies, has died at age 66.   May she rest in well-buttered peace.

Bigot died, age 84.  Not worth remembering.  Come to find out, Time magazine wrote about him as a busybody college student in 1951.  Apparently he was always morbidly obsessed with religion and other's people's sex lives.

The hits just keep on coming:  yesterday afternoon, federal district judge Bernard Friedman struck down Michigan's same-sex marriage ban, approved by voters in 2004, as an unconstitutional violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Judge Friedman brought down the ban with a ringing salvo of the heavy artillery:

The Court is not aware of any legal authority that entitles a ballot-approved measure to special deference in the event it raises a constitutional question. On the contrary, the Supreme Court has clearly stated that if . . . an enactment violates the U.S. Constitution - whether passed by the people or their representatives - judicial review is necessary to preserve the rule of law . . . [t]he electorate cannot order a violation of the Due Process or Equal Protection Clauses by referendum or otherwise, just as the state may not avoid their application by deferring to the wishes or objections of its citizens. . . .

In attempting to define this case as a challenge to “the will of the people,” Tr. 2/25/14 p. 40, state defendants lost sight of what this case is truly about: people. No court record of this proceeding could ever fully convey the personal sacrifice of these two plaintiffs who seek to ensure that the state may no longer impair the rights of their children and the thousands of others now being raised by same-sex couples. It is the Court’s fervent hope that these children will grow up “to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives.” Windsor, 133 S. Ct. at 2694. Today’s decision is a step in that direction, and affirms the enduring principle that regardless of whoever finds favor in the eyes of the most recent majority, the guarantee of equal protection must prevail.

Read the full decision here. Unlike other judges who have recently issued similar rulings in several states, Judge Friedman did not issue a stay of his order, so this morning at least four county clerks in Michigan opened their offices to issue marriage licenses and perform wedding ceremonies. Hooray for all the happy couples.

BTW, Judge Friedman, a Reagan appointee, also torpedoed that fatally flawed anti-gay "study" by Mark Regnerus, concluding:

The Court finds Regnerus’s testimony entirely unbelievable and not worthy of serious consideration. . . . While Regnerus maintained that the funding source [i.e., the Republican Heritage Foundation] did not affect his impartiality as a researcher, the Court finds this testimony unbelievable. The funder clearly wanted a certain result, and Regnerus obliged.

Yeow!


And finally, in overseas news:

U.S. Freezes Putin's Netflix Account

CNN Apologizes for Briefly Airing Non-Flight 370 Story


Update, 5:25 p.m.: At the request of Michigan's attorney general, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals this afternoon issued a stay of the district court ruling, but not before dozens of couples had obtained marriage licenses and married at several county courthouses across the state.  The circuit court will hear arguments on Tuesday.


And Rachel Maddow serves up some reflections on the life and death of a hate-filled bigot - worth watching for some truly laugh-out-loud counterprotesters' signs.

The Homosexual in America, 1969

David Mixner has done an excellent summary of Time magazine's cover story from the October 31, 1969, on queer life in America at the dawn of the gay lib era.

As it happens, it was about that same time, October of '69, that I first came to the crushing realization that "homosexual" and "me" were synonyms. Which I've tried to write about before here on the Blue Truck, but even now the memories are still too painful to discuss in detail. Back then, there were no out people here in the Southland, and not a soul you could talk to about it. What few mentions of the subject you found in library books were all extremely discouraging, consigning you to a life of loneliness and desperation. Only once in a great while did you come across a magazine article that suggested there were others like you in existence, that you were not the only queer boy in the world, which is exactly how it felt.

The Time article was pretty sympathetic to us for its time, only a few months after Stonewall - which, children, as big as it looms in our collective memory now was not an earth-shaking event for the general population at the time. If anyone heard about it when it happened - and I certainly didn't, way down here in the Deep South - it was more like, "Oh God, another kooky bunch of weirdos causing trouble." There was a lot of that in the sixties, just one damn thing after another as our parents said.  But in the summer of 1969, people were much more interested in hearing and seeing the first moon landing, the investiture of the Prince of Wales, and that ungodly conglomeration of dirty hippies at some place called Woodstock. Stonewall was a tiny blip on the nation's radar; it wasn't until the following year when the first anniversary was celebrated with parades and protests that the gay liberation movement really began to impress itself on the consciousness of the heartland.

And then there were the magazine articles that, one by one, drew attention to the newly militant, loud and proud homos. Despite the good things Time had to say about us - you can read the entire article at their website - the article also served up a heap of sneering, slanted views and fears that are still being proclaimed as gospel truth by the unenlightened and the bigoted.  As well as some things that are still quite true and up to date, like the vicious humor of bitchy queens and the married (can you say Republican?) closet cases tricking in men's rooms.

I'm glad to discover this article online, though, because at last I have found the quote I remembered all these many years but wasn't sure where I read it, or when - I would have thought perhaps a couple years later. But I still recall the utter disbelief I felt when I read this statement by a gay activist:

I won't be happy until all churches give homosexual dances, and parents are sitting in the balcony saying, 'Don't John and Henry look cute dancing together?'

Deep in the darkness of my closet, I laughed out loud when I read this, thinking, "Oh no, that will never, ever happen - you're crazy, buddy." It really was totally unthinkable, in that time and in that place, a ludicrous idea like a snowball in hell. It was much easier to believe in the sci-fi gadgetry of Star Trek than to believe homos would ever be so accepted.

And yet - here we are, 42 years later, and it just takes my breath away sometimes to consider how many light-years we've advanced since that preposterous thought was voiced. If we aren't quite there, it's easy to believe we almost are, and the next generation will see it and live it - no science fiction involved.

Make it so.

Get Over Yourself, Mary

Via Andrew Sullivan, Time magazine on the now-discredited cult of self-esteem and its results:

New research has found that self-esteem can be just as high among D students, drunk drivers and former Presidents from Arkansas as it is among Nobel laureates, nuns and New York City fire fighters. In fact, according to research performed by Brad Bushman of Iowa State University and Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University, people with high self-esteem can engage in far more antisocial behavior than those with low self-worth. "I think we had a great deal of optimism that high self-esteem would cause all sorts of positive consequences and that if we raised self-esteem, people would do better in life," Baumeister told the Times. "Mostly, the data have not borne that out." Racists, street thugs and school bullies all polled high on the self-esteem charts. And you can see why. If you think you're God's gift, you're particularly offended if other people don't treat you that way. So you lash out or commit crimes or cut ethical corners to reassert your pre-eminence. After all, who are your moral inferiors to suggest that you could be doing something, er, wrong? What do they know?

Self-esteem can also be an educational boomerang. Friends of mine who teach today's college students are constantly complaining about the high self-esteem of their students. When the kids have been told from Day One that they can do no wrong, when every grade in high school is assessed so as to make the kid feel good rather than to give an accurate measure of his work, the student can develop self-worth dangerously unrelated to the objective truth. He can then get
deeply offended when he's told he is getting a C grade in college and become demoralized or extremely angry.

What I Say: Didn't we learn all this on the playground, early on? You remember the bullies who stole your lunch money, don't you, and never doubted they were kings of the hill? The same with the utterly snobbish and snotty Greek boys and girls in college. And the whole country-club set, and the shitty store clerks, and on and on . . . they all think they are just wonderful, you know? Self-esteem is not the fucking problem.

It just goes to show, once again, the eternal need for what my mama called "plain old common horse sense."

Update.  Of course, a prime example of an interstellar gap between self-esteem and actual ability is Sarah Palin.  Who, Joe Jervis reports, has just signed on with Fox News, no doubt for a handsome sum - more than any of you shitkickers will ever see in your life, I bet.

 

Yeah, it's photoshopped, not the real thing.

But sometimes a well done parody conveys a certain truth better than the real thing, you know what I mean, boys?

The Decade from Hell

. . . that's what Time's editors call it, from hanging chad to economic meltdown and all that came in between.  Will the next decade be better?  What do you say, guys?

As far as progress on LGBT rights, there's a lot to be happy about, despite some severe disappointments:  44 percent of the U.S. population now lives in states that outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation, and 29 percent live where gender-identity discrimination is also illegal.  Eleven states offer same-sex marriage, or a near equivalent; seven others offer at least some rights and protections for same-sex couples. 

See a quick summary of how far we've come in the last ten years, prepared by the Movement Advancement Project, A Decade of Progress on LGBT Rights; or the full 20-page Momentum Report (both PDF).

Bonus:  a clickable map that shows the estimated LGB (no T, sorry) population in your state, and a quick run down of pro- or anti-LGBT laws. 

WTF: The Invisible Gays - again

On this historic day, when the whole queer community in this nation is protesting from shore to shore, all at the same time, in an unprecedented way, here is how two of the nation's biggest mainstream media web sites reported it. Screenshots taken by me about 2 p.m. CST today:

One small spot on the CNN page, which story contained a link to this other story in great big letters on the Time magazine site:

So. What is the subtext, the suggestion given by these two pieces? Two things, I think:

A) Teh gayz are a tiny, inconsequential bunch worth only a very brief mention, and

B) THEY'RE SCARY AS HELL, YOU COULD BE NEXT!

Hmmm. Seems to me we need to hold these MSM outlets accountable for fair and balanced coverage. I suspect that the Time-CNN combo is run by a bunch of Republican bigots; but that's just a guess, I don't know for sure.

Still, this is America, right? I know there are lots of other important news topics that need to be reported today, all around the country and the world. But dammit, our protests, our struggle, our civil rights, our families are bloody well important also.

I remember vividly watching the coverage of the civil rights struggle back in the 60's - the MSM always had a lot to say about those protests.

We need to demand better coverage, better reporting of our cause. As Olbermann put it so briefly and brilliantly in his equal marriage essay this week: "Just because this is the only world we have and the other guy counts too.” (Emphasis mine.)

The same goes for all mistreated groups, not just us; but this is our moment, our time, our demand for justice and equal rights. No one's going to hand it to us for free, guys.

Write some letters, post comments, make your voice heard by the MSM. Demand that national LGBT groups also turn up the heat. Remember this: it's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.