Savage Wrong and Right

I suppose you fellas have already heard about the brouhaha over Dan Savage's remarks a couple weeks ago during the National High School Journalism convention in Seattle.  I've ignored it until today, but for the record, here is what Savage said to the assembled high-schoolers:



The thing is, as I may have said before in this blog, at his best Dan is a very intelligent and highly articulate advocate for gay rights.  At his worst, however, he can be a self-righteous prick, as bad as anyone on the right wing of the spectrum - and that goes for some other other gay speakers and bloggers whose names are familiar to you.  Being gay, being a minority, being oppressed - for whatever reason - does not make you infallible, does not mean you can never do anything wrong.

Nor, as my mama always said, do two wrongs ever make a right.

I was, then, pleasantly surpised to learn that Dan is not a total prick:  he has actually apologized in his blog for using the phrase "pansy-assed" - which he was indeed quite wrong in using, for several reasons.  In your Head Trucker's mind, he was also wrong to use "bullshit" to a captive audience of high-school kids.  This wasn't a nightclub, it wasn't even a college crowd.

When you are speaking in public, you must always consider your audience and your purpose for being there - not just saying whatever the hell first pops into your head.  On an occasion when Dan might have opened some young minds to a more insightful view of what it means to be gay in a world dominated by unreasonable prejudice, he may have closed some of those minds forever by being too quick-tongued and too potty-mouthed - which is, in fact, a form of arrogance, despising your hearers.  Whether they are right or wrong, smart or dumb, you have to start with people where they are, or you won't start with them at all, ever.

As a prime example, your Head Trucker is old enough, just barely, to remember when bigshot Mr. Kruschev came to the United Nations and told the West "We will bury you," all the while pounding the podium with his shoe. Yes, I'm not fucking kidding, youngsters - he really did, go look it up.

I'm sure he enjoyed the hell out of that little self-aggrandizing stunt at the moment he did it - the human creature is so perversely constituted that being a prick in public is quite thrilling, and I'm ashamed to say that I can testify to the fact - but what exactly did he accomplish for the good of his country and his fellow Soviets thereby?

Absolutely nothing. There he was, for one golden moment at the summit of the whole world's attention, and he had no more sense of how to use that rare opportunity for the good of the world, or at least for that of his own countrymen, than a dog pissing on a fire hydrant. How.Fucking.Sad.

And yes, your Head Trucker has a pretty damn dirty mouth himself when he gets wound up, but I'm just talking among us guys here.  There's a time and place for everything, ya know.

Here's Dan's own response to the uproar, after the jump: