Nate Knows Nada

BF and I went to a Vermont B&B for the weekend. It’s not like we really had the money, espcially since we have to go to California in 2 weeks, but we both wanted a break from the semester, so we thought we’d treat ourselves.

To me, it was the stunning diplay of New England cliche. It was all very pleasant, but the towns were like something out of a movie, with little churches and shops and the like.

We stayed a a gay-run B&B in Chester, Vermont, called the The Stone Hearth Inn. We drove up on Saturday, ate a nice little meal, checked in, read books and drank. Sunday we went to church (at St. Luke’s), drove a lot, saw more little towns, including Woodstock. There we saw the Stephen Huneck gallery, full of dog-themed furniture and art. Hilarious.

Monday, we left, but not before stopping at the bookstore. Lovely, and I bought a book, for me and also to make sure the place stays in business. Good bookstores in smal towns need to get support. We spoke with Lynn, the proprietress, for about 30 minutes, and she even gave me a book for free, as long as I promised to send her a review for display in the store.

Larry, Daryll, and Daryll were not available for comment.

I’m back! Didja miss me?

I have a whole file (33 pages in 10 point, single spacing) of quotes that I have found interesting. I thought I’d include a few this morning, since all my thoughts went out this week in my paper on The West Wing (which you can find here).

“It is an awkward truth that social life is the antidote to scholarly paranoia; it drains intellectual differences of their drama. The cure for the acrimony of intellectuals is dinner. Had Jesus invited a few Pharisees over for the Supper – and the Pharisees, let us remember, had been revolutionaries only a little while before – it might not have been his last. Dining with disciples is a perilous business.”
– Adam Gopnick, The New Yorker, 1 April 2002

“Morality can only be relative, not universal. Ethics must be interpreted in terms of politics; and the search for an ethical norm outside politics is doomed to frustration.”
-E.H. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, 21

“Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.”
– Don DeLillo, Underworld (237)

“Although Americans justify their self-interest in moral terms, their true interest is never itself moral. Yet, paradoxically, only Americans — a few, that is — ever try to be moral in politics.”
– Gore Vidal (Burr, 520)

“If you could understand a single grain of wheat, you would die of wonder.”
– Martin Luther

I love this!  A company in England has manufactured an inflatable church!

Pump up the pulpit!

In this morning’s NY Times, we learn that Bayer Drug sold possibly HIV-infected blood clotting factor to Asian countries, even after it knew that there was a possibility of infecting people with the drug. Take a look here.

I’m not surprised,. but I’m still aghast.  I wish I had more time to process this here, but there’s two things going on.  First, there’s a form of good-old-fashioned racism, especially regarding Asians and disease.  Take a look at another article on the topic.  But there’s also a similar sense that expendable people — like gays — are permitted to get AIDS or even have it given to them.  Someone at Bayer decided that Asians were expendable.

I’m a huge fan of the show. But I’m finding it faulty on many levels right now. Here’s an example.

The people of The West Wing, involved as they are in professional politics, must deal constantly with those who disagree, even vehemently, with them. This, in some sense, marks them as different from the rest of Americans, who can structure their daily lives and work to avoid significant disagreement with other people on public matters, social and political. Even so, Americans know that the health of the Republic depends upon the cultivation of debate and disagreement, but they generally leave the matter to politicians, talking heads, academics, and other members of the “chattering classes.” Every step of life in TWW brings the staffers and the president into regular contact with conflict. As fulfillers of their duty, to serve the public interest, what duty do these characters bear toward those who disagree with them?

This question has been answered in various fashions since the beginning of the series. In the pilot episode of the series, many of the answers to the above question appear via a major subplot. As the episode opens, we learn that the deputy chief of staff, Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford), has insulted a leader of the Christian right-wing on one of the Sunday morning talk shows that are a staple of the political game.

Mary Marsh: No. Well, I can tell you that you don’t believe in any God that I pray to, Mr. Lyman. Not any God that I pray to.

Josh: Lady, the God you pray to is too busy being indicted for tax fraud.

For this comment and possibly angering a powerful constituency the president can ill-afford to cross at this point, Josh’s job is in danger. We learn in the meantime that the president is a “deeply religious man”1 who discourages young women from having abortions but who “does not believe that it’s the government’s place to legislate this issue.”2 White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) arranges a meeting between the staff, including Josh, and the Christian conservatives who are angered by his remark. Josh apologizes for the tenor of his remark and notes that any person willing to debate ideas deserves better than glib insults. One of the Christian conservatives speaks up, asking what her group will get in return for the insult, quickly demanding a presidential radio address in support of school vouchers or against pornography (with the implication that neither is a policy position the president would take). Finally, the president appears in the midst of heated argument, and asks the visitors why they have not denounced a fringe group called The Lambs of God. He explains that he is upset and extremely angry.

Bartlet: It seems my granddaughter, Annie, had given an interview in one of those teen magazines and somewhere between movie stars and makeup tips, she talked about her feelings on a woman’s right to choose. Now Annie, all of 12, has always been precocious, but she’s got a good head on her shoulders and I like it when she uses it, so I couldn’t understand it when her mother called me in tears yesterday…. Now I love my family and I’ve read my Bible from cover to cover so I want you to tell me: From what part of Holy Scripture do you suppose the Lambs of God drew their divine inspiration when they sent my 12-year-old granddaughter a Raggedy Ann doll with a knife stuck in its throat? (pause) You’ll denounce these people. You’ll do it publicly. And until you do, you can all get your fat asses out of my White House. (Everyone is frozen.) C.J., show these people out.

Mary Marsh: I believe we can find the door.

Bartlet: Find it now.3

This president does not remain above menace and intimidation when he believes that the various peoples he must deal with have violated their own duties. As the statements above indicate, the president’s duty includes a mutual respect for his adversaries, until they violate the compact of democratic deliberative discourse. Once they have done that, or people associated with them have done so (as the Lambs of God were loosely associated with but not part of the organizations the lobbyists represented), they are no longer worthy to participate in the the public sphere that the president controls (a fairly significant portion). The above dialogue also indicates that the president in TWW perceives part of his duty to be the control of the public discourse. If locking radicals out of the White House proves to be his solution, he sets himself up as an arbiter of what and what is not acceptable for people to say to gain entry into the public sphere. No support for the actions of the fictional radicals is implied here, but the president indicates from the very beginning of the series that he will serve as a cop for republican conduct in American politics. One also wonders whether the president would have acted so forcefully on the (implied) right side had the victim of the radical act not been his granddaughter. Unfortunately, we are given no further clues as to the extent of the president’s duty to act as republican policeman or whether he acts on a particular duty when it does not affect him in a personal way.

One of the criticisms of the show lies in the personalization of policy that often occurs in TWW. Chris Lehmann noted in Atlantic Monthly,

…In the thickets of controversy that crop up in the Bartlet Administration, the strongest objection to a policy or a decision to overstep protocol is usually that it doesn’t feel right. And when the members of Team Bartlet chart a new policy course, it is because they agree that it suits the perceived national mood or because it springs… from a profound personal experience…. If one of the sixties’ most enduring — if dubious — notions is that the personal is political, The West Wing operates from the converse: the political is, above all, personal.4

More interesting for questions of political ideology than Lehmann’s center-right critique is another question. What are the sources of action, belief, and opinion when a public servant follows one’s sense of duty? TWW, unfortunately, either does not answer or offers a vague notion, such as “love of country.”

Here’s what the marrow people have to say:

# “Are you at risk for HIV (the AIDS virus) or Hepatitis?”

# Volunteers who are at risk for HIV (the AIDS virus) or hepatitis cannot be donors. HIV can be transmitted through marrow donation. Based on FDA requirements for blood donors, if your answer to any of the following questions is “yes,” you are considered at risk for either HIV or hepatitis and must disqualify yourself from the Program.

#
# Are you a male who had sex with another male even once since 1977?

There you have it. Doesn’t matter if I have used a rubber every time, that I test regularly, and that I take all the reasonable precautions (unreasonable = Bush administration and Catholic Church strategy: total abstinence). Man-on-man means I’m out. And so is anyone else who has had sex with even one man in the last 26 years.

To be fair, it’s not their fault. They’re just following the guidelines that the Red Cross and the FDA have set. But it’s still a ridiculous, stigmatizing, homophobic (yes, it’s that too) law.

One of my best friends from college did this recently.  What he did saved the life of a man he never met.

I’m happy for him, for the man whose life he helped to save, and I am proud that he could do it.  He’s a giving guy, and always has been.  This is in his character, and I can’t imagine he wouldn’t do it.

But permit some narcissism for a minute.  I could never do such a thing.  Not because I wouldn’t be willing, but because I am gay.  Current federal regulations do not permit men who have had sex with other men since 1977 to donate blood, blood products, organs, marrow, or pretty much anything.  This occurs because we are in a statistically higher risk category than straight people.  But this commits the common fallacy to infer individual characteristics from group characteristics.  If I were straight, my blood would be accepted and the tested, no matter how many women I had slept with.  But as a gay man, I could have had sex with one other man, and I am categorically forbidden from doing this good.

My body and what comes from it, thereby, are polluted.  The gifts that I can give to help others out — blood, organs, whatever — are tainted by the fact that the donor has conducted an activity that many regard as requiring disapproval.  In some sense, by being gay, my body is a poison to be controlled, rejected, and isolated.

I’m happy for Matt.  But as much as I feel that, it also reminds me that pollution prevents me from ever doing the same.

It’s been way too long since I have written a serious academic paper on my own, and one of the things I have always prided myself upon in my work is that I’m a fairly good writer. But when you haven’t done any serious writing in a year or two, it’s hard to know if you’re doing well. Is the point getting across? Is the style clear and pleasant to read? Is it reflective of how and what I think?

Writing is really hard, as I had forgotten. But the difficulty is enjoyable, as it’s something I can do in a way that no one else can.

This is the reason I have been hesitant about keeping a blog.  Not only is it the offense factor, but it’s also a hesitancy on my part to reveal too much of myself to whomever might be out there.  Do you need to know about  my d———?  Or about my r————?  And how much of my interior monologue should be public?  Not that a ton of people are reading this, as the stats seem to indicate.  But what’s my line, the step over which I will not go?  Dean and Shel (whom I link to at right) let it all hang out — but I don’t know that that’s for me.

My approach to life is to remain sort of aloof.  Whereas BF needs to be closer to people when he’s insecure, I need to pull away and have more space to myself, and it’s very hard for me to let anyone in.  I’ll let Matt in, and Keith, and maybe another, but distance is my means.  Which isn’t a surprise, consideing that my personality tests indicate I’m an “introvert.”

What do other people think?  What’s your line?