Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Vote Forward to Form A More Perfect Union... OR Vote For the GOP Gay Bashers. You Decide.

Washington Post:
Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School… he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it. “He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told… [a] close friend… Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look… A few days later… Romney march[ed] out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair… they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors. The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another… “It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said… the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.” “It was a hack job,” recalled… a childhood friend of Romney who was in the dorm room when the incident occurred. “It was vicious.”
Most people grow up and change with the passage of time and I think it would be both mistaken and unfair to pretend that an incident like this one "defines" Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney more than his record or positions do (whatever he's being told those are from moment to moment by his handlers), but the airy lack of genuine remorse with which he responded to reports of the incident here and now on the campaign trail seem to me to reiterate the casual insensitivity and cruelty of the original incident and are quite as troubling as the story of this brutal gay bashing itself.

Asked to comment on the incident by The Hill, Romney replied: "I played a lot of pranks in high school… you just say to yourself, 'Back in high school,' you know, 'I did some dumb things.' If anyone was hurt by that or offended by that, obviously, I apologize. But overall, high school years were a long time ago." As somebody who was tripped in the hallway and had chewing tobacco spit on his back and was ganged up on in the locker room and was called a faggot by a chorus of athletes in the cafeteria and was called "Female Dale" and "Dale Queerico" and was regularly humiliated and attacked in front of hundreds of indifferent peers and smiling teachers and felt a leaden ice cold knot forming in my stomach every morning as the hulking contour of the high school building loomed and the bank of doors swept open like the maw of Ginsberg's Molloch hungry for child sacrifice I can tell you, Mitt, that the word "prank" is hardly the right word to describe what you did in your irrational rage at the boy who dared to be a little different from you. It is no more proper for you to call your attack a "prank" than it was right for that other icon of Republican cruelty Rush Limbaugh to compare the images of war crimes and torture at Abu Ghraib to "fraternity pranks" and "innocent rough housing."

It is true that people do dumb things in high school. I took Ayn Rand seriously when I was young, for example. Then I lived a little in the real world and grasped the parochialism and cruelty and magical thinking of Rand's worldview (not to mention her terminally bad writing) and rejected it utterly. But did Romney learn anything from this incident of youthful cruelty and violence and folly?

Romney says, in the usual smug non-apology apology format GOP bigots tend to prefer when they get caught in their casual everyday racism or sexism or indifference to the suffering of the vulnerable publicly crossing the line into blatant inhumanity: "If anyone was hurt by that or offended by that, obviously, I apologize."

If anyone was hurt? If? IF?

Is that even in question? Assault doesn't leave open the possibility of non-hurt and this was clearly an assault! Do people who are not hurting often scream for help and cry in terror in your company, Mitt?

I don't know what I find more damning, the fact that Romney might so effortlessly lie about forgetting this violent assault on a fellow student crying and screaming for help while he pinned him down and slashed at his face with those shears or the stunning possibility that a person could actually truly forget a thing like that?

Presidential figures assume the weird mass-mediated psychic space that celebrities also occupy, in which millions come to feel sure they know a person when what they know is simply a profile strung together from a constellation of incidents spun by PR people and then forced directly into center of our attention. I do not know who Mitt Romney is. I don't pretend that Mitt Romney the man is one and the same as the ugly cartoon forming in my mind from this incident of gay-bashing connected to his declaration that he enjoys firing people connected to the incident in which the Romney family dog Seamus was lashed to the roof of a car for a long drive across country in icy whether despite the fact that he was sick and suffering and when he became incontinent Romney robotically sprayed him down with a hose and rather than comforting him or making space for him in the car simply crammed him back wet and miserable into the lashing winter wind and drove on.

But I will say that there is a reason that these are the incidents that resonate with me. It is because when Romney congratulates himself for his "success" he makes no distinction between the way a person might make a fortune providing useful goods and services people need and the way he made a fortune buying up companies and firing everybody and sending the jobs offshore where slave labor is cheap and costs are low because standards are too and then looting the remains of once thriving enterprises for scrap before moving on to the next target. It is because Romney signed on enthusiastically to the Randroid Paul Ryan budget that wants to couponize Medicare and lard the already rich with still more tax cuts paid for by cutting support and services for the vulnerable and slashing public investment in the common good. Or as TPM reports, "Mitt Romney clashed with a state commission tasked with helping LGBT youth at risk for bullying and suicide throughout his term as Massachusetts governor over funding and its participation in a pride parade. He eventually abolished the group altogether." What a coincidence! Romney made his fortune in a way that only a callous cruel selfishly short-sighted man could. And he defends policies that are just as callous and cruel and selfish and short-sighted to this day.

The cartoon that is forming in my mind as in the minds of millions of us is not Romney but it is the reality of Romney that makes just that cartoon seem the apt one. It's because the shoe fits, that he must wear it.

If Romney is hurt by that or offended by that, obviously, I apologize.

7 comments:

jimf said...

> As somebody who was tripped in the hallway and had
> chewing tobacco spit on his back and was ganged up
> on in the locker room and was called a faggot by a
> chorus of athletes in the cafeteria and was called
> "Female Dale" and "Dale Queerico" and was regularly
> humiliated and attacked in front of hundreds of
> indifferent peers and smiling teachers and felt a
> leaden ice cold knot forming in my stomach every
> morning as the hulking contour of the high school
> building loomed. . .

That's 'cause your daddy didn't make you go out and dig a ditch when you were four.

Parents Should 'Punch' Gay-Acting Children, Says Pastor Sean Harris
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gjm7W-hDLc

Dale Carrico said...

Curiously enough, from junior high school on I worked at a garden center and spent considerable time digging ditches, laying sod, planting and mulching, and spraying insecticide on lawns. No doubt the cut flowers in the fridge at the back of the store exerted the inverting gravity that overcame the wholesome heterosexualizing sweat of my brow and earned me my urning. That and this damned penchant for puns.

jollyspaniard said...

The non apology is the most damning thing of all to me. I don't remember it but I can tell you I didn't do it because he was gay sounds really sketchy.

I suspect he does remember it, and doesn't feel a milligram of remorse over it other than the embarassment it's causing him.

It's going to be a long five months for the tin man. He has to convince people that he cares about their problems and is rooting for them. His problem is that he's unable to conceal his lack of empathy.

Rusty and Rocky said...

Thank you for posting this. I read your blog daily and I am grateful for the way you are able to interpret topical events in more profound ways - either by bringing out the universal or personal aspects of them. Of course, that there was something personally involved here was very affecting for me, and it's admirable that you are able to share that with us.

Cruelty and indifference are the worst traits of humans, along with blind herd-like following and cultish hatred of anything different or outside the arbitrary thing one from which one has made a group (religion, location of residence, ideas of masculinity, etc.) Ironically, even though it's likely that bigots and gay-bashers are also probably statistically more likely to doubt the fact of evolution, their behavior comes from the most base, primal, and brutishly dumb part of our animal history. Romney is little more than a territorial chimpanzee in a suit, ready to hound and brutalize any who don't fit into what his idea of a clan should be (a frightening thought: the indifference and cruelty of a jungle beast + the deranged and bizarre metaphysical assumptions of Mormonism. And this is not even addressing his soulless history in business (and particularly that photo of him holding up the dollar bills with his co-workers at Bain -- "look how many bananas I have!")

jimf said...

> Romney is little more than a territorial chimpanzee in
> a suit, ready to hound and brutalize any who don't fit
> into what his idea of a clan should be (a frightening
> thought: the indifference and cruelty of a jungle beast +
> the deranged and bizarre metaphysical assumptions of
> Mormonism.

Mormons who really believe their faith, and who aren't merely going through the motions because they're embedded in the social milieu (and it's hard to do that and remain an active Mormon -- unlike many other Christian denominations, Mormonism really is an all-or-nothing affair; if you're in, you really gotta be **in**, or the bishop and the stake president -- to say nothing of your friends and family -- will want to know **exactly** what's going on with you), really do believe they're God's chosen people in the modern world. They're the only ones with the correct interpretation of the Gospel, the only ones who know how to get into Heaven (or the "Celestial Kingdom", as it's known by them).

For a true-believing Mormon, all non-Mormon human beings are
stumbling blindly in outer darkness.

For a Mormon, worldly happiness and prosperity are the outward signs of inward spiritual purity. Misfortune, marital discord, even clinical depression, are outward indicators of sin.

So don't expect any outside criticism to penetrate the smug, superior, hermetically-sealed mind-set of the LDS faith.

From my point of view, **all** the offshoots of the Abrahamic religions that parasitize Western civilization contain "deranged and bizarre metaphysical assumptions". Also, I'm inclined to believe that the most successful and powerful individuals in the business and political realms are overwhelmingly likely to be "territorial chimpanzee[s] in a suit [exhibiting the] indifference and cruelty of a jungle beast."

**Argument** seldom bridges these gaps. But there is hope -- Hope in Technology, of all things. I'm not talking about Robot Gods here, merely the mundane (in today's terms; I still tend to think of it as damn-near miraculous, but I guess I'm just showing my age) technology of the Internet, and blogs, and Wikipedia, and Google, and YouTube. It's much easier than in the past for ex-cultists (including ex-Mormons) to find each other and state their case in a way that makes it hard(er) for the remaining members in good standing to believe the party line that such people have succumbed to total degeneracy (which makes it easier for people who are "struggling" with their own beliefs to switch allegiances, when the time finally comes).

And it's harder than ever for powerful people to censor and spin and control what is said and remembered about them.

jimf said...

> Vote For the GOP Gay Bashers. . .

"I want to just give you a little bit about my background as someone as a person who is a Christian now but was not a Christian until the time I was 20. When I got saved and came into a relationship with Jesus I was actually quite a liberal-minded person, you might say. I worked for the Human Rights Campaign. When I met Jesus I was actually canvassing for gay rights in Portland, Oregon working to get sexual orientation put on Oregon's hate crimes bill at the time. So this is not an issue on which I'm just a brainwashed, ridiculous Christian that has never thought about the issues. But the fact is, when I became a believer, there were many things in my life that had to change as far as my perspectives and my values. One of those things was I was vegan, also, at the time. I don't have any problem with being vegan or anything like that, but for me, I realized that was a worship thing and it was a self-righteous thing, and so there was a lot of these kinds of areas where I had to have my mind renewed and I had to approach them in a way that honors the one true God of the Universe, Jesus Christ. . .

. . .and then. . . in Romans 13 it talks about the purpose of law and government, because that's what we're really talking about I think in this question, is can you be a faithful Christian and support legal recognition of gay marriage? And it says in Romans chapter 13 [Romans 13:1] 'Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God.' So all authority is ultimate allowed by God. Now, authority is responsible for the decisions it makes and how it uses that power, and it will stand and give an account before Jesus Christ one day. But it is appointed by God with that privilege. And it says in Verse 2 [Romans 13:2-4] 'Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. 3. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. 4. For he is God's minister to you for good.' OK, so that's telling you what the design of human government is by God -- it's intended to be a minister for good, as defined by God, to the people. So what that means is, governments should, as they're making laws -- politicians, people as they're lobbying for different laws and things, should do so with the intent of acknowledging what righteousness is as defined by the Lord in his word, and as they're making laws they should seek to promote justice and laws that are righteous as defined by God. And so, you have to plug that into this issue if you're a Christian and you're trying to think through this, and you want to not be so culturally-minded in this but Biblically-minded in this issue of gay marriage. You have to plug in God's **design** for human government. And you know, to me, as homosexuality is clearly defined as something that is not righteous from God's sight, you have to plug that in as you go and vote. Are you voting for something that God is inherently not in favor of? That, to me, is the real question. And I just kind of leave that to you, you know? . . ."

Refuge Church: Q&A Series
Are you a bad Christian if you support gay marriage?
Pastor Kellen Criswell
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44DRqjESlwI
(Uploaded by REFUGEutah on Aug 16, 2011)

He's cute!

(He wants the Mormons to "meet Christ", too. ;-> )

jimf said...

> I'm inclined to believe that the most successful and
> powerful individuals in the business and political realms
> are overwhelmingly likely to be "territorial chimpanzee[s]
> in a suit [exhibiting the] indifference and cruelty of
> a jungle beast."

Capitalists and Other Psychopaths
By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ
Published: May 12, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/fables-of-wealth.html
--------------------
"THERE is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich:
who they are, what their social role may be, whether they
are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A recent study
found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are
“clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in
and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying,
fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large
is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more
likely to lie, cheat and break the law.

The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone
would find them surprising. . ."