The problem with liberalism is that it’s founded on charity and pity—as opposed to a leftism based on solidarity and justice. Nothing epitomizes the inadequacy of liberalism like the place of the gay establishment, so quick to couch rights claims such as marriage equality in the language of the aggrieved middle-class taxpayer. (“What do you mean I can’t have what I want? I PAY MY TAXES!”)

But then there are the gay conservatives, the mystifying people (mostly white men, of course) who buy into all the wrong arguments about the failed Obama presidency, and make liberal hypocrisy and elitism far more palatable. From the ashes of Log Cabin (are they even still around?) we have GoPAC, with Chris Barron and Jimmy LaSalvia mouthing off at the helm. Arguably, you can spin it as a net boon for humanity that gay conservatives can exist at all, but that’s glib and ridiculous. They’re terrible. They’re the worst. And they’re ours.

It’s a dirty little secret—or perhaps, a suppressed fact—that apart from white people in the Upper South, the only demographic of any significance voted more Republican in 2008 (27%) than in 2004 (23%) was LGBT people. That’s amazing, and it never gets a mention.

There are more gay conservatives than there were, judging by CNN’s exit polls.

(Another dirty secret is that black people are not to blame for Prop. 8, but luckily the flare-up of tensions didn’t seem to last. If anything, L.A. County, which narrowly voted in favor of banning same-sex marriage in California, tilted the results way more than the state’s comparatively miniscule number of black people ever could).

Anyway, why the fuck would LGBT people vote Republican? Being conservative is one thing, but voting for a party that specifically, and with vitriol, condemns your very existence is another. You can hold your nose and vote for a corrupt Democrat once in a while, but choosing the bad side at the top of the ticket is quite something.

And they’re kind of ascendant again. Now we have news that Ann Coulter has joined the board of GOProud as its “gay icon.” Leaving aside the question of whether or not to retire that term, what does she bring them? I would guess that more than anything else, it’s legitimacy for their role as gadfly, a tiny organization with low membership that can vault itself into the conversation by virtue of its own status as a paradoxical and mildly interesting curio.

Ann Coulter is an outspoken irritant.  She bothers liberals, even though she’s part of the ceaseless chorus of distractions and wields no power, and raises their blood pressure in ways that wonkier people can’t. Mitt Romney, if president, would appoint guys who would gut the welfare state and turn us into a plutocracy once and for all, but they’re just nerds and nothing they do will ever go viral. What would GOProud want with them? Better to get the flashiest attention whore who opposes everything about gay people and calls them names.

It’s easy to caricature gay conservatives as either victims of mental illness or such rich, selfish bastards that they don’t care about anything but their fucking money (essentially the stereotype of the childless, pampered DINK couple, but curdled and bitchy). A more compelling point is the discomfort, bordering on outright panic, that a lot of gay people share with a lot of straight people.

It’s not socially acceptable to be a gay man living an openly gay life who says things like, “I might be gay, but at least I’m not a faggot. I don’t dress like that or talk like that.” (You do hear same-gender-attracted people say these things, but it’s usually a rationalization for why they aren’t actually gay). Doubtless, this is a widely held, albeit private, opinion.

And once in a while, you do hear a gay conservative express antipathy for flamboyant fags. (Usually, the conservatives have total gay face and frosted highlights and a lisp themselves). So there is no small measure of self-hatred at work, the same kinds of things that armchair psychology clearly dictates are wrapped up in fatherly disapproval over sons who suck at sports and sit with the girls at recess, and all that. Joining the uppermost echelon of the Establishment as away to prove yourself isn’t entirely unsympathetic; it’s a variation on the underdog theme. And power is intoxicating, so why not get closer to it?

I can also see a perverse form of hedonism. Beyond starfucking Ann Coulter, it’s pretty apparent that the empire is heading off a cliff, and unless the Chinese are about to whip out some really amazing technological shit, we’re going to take the planet with us. We’re in the vicinity of Peak Oil, we probably passed the point of no return on atmospheric carbon emissions already, and with seven billion mouths gnawing at the future, Peak Water might be at hand. Eventually, we’re going to hit Peak Pottery Barn and Peak Ibiza and Peak Fun. Why not enjoy life now and push for change that maximizes your medium-term gains?

But I think the real motivation is resentment. This is something you find among black conservatives, too—a bristling at the assumption that “because I am visibly a part of Tribe X, I must therefore think and vote in a way mandated by Tribe X.” (Except black conservatives have a handy discourse of enslavement and plantations and Democrats-as-Uncle Toms that is inflammatory and inane).

I share this. In San Francisco, some absurd organization called t Alice B. Toklas Democratic club endorses people for office based on whether or not they are themselves LGBT. Could that be any more pseudo-intellectual, tribal or crass?

(I don’t know how well that works, but I’m sure a lot of gay people automatically vote gay without any further engagement with the candidates vis-à-vis their own interests, or those of more marginalized groups of people than, say, the pitiful, dispossessed homos of 21^st century San Francisco.)

With conservatives, it’s the opposite—they resent the entire apparatus, and envision themselves as lone wolves crusading against a system that includes gay liberals as insiders. Again, it’s all too easy to pathologize this as “conservatives prefer absolutes, liberals love nuance.” But the gay conservative critique is subsumed into an overall investment in the system.

It’s not that liberals don’t do it, too. Gay marriage inevitably and frictionlessly led to giant gay weddings and gay banns published in the SundayStyles section. Commodication of the lifestyle trumps everything else, and LGBT people in urban America are both the very opposite of a persecuted class and conspicuously not joining the fight with, say, other citizens of urban America who are having a rough go with foreclosures and unemployment.

That said, the resentment among gay conservatives, if it has a point at all, it’s a mystery to me. I suspect, deep down, that the real purpose is simply to announce their existence. It’s a case of perpetual coming out, combined with activism’s worst impulses. In the end, it’s pure Kabuki, territorial seizures of a piece of a pie we all know is shrinking.

This is so fucked up. What about this can’t be explained away by ordinary four-year-old behavior? At least Tibetan Buddhists take great pains when plucking one reincarnated lama out of obscurity–why isn’t it transparently obvious that the son of a preacher man would learn by imitation the family business? How fucking un-wondrous!

What’s really embarrassing is how easy this type of grifting is; even a child can do it. The breathless, stentorian tones. The occasional yelping the name of Jesus. The rote recitation of the same shibboleths, jarringly emphasized here and there to endow the same bullshit with import. Yowza. What precocious kid with a flair for theatrics can’t ape such a simplistic formula, when all the adults around him encourage it and cheer hi on?

As with everything evangelical, unless they’re specifically enumerating the List of Don’ts (which gay sex always tops, seeing as it’s a delightfully salacious sin which only about 8% of humans ever feel tempted to commit, unlike stealing or cheating on your wife), they never actually say anything. It’s entirely form, no substance at all. Text me when this boy-child unearths a golden tablet, reveals God’s newest Testament or just silences the grown-ups with a sermon about how lying is bad and sharing cookies is good.

Maybe he’ll go to Heaven. That was a real doozy, learning it’s For Realz from that Burpo kid with the stage parents who coached him to the top of the Best Seller mountain. I can’t wait for the follow-up, when that little fraud goes to Hell.

Is it the Spirit really working through him at mysterious times, or is the kid a normal little boy with mood swings and no impulse control?

I really wish there was a Holy Spirit. I feel truly deprived by feeling only it absence. I would like it in the from by the Holy Spirit. I bet it would feel like one of those warming-cooling analgesic gels, only better.

Many of the people who make big six-figure incomes consider themselves middle class. A University of Chicago professor arguing against the repeal of the Bush tax cuts made waves by saying he was “just getting by” with his $250,000 income…

All of this is a testament to the amazing (and rapidly expanding) cultural divide that exists in this country, where the poor and the rich seldom cross paths at all, and the rich, in particular, simply have no concept what being broke and poor really means. It is true that if you make $300,000 in America, you won’t feel like you’re so very rich once you get finished paying your taxes, your mortgage, your medical bills and so on.

For this reason, a lot of people who make that kind of money believe they are the modern middle class: house in the burbs, a car, a kid in college, a trip to Europe once a year, what’s the big deal? Wealth…is rapidly becoming defined as belonging to anyone who has any form of job security at all…

That the Tea Party and their Republican allies in congress have so successfully made government workers with their New Deal benefits out to be the kulak class of modern America says a lot about the unique brand of two-way class blindness we have in this country. It’s not just that the rich don’t know the poor exist…It also works the other way — the poor have no idea what real rich people are like. They apparently never see them.

What does it even mean to be ‘middle class’ if affluent people with jobs on television can claim the mantle and get away with it? (It means the term has become as meaningless as terrorism, for starters). It also means that

It’s also an unintended consequence of the decline of the WASP elite. The fact that there isn’t a Boston Brahmin named Peabody Saltonstall representing Massachusetts in the Senate as a patrician Republican from that Old Money bastion cloaks the fact that there is a greater concentration of wealth than ever. It’s just not held in trusts by the Social Directory.

You’d think demography would be on the good side. The 2008 election, when Indiana and North Carolina (and Dallas County, and nearly all of Northern Virginia) went blue wasn’t only supposed to represent the Great Middle coming to its senses after 8 years of Bush. It was  also a tipping point for the clout of young and/or non-white voters, whom the Obama campaign courted assiduously–not just for their one time votes–but to enfranchise them fully, to stanch the self-fulfilling bleeding that their lackluster participation in the political process created.

These were the people the least invested in hedge funds, least invested in the idea of hedge funds and their purported utility, their beneficence, their alleged genius in allocating capital and making the creaking system right itself. These were the people least invested in the system altogether. What happened to them? Why is the white-picket fortress surrounding the very wealthiest Americans adding a moat?

Four years later, the elderly white people trounced that coalition and we have lurched so violently rightward that the George W. Bush of 2004 would have a hard time emerging from a primary battle.

Yet there are more Latinos and Asians than ever, right? There’s probably more single women (a Democratic demo for sure) as the primacy of the nuclear family continues to plunge. The conservative nightmare, where the U.S. spirals into a post-Christian dystopia full of atheists and lesbians and a trillion Mexicans has a tiny grain of truth to it (although I’d add that we’ll eventually be left with Mormons, Hasidim and unemployed graphic designers only, like the last clumps of matter which will inherit the universe in its final stages of expansion as it all flies apart).

But how many more McCain voters have died off, relative to Obama voters, in the interim? Why isn’t this translating into, well, revolution?

Always at the forefront, California is on the cusp of permanent Republican minority–perhaps even permanent Republican “super-minority” wherein the intransigent bastards can no longer use the power given to them by quirks in the state constitution to thwart the voters in this overwhelmingly blue state. Then why does it sometimes feel like we’re 500,000 Latinos away from becoming the Christian Iran? Why is our once and future governor so tepid?

Why is everything red-shifting away from us like distant galaxies in spite of the incoming permanent Democratic majority (no one talks about that thesis anymore, do they?) The most depressing fact about the rightward lurch is that the best models couldn’t predict it and can’t explain it.

To go back to the universe-as-metaphor one last time, there must be some kind of dark energy holding these trends together, because they’re accelerating when they should be reversing. That dark matter is eviscerating the republic.

Of course, as a cisgender male erotically attached to the male anatomy, I have a horse in this race. I’m not especially interested in getting people to love the cock, but cock-hatred is too casual, too easy and too unexamined.

I get that men all too often actively threaten women, and the erection is all too potent (pun semi-intended) a symbol for that threat. The male body actually grows even larger just before it rapes you. And that’s terrible.

But here’s an exchange from 7×7 Magazine that’s just too much. (The title, “Am I More Bisexual Than I Think?” is dumb, too. It’s 2011. Get over the primacy of identity over action, fuck who you want to fuck without getting all anxious, and things will fall into place more easily.) Here’s the money quote:

…[T]he fantasies that run in my head often involve women’s bodies—men’s too, but there are lots of female parts. Is this because women’s bodies are so pretty? Have I seen too much porn? Maybe I’m more bisexual than I think. How common is it for a straight woman to fantasize so much about other women?

He Said: I surveyed several of my female friends, and all of them found your fantasies normal. Men generally thought you were hot just for having them. So I’m not sure you need to figure out why you fantasize about women’s bodies. It might be a mix of the reasons you stated or something else entirely. Without question women’s bodies are more beautiful than men’s—I mean, have you ever had a close look at a scrotum?

I know I’m picking apart casual discourse as if it were a gravely worded treatise, but why is this idea okay? What purpose does it serve to allow this free-floating and entirely subjective opinion masquerade as fact.

(I want to stand up and yell that scrotums are awesome, and fun to play with, and I like having one, and their size and shape is determined by their function, and the density of nerve endings makes them as erogenous as the glans if not more so, and pretty pretty boobies look like colossal squid eyes to me sometimes. But that’s not the point either.)

It’s totally okay to hold the opinion that penises are ugly, but it’s not a fact that they are so. Shouldn’t sex columnists dispense advice that encourages people to appreciate their own anatomy? A lot of guys have major insecurities about the nether regions–in fact, pretty much everyone does. It’s why we have Ferraris and the Burj Khalifa.

Don’t use words like “pretty,” with connotations that already define masculine beauty out of the equation, to put my scrotum down, stupid. My balls are fucking awesome!

I’m really over this. I guess I’ve outgrown my militancy a little bit, but really I’ve just come to see the game for what it is: a theatrical construction designed to lay bare the sophisticates’ horror at the masses, and shore up the alliance between the masses and the extremely powerful people who are careful never to let it be known that they hate them.

Back to the clip. What’s actually disturbing? Is it “My smokin’ hot wife, Lisa.“? I think that’s actually pretty funny. Is it “Boogity-boogity-boogity!“? (It’s a combination of Boomhauer from King of the Hill and Glenn Quagmire from Family Guy–cartoonish, but probably the guy’s aware and having fun).

It’s not the fact that the guy has a strong Southern accent, is it? Of course it is, in part. It’s part of why a lot of George W. Bush’s strident liberal critics go easier on Obama in spite of our fighting yet more wars–Obama articulates himself (when he even bothers to anymore, that is) without any trace of a regional accent, let along a put-upon one masking his upbringing, and without malapropisms.

It’s not that he’s praying at all, is it? Of course it is. Discomfort with public prayer (unless it’s part of some upscale, boutique religion) is a shibboleth of leftism. You have to flare your nostrils and gape when you hear it, and you have to look around to see who else in the crowd is performing discomfort so you can share your experience later at the we-survived-it debriefing; it’s just the rules.

What’s the real problem with the performative liberal reaction to these things? What are we all falling for, and why are we falling for it?

The fallacy is that liberals are merely reacting and not acting. In fact, Middle America/Christendom/conservatives already know all too keenly that they are rabble, despised by the cool kids before they even open their mouths to crap.

At bottom, this is the same dynamic as the media’s completely erroneous belief that they merely report on things without influencing public perception of the events in question simply by existing. The media do not typically inform; they stoke, plant grievances and reward preconceptions. Fox is just the best and most brazen about it, but JoeMyGod is doing it here.

Why is Michelle Bachmann popular? Why might she snatch the presidency away from Mr. Hope and Change and Look How Great We Are? Ultimately, it’s because the people whom liberals just cannot fucking stand the thought of, the stupid, judgmental, Christ-worshiping, fat, uncritical, gross people who occupy most of that geopolitically minor landmass off the west coast of Manhattan know that liberals who hate them really hate her, and they are so eager to stick it to those liberals that they’ll vote for the target of liberal rage.

This is an awesome strategy for the right, as the demographics will almost always be on their side. (It’s vexing how horribly right wing the country has become even as it’s more diverse than ever; why is that?) Throw in the correlative Democratic cowardice and you have all the explanation you need for why a “liberal Democrat” is about to gut Social Security, the signature achievement of his party and country in the 20th century.

Super-cosmopolitan people by necessity define themselves in opposition to mass taste. The conservatives have won for years because they’ve made elections about taste. Who would you rather have a beer with? Doesn’t Michael Dukakis look like a nerd in that tank? Isn’t Al Gore wooden? Don’t pay attention to the capital gains tax–let’s plant a kitschy sculpture of the Ten Commandments at an Alabama courthouse where no liberal will even see it, except once it becomes national news. Then they’ll  reveal themselves to be hysterical scolds with different values from you and me. Values like shooting deer on the weekend and not letting women earn what men earn.

(I recognize the naked elitism in my line of thinking, and the crypto-Leninist implication that a vanguard of progressives comfy in evangelical/NASCAR/NRA circles will prevail.)

But only when more privileged people condescend to visit those enormous swaths of the country deemed uninhabitable and not worth going to will they chill the fuck out, and only when liberals succeed at tamping down their horror and revealing the destruction that the dangerous (but publicly welcoming) corporate paymasters are inflicting on these people will they reabsorb the lapsed Democrats who fled thirty years ago. The plutocrats are taking everything, and the natural alliances among have-nots are in tatters.

Second, Rupert Murdoch doesn’t want to advance the cause of conservatism as much as he wants to destroy the power of the media to act as a check on power. This intensely destructive philosophy finds a natural niche on the right because of its pro-corporate orientation and the cultural aversion towards dirty hippies and other folks who aren’t gaga for getting stomped in the face by transnational capital. But he’s different from Roger Ailes, the head of Fox and true believer in the Republican Party.

Murdoch’s an extremely adroit practitioner of the ultimate corporatist strategy of keeping regular folks at each other’s throats when we should all be allied against him and the other people at the top. What is the news cycle? It’s not a parade of effective muckraking wherein corrupt people are thwarted and the massing of wealth and power gets its due comeuppance by a healthy democratic polity’s vigorous Fourth Estate. It’s a top-down nightmare of competing resentments.

Liberals find Michelle Bachmann ignorant and scary (and freakishly focused; she’s what Sarah Palin was supposed to be). Movement conservatives flock to her because as a first principle, they’ll gravitate towards whatever those snobbish, effete liberals hate the most, and other conservatives will find reasons to support her. The act of exposing Markus and Michelle Bachmann’s predictably awful Christian weirdness just hardens her white, middle-class fan base all the more because their basic grievances (there’s no work to be had, no guarantee of getting ahead even when there is, and life sucks) are legitimate and Rupert Murdoch and his ilk have been successful at channeling it and, unfairly or not, hammering at liberalism’s comparative inability to do so.

Fluffing the people who “got” Michelle Obama for eating a cheeseburger or who express outrage at the things that come out of Fred Phelps’s mouth is entertaining, and jabbing at a person’s moral superiority with a stick is a great way to keep them all exercised and paying attention, but it’s also complete bullshit. Measurable depreciations in the standard of living are really all that matter, but they involve math instead of dick tweets or verbal gaffes.

Almost every Tea Partier could be a Democrat, since when you strip away the ignorance of history and the false consciousness and the overt racism and the gold fetish and the misplaced rage at who it is who took their country away, it’s the Democratic Party who used to be able to address their fundamental anxiety. (Of course, the Democratic Party used to be really racist, too, but that’s a whole other subject).

There’s a natural alliance there, but the sophisticated half of the country thinks the patriotic half is stupid and the forgotten half thinks the entitled half is a cancer.

Anyway, this whole dynamic is precisely what Rupert Murdoch stokes. If you believe that the overarching problem with everything in the United States is imperial plutocracy’s tendency to gobble everything, no matter how obviously unsustainable, destructive and anti-democratic, you must agree that Murdoch is the primary enabler. He exists to enhance power. If he can be toppled, we have a chance.

In the meantime, the News of the World is gone. That’s one fewer tabloid out there, which is fine because I always preferred the Sun, anyway. Page 3 has tits!

I’ve watched this twice now, and both times it made me tear up a little. (I’m a sap, and I know the song is trite beyond description, but I know all the words). The thing that’s actually sad isn’t the tragic death of the Big Bopper in a plane crash, but the fact that the initial impetus to make this video is a sad truth: Grand Rapids is a dying city in a dying state in a dying empire.

Although the production is excellent (what are they blowing up on that bridge?), I fail to see what you’re supposed to experience about Grand Rapids. Unless you know the city well already, who would even guess that was where this was shot until the camera whizzes up into the stratosphere at the very end? I didn’t.

Michigan, where people get arrested for growing vegetable gardens, is one of two states to have lost population in the 2000s. The auto industry might have been spared a gruesome death, but you can’t arrest a half-century of deindustrialization with a tough union contract and a bailout. They’re in trouble.

I have no doubt that quality of life is higher there than in a lot of places, and that the eager participants in the video were genuinely happy to be part of this, but the fact that they need to do it at all says everything. I would never want to live in China, and I wouldn’t want to live under a banner that says something like “Civilize Our City, and Make Yourself a Citizen” or whatever their propaganda du jour might be, but I doubt you’d ever see something like this there.

It would be nice for a mid-size Midwestern city to become a tech haven for wind turbines that float on the ocean and harness wave power, with their rotors bejewelled in photovoltaic cells. They could de-acifidify seawater so the corals don’t bleach and, WALL-E like, condense the garbage in the North Pacific Gyre and they would never need replacement, ever.

First, he’s saying that because the Catholic Church is a whiny bitch that’ll fuck over needy kids just to spite fags, it’s not actually the Church’s fault.

Second, I can’t count  how many times I’ve heard that marriage fairness/non-discrimination in employment/not getting the shit beat out of you constitutes “special rights” for gays. It’s been the right’s most effective shorthand for decades, playing up the politics of resentment to thwart homo justice as part of the larger campaign to divide the have-nots against each other. Now Perkins is kvetching that churches don’t get special exemptions. Well, which is it?

Third, I take issue with the phrase “Family Research Council.”  They’re not researching families, or anything at all, as far as I can tell.  It’s not a council if it’s always the same spokesman who never seems to refer to any group of Christian elders. And “family” is really just supposed to be an all-purpose dog whistle meaning “we’re not gay, liberal, pro-uterus, pro-children or pro-childlessness.” It’s awful.

“Family” is supposed to be some kind of affirmation of life by denying everything fun. It’s as creepy a virtue as “decency.”

You have to hold in your head two highly contradictory ways of looking at this, one being overwhelming pity for all the poor fucks born into a world of extreme poverty and the other being a steely, cruel desire to snuff them out before they’re born, for the sake of those who do live (or get to live) and for the world which we’re ruining.

My dream of an affluent, secular and peaceful world of 600 million homo sapiens and lots of whales and gorillas is probably dead in the water.

These projections are of course only speculation. We might crash, blow ourselves up and achieve the Singularity long before then.  But I can’t imagine the world trending away from violence and disintegration with resources becoming ever scarcer.

Seeing the ways in which the empire is groaning with 310 million Americans in it, I’m especially skeptical of the survival of our republic with the prospect of ninety million more by mid-century. 15% of the US is on food stamps, our shitty and expensive medical care is going to bury us as Khruschchev’s shoe never could, and we’re quietly axing the benevolent fruits of our vast power, like SETI and the Space Shuttle–not that it really did anything, but we have nothing more scientific or equally showy to replace it.

Where are those Americans going to live? Clark County, Nevada and Maricopa County, Arizona don’t have enough water for many more millions of inhabitants, and the places most suitable for that ecological burden are currently hemorrhaging people–Michigan comes to mind.  (I still say there’s going to be a massive move into Alaska within thirty years. The government has subsidized them since before statehood and there’s no reason that apparatus won’t be re-oriented for spectacular growth).

The underlying premise for the Arab spring was demography. You just can’t slap a dictatorial police state on top of a country with tens of millions of unemployed young people. The underlying premise for China’s one-party capitalist superstate is stability.  The Chinese endured so many droughts and revolutions that they’re paranoid about anything that could destabilize all that they’ve built.

When the one-child policy is relaxed (in order to balance their tilt towards an aged population), I wonder if a new generation will hoover everything up. Chinese baby boomers, if they get to enjoy it at all, will probably finish what the American boomers might almost succeed in doing, which is destroy the earth to guaranatee their own prosperity.

It remains to be seen just how nihilistic this country becomes in its death throes, and if we take the whole world with us.  I wish China well and I hope they figure out how to extract an American upper middle class standard of living out of a world without oil and ten billion mouths to feed,  1/8 of which are their own. Although that burgeoning megalopolis of 42 million doesn’t bode well for the daily comfort of the little guy.

And 3.57 billion Africans in eighty-nine years? Jesus Christ.  That was the total world population in 1970 or so.  The whole world is going to be dispossessed Muslims, evangelicals, Hasidim and Mormons screaming at each other over the nuclear wastelands, with a tiny sliver of atheists in Copenhagen and Boulder.

This is just further proof that non-reproductive sex (i.e. sodomy, in the widest definition) is a highly ethical act.  Won’t you join me in not reproducing?

These are the rail yards on the north side of Gary, IN.  Have you ever known a city so cut off from its waterfront?  That’s a lot of track to hop.  I wonder how many people live here.