THEY DO IT ALL FOR YOU, BUT LORDIE DON"T GET ON THEIR BAD SIDE

I generally go with the conventional wisdom and list the Dred Scott decision as the Worst Supreme Court Decision Ever, but Holy Shit is this Kelo decision a doozy or what? I always knew the government could use Eminent Domain to dispossess us, but never have I seen such bald-faced endorsement of greed, not since the Court declared that corporations have the same rights as a person.

In 1886, the Supreme Court in "Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad" Chief Justice Waite wrote: "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does."

Betcha didn't know that, did you? The Fourteenth Amendment was meant to protect freed slaves: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The Santa Clara decision meant that you have to treat a corporate entity as you would a person. Catch being, a corporation is effectively immortal; when one corporate lackey dies, ten more shall take its place. You are not immortal. You might go to court to stop a corporation from paving over a favorite tree, but their lawyers don't really have to win, they just have to wait you out... (A favorite trick around here is to cut down the trees, put in the parking lot, then apologize, pay a fine, and plant some saplings.)

I guess with Kelo, the gloves are off between the private homeowner and the legions of Corporate Man.

Sadly, no surprise here-- when you grow up on John D. MacDonald novels, you can't have many illusions about real-estate developers-- but even some

Republican bloggers

see this for what it is.
Decisions made in a panic are almost always bad decisions. A lot of city fathers in an economic panic would sacrifice their own daughters to a volcano, if they thought it would attract developers. Wait till the dust clears from the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast; early reports say only 30% of the contracts are going to local businesses.
My interests are more literary than political, and I see the betrayal of Kelo and the others as another case of people who thought they were secure in the American social contract, until they found themselves on the losing side of an issue. I think of the middle class families at Love Canal, or the dairy farmers in Michigan when the PBB scandal broke.
We all expect the poor to be run over, but just wait till the Kelo decision bites someone prominent in the ass. I'm trying to get Wal-Mart excited about building in Georgetown...


See also: Supreme Court: Oregon's Right-to-Die Case

Days of Rage

I was carrying so much anger about ignorant, un-Christian "Christians" and the damage they do that I went to 5:00 Mass. Thought I'd ask the priest afterwards how he dealt with fanatics. Killing kind of rage, the kind that hurts you more than it hurts them and can slide so easily into despair.

First one there. Others drifted in, idle chat about their day as we waited to begin. One of the worshipers was tired, having spent the day working in pediatric intensive care. Another was asked about their latest CAT scan and their own recovery. A toddler, there with mother, father, and baby brother, visited us all in turns, then sat quietly reading something called "My Quiet Book", with all its pages made of cloth. Ken stuck his head in the door and asked us to remember in prayers a parishioner whose son was getting married in two weeks but the future mother-in-law was just killed in a car accident and a four year old with stage four cancer, both parents doctors, which meant they already knew more than was good for them as they worried...

Kind of puts you in perspective, doesn't it, punk?

We were supposed to thank God for something he'd given us. Yeah. right. Thank you for all the anger. Some inherited, a lot more of it earned, and some of it, quoting myself now, a chip put on my shoulder by Spartacus and knocked off by Wat Tyler. I've even been angry with God this year (God can take it; God knows they can dish it out). What am I, a fricking samurai-- the man with nothing to lose can accomplish great things?

The homily was about Mary. Whether you believe or not, metaphor or objective reality, Mary's probably the best of us. A human girl-- no super powers, remember-- given something she never asked to carry. Then a woman who loses a child, the worst thing imaginable, and in a particularly horrible way, yeah she can carry that too.

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world. Have mercy on us. I tend to imagine a literal lamb, lost animals safe from hurt. My little furry angels. The murdered lamb, as blameless as Mary.

My anger went away, or at least settled down to an acceptable simmer. God wasn't there for the self-righteous winners, wasn't a prosecutor like Dobson and Falwell and Robertson and our local mean-spirited pipsqueaks. They were too busy hating with a sanctimonious grin on their face, and driving nice cars. God was down here with the broken ones, getting the shit kicked out of her/him like the rest of us. It's the daily crucifixion. Even if we're lucky enough to avoid the harshness of society-- born in East Grand Rapids, say, instead of the 9th Ward of New Orleans-- we're still crucified by time, wearing us down, breaking and burning us.

Sooner or later, of course, reality, life will find a way to snap your self-perceptions like a twig. An old hippie in Stephen King's "Firestarter" says "life is short, pain's long, and we're here to help each other through". Some of us know that by instinct, and it makes us kinder to others, more tolerant not less, and some haven't learned it yet.

August Wilson's Come and Gone

August Wilson died this week of liver cancer. One of his titles, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom", led me to read his plays because of my love for the old true music. Until I saw the buzz in the New York papers, I was surprised that anyone besides me knew who Ma Rainey was, outside of a few blues fans-- and here she was on Broadway as she probably deserved to be back when.
It stuck in my mind like "Jelly's Last Jam" by George Wolfe, or singing "Black and Blue" in the midst of all the joy in the Fats Waller musical "Ain't Misbehaving".

For those of you who don't know, Mr. Wilson wrote a cycle of plays that chronicle black cultural history through the 20th century. That description doesn't quite cover it. What he did was harness the rhythms of colliquial black American speech to tell his stories, and it's a beautiful thing. That description is accurate, but still too flat.

Compare Pat Boone's "Tutti Frutti" with Little Richard's, or Big Mama Thorton's "Hound Dog" with Elvis Presley's version, and you'll get what I'm trying to say. Just the way Big Mama Thorton sings the first three words, "You ain't nothin--" will rip all the Elvis Presley out your throat. Elvis Presley, 'dangerous'? Sheee-yit...

Mississippi John Hurt was the first to climb inside my soul-- I opened the album because the cover reminded me of my grandpa-- and by the time I heard Skip James wail "Cypress Grove Blues", I knew there was a poetry here to rival any moment in Sophocles or Aeschylus. Pity and terror, like the man said.

Funny thing is, I've never seen a stage production of any of Wilson's work, only read him-- so the productions in my mind are as perfect as can be, performed with the voices of people I grew up around and long dead blues men and women. I think he'd like them.


"I'm trying to take culture and put it onstage, demonstrate it is capable of sustaining you. There is no idea that can't be contained by life: Asian life, European life, certainly black life. My plays are about love, honor, duty, betrayal - things humans have written about since the beginning of time. "

Rest now. God bless.

PERVERTS HAVE TAKEN OVER THE REPUBLICAN PARTY: Please Stop Worrying About Other Men's Penises!

I am waiting for a politician who will ask, "Who are these anti-gay marriage busybodies to be so concerned with other people's penises?" Most of us go through entire days, sometimes weeks, without thinking about other people's genitalia unless we want to have sex with them.

Let's start describing this obsession of the Republican Party, this penis fixation of Wildmon and Falwell and Dobson and crew as what it is: a fetish. Some fetishists obsess about high heel shoes, some about women's breasts (exclusively I mean), some about French maid costumes--
and Rick Santorum worries about other men's penises and what they might be doing with them RIGHT NOW and what that might be doing to America. Whatever crime, greed, cronyism, illiteracy, job loss, environmental neglect and "Growing Up Gotti" might be doing to America, it pales compared to the destructive power of same-sex marriage and genital contact between members of the same sex! (Does Santorum remind anyone else of Paul Lynde? Or Tony Nelson, with Jeannie running around the house and all he wants to do is spend time with Roger?)

In the small but diverse town where I grew up, surrounded by blue-collar heterosexualists, there was none of this perverse gay bashing. It was a truism of my boyhood, learned from my fathers and uncles and the old men in the truck stops and barber shops: heterosexual men who were secure in their own identity simply did not worry so much about homosexual men.

The few openly gay men in the community were no more eccentric than the Sunday painters or photography club. K. and E. were like eccentric uncles whose difference added to the community; their homosexuality was no more irksome than the peculiarities of the camera club or the Jaycees, and I remember hearing more complaints about the Jaycees. If small town gays gravitated to the local arts scene, theatre and architecture and interior design, that was simply because those worlds were more live and let live about their inhabitants.

Men who exhibited homosexual panic, who talked about “goddamn queers tried to rape me” and such, were sniffed at by the rest of the truck drivers as being worried for a reason. When my turn came at 19 to be propositioned by a gay man (I was young and pretty then), I politely declined with no one’s feelings or noses being hurt.

My uncle’s concern baffled me. It would have seemed silly to have someone worry about me being seduced by our local gay theatre director. It seems silly now. How could a homosexual take my penis in his mouth unless I wanted to put it there? That would have been a poor substitute for the girls and women I had crushes on, who swirled around my adolescent brain in an unattainable hareem.

In panicky times like these, we must speak calm truth to hysterics. Anne M. Gobi, a Representative of Massachusetts, says,
"I haven't talked to any married heterosexual couples that have felt threatened by same-sex marriages."

Simply put, there aren’t enough hours in the day, what will all the other things I have to worry about. When clouds of the day part, when the demands of art and commerce are met, I selfishly start worrying about my own sex life. I'm not a patriot like Rick Santorum. Indeed, I hardly ever worry about other people's sex lives, excepting them as might intersect with mine.

It is time to confront public figures who espouse this kind of hatred against gay men and lesbians. The men and women who are born with an attraction to the same or rarely, both sexes, deserve to be left alone so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses. It is the Republican party and the so called Christian church that has been overrun by perverts.

Only three groups are so curious about unfamiliar genitals:

* Researchers and physicians, who have legitimate research questions;

* Pornographers, who entertain Americans to the hypocritical tune of $500 million to $1.8 billion dollars a year (the “$10 billion” often cited by crusaders and producers has been shown to be impossible);

* And Republican politicians and evangelical clergymen, who in a world of corruption, pain and ignorance can find nothing better to do their time.

WHO IS PAT ROBERTSON, THAT THOU ARE MINDFUL OF HIM? Mavens of Immoral Morality

It's a funny thing, the moral arbiter business. Chuck Colson was, by all reports, as rapacious a shitheel as any you could find in Washington today, but then he fell from on high, went to jail, found Jesus. I wish him luck. Funny, for all my sins of the flesh, I guess I knew even as a little kid that subverting the Constitution was a bad thing; Colson didn't know that until he was a grown man, and they had to whisk his sorry ass off to jail before he learned his civics lesson. Well, never mind, better late to the party than never arrive at all.

... But then this presumptuous ninny has the audacity to go on the radio and call other people immoral, while making great noises about his own virtue and love for the Lord? Like the Cheech and Chong Jesus Freak who "used to be messed up on drugs; now I'm all messed up on the Lord", Colson is the same nasty little shit he ever was. Once it was his duty to savage anyone who didn't love Richard Nixon; now the same energy is devoted to lashing at the enemies of the Lord. Who are the enemies of the Lord? Chuck Colson's gonna tell you. (Don't bother asking Jesus: just another Jewish liberal.)

Now we have William Bennett, compulsive gambler, verbal bully, education maven and again, a self-proclaimed moral arbiter and "editor" of "The Book of Virtues". My goodness these men are virtuous! They tell us so at every turn! Or rather, they tell us how much more sinful everyone else is. ... (Funny how he tells us what's wrong with our teachers but never actually gets down in the trenches with the foot soldiers trying to teach crack babies to read or telling a popular kid he still has to read the Constitution.)

Ah, Wild Bill: "But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."

To say the least; the paperwork must be horrendous. Let me simply ask that Bill do some homework: he can total up how much crime was committed by blacks over the last hundred years, and estimate the dollar cost in property loss, earning power of murder victims, and etc. Then he can total up the damages caused by the white power structure he belongs to: world wars, foreign assasinations, property damage, etc. Don't forget the cost of bottled water and the fish in Lake Michigan that can't be eaten by pregnant women anymore.

And Bill will whine: but those are not street crimes, but acts of policy in the name of the state, for Virtue, for Right, for Kate Smith and the Grand Old Flag. For Business, for General Motors for Henry Kissinger, for General Pinochet, in the name of whatever's good for the USA.

The moral audacity of these men! I stand in awe. Anne Coulter must have been binding the sores of lepers day and night in her college years, in order to attain the high moral ground where now she stands. Bill Frist, Tom DeLay, I tell you we are moral midgets next to them. And George W. Bush, a business wrecking alcoholic asshole for forty something years, yes, but a saint for twenty...?

"Heaven for climate, but Hell for society."