The White Peril 白禍

Atsushi is now on a plane. He will land at Haneda at around 9:30, arrive at our door at around 11:00, and leave for his parents' place at around 14:00. That gives us three hours together (sort of) to celebrate New Year's Eve, Japan's major holiday. Given how we'll have to shoehorn things in, I'm at least trying to make the house as close to spotless as possible, in the hopes that the effort will convey a celebratory air. Accompanying music by Heart. No, not the 70s stuff that we're all supposed to admire for creating a distaff Led Zep--sorry, Mom and Dad--but the 80s stuff that was out when I was in high school. You know, after the Wilsons looked at each other and said, "Millions of kids shell out for albums at mall record stores every day. Dammit, WE WANT THAT MONEY. Where's Diane Warren's card?" There's something very satisfying about lovingly, tenderly, soothingly moving a dusting glove over your favorite vases while shrieking "Who Will You Run To" along with Ann.

I don't know whether I'll be back between now and tonight's party. If I'm not, everyone have a happy and safe new year.

Jon Rowe's recent post on homosexuality in the context of the DSM has been deservedly linked by everyone (via Ex-Gay Watch for me). Mike notes that the implications cut both ways: "Those who would today classify homophobia as a mental disorder might want to reconsider." He's tacitly referring to this paragraph of Jon's:

The "regrettable tendency" to which I refer is the (mis)use of the concept of "mental illness" to enforce moral or social norms. Back in Socarides's day, it was the 1950s style social conservative morality which was "medicalized." Today it's PC. Previously, homosexuality and other behaviors which violated "traditional morality" were "mental illnesses." Today "racism" and "homophobia" are mental illnesses (or at least, some folks within the profession seriously advance this notion). As Pete Townshend put it: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

On a related but slightly different topic, I always get a charge out of the social conservatives who believe homosexuality is caused by abuse during childhood and/or that gays should go in for "reparative" therapy. These are often the same sorts of people who in general--and, in my view, quite correctly--are highly suspicious of Oprah-style recovered memories of molestation and who in any case believe that adults should get a grip on themselves, stop foisting responsibility for their own character development off on their parents, and carve out a life with the resources they have.

If you're gay, though--well, then to some people, you must have been sexually abused as a child (even if you have no such memories and know your parents and other elders would never do any such thing). And you're supposed to consult a helpful therapist to help you riffle through your inner filing cabinet looking for, you know, some incident when you were three and Dad took away your Tonka truck in a fashion that made him seem to be withdrawing from you emotionally (or worse). It's all very odd.

Joe thinks I'm being too dismissive of That Movie. He's seen it and has posted about it. Here's (to me) the important part:

Homosexual and gay are not synonymous; all homosexuals are not gay. Homosexual acts may be circumstantial--a man in prison, a drunken evening--or experimental and do not mean an individual is homosexual by nature. But experimentation can lead to the discovery of a homosexual inclination.

Once that inclination is realized, how it is addressed matters to all of us. Because then there is a choice to be made: to accept homosexuality or to resist and fight it. To embrace it is to become gay. To resist it leads to all kinds of trouble.

...

Urbanization and mobilization--particularly World War II which brought women into the workforce and men together as it took them around the world--brought with it the beginnings of a gay identity. That identity is rooted in the collective experience of those who have gone through the difficult process of making the choice to embrace their homsexuality.

The nuclearization of the family has had a major effect, too. When you bring people up to choose their own spouses, and when they know that the bulk of their emotional sustenance and support through life's obstacles will be channeled through a partnership of two, it becomes far more urgent that their partnerships are based on not only duty but also compatibility. Extended family societies impinge more on individual identity--and they tend not to make the pursuit of happiness a high priority, let alone enshrine it in their founding documents--but they also provide a constellation of relationships with in-laws that makes difficulties with any one person easier to manage: you may not get along very well with your husband and mother-in-law, but your helpful sister-in-law and slyly sympathetic father-in-law can always be close at hand to keep you from losing your mind.

Getting back to what Joe writes, the "collective experience" part is a little on the Richard Goldstein side for me, but in a major sense, he's right. Those of us you see publicly calling ourselves gay are working culturally, both for better and for worse, off a framework developed by men and women after World War II, especially through the 60s and 70s.

That doesn't mean, of course, that our elders have turned their mind rays on us and turned us all into zombies. Poor Eric, practically tearing his hair out as usual to get people to remember that they're in charge of their own lives, notes the reactions to Brokeback Mountain in a splashy Inquirer article:

From what I've read, the film targets the mainstream heterosexual market, but that doesn't guarantee that they'll be lining up to see it in large numbers. Hype won't persuade people to see a film with which they can't identify, nor will a good scolding. (It's a real stretch to blame "heterosexual bigotry" for the failure of people to see a film.)

If only there'd been a major coordinated attack on the film by social conservatives with massive boycotts and picket lines in front of every theater! That might have triggered a Brokeback Mountain backlash [Say that five times fast--SRK], but the social conservatives seem to be learning what not to do. (I guess I should keep my trap shut about such things....)

MORE: I think, however, that it would be a mistake to misread this strategic silence as an indication of tolerance or an embrace of a live-and-let-live philosophy.

That's because the hard core opposition to the film arises from a moral collectivist belief that people are not responsible for their own actions:

"If [Brokeback Mountain] encourages even one confused boy to engage in sex with another male, that makes it an instrument of corruption, not one of enlightenment."

I may be in a minority, but I can't think of a single time--at any point in my life--where sex resulted from confusion.

I haven't read the short story for a while, but if the movie is faithful to it, the message it sends would seem to be that if you fall in love with another man, you end up living alone in a drafty trailer or murdered with a tire iron. Neither sounds all that encouraging, though naysayers can always work the angle of supposedly endless teenage impressionability.

In any case, I'm not sure what real, wide-ranging effect Joe expects the movie to have. Most of the public positions people are taking in response to it don't seem to deviate much from those they were already taking anyway, though I'm sure there will be at least some cases in which people are moved by it to think more sympathetically about gays. He ends this way:

What we must see, all of us gay and straight alike, is that it's in our interest to help open the closet door. We must make the choice to come out of the closet and become gay an easier one; the obvious one. Because that's the right choice, the good choice, the healthy choice, for our society and for all of us living in it.

I agree, obviously; I just don't know that a movie like Brokeback Mountain helps much. I can only speak authoritatively about my own experience, but what made the difference for me was a conversation with my soon-to-be first boyfriend. I don't remember it verbatim, which is kind of odd considering how it affected the way my life has gone since then, but what he said was basically this: "I'm not forcing you into anything. I couldn't if I wanted to. You want to take the line that you're just kind of feeling experimental and stuff, you go ahead. But let me tell you what I see: I'm offering you a relationship, and you're responding. If you want me to go away, you can tell me decisively to get lost, and you'll never hear from me again. But you won't." And I didn't, because he was right. He was just naming what I already knew I was, and it mattered because he was an actual person that I knew. I don't think even the most seductive pop culture artifacts would have really made up for the fact that the few stray gays I'd known until then (such as my high school homeroom teacher and the squalling brats in the college LGBA) were 180 degrees opposite from the kind of person I wanted to become. Cultural acceptance is important; it matters. But it can't do the most pressing job of getting people to own what they are and decide whether they're going to use it for good or ill.

Added at 16:27: Joe has also commented on the Christianity Today review.

Hi! Is it obvious that I'm jet-lagged and wide awake at 6 a.m.? I tried lying sleepless in bed for a few hours to get my body used to the idea that this part of the day is rest time, but I can only do that for so long before I go nuts. Then I tried reading, but my brain is too fried to concentrate. Ditto with sudoku. And I had enough TV, after two weeks in the States, to do me just fine for a while.

I could unpack my stuff, but I'm afraid I'm so hazy that I'd start putting the navy T-shirts away in the designated grey/black T-shirt drawer, and we would not want that.

So one more post, and then I'm going to try to sleep a bit before Atsushi gets here at 11:00 or so.

I was going to let this point drop--largely because the fights I've had about it have been with non-blog people--but it's something that apparently has to be said repeatedly, so here it is one more time.

I could have seen...yes, here it comes again...Brokeback Mountain while I was in the States. I decided not to. I'll probably get the DVD, or if it plays in some arty theater here in Tokyo, I may see it there. How that can be construed as meaning that I think people who have eagerly lined up to see it--and, subsequently, been very affected by it--are suckers, I cannot imagine. Do I really strike anyone as the kind of man to sneer at people for sincere, deep-seated responses to art? Chris has a post up about it that, as his often do, moved me to tears. One of the major functions of art is to remind us that we all labor, in our individual ways, within the human condition, and I'm glad this movie's been made so that people who see pieces of their own story in it can take comfort in that.

But those of us who don't see our story in it have to be allowed to appreciate it on our own terms and to our own degree, and that's where I find the implication that it's our homosexual duty to rally around Brokeback Mountain, the pop culture phenomenon, annoying. Gays deserve as much liberty to decide whom to identify with as anyone else does. Sometimes we'll sympathize with people without necessarily seeing them as reflections of ourselves, even if gay advocates deem it politically expedient to do so. We have to be as free to choose for ourselves as we are to speak for ourselves.

Personally, my highest hope for Brokeback Mountain is that it's kind of like Romeo and Juliet, making a generalizable point about the raw resilience of love in the face of social pressure by taking the circumstances to an unusual extreme. Given the frantic "It's not a gay movie!" PR fusillade, that appears to be the way its makers are also hoping it will be regarded. But that may not make it a metaphor for gay life in any kind of direct and overarching way.

In 2006, there are plenty of us who have been out our entire adult lives, with more experienced friends who showed us the ropes and became like family. I'd have to dig back in my memory over a decade to recall agonizedly burying a yearning for an electric connection to someone and tamping the dirt down over it just because he was a man. I haven't forgotten what that was like, obviously, and if it's depicted skillfully on screen, I'm sure I'll find it devastating and difficult to watch. I'm not saying every gay-themed movie has to be Beautiful Thing or The Sum of Us. It's just that self-loathing and the necessity of keeping things hidden don't govern adult reality for many of us, and it's not clear to me why we should push the line that Brokeback Mountain says more than it actually does about the gay experience just to get more exposure for gay love stories.

One sign of an advanced society is the TLC with which it treats artifacts of profound cultural significance.

Okay, just one more Brokeback Mountain post.

Actually, not even a Brokeback Mountain post, but a link to Tom being hilarious about it:

It's not fair of me to discount Cocksuck Canyon sight unseen, scent unsmelled, feel unfelt, ticket unbought, and cheap of me to not even respect its proper christian name. But really, why would any gay guy with any kind of sexual history need big screen affirmation of the varieties of homosexual experience, the cruelties of heterosexual ignorance, and the deep love and great thrills that can be found in that nexus? Or in that Lexus.

I have pre-judged incorrectly before. Angels in America always seemed to hold out the promise to me of everything I hated about angels, prepositions and America. But when I saw the first half a few weeks ago, unhappy with my lot in entertainment and ready to bolt at every commercial break, I found myself remaining. I'm not sure yet if the play is good, but I know the performances were great. I don't who that chick is who played the mormon's wife, but she's terrific. As is Mr. Pacino ("I'm sooooo ashamed") and pretty much all the others. I will gladly watch the second half when mischance allows.

Mickey Kaus has it exactly wrong when he insists that Brokeback M. is a gay movie and protests to the contrary only make it gayer. This really is a movie for straights, and Mickey K. has been viral marketed into a slavish delirium, "I'll go see it, but I don't want to go see it." That kind of mid-brow, pop-cult robotics shames all free-thinking replicants everywhere.

It gets better from there.

I've toyed for years with the idea of getting a Japanese driver's license and maybe a junky car. For some reason, I've never gotten around to it. Part of it is that I can get everywhere on foot, by cab, or by train without really feeling inconvenienced; and part of it is that I think Atsushi likes doing the driving because it means I'm letting him do something for me. So we have a claim on a parking space in our building (probably worth more per square meter than our apartment) that's empty while he has the Toyota in Kyushu.

The result is that my need to be at the controls of a motor vehicle gets saved up for eleven months of the year and only has an outlet while I'm home. Luckily for me, eastern PA has a lot of variety in the driving, so I get a good workout here. Within fifteen minutes of my parents' house--have I mentioned that they not only have giant creche out front but also one of those fan-inflated light-up snowmen just outside my bedroom window?--you can go from back roads to a tractor-trailer-heavy interstate to downtown. But the most fun to be had is around Philadelphia.

For those who haven't had the pleasure, four of the interstates through metro Philadelphia are 76 (the Schuylkill Expressway), 276 (the Pennsylvania Turnpike), 476 (the Northeast Extension of the Turnpike, which runs up by my hometown), and 676 (the Vine Street Expressway in Philly and then through to New Jersey). I assume that the number assignments were patriotic in origin, but figuring out which is which must drive non-locals insane.

And that, of course, is before they actually start driving on them. Today, I hit the Schuylkill Expressway at the perfect time to experience all its electrifying glory: it was crowded enough that you were hemmed in on all sides but empty enough that it was possible for everyone to do 70. The sun was low enough to get in your eyes at inopportune moments. Also, the Schuylkill is one of those roads with on and off ramps on both left and right, so quite a few people find it necessary to cross three lanes of traffic at some point along the way from A to B. You just have to settle in and treat it like a real-life video game.

I smiled a little as I shot past the University City exit. When I was in college and coming back from a few days home in Emmaus, my father and I would slow to get off there, and at that point my muscles would unclench and I'd think, I'm back--thank God! This was when I was still getting up at 7:30 to go to church every Saturday, so I meant that last part literally. It was also when Philadelphia seemed blissfully far away from the Lehigh Valley, though compared to Tokyo, of course, it's right there. I think I might still have been entertaining the idea of becoming a writer then, before I realized that I'm perfectly content to play out my imagination inside my own little mental world and am much better, in the external sense, at explicating other people's original writings than contriving my own.

Things have changed for my college friends, too, which is why today I was headed not for Center City but for Haddonfield, NJ, where two of them--married, with two little girls--moved from Rittenhouse Square when their family started growing. We ate Old El Paso tacos and seedless grapes and ice cream. The girls are clearly going to be brainy like their parents, and in years past, I've brought them age-appropriate books and read them aloud. You know, Make Way for Ducklings and stuff. But some four- or five-year-olds suddenly pull way ahead of their age group in terms of reading level, so I figured I'd overshoot widely this time around and give them one Hardy Boys and one Nancy Drew mystery. That way, if they get bored with children's books in a few years' time, Mom and Dad have something longer and a little more complicated to read to them.

It would have been nice to have time to see more people, but I'm feeling ready to go back to New York tomorrow and then Tokyo on Wednesday. Long ago in college, before I came out, I was afraid that a decade down the line all my friends would have settled into happiness and I'd still be terminally pissy and resentful without having figured out what I was resenting. That's over, fortunately. I can enjoy spending time with my parents and visit my hometown without its feeling like a noose tightening around me. I can visit my friends and feel the familiar feeling of being back in the group kick in. But I'll be pleasurably relieved to turn the key in the lock when I get home to Tokyo and start planning what to make for breakfast when Atsushi's flight comes in the next morning.

Eric, Tom, and I had our second (what looks to be) annual Philadelphia Phags blog meet-up last night. (Tom's comment: "I like that the 4000 mile away guy always brings the 15 mile away guys together." That's always the way of it, huh?) I was probably fine to drive home, but I was nodding off somewhat, so I ended up staying in what can only be described as Eric's guesthouse. After showing me where the bathroom light switch and stuff were, he pointed out that there was a computer in the bedroom "in case you feel like blogging." At the suggestion that I might not want to let a single night go without posting something, I just smiled--Eric, honey, I think you're just the tiniest bit more into blogging than I am.

Of course, this morning, I woke up and realized I didn't have a book with me, and I don't want to go making noises in Eric's living room in case he's still asleep. So here I am logged on, though I can't say I'm quite in the mood to be trawling the Japanese media for interesting stories.

So then, just to keep the gay theme of the day going....

We met Tom on-site at his new venture, the Philadelphia AIDS Thrift (PAT for short). Like many crossword puzzles, it has an aerie. Like many gay-friendly thrift stores, it has an entertaining selection of books, housewares, and fashion-victim clothes. Mindful of the weight of my luggage, I confined myself to picking up a few paperbacks; but if you're in the area, it's worth checking out. (Unless you're around twenty-three, my advice is to walk resolutely past the leather pants, BTW.)

Mary at Gay Orbit has a message for straight people: Gay people en masse don't care whether you see, like, dislike, swoon for, or find major socio-politico portent in Brokeback Mountain. To coin a phrase, it's only a movie.

Uh, I can't think of anything else gay to say except maybe that Atsushi sounds even sexier than usual when he's half-asleep, and I'm almost sorry that when I get back to Tokyo, our nightly phone call will go back to taking place when he's still up. Speaking of being awake, this might be a good time to see whether my host is ambulatory. Enjoy the rest of the weekend, everyone.

Added at 11:50: Eric has posted about the visit, complete with way too many pictures of my un-photogenic self. It's worth clicking through to see the great pic of Tom in front of the poster, though. Notice that he and the shark have the same untrustworthy smile.

Chris at Coming Out at 48 is back from his break and has prepared this grenadine, which reminds me that I still haven't extracted from Atsushi what he wants from my parents. I came out to them...uh, it'll be exactly ten years in two or so weeks, and if you'd told me then that in 2005, they'd be pestering me to tell them what they should get my boyfriend for Christmas, I would have looked at you as if you'd just landed from Mars. I was just kind of hoping to make it through the holidays in one piece.

Things have changed 180 degrees, so I've been trying like mad to make this come off perfectly. You know, somehow finding out what Atsushi might like without letting him know that it's going to come from my parents, so the surprise isn't spoiled but he gets an artifact he really wants. Yeah, yeah, yeah, c'est le geste qui compte and stuff. It's obviously not working, so I'll post this. And Atsushi will read it. And tomorrow I'll just ask him point blank what he wants my mother and father to get him from America. And I'll spend Christmas and お正月 feeling undeserving of both him and them as usual.

Am I the only one who finds the attention being lavished on Brokeback Mountain just a little unpalatable? I have no objection to excitement by gays that there's a movie that addresses gay themes--especially the sort of desperate, unspoken attraction that a lot of us can remember from before coming out and that is at the heart of a lot of straight romantic dramas also. Nor do I see how having it take place on the plains is inherently PC and exploitative; if Annie Proulx had set the original story anywhere outside the Castro or Christopher Street, someone somewhere would be bellyaching that the resulting screenplay was designed to falsely gay up the region in question. That's just the way it goes with these things.

What I'm unsettled at is the way gay commentators seem to be freighting a single art movie with more significance than it may be capable of bearing up under. Via Michael, here's Steve Miller at IGF on two reviews. And on the blog at the Washington Blade, Matt Hennie and Ken Sain sum up what appear to be the main nay and yea arguments, respectively.

The whole is-it-an-authentically-gay-movie? thing is the sort of discussion that bores me to tears. What interests me more is how distinct its gayness actually makes it from other sorts of movies about minorities. I mean, I can see why the potential success of Brokeback Mountain means something to people. I can't see why it means that much. Hennie makes an excellent general point...

Most people go to the movies for escape and relaxation, not to be challenged by a movie that's on the cutting edge.

...and then unfortunately develops it only from the gay angle, as if there weren't plenty of other groups of people who only tend to show up in major movies if depicted stereotypically.

For a timely example, just look at Memoirs of a Geisha, based on Arthur Golden's repellant novel, which reaffirms the Hollywood truisms that (1) anyone with slanted eyes can play an Asian of any old nationality well enough to be persuasive to audiences (and to critics, who affect to know better) and (2) it helps if the English spoken is Charlie Chan-ified enough to seem exotic. A movie that was unshowily and un-Mikado-ly adapted from, say, Mineko Iwasaki's Geisha: A Life would probably flop. People would keep expecting its Orientalness to kick in and be disappointed when it didn't.

Gays, of course, have a bigger problem in that--get this through your heads, people--a lot of people think what we do in bed is frankly disgusting, which kind of makes it hard to get a romantic drama over. I'm not applauding that, but it's a fact. Philadelphia, Sain oddly doesn't seem to realize, was acceptable because the story fit preconceptions: Tom Hanks was unfaithful to his boyfriend and got AIDS, and the single sexual encounter treated by the film was guilt-shrouded and took place off-screen in a grubby porn theater. Those preconceptions doubtless are based, for many people, on the idea that being gay is somehow worthy of punishment; however, gay activism has to take some of the blame for having spent much of its energy since 1982 on depicting gay men as noble, suffering, and tragic.

It would be nice if Americans were aware that gays come in as many personality and ideological types as everyone else, but these things take time, and we have decades of disastrously bad PR by gay advocacy groups to undo. Whatever the merits of Brokeback Mountain--and it's based on an Annie Proulx product and stars Heath Ledger and Boy Gyllenhaal, which are three strikes against it right there as far as I'm concerned, though I promise to keep an open mind until I see the thing--there are too many variables involved in its potential success or failure to justify the current amount of gay arm-flailing. Its reception is certainly going to be an indicator of America's attitudes toward gays, but I don't think poring over every last box office receipt is going to tell us much that, frankly, we don't already know. It would be nice if people just let a movie be a movie.

I'm not going to have much time to spend with people when I go home, but one of the first blog-related acquaintances I made was Tom at Agenda Bender, and I'm hoping to get to see him during my approximately five minutes in Philadelphia. Almost exactly two years ago, he posted this. I have a feeling I'm going to be rereading it the first week of every December his blog is still up.

I was going to post about the Nikkei's acid editorial on the latest developments in the "trinity reforms," but then I came across Camille's Salon review of the new Madonna album. The restructuring of the Japanese government can wait.

Paglia's paradoxical reaction is funny--in effect: "This CD is such a trivial non-event that it's moved me to write three pages and reexamine my entire collection of dance records on vinyl." I've certainly expended energy over the last few weeks listening to Madonna's hokey lyrics and her producers' ripped-off rhythm tracks and thinking, This song should really be annoying me. Why am I not annoyed? Why am I SINGING ALONG? I don't know that I'd go in the direction Paglia does in this climactic passage, though:

Last summer, Madonna described her forthcoming CD as "future disco" — which raised the hopes of all die-hard disco fans that "Confessions on a Dance Floor" would be a masterpiece, a return to roots but also a visionary breakthrough.

That's not what we got — though you'd never know it from the gushing reviews, which applauded the CD for achieving Madonna's purported aim of making people dance. My blood boiled at this insulting reduction of dance music to gymnastics — mere recreational aerobics. I for one do not dance to dance music; disco for me is a lofty metaphysical mode that induces contemplation. (Of course, this may partly descend from my Agnes Gooch marginalization in the old bar scene, where I was — as Nora Ephron would say — a wallflower at the orgy.) Giorgio Moroder's albums, which I listened to obsessively on headphones, were an enormous inspiration to me throughout the writing of "Sexual Personae" in the 1970s and '80s. Disco at its best is a neurological event, a shamanistic vehicle of space-time travel.

I'm not sure what Agnes is doing in that paragraph. Her issue was that she needed to pull herself together and stop being a wrung-out ninny. Not a problem I can ever imagine Camille's having. Anyway, maybe it's because I've never felt marginalized at bars, but I don't see why dancing at a club is to be dismissed as "mere recreational aerobics" because Camille couldn't get a date thirty years ago.

I wish Confessions on a Dance Floor had had more songs that are good just to listen to, too, the way Madonna's un-remixed classic singles are. Straight-ahead pop melodies do come up, but only in the second half; the album is front-loaded with songs in which the choruses are connected by lots of chopped-up phrases instead of real verses. But whatever. Surely, having done all she's done for dance pop, Madonna's entitled to devote one album to giving the fags something to dance to, even if it's not another Lasting Contribution to art. At least here in Tokyo, "Hung Up," for all its flaws, is the first song since Kylie's "Can't Get You out of My Head" that makes all the guys of every age in a bar look up and react when it comes on. Some of the reactions, granted, are on the order of "This bitch never could sing and I wish she'd finally GO AWAY!" (Kylie got that, too.) But no one's indifferent. There's something very winning about Madonna's sheer ability to keep convincing you you have to listen and watch.

A few minor points: by the time Teena Marie made "Lover Girl," her collaboration with Rick James was long over. And in her rush to credit Giorgio Moroder for everything good that Confessions on a Dance Floor rips off, Paglia seems completely unaware of the half-dozen early New Order rhythm tracks that Price has nicked. I can easily imagine her dismissing New Order as not warm and sensual and "visceral" enough to be truly Dionysian, or what have you, but the fact is that they've had just about as much influence on dance music over the last twenty years as Madonna has. (Not that they were always original themselves. The drum break at the beginning of "Blue Monday" is stolen directly from Donna Summer's "Our Love.") Given all the arm-windmilling Paglia does about Madonna's lazily snagging ideas from obvious sources, you'd have thought NO would come up somewhere.

Added on 3 December: Ann Althouse posted about the above passage, too; as always, some of her commenters are hilarious.