The White Peril 白禍

Wow. You usually don't see these lefty types being quite this up-front:

Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, said the message revolves around the word "no."

"We are saying 'no' to the Bush agenda, 'no' to the war in Iraq, 'no' to the regime change by our government, 'no' to pre-emptive war, 'no' to the economic policies," Cagan said.

There are times when defining things by negatives is a good thing. If, for example, you think of rights as being based on non-interference by the government while you freely go about your business, that in effect affirms your ability to pursue your own ends your own way. But Cagan unintentionally summarizes why even a lot of us "social liberals" and registered Democrats feel such frank post-9/11 revulsion for these groups. All they do is bitch about what the Republicans are doing, which is as easy as falling off a log. About as useful, too.

But it goes deeper than that. Americans know the value of restraint and self-discipline. But we also think of life as full--full of possibility, full of color, and full of worthwhile business to get on with. A message that "revolves around 'no'" in its entirety doesn't jibe with reality as Americans perceive it. It just sounds cranky and out of touch, which is unfortunate. There are plenty of legitimate questions to raise about Bush administration policies; associating them in the minds of a nationwide television audience with naysaying petulance makes it less likely that ordinary voters will take them seriously.

So the headline on this Reuter's story says, "US Military Sodomy Ban Upheld in Narrow Ruling-NYT." Okay. But then the article says:

In a limited ruling, the highest U.S. military court said that under certain circumstances, the military's ban on sodomy was constitutional, the New York Times said on Tuesday.

...

The case in question, United States v. Marcum, concerned the conviction four years ago of former Air Force Sgt. Eric Marcum on charges that included consensual sodomy, for his having sex with men under his supervision, the newspaper said.

He is on parole after first being sentenced to 10 years in prison, a term later cut to six years.

Marcum, a linguist at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, appealed the conviction on the consensual sodomy charge, saying the Lawrence case invalidated it.

The five judges gave considerable weight to military regulations barring sexual relationships between superiors and subordinates in the same command.

They said several subordinate airmen testified they engaged in consensual and nonconsensual sexual activity with Marcum, including one who said Marcum might have taken advantage of him. On that basis, the court said the Lawrence decision did not protect Marcum.

That "men under his supervision" puts a slightly different cast on things ("under certain circumstances"!), does it not? I'm not quite sure what the "considerable weight" part is; if you're not supposed to be banging your subordinates, that seems to me to settle it, vociferously committed to gay rights though I am. Emotional upheaval and conflicts of loyalty probably aren't as potentially disastrous in the linguistics department as they are closer to combat; but if Marcum's people can argue that Lawrence v. Texas invalidates the ban on homosexual contact between supervisor and supervised, why can't some straight Lieutenant who's screwing a woman underling (so to speak) get out of punishment by pointing out that heterosexual sex is legal nationwide?

I really, seriously hope I'm being an idiot and missing something here. I did look for the NYT story to see whether it clarified things a bit; unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be on-line. Past references to the case don't clarify things much for non-lawyer me. Maybe he wasn't originally tried on the supervisor-subordinate charge because the same-sex charge would so plainly hold up, making it not worth the bother?

Added on 26 August: I'd managed to miss this on 365gay the other day; it makes the reasoning behind the ruling seem clearer.

So you know how they were talking about redoing the food pyramid a few months ago? Apparently, they were not just fooling around. I had to read the opening of this CNN.com article five or so times before I was sure I was really seeing what I was seeing:

A federal dietary advisory panel is considering whether its revision of nutrition guidelines should let some people treat themselves to guilt-free desserts.

Such treats would be bonuses for healthful living, under proposals being considered by the advisory panel that's drafting an update of the nutritional guidance.

The experts are looking at what are called "discretionary calories." Those could be allowed for people who get nutritious meals while staying below the calories they need to burn for energy.

The panel is looking at ways to write discretionary calories into the recommendations that the government is to issue early next year, in tandem with an update of the food guide pyramid.

Discretionary calories are what's left when the calories needed to meet all of a person's nutrient needs are subtracted from the greater number of calories needed to meet energy needs.

To gain discretionary calories, people would eat a balanced diet of foods that are high in nutrients such as vitamins and minerals, but not high in calories. This could include vegetables and fruits, for instance, as well as protein from meat and carbohydrates from bread. But consumers would have to eat in moderation, so they get all their nutrients while staying below their energy ceiling.

The payoff: They could pick up the extra calories for energy without having to worry about nutrition. And this allows a variety of high-calorie fun foods. Ice cream would be one possibility, said committee member Joanne Lupton, a nutrition professor at Texas A&M University.

I've sliced out a bunch of paragraphs in a row because it was the overall effect that bothered me. Unless there's something here I didn't get, the content of all this is: (1) Dessert contains sugars that give quick energy. (2) If you want to eat dessert in a fashion that gives you access to its quick energy without suffering ill health effects from its otherwise empty calories, be sure your actual dinner consists of especially nutritious foods. (3) For those who haven't heard of it, ice cream is a food that some people might enjoy as a dessert. Why don't I ever get recruited for federal panels that can proclaim that fruits and vegetables are healthy and have it treated as news?

And then there's the creepy, solemn tone with which servings of "fun foods" are described as being "allowed" as "bonuses" to those of us the panel thinks can be trusted with "discretionary" calories. It makes me feel as if the home ec teacher had just singled me out for making the shapeliest lasagne in the whole eighth grade.

I realize that while this is pretty much a waste of tax money (reason enough to oppose it), it's not strictly coercive. But I have no trouble imagining that if, say, some of those inane lawsuits against fast food outlets result in settlements or--heaven forfend--victories in court, one way restaurants might conceive of to protect themselves against future litigants might be to make sure the set meals they offer can be shown to adhere to the new food pyramid.

The title, BTW, means that the post contains scattered thoughts. The compound 投票 doesn't mean "scattered thoughts." It means "vote," literally "cast" + "ballot."

*****

Ann Althouse has been writing about her idea of independent political views. She describes the people that partisans are getting impatient with for just being plain dithery when they know they're going to vote the way they always do anyway, and then says:

I'm really not one of those people. I'm one of the people whose politics were changed by 9/11. Prior to 9/11, my disagreement with the social conservatives kept me from having much of any interest in Republican presidential candidates. After 9/11, I became quite bonded to George Bush. If I had to vote today, I would vote for Bush, because at this point, I cannot trust Kerry on security matters. Kerry has allowed himself to stand for so many different things, according to what is expedient at the moment. I didn't buy the strong-on-security pitch of the convention, which I know was aimed at shoring up support from centrists like me. The problem there is that I just don't believe them. (And I note that I've just written "them" and not Kerry. I was going to edit that out, but I'm going to leave it in, because it signifies my queasy feeling that Kerry is a device for returning to power a party that doesn't stand for much of any of the things that were promoted at the convention.) What would appeal to me from the Republican side, along with a convincing case that they really are competent about the security issues we assume they care more about, would be a more libertarian approach to social issues.

There certainly are those who seem to get off on calling themselves "independent" because it connotes free-spiritedness, which makes them feel dashing. Others want to cobble together a set of beliefs on policy that feel good to them but aren't consistent with each other, and they're too lazy (or fearful of giving up comforting but untenable ideas) to sort them out.

Personally, I have no objection to being easily categorizable. I don't want people just presuming without basis that I think this or that, but I don't think eclecticism is a political value in and of itself. From reading Prof. Althouse, I think I may be somewhat to the right of her on social issues, though she would probably find it easier to be welcomed into the Republican Party if she defected. In any case, I feel much the same about the Presidential candidates and the Democratic Convention as she does. I don't mind that I don't agree 100% with either party's platform; that's life. I don't mind that there are people with whom I probably agree on 95% of policy issues who still see me as an enemy because of the gay thing. Well, I mind, but they have as much right not to budge as I do.

What I mind is the say-anything-to-get-elected-and-start-worrying-about-what-to-do-after-you're-handed-the-goody-bag mentality. I'm nothing close to a Bush fan, though he's a very likable kind of guy. It's hard to buy that all the compromises he makes are actually part of a grand rope-a-dope scheme to triumph over his opponents. I'm also not sent by the designation "man of faith," though I recognize that sincere religious conviction is often a welcome indicator of non-flakiness.

Perhaps Kerry would, once installed, be a non-flaky President, too. But at this point, I feel as if voting for Kerry would be buying a pig in a poke.

[Wait a minute. We don't talk like that where I grew up....]

I feel as if voting for Kerry would be an act of faith in and of itself. At least I know what I think Bush does well and badly, and I can be pretty sure we'll be in decent (not great, but decent) shape when he leaves office. This whole thing--never thought I'd see the day when I said this--is making me nostalgic for the 2000 election.

Okay, a few weeks ago, CNN reported that Democrats Abroad Japan was pulling out all the stops to recruit voters among American expats here. They mentioned--I swear it was mixed in with talking about people who'd come from the States to be celeb draws--that a Terry MacMillan was helping to get out the vote. I assumed it was the novelist who wrote, among others, Waiting to Exhale. Looks as if I spoke too soon; Terri MacMillan is a musician who lives here in Tokyo and is a higher-up with DAJ. I'd seen Terry McMillan (the novelist) interviewed a few times and just thought she'd done an image change, but I was wrong. Sorry about that.

Since I'm officially registered as a Democrat, and I'm in Japan, I decided to click on a few of the links at the right of the DAJ site. I sent to my county for my absentee ballot yesterday, but I was interested to see what the voter registration sites looked like. The one that most interested me was overseasvote.com. For reasons I can't quite identify, I was a little unsettled by the exhortations to non-US citizens to encourage their American friends to vote. That doesn't interfere in any way with the political process, so I'm not sure what the sticking point is.

It's probably part of my more general feeling that I'd rather people not vote if they have to be caressed and cooed and cajoled into doing so. I'm not speaking about ethics here, really; I know that it's DAJ's job to get as many people to vote Democratic as possible, and I don't think there's anything wrong with what they're doing. You know, the explanations and FAQ lists and things. (It's only fair to point out that Republicans Abroad Japan says this on its voter registration page: "RAJ maintains a strictly nonpartisan approach to our voter outreach and registration program. We do not ask Americans seeking to register to vote their party affiliation. Nor do we advocate voting stances on either issues or candidates. We believe that Americans, when allowed to decide for themselves, free of any political pressure, will choose to vote Republican." It'd be nice if the DAJ site struck that tone, but that's a quibble.) But one of the pages says something to the effect that most people don't vote because the process is confusing.

Oh? I mean, fine, it was a little complicated registering my first time. Those of you who've never lived abroad may not have had reason to think about this, but the residency you declare of course affects whose tax laws apply to you. For example, Pennsylvania doesn't tax you on money earned abroad; you don't even have to file a return. In other states, you do. We all have to file a federal return--you can run, but you can't hide--however, you get the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion on everything up to a specified amount. Some people haven't lived at home for years and are simply unsure where there residence is supposed to be. So there's kind of a crazy quilt of rules to think about. That's true enough.

Still, I'm sorry, it's not that confusing. If you're an intelligent person interested in exercising one of his fundamental rights as a US citizen, surely it's worth the five-minute mental exertion needed to figure out where your official residence at home is. If you Google "united states citizen abroad vote register," you can refer to pages based at US embassies around the globe that tell you what you need to do and what criteria you can use when you have to make judgment calls. It's a multi-step but not baffling process. I'm far from the first person to say this, but if you can't bestir yourself to take an hour or two (for someone who's lived a very complicated life) to figure out how to vote, I don't see why anyone should have to come after you.

When you live in Tokyo, you're the first to find out when there's an accident at a Japanese nuclear facility and the last to find out when the Governor of New Jersey comes out and announces his resignation.

Every gay guy linked to the left of this page, along with many others besides, has offered an opinion (well, not Eric at Classical Values, though I'd be interested to hear what he thinks). I think the one I agree with most is Agenda Bender, who wants to restore sexual purity and discretion to the Governorship of New Jersey by taking it over himself. I'll campaign for him.

But seriously, looking at the transcript of the speech, I worry:

I am also here today because, shamefully, I engaged in adult consensual affair with another man, which violates my bonds of matrimony. It was wrong. It was foolish. It was inexcusable.

And for this, I ask the forgiveness and the grace of my wife.

Discount Blogger says that yesterday's press conference may, not surprisingly, be a defensive move against coming charges of misconduct in office. We don't know yet. But just taking what the Governor said at face value, I have to wonder at some people's reactions. I don't see how McGreevey's speech can be construed as saying that gays are unfit for office. I also don't think that the pressure to be closeted, which I detest as much as any out homosexual, can be summarily blamed (though Right Side of the Rainbow does imply that McGreevey made a bad choice in a bad situation).

One of the arguments most gay marriage advocates use is that it would help keep gay guys from screwing around on their partners. McGreevey--looking at the content of his speech and leaving aside his sincerity, which we can't assess--believes that it was wrong to break his vows and screw around on his partner. Shouldn't people who think gay and straight relationships should be taken equally seriously be paying attention to that part, too?

Given what he says about the pain caused to his wife, it does not appear that she was the sort who agrees to look the other way while her husband picks up a guy every few weeks to keep the jones from driving him crazy. Pointing out that, in a better world, none of this would have had to happen...that's fine. But McGreevey accepted responsibility for a marriage and child, and he wants to avoid piling public scandal on top of private upheaval. If he believes that's more important than proving that out gay men can be respectable politicians, I have a hard time thinking ill of him for it. We'll see what happens.

There's apparently a great deal of self-deception going around over the upcoming election. A few weeks back, Virginia Postrel chided libertarians about citing Bush's betrayal of free trade principles as a reason to vote for Kerry. Everybody and his grandmother thinks Andrew Sullivan is being soft on Kerry because he feels spurned by Bush.

Contrariwise, Michael Demmons says Boi from Troy is delusional for comparing Bush-Cheney favorably to other Republican presidential tickets on gay rights. And Dale Carpenter has a piece up at IGF about the nerve-abrading contortions of gay Democrats at and after the convention--a topic that's been flogged lifeless by others but that Carprenter treats with characteristic point and clarity:

What to make of the Boston Democrats? They really like gay people, but they'd really rather the American public didn't know that. And what of gay Democrats? They're high-minded idealists when they criticize gay Republicans for working within a party that doesn't much like gays; but they're sober-minded pragmatists when assessing their own party's treatment of gays. Yes, they acknowledge, the Boston convention was a retreat from gay visibility at past conventions. But, they quickly add, that's necessary to defeat the evil Republicans.

Kerry announced his obligatory respect for diversity in language so general President Bush himself could have used it. He also tried to undermine Republican moralism by claiming to support �family values,� which for Democrats means raising taxes to pay for social programs and government-controlled health care.

Then there was Kerry's promise not to �misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States.� This passage caused much mirth among gay Democrats, who clung to it as possibly a reference to the Bush-supported Federal Marriage Amendment. That's certainly a reasonable interpretation, and no doubt it's what Kerry wanted gay Americans to understand it to mean.

But, in context, it was oblique. To the casual listener, who heard Kerry denounce Attorney General John Ashcroft, it could have been understood as a critique of the Bush administration's overall record on civil liberties. And, since neither Kerry nor Edwards could be bothered to show up to actually vote against the FMA, why give them the benefit of the interpretive doubt?

I agree. But I have to ask the pro-gay marriage people (including Carpenter, who I don't think is being willfully disingenuous but doesn't address this point), didn't you see this coming even a little bit? For the last year or so, advocates of gay marriage have been hammering at us that straight people who oppose it plainly want to relegate homosexuals to second-class citizenship and that we gays who don't support it plainly aren't self-respecting and are content to be marginalized.

They sure as hell succeeded at getting the issue on the table. You can't gainsay that point. But they also succeeded at making people think of gay marriage as the issue that drives gay advocacy. Now we have the predictable result: The last thing politicians trying to cobble together blocs of diverse voters in close contests need is to start yapping about a divisive issue, so they're playing it safe. And playing it safe in this environment means avoiding mention of not just gay marriage but basic inclusiveness towards gays, now that a lot of people have been pummeled into linking them. The alloy of general blind partisan loyalty and specific anyone-but-Bush loathing from which many gay Democrats are cast means that Kerry can string them along and Bush has no reason not to keep his distance.

I've talked mostly about gay marriage here (for a change, huh?), but I could go off on trade policy, too--and I say that as the son of a steelworker. And then there's that multi-front war and national security whatchamacalit that's going on. Most of us aren't going to be all that happy about the choices we make when we cast our ballots in November, and I can't fault people for getting gretzy about that. It's the creeping tone of enervation and oh-whatever grasping at straws that rattles me. Wondering whether we're at a tipping point before things really go downhill is possibly unavoidable, but we have to stay in the game. We didn't choose to be the people who are enfranchised at this point in history, but we are, and it's our job. We still have thousands of soldiers and a handful of international allies who are willing to put themselves on the line for what we believe in. Not to mention the people who are going to come after us. It's not too much to ask that we stay actively, publicly enthusiastic about what we know to be true and valuable and keep actively, publicly looking for every way, major and minor, to put it into practice. Even if things do go from bad to worse, there will come a time years and years from now when people will want to rebuild what we've been enjoying. We owe it to them to leave behind as much guidance as possible.

Now, about that election--will anyone be terribly put out if I write in Bill the Cat?

Alice, back in Texas, is writing about the interplay between freedom and decorum again:

Well, after trawling through enough racks of clothes for people whose attempts to attract the opposite sex are so subtle that they make Britney Spears look like Maria Von Trapp, one might be forgiven for thinking that a few burquas here and there would smarten the place up a bit. But then, one of the liberations of the West is the right to make a total muppet of yourself in shopping malls.

I'm at the tail end of the part of the life cycle in which I can get away with appearing in public in a saucy (not to say slutty) little T-shirt without looking pathetic, so I'm working it while I can.

Within reason. Even when I was in my 20's, I was never a fan of the leave-nothing-to-the-imagination school. It's not just that I was brought up to dress properly when appearing in public, though that's part of it. It's also that running around half-naked makes lasciviousness less fun. (Yes, I know, that lesson is as old as civilization itself. It could stand to be rediscovered.) There are few better ways to drive yourself pleasurably insane than to be talking to a guy in a dress shirt and loosened tie and try to guess, based on the backs of his hands and what you can glimpse of his throat when he leans in to say something over the din, how hairy he is, how solidly he's built, and whether his skin is creamier where the sun doesn't normally hit it. A shredded, low-slung tank top--through which you and everyone he's shared a train car with today have been able to scrutinize, at leisure, everything but the nipples--kind of puts the kibosh on that kind of amusement.

Of course, what Alice is talking about operates at an entirely different level. When it's the burqa (or chador or salwar kamiz) under discussion, you lose the ability to feed the senses in ways that have nothing to do with naughtiness.

Added at 10 a.m.: Susanna has linked to a portfolio of nude photographs and expressed both delight in their aesthetic value and reservations about the fact that there are naked people in them. I can't help with that issue from a Christian perspective, but I don't think that just any old nude image adds to the weird fetishization of sex in American culture. If art is considered a special cultural zone in which inspiration is given the purest possible expression, you can distinguish between posing nude in a photographer's studio (fine) and being half-naked thoughout a day's errands at the grocery store, post office, and DMV (problematic).