Monthly Archives: February 2012

The Judgmentor in America: Doing The Right Thing Edition

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Noun: American Righteousness. Opinion: Love.

Image Credit: The National Archives

Americans always do the right thing…eventually: I want to revisit gay marriage. Come with me. Let’s pick up some pastries on the way so we don’t show up empty-handed.

I have expressed exasperation before at the energy we’ve invested into an issue as self-evident as gay marriage. This still stands. I’ve yearned for the conversation to take on a different tone, one more productive and thoughtful, one less blind, deaf, dumb and generally maudlin. This also still stands. But I want to put this issue in a larger context, one I think ingrained in the character of this nation.

I have always been and I am all for gay marriage. In whatever way one can be “for” marriage, that is. I do not buy into a one-size-fits-all ethos when it comes to marriage, gay or not, and to me it does not seem to be SUCH a desirable thing, so my for-ness in gay marriage may have come across as tepid. However. I would put the strength of my against-ness in the ring with anyone with balls big enough when it comes to the bigotry of those who feel called upon to prevent gay marriage legalization. If I am a bit indolent in my support for what I think is a common sensical application of basic rights, you can only imagine how I feel about those who would actually use the energy to take up arms against it. To actually get up off the couch to battle for a right I do not exercise myself would be something very noble, and I’m not noble. I’m not proud of this. But to inconvenience oneself to the extent of abandoning a perfectly good couch–for what? To exert one’s efforts to mind someone else’s business? To prevent their expression of loyalty and commitment? That’s just ghastly. That’s worse than I am.

Nevertheless, I look with doubt upon all this whooping and joyful tearing when a law passes allowing for gay marriage. It is a difference in attitude, perhaps.  I am one to climb a mountain and despair when I look at the expansive range of those we must yet climb. Others will celebrate the conquering of the most recent mountain. I strongly recommend this latter take on life, it seems to me wiser.  But I cannot help but wonder that there be so much celebrating over a law. A law that says that the state will acknowledge the vows between two adults with comparable genitals.  At least that is what I think it says, in essence.  It does not say the state will allow and acknowledge the vows between two children, or two goats, or two adults and a goat, or a female adult, a male child, and a neutered goat. In essence, it is the same law as has ever been, except for the genitals part. Two adults, same brand of genitals. Really, it’s such a small thing.

So much angst and anger over such a small thing. It doesn’t even say that the people in the state have to be nice about acknowledging the marriage. Your uptight, right-wing neighbor will continue to snub you, or be afraid of you, or talk viciously about you behind your back, or patronize you. An uptight, right-wing woman asking a gay man whether her heels go with her apron, all the while telling her daughter not to dress like a boy, strikes me as revolting. An uptight, right-wing man titillated by his lesbian neighbors, all the while studiously avoiding the effeminate man in the locker room, is repulsive beyond words. Pass a law against hate and vanity–and you will see me crying tears of joy. It will be about as effective against hate and vanity as a law passed to allow marriage between similar genitals, but it seems to me it will get more to the heart of the matter.

But that is not really the point of gay marriage laws, is it? Gay marriage laws are not about fighting hate and vanity, it is about allowing gay people to marry. And laws often anticipate cultural submission. And so far as that goes, they are very good laws, indeed. Two people in love get to marry and benefit from state-acknowledged marriage. But that is a small thing. The marriage doesn’t change your love, and it doesn’t change how others see your love; love is big, just as hate and vanity are big, and the act of marrying (unlike staying married) is small. I understand why you may disagree. But you needn’t worry, as I am comfortably ensconced on my couch, and will not budge to make such a trivial point. You have my couch-enabled support for marrying as much as you like.

The hate and vanity, however, sticks in and up my craw, wherever that is. For every state that allows gay marriage, there is still another mountain in the range represented by hate and vanity. And for every celebration, I and my craw fear that the battle is being mistaken for the war. The war is against hate and vanity.  The war is for love and inclusion. And while gay marriage laws are not about fighting hate and vanity, they are TOTALLY about fighting hate and vanity. They are intrinsically part of the war against hate and vanity. While this war is so much larger than gayness or marriedness–just as you and I are more than our sexual orientation and married status—the Battle for Gay Marriage is a part of the larger purpose. The purpose encompasses the Battle over Women’s Bodies, the Battle for Open Immigration, the Battle of Economic Justice.

Different battles, same war. The same war this country has been fighting a long, long time. Even before we were actually a country, in fact—the Virginia Declaration of Rights set the artillery up before we declared independence from England. We fought it literally as in the Civil War, we fought it figuratively as in the women’s movement, and we fought it somewhere in between as in the civil rights struggle.

The enemies are sometimes people, but mostly wrong ideas. While I may be astounded by the poor decision-making of the voting populace, I believe that most Americans care about doing the right thing. Their hearts want to do the right thing but their heads are caught up in wrong ideas. There are lots of reasons for that—the right ideas are complicated, and we weren’t taught stuff in school, and the game’s on, and the guacamole’s turning brown. But we don’t need to be fancy lawyer smart to do the right thing, thankfully. We just need to be streetwise, in a people-savvy manner, and we are that. We’re a lot that! I mean, we’re about the streetwisest there is. Even our rednecks are streetwise in a slow, fearless sort of way. OK, say you’re walking at night down a dark alley in a big city.  I give you the choice of taking along one companion out of three, and you know nothing about them except that one’s American, one’s Brazilian, and one’s Armenian. Who do you take? The American, obviously. OK, again: one American, one Dane, and one Korean. THE AMERICAN.   OK, OK, last one: one American, one Moroccan, and one Canadian. DUH! It’s ALWAYS the American.

(Many years ago, an American classmate during my year abroad in college took the Paris metro late one night. She was alone on the train with only a group of young urban thugs who proceeded to harass her in French. She didn’t understand French, but knew perfectly well what they were saying. So she stood up, turned to face them, and told them off in English: “If you were thugs from Chicago, I’d be afraid of you.  But you’re not.  You’re French. Who the fuck do you think you’re kidding?” Then she sat down, and they left her alone. See? Always pick the American. Preferably one from Chicago, given the option.)

We have what it takes to get it right, is my point. And we have! Often!

Sure. We get it wrong all the time. Perfection is beyond a democracy; too many competing wrong ideas. So we optimize, plucking off the wrong ideas one by one. Over long periods of time. Trying to outpace the regeneration of new wrong ideas. Budge a little here, budge a little there. We each try to influence the Ouija board to spell out what we’d like our country’s destiny to be.

A-G-A-I-N-S-T H-A-T-E A-N-D V-A-N-I-T-Y.

That’s the enemy. That’s what we’ve always been fighting. Unrepresented taxing, slave owning, lynching, raping, child laboring, oppressing, Watergating, warring, poverty-ing, suiciding, terrorizing. America’s been fighting this fight a long time. Not all countries do, you know. Go where the political elite determine all government discourse; there may be surface peace, but there is also stagnation. Go to another, where routine goes unattended; progress seems born of ennui and discontent instead of ideals and values. Go to yet another, they don’t even pretend to care about this shit.

Not us, we’re a country of constant ideal-driven conflict. That’s why people get off couches where they belong to fight against gay marriage—they forgot to look for the hate and vanity and got wrong ideas stuck in their heads. But that’s also why we’ve gotten it right for so long—fighting against hate and vanity is as old as our Constitution (almost every article and amendment in there is about containing hate and vanity). As long as we identify the hate and vanity, using our wily street wisdom, we tend to do fine. If you hear prejudice dribbling out of the mouth of a politician, if you smell ego on the breath of an elected official, if you yourself are feeling flattered by false attention or driven by selfish motives—you know what to do.

It takes too long, I know. There’s too much damage to the collateral, this is so sadly true. But we get there. Moral America always gets there. Looking back on our history, we tend to arrive, though we arrive late. I mean, could we have dragged our feet any more on abolition of slavery? Come on. So it’s a matter of urgency we have to work on, but, thankfully, not a matter of values.

This is how we’ve done it, how we fought hate and vanity. The gay guy who never impregnated a woman in his life did the right thing when he saw the oppression of women’s reproductive rights. The white woman who’d never been pulled over by a cop did the right thing when she saw someone’s civil liberties breached. The African American did the right thing when she witnessed uncool goings-down towards Arab Americans. The rich Asian American standing next to a poor Mexican American did the right thing when he got the long end of a double-standards racist/classist/horseshit stick. The straight dude did the right thing after hearing some crazy homophobic rant. It doesn’t matter if the fight serves our immediate interests, we all benefit from living in a world that isn’t ruled by hate and vanity.

I’m not worried about gay marriage, gay marriage is a foregone conclusion—it’s the right thing to do, and America will do it. Women’s authority over their own bodies is a foregone conclusion—it’s also the right thing to do, and we will get there. Inclusive immigration laws are a foregone conclusion—we know it’s the right thing to do, we’re just afraid to do it. But we will. Because the most un-American thing to do would be to lose this war, the War on Hate and Vanity. It would invalidate our entire history. Let’s just win it soon, let’s win it now, starting on our couches, in whatever small way we can, by doing the right thing.

The Judgmentor in America: Winners Edition

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Noun: American Winners. Opinion: Love.

Image credit: Sports Illustrated

It is election year. Politicians are telling us why America’s so great. Clint Eastwood is on a Super Bowl ad telling us why America’s so great.  My friends, studying for their naturalization tests, are telling me why America’s so great.

The Judgmentor agrees. America’s so great. But I’m pretty sure we don’t all agree on why, and in a series of posts I’ll be investigating why I’m right and everyone else is wrong. Here are my credentials: I was born here, I didn’t always live here, I don’t always belong here, but I belong less everywhere else. I grew up in America, mostly, and was considered foreign. When I lived where I looked like everyone else, they considered me American. I don’t identify with any particular land or place, but I’m of a species that could only have evolved in the United States.  I’m both insider and outsider at once, and I will identify Americans as “they” and “us” depending on my mood.

I love this stupid country.  Here is the first of many reasons why, in a new series we call “The Judgmentor in America” (insert dramatic bass drum effects):

Americans are good winners: I came to know competition in a different world, an Asian world.  There’s more at stake there in the outcome—the glory of victory is taken as a matter of fact, as a social achievement.  The shame of loss is seen as a personal failure. It’s a method of promoting conformity and the rule of law while avoiding the blight of Western democracy: the race to the bottom, the curse of the average, the disgrace of the lowest common denominator. And it works, too, so you should work on your chopsticks skills because this prehistoric implement you call a “fork” is hard to pronounce for most of us, and we will likely rid of it when our superior math skills (even the girls) allow us to vanquish this society of creatures who are lazy, entitled, and as far as we yellow-types can discern with our slanty eyes, a bit undercooked and in need of a couple more minutes to brown in the wok.

For many years it never occurred to me that competition could be fun for anyone; it was supposed to be work and toil, punitive and fearsome. Americans’ delight in competing and fetishistic belief in competitive markets can come across as primeval; like Romans savoring the blood-seasoned air of the Colosseum, Americans revel in competition even when the game is rigged. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate—as opposed to the Roman indifference to the viable parity between a Christian and a lion, Americans care very much that the playing field be level. But this jock itch for sport and faith in capitalistic dogma can render Americans blind to systemic handicapping, which effectively takes the armor off the Christian and the muzzle off the lion. It somehow fails to register. Game on! Americans cry in their bloodlust. Game on! they cry, followed by attempts to mimic the howling of wolves.

To many in the world, this American excitability is a bit of a turn-off. I used to think so, too. But then I realized that Americans come to competition from a different angle than most—an angle unique to their unpretentious, uncomplicated natures. Americans love a clean game and a hard-won victory. Americans don’t love to lose, but they don’t hate failure as much as most; they’re sincerely glad to have played, those dopey sons of bitches. Americans, callow as they are, don’t see cheating as an evil necessity; they don’t even account for it when strategizing against the other team. And Americans don’t masturbate triumphantly when they’re on the winning side of a blowout; they’ll actually take it easy, take a knee, give the benchwarmers a chance to play, and be content never knowing how high the score could have gone. I’m not sure how to explain how amazing this is. I don’t know if I can convey how unique this is. This—is not the way it is in much of the world. This—is not what competition means in other places.  This—is entirely disarming and adorable.

But the quality that completely redeems Americans of their caveman-like belief that to-take-one-must-club-over-the-head is how well they behave when they win. They’re usually good losers, but when I think of American competition nothing comes to mind as clearly as the Olympics and in the Olympics, Americans win a whole hell of a lot. And there are a lot of opportunities there to be obnoxious about it, but growing up I didn’t see many who took them. Most of the narratives were along the lines of the Miracle on Ice, a little before my time but utterly indicative of my ultimate point, when the Americans beat the undefeated Soviets in a medal-round hockey game.  It was the winter of 1980. 52 Americans are held hostage in Iran. We’re a solid generation and a half into the Cold War. We’re still twitching from whatever Agent Orange-drenched shrapnel embedded itself into our collective skull in Vietnam. Those Soviet bitches just invaded Afghanistan, which was decidedly not cool. The late 1970s saw the birth of this strange phenomenon of mass school shootings, an inauspicious sign of American self-inflicted violence to come. Inflation was high, unemployment was high. It was a time of uncertainty and confusion in America.  It was a time when America had real enemies out there, ones our own size, ones we were afraid of.  It was a time when America had real conflict at home, ones we created, ones we were afraid of. It was a time when Americans weren’t really feeling like winners.

The Soviet team was expected to win. The American team was expected to lose. There would be lots of good reasons to lose, and people would comfort each other with those reasons when we lost, and though it would feel real fucking groovy to beat those pinkos, shit man, you dig? Well, never mind. Let’s hope we play a good game.

I can never follow the puck in hockey, making it a really boring sport of men randomly skating in a rink with the occasional eruption of nonsensical brawls and loss of teeth, but from what I can gather the game basically went like this: the Soviets come out humping hard, the Americans face the assault nobly until the end of the first period when they get a lucky shot, tying up the game. The Soviets, like all heroes in Greek tragedies facing an inevitable end, presumably grunt at each other and shrug it off, not realizing the import of this turn of events. They’re winners, remember, and have the muscle memory of winning, so come out grinding even harder in the second half. American goalie Jim Craig bites his lip and takes it like a power bottom. A little more back and forth, a defensive error, Americans are up with twelve minutes to kill, the Soviets flail and go limp, with five seconds to go broadcaster Al Michaels asks if you believe in miracles, answers his own question (“Yes!”), the entire USA hockey team comes spilling out onto the ice and fall on top of one another like a litter of golden retrievers deliriously happy to be a puppy in a world made of puppies.

There’s a lot more homoerotic hugging and skating, then the two teams line up to shake paws, and the camera closes in on the hero of the hour, Craig. And this is the moment that feels somehow different, special, and very American. Craig wasn’t exactly known for being easy-going or modest, but this moment speaks volumes about him and the American winner. He’s standing there like a groom at a receiving line. He’s shaking his opponents’ hands and nodding at them, like he’s acknowledging what they look like without their helmets on.  It’s not rushed, it’s not reluctant, there’s no undertone of smugness or conceit. He’s friendly but not smiling too much, he’s looking into their eyes, he’s pleased to see them there, thanks for coming. Good game, good game, let’s grab a beer sometime, good game, that was a good shot you got by me, good game. And he’s doing all this while experiencing the BIGGEST BONER OF HIS LIFE. And you know he’s got a stiffy because after he’s shaken the last hand he ejaculates an enormous smile with his arms up while doing a little leap of joy.

That right there is an American winner.

There’s a lot of decency and humility that goes into being able to do that. There’s a lot of respect for your opponent and generosity towards others. That there is the kind of moment your papaw was trying to prepare you for when he talked about the importance of character.

And the Russians were stunned, of course.  They were disappointed, of course.  But good winners have a way of bringing out good losers, and they smiled back when the Americans smiled at them. Good winners know that the win mattered because the opponent was worthy, and when good winners celebrate they invite the losers to the spoils. Even if they’re Soviets. It’s only right.

I’ve seen more good winners born in America than anywhere else. It makes me feel OK about their weird competitive streak, their strange need to compete for competition’s sake, their penchant for making more work for themselves. It’s mostly benign. I still don’t love the game, whatever the game is, and I don’t much care who wins, but I do and will always love a good winner.  Good winners are the best this country has to offer when it is at its best—good winners are what we get when we do it right and well at the same time.

Good winners are also becoming increasingly rare. Is it just me? I don’t recall winners of my youth gloating. I don’t recall dancing in the end zone, as if struck with a neuromuscular disease. I don’t recall people going out of their way to rub their opponents’ noses in the shit they just took in their mailbox. Good winners don’t do that.  Good winners enjoy their victories but not at the cost of someone else’s pride and hard work.  If your team won the Super Bowl and you heckle the wife of the opposing quarterback, even if she is a bag of bitch and crazy, you’re not a good winner. If you’re rich and have contempt for the poor, you’re not a good winner.  If you are lucky and privileged and think you’re a better person because of it, you’re not a good winner. If you’re part of the majority and exploit the minority, you’re not a good winner. That’s not what good winners do.

And as far as I’m concerned, that’s not what good Americans do.

America is the last natural habitat of good winners, species benus victorius bigbonorum americanus, and they are highly endangered.  Please help protect this species. They are hugely important to our environment.