What to Wear, What to Wear, четыре

Truly loyal readers, who have been with CoG from the start four years ago, know that there is a tradition here. Yes, those loyal readers remember that each year I contemplate my inability to prefect a Halloween costume. Those same loyal readers would also be able to name four supporting characters who have appeared regularly on this blog. They would dutiful remember every move that I have made and the tribulations that accompanied them. A truly loyal reader would know the make and model of my first car ever or where I attended high school. They would have small altars in their house dedicated to my image. Genuinely loyal readers would be willing to take a bullet for me. **Sigh** I wonder if such a reader exists. . .

What were we talking about? Oh, right, Halloween is just around the corner. As the official gay holiday, the expectations are always so high for choosing the right outfit. Yet, no matter how I have tried these past four years, my costumes have never quite worked out. Let me take you through what I aim for and the disappointing results:

What I Aim for: Yoda

We all remember the unexpected way that Yoda made his way into our imagination and became a pop-culture icon. Sure, he started out as an annoying muppett who terrorized R2-D2. Eventually, though, he became the voice of reason who delivered sage advice in the form of inverted sentences. Yoda is so much part of our social consciousness, that his name is even identified by the spell checker in my wordprocessor. A great costume he is.

What I End Up With: Gollum

Gollum, like Yoda, has his own creative rules for grammar. Less cute and endearing, though, Gollum would be a disappointing result when aiming for Yoda. Who ever turned to Gollum for advice? As far as I know, he never evidence any strange mental powers that gave him the ability to levitate rocks.

***

What I Aim for: Mr. Belvedere, 1948

Of all the fussy, crypto-gay film characters to appear in the postwar era, Mr. Belvedere ranks the highest in my estimation. He was a man after my own heart. Belvedere disdained Americans’ unhealthy obsession with children, scorned the prison of heterosexual marriage, and tore apart environmentally and socially disastrous suburbs. This costume would scare the snot out of Focus on the Family.

What I End Up With: Mr. Belvedere, 1985

After skulking around Fantasy Island, this pale imitation of the original Belvedere ended up enslaved to a middle-class hetero home in Pennsylvania. Sure, he was just as fussy as his forties counterpart, but the Reagan-era Belvedere did less to critique the banality of suburbia than to become its queer booster. Okay, there was the "very special episode" that dealt with HIV. Mostly, though, this Belvedere hid from real controversy. He even disavowed his queernees by locking himself into an unexpected and largely unexplained hetero marriage. Who needs to go disguised as that closeted mess?

***

What I Aim for: Phyllis Schlafly

Going as the original Queen of Mean, Phyllis Schlafly, could quite possibly be the scariest costume ever conceived. Shlafly burst onto the national scene in 1964 with a screed that proclaimed that the Republican Party was not radically conservative enough. Never one to shy away from blatantly irresponsible statements, Shlafly frequently spoke out against any attempt to curb the proliferation of nuclear arms during the Cold War. Heck, she declared the atomic bomb “a marvelous gift that was given to our country by a wise god.”

More recently, she has called for a purge of the Supreme Court of “activist judges” (Read: Anybody who disagrees with Phyllis Schlafly). Apparently, according to her altered Republican reality, justices who undermine the Constitution by supporting a coup that installs a half-wit into the presidency aren’t “activists.” They are “literalists.” She has also demanded “abstinence only”education, opposed the distribution of contraceptives for the unmarried, and has dismissed the use of condoms as a means to check the spread of HIV.

Those other “accomplishments” aside, Schlafly will probably best be remembered as the demagogue who killed the Equal Rights Amendment in the U.S. through her "Stop ERA" campaign. Schlafly confidently declared that the ERA was not what feminists claimed (ensuring equal access to services, equal pay for equal work, fairness). According to Schlafly, it was really about making women susceptible to military drafts, unisex toilets, and (horrors!) lesbian marriage. The adoring media side-stepped the fact that Schlafly was a driven, highly-educated, career activist who rarely spent her days baking cookies or mending shirts. Instead, they accepted her self-created image as representing “normal moms” who opposed their own liberation. This could be a costume scarier than Freddie Krueger.

What I End Up With: Sarah Palin

Oh, sure, Sarah Palin is just as cynical as Schlafly. As much as Schlafly downplayed her own career success, Palin’s constant refrains of being “just a hockey mom” mask her steely determination to become a mayor, governor of Alaska, and now vice president. Like Schlafly, she also pretends to speak for the majority of women (even though polls suggest that only a tiny minority agree with her).

And, of course, she has mastered the Orwellian double speak of “hate is love” on gay issues. In her nationally televised debate with Joe Biden, she implied that she had “gay friends,” or at least she has friends who have gay friends. Palin tends to ramble incoherently, making it hard to pin down what she really meant when she said, “I am tolerant and I have a very diverse family and group of friends and even within that group you would see some who may not agree with me on this issue, some very dear friends who don't agree with me on this issue.”

If we were in doubt about how she defines being “tolerant,” she clarified herself in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network. "I am, in my own, state, I have voted along with the vast majority of Alaskans who had the opportunity to vote to amend our Constitution defining marriage as between one man and one woman," Palin stated, “I wish on a federal level that's where we would go because I don't support gay marriage.”

What a nice, tolerant friend she is! I don’t know about you, but I always like to have friends around who, based on their theology, think of me as a lesser person who deserves fewer rights than the majority of Americans.

While Palin has some frightful elements, I can’t help thinking she is a pale (Palin?) imitation of things we have seen many times before in this nation. If Schlafly was unique and masterful in her evil, Palin looks like a tired retread. She is just another arch-conservative woman who benefited from feminism, but seeks to dismantle those gains for others.

***

What I Aim For: Warren G. Harding

For decades, Warren G. Harding was most often selected as the worst president the nation had ever known (in competition with Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan). When Harding was elected in 1920, he already had a reputation of being a bit slow and woefully unprepared for the job before him. Though he died before he even finished his first time, his administration became renowned for its corruption, unchecked greed, and incompetence. He also initiated economic policies, via Herbert Hoover, that culminated in the U.S.’s Great Depression. By all accounts, a major loser. Even Harding admitted, “I am not fit for this office and should never have been here." It would be a costume that only historians would appreciate.

What I End Up With: George W. Bush

Harding used to be considered the worst president, but I think that we can safely say that Bushie transformed himself into the most hated executive that this nation has ever known. Unlike Harding, he didn’t have the personal self-awareness to acknowledge his own ineptitude. Instead, he has unapologetically driven this country into moral and literal bankruptcy. If I appeared as Bush, even as a Halloween costume, I doubt that I could keep from vomiting.

***

What I Aim For: Gollum

Cold, soulless, greedy, erratic, self-interested, and mean: These are a few of the words that come to mind when thinking of Gollum. Okay, so he isn’t Yoda, but he has the potential to frighten. His internal dialogues and erratic behavior made Gollum unpredictable and dangerous to those who surrounded him.

What I End Up With: John McCain

Cold, soulless, greedy, erratic, self-interested, and mean: These are a few of the words that come to mind when thinking of John McCain. While I never (ever) agreed with McCain’s politics, he long ago lost whatever courtesy I might have given him when he so clearly cuddled up to Bushie to fuel his own ambition. Seriously misreading the direction of history, McCain banked on the idea that the nation would embrace the Bush administration’s mishandling of everything from the economy to wars. He was mistaken.

During this campaign, even he has appeared frightened by the bile and hatred that has bubbled up from some of his supporters. Nonetheless, he clearly will do anything to take power. McCain has veered from one direction to another in increasingly desperate attempts to appear legitimate. He went from arguing that there was nothing wrong with the economy to suspending his campaign because the economy was in serious crisis. Most recently he “guaranteed” that he would win the White House, despite being behind in most of the nation’s major polls. To make that guarantee, he is either completely out of touch with reality or he already knows that the Republicans are planing yet another coup that will undermine the will of the people. When he starts mumbling "my precious" on November 4, I think that we will all know the score.

Unlike Gollum, McCain has no magical ring or bastard Hobbitts to explain his personality disorders. Sadly, a McCain costume would be a more mundane form of anxious selfishness.

***

What I Aim For: GayProf

Few other bloggers have the cool and glamorous personality of GayProf. He is good looking, witty, and can deflect bullets with his magic bracelets! Who doesn't want to be GayProf? Surely his own comic book or television series is just around the corner.

What I End Up With: Kevin French

From the extremely short-lived cartoon Mission Hill, Kevin French would probably be the best I could do for a rendition of GayProf. Nerdy, self-conscious, and maybe a bit of a smug know-it-all, French would be a downer as a costume. Ask yourself this, though, is GayProf any less likely to know the details of dilithium mining in the Star Trek universe than Kevin French?

An Academic Affair

Over the past few days GayProf returned to his equivalent of Paradise Island, known in Patriarch’s World as the Land of Enchantment. By good fortune, an academic conference happened to be in my birth city, giving the perfect excuse for my return. Such visits always makes me feel a little wistful. Why did I think leaving such a great place was a good idea? It seems like so long ago that I was chosen to bring our philosophy of peace, love, and better living through turquoise to the rest of the world.

Since I don’t own an invisible jet – yet – I depend upon the nation’s crooked and corrupt airlines to transport me around. Why, as consumers, have we allowed mismanagement to be rewarded in the nation's highly overpaid airline CEOs? As we seem to be historical witnesses to the collapse of capitalism as we knew it, why not demand a revolution in air travel? Every person reading this blog should write their governmental representatives now to oppose the merger of Northwest and Delta. Remember that their explanation for wanting to do so was that they hoped to reduce competition. In other words, they want to screw consumers by limiting our options.

Before I could get home, my airline stranded me overnight in the dreaded state of Texas. For a complicated set of reasons, not a single hotel room was nearby. There wasn’t even an accommodating manger. Thus, to get even a few hours of sleep, I had to spend the night trying to arrange myself in between gobs of gum stuck in the carpet. Twenty-four hours after my original arrival time, I actually made it to ABQ.

While at the conference, I did have an official duty to speak on a panel. For those of you who have never seen me serve on an academic panel in real life, here is a pretty accurate image of what that looks like:



Okay, maybe that's not totally accurate. Nobody on my panel wore a silver jumpsuit.

Outside of the panel, being on home turf didn’t change my feeling that academic conferences are always a mixed bag. I enjoy the opportunity of meeting new people, especially given that I was able to meet some scholars whose work I have long admired. It also gave me a chance to see some fellow bloggers!

Attending the conference allowed me to briefly catch sight of StinkyLulu. For the first time, I also met Tenured Radical and had a much needed drinkie. We spent some time comparing notes over blogging, the academic world, and the possibilities of a queer future. Why, you might even say that we spent the time “paling around together.” I wonder who is more implicated by that association? Only time will tell which of our political ambitions will be endangered.

Another good element of the conference was the chance to reconnect with a good friend from my former Texas university. Early this semester I was delighted to learn that he had also escaped found liberation run screaming into the night departed Texas for a much happier location in the urban west.

We both agreed that a) leaving Texas (Yes, including Austin) was one the best things that any gay man could do for himself and b) when people at our new institutions use the phrase “hostile work environment," they have no idea what they are talking about. That is not to say that those institutions don’t have problems, because they do. Still, in seeing him again, I had the uncanny feeling that we were like the survivors of a ship wreck or maybe a zeppelin explosion. Sure, other people can recognize those things as terrible calamities; but until you spend twelve hours clinging to a headboard in icy waters or jump out a window twenty-feet high to escape a hydrogen fire, you can't truly understand the horrors of those circumstances.



Me being me, the conference also had some moments of gravitas. Given that my non-GayProf persona is mild-mannered, I often find academic gatherings a wee bit awkward. Let’s face it: professors are not renowned for their great social skills and sparkling repartee. While I am much better than I used to be, my own natural shyness makes me less than ideal for “networking” situations.

My self-doubts and insecurities can lead to some serious over-analyzing of situations. For instance, I briefly ran into a senior scholar who has always been really nice to me. In this instance, he was still friendly, but clearly in a rush. Despite a history of goodwill, I nonetheless spent considerable time agonizing over the significance of his relatively short conversation with me. Was it a sign that he didn’t like my work? Had I annoyed him in some way? Was he disappointed in NERPoD? Did my star-spangled short-shorts make him uncomfortable?

It took me a moment to snap myself out of such thinking. Just what did I expect him to do? Lavish me with praise? Say that my work had changed his life forever? Reach into his pocket and give me c-note? Pick me up and carry me around the convention center on his shoulders? While I would have appreciated any of those gestures, it’s a wee bit silly to expect them -- at least not all the time.



Given that conferences present me with a certain level of social anxiety, I am always surprised by the number of conventioneers who knock-boots. I have a hard enough time keeping up chit-chat in between sessions, how would I possibly survive anything more intimate? Mastering the protocol of conference-shagging would elude me completely. Do you exchange business cards before or after you have fully showered? Or do you simply slink away hoping that the rumors haven’t already started that you are a “conference ho?” More importantly, how do you claim condoms and lube on your expense report?

I don't think balling at a conference would be so bad if the sex was good. But what if you ended up having a lousy time in the sack? I suppose you would have no option but to "friend them" on Facebook. That means that you are going to have to look at their "status updates" on your own Facebook page as a constant reminder of the crummy sex that you had that night. "Oh great," you'll think to yourself, "He can take time to inform Facebook that he just scooped out the cat litter, but he couldn't take an extra minute in the shower to clean around his foreskin? He sure as hell better not write on my wall."

Of course, the real thing that would bother me about a conference hook-up would be that you have to see him for the next several days, if not the rest of your life. This is a pretty serious commitment for some casual spunking.



Some guy that you pick up at a bar or on-line is gone by the next morning’s coffee at the latest. In the case of hooking-up at an annual conference, you will potentially see that same trick year after year for the rest of your career. You will both get older and older. Each of you will notice how your bodies change, including your receding hairlines and expanding waistlines. It will make you both feel strange. You will quickly wonder how (or why) you ever had sex in the first place. If your night was less than mind-blowing (or anything blowing), it might ruin that conference forever. I hear some people have decided to leave academia all together rather than having to face a bum lay at the MLA.

If that sounds like too much hyperbole, you are at least guaranteed to see him over and over for the next forty-eight hours. How much obligation do you have to sit next to him if you both attend the same panel the next day? I mean, it’s one thing to get naked and sweaty together for a quick tumble; but having to sit through a ninety-minute academic discussion together? That's starting to sound like a relationship.

Never Feed Crazy Trolls

Just because I have been away from my little bloggy doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been cursed with the trolls. Alas, these trolls don’t even provide anything useful, like spinning straw into gold or keeping bridges safe with enigmatic riddle-telling.

For whatever reason, these trolls have convinced themselves that I was deeply involved in discussions about the Duke LaCrosse Team in 2006. For those who don’t remember (or lived under a rock or in a cave with no television reception), the case centered on accusations by an African-American woman (who the team hired to strip for them) that she had been sexually assaulted by the mostly white team. After fifteen months, the students were exonerated and the district attorney of Durham, North Carolina, Michael Nifong, had been disbarred.

Investigations revealed that the police seemingly attained the accusations while the witness was under pressure; the district attorney suppressed evidence (and apparently failed to ever interview the witness himself); and the Duke campus erupted in some serious displays of bad judgment. During those long fifteen months, the media (including bloggers across the political spectrum) seized on the case as a means to debate racism, sexism, sexual violence, and economic privilege. To be certain, many of those people stepped over the students' basic rights and access to justice.

At the time, though, I wrote nothing on this blog about the case. For starters, it just isn’t the type of story that I imagine as appropriate at CoG. Why? Well, first, I try to keep up the pretense of the few journalistic ethics that I learned from high school. As I remember from my time in room A-22, assertions of guilt of an accused individual before a jury-of-their peers declares hir guilty is a big no-no (This, of course, doesn’t mean that you aren’t allowed to write about such cases or speculate about their larger implications. Free speech is, well, free. It does mean, however, that one must always assume innocence and write about “alleged murders," or the “individual accused of robbery,” etc. rather than “the murder” or “the highway man”).

Second, I just don’t think that it is in good taste to write about accusations of rape in a blog whose distinctive features are campy comic books and jokes about stalking celebrities. While I am happy to point out racism, sexism, and homophobia in the media, I usually stay clear of stories about specific people who are in horrific circumstances.

Finally, as a historian, I much prefer to write about the dead and buried (or, even better, the imaginary). Everything is so much more settled that way. Current events allow too many opportunities to be wrong and, as best as I remember (and that was a long time ago (and I concede I might have made mistakes that I don’t know about (I am only human and we are talking about something almost two years ago))), I did think that there were a substantial number of things that we didn’t know about this case (despite the unending press coverage).



Since I didn’t blog about it at all, and rarely commented on other blogs that did, I was somewhat surprised that individuals, like my new friend Joey7777, started showing up at CoG and demanding that I “take responsibility for my part in the Duke Case.” Hey, if people really want to know what I think about the Duke Case, who am I to deprive them?

Let me be clear: I have no problem apologizing if I implicitly or explicitly stated the guilt of the Duke students before they had a fair trial on some other blog's comments. Such actions are, indeed, unethical and contribute to the failures of the justice system. That is not something that I want to do intentionally or unintentionally. Nonetheless, I never wrote an entry on the case here or on any other blog.

I don't have a problem with right-wing bloggers forcing left-wing bloggers to eat crow when they have crossed a line and been caught at it. That is a healthy part of free speech (concerns about free speech, I suspect, is not really involved in these accusations, which I will discuss in a moment).

Too many leftist bloggers did cross the line and write about the students as guilty without first-hand knowledge of the case. We can, of course, understand why they might have been inclined to do so. This nation’s history is riddled with cases where women, especially women of color, have been deprived of justice when they have been sexually assaulted. The media also made the case into something that had to be debated. Nonetheless, we all have to be vigilant in understanding how each case develops and remembering that every individual is guaranteed some basic rights, including the presumption of innocence.

The mishandling of the Duke Case could have provided real opportunities for people who consider themselves on the right or conservative to take a moral high ground. Had they desired, they could have become leaders by building coalitions with the left to solve common problems. Without a doubt, the Duke Case exposed that many U.S. police departments and district attorney’s offices are inadequate and geared to politics rather than justice. Those are issues we all should be concerned about, regardless of our political leanings.

It also revealed that the media was not at all an agent of justice, but rather sought to capitalize on the furor around the case for their own rewards. For this and many other reasons, I no longer think that it is valid to debate whether the media has a “conservative” or a “liberal” bias. Such debates only maintain that status quo, making us part of the “info-tainmaint” that has replaced actual news in this nation. We all, on the right and left, need to recognize that the media in this nation, composed of profit-driven mega-corporations, is not serving anybody’s interests in this society.



Alas, though, most people on the right passed on such opportunities for real change. Instead, they have decided to use the Duke case as a means to distract, or even to try to silence and intimidate people. Indeed, they don’t bother with details like whether I really wrote about the Duke Case on this blog or not. Instead, they have presumed that I must have done so because of their own assumptions about who they imagine I am as a person. I have constantly pointed out to my new buddy Joey7777, for instance, that I never had an entry on this topic, but that did not satisfy him.

After many empty statements lacking any real evidence about my supposed deep investment in this case and support of the District Attorney (whose name I had to actually look up), the only thing that he could point to was a comment by me that I allegedly wrote on Angry Black Bitch. After reviewing the past files on the topic on her blog (which, by the way, maintained its own strict journalistic standards when talking about the accused players as far as I can tell), I found only one statement from me on the topic (and I spent most of it discussing the media coverage rather than the “alleged rapists”). Why bother with little things like how much I wrote when you can just make shit up because you think it must be true anyway? Joey7777 has written much more about my supposed writings on the case than I ever actually wrote myself. The Alanis-Morisette-level of irony of making facile accusations about a case centered on false accusations seems to be lost on Joey7777 (Who has time for irony when you are certain that you are right?). Perhaps his next step will be to falsify some entries under my name.

I am not interested in these accusations because of what they say or don’t say about me and my supposed culpability in the case. Trust me, this post’s mere subject is likely to generate an unending rant of hate mail and hasty comments (Thank the goddess this blog is almost dead). I try to keep a sense of humor about such things. To paraphrase the immortal words of Kylie Minogue: Regardless of the hand that is dealt, the joker is always smiling in every deck of cards.



Instead, I am interested in how individuals like Joey7777 are attempting to use the Duke Case to simply get people on the left to shut up while pretending like they care about "justice."

Indeed, some are even deploying a guilty-by-association strategy. Such things can be seen in a discussion in another blog about gays and race (one that I don’t normally read, but there was mention of me, so I was vain enough to look it up). To be honest, in that comment section, I would say neither the left nor the right were really engaged in a productive discussion. However, a telling moment came when somebody dismissed all potential participation by one blogger by stating:

“YOU shouldn't be criticizing anyone if you're friends with that GayProf comic book doofus. Referring to the Duke case, again: Gay Prof was all over the place saying the guys were guilty and how it represented "racism, sexism, colonialism, homophobia, misogyny…blah blah…" (all the b.s. these academics play around with), and then when the guys turned out innocent GayProf skulked away and hid from the story. So don't go knocking other guys if you're buds with that racist weasel.”

Aren’t they sweet and ever so respectful? That's Professor Comic Book Weasel to you.

We can again set aside the fact that I did not actually blog about the case and rarely even commented on other blogger’s posts about the case (hardly constituting me writing about it “all over the place”). Instead , there is a telling rhetorical strategy at play here. According to this person, if you even knew somebody who once blogged about the case (or, in this instance, seemed like they might have blogged about the case), you are apparently forever robbed from talking about race, racism, shaking up the status quo, or possibly saying anything ever again. Hmm, that's a free society in the making.

My special buddy Joey7777 fancies himself as “doing his part not to let academic sneaks and bullies get away with trying to hurt innocent people.” That’s cool with me. We/I make lots of mistakes. He can look forward to pointing out each and every one if he so desires. It's unlikely that I will respond. He has also invited me to e-mail him. I think I'll pass on that, too.

I would suggest, though, that if he was really invested in questions about social justice in this nation that he could focus his efforts on people and circumstances that matter a lot more than a random prof with a blog and a Wonder-Woman kink. He might, for instance, take an interest in the racial and economic disparity that exists in our prison system. There are many innocent people who did not have the resources that permitted the Duke students to fight the system.

Or he might consider what it means that the International Court of Justice has ruled that the U.S. has violated the rights of over fifty Mexican nationals currently on death row under the terms of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. In August of the past year, a ruling from the ICJ concluded that Texas authorities had mishandled one of those death-penalty cases resulting in a prisoner being deprived his basic rights, thus necessitating a stay of execution. The state of Texas ignored both the ICJ ruling and appeals from the UN and Mexico City, moving ahead with his murder. Every comment written here could be time spent saving people's lives and reforming our justice system. To each his own, though.



Indeed, my beloved trolls would do well to follow the statements of one of the actual Duke students involved in the case. In a statement to the press, this student reminded us that it was their status and access to financial resources that helped them to attain their release. “This entire experience has opened my eyes up to a tragic world of injustice I never knew existed,” he said, “If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, I can’t imagine what they’d do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves. So rather than relying on disparaging stereotypes and creating political and racial conflicts, all of us need to take a step back from this case and learn from it.” I tend to agree.

In the meantime, I wonder how long before GayProf is linked to the Weather Underground. . .

Brave New World

Today I had a delightful lunch with HistoriAnn, who is currently visiting Midwestern Funky Town. It made me remember the things that I like about blogging. Oh, sure, there are the fake personas and convicted criminals inhabiting blogland that scare me silly. But the blogosphere also provides really good opportunities to meet cool people. With only one or two exceptions, I have never been disappointed by meeting a blogger in real life.

Alas, though, my little bloggy has been far on the back burner to the Never Ending Research Project of Doom. It dawned on me the other day that I have been working on NERPoD in one form or another since my first year in graduate school in 1996. That is a long time. Let me put that in perspective for you:

When I started NERPoD, Bill Clinton had just been elected to his second term.

When I started NERPoD, nobody had ever heard of Monica Lewinsky or would have considered “Blue Dress” a punchline for a joke.

When I started NERPoD, the Nintendo 64 was cutting-edge entertainment technology.



When I started NERPoD, there was no such television show as CSI.

When I started NERPoD, there was only one television show with “Law & Order” in the title.

When I started NERPoD, George W. Bush was governor of Texas, a state that I swore to avoid for that and many other reasons.

When I started NERPoD, Motorola had just introduced the first ever “clamshell” cellular phone.

When I started NERPoD, TWA airlines was still flying planes.



When I started NERPoD, McDonnell Douglas was still manufacturing planes.

When I started NERPoD, it was possible for people with a lot more money than me to take a concord plane.

When I started NERPoD, Barack Obama had never held an elected office.

When I started NERPoD, Woolworth’s stores still existed.

When I started NERPoD, George Lucas was known for his legacy of Star Wars rather than being known for trashing his legacy of Star Wars.



When I started NERPoD, Princess Di was still alive.

When I started NERPoD, all the Heaven’s Gate cult followers were also still alive.

When I started NERPoD, they were still filming Titanic.

When I started NERPoD, the Macarena was all the rage.



When I started NERPoD, state “sodomy laws” were still considered Constitutional. Fourteen states, including Texas, still had them on the books until 2003.

When I started NERPoD, I had a completely full head of dark, luxurious hair that I never imagined would recede (I partially blame NERPoD).

When I started NERPoD, Exxon and Mobile were two different companies.

When I started NERPoD, gasoline cost $1.27/gallon.



When I started NERPoD, the Department of Justice still filed antitrust lawsuits.

When I started NERPoD, you could still smoke in California bars and restaurants.

When I started NERPoD, singer George Michael had never been arrested.

When I started NERPoD, Charlton Heston had never been president of the NRA.

When I started NERPoD, there was no such thing as “Google.”

When I started NERPoD, it was not possible to clone mammals.

When I started NERPoD, Netscape was the internet browser that everybody used.

When I started NERPoD, I drove a Daihatsu – the best-built car that I will probably ever own. I miss that car.



When I started NERPoD, Tony Blair had never been Prime Minister of Britain.

When I started NERPoD, Jean Chrétien was the Prime Minister of Canada (Bonus points to non-Canadians who can name the current (evil) Prime Minister of Canada without an internet search).

When I started NERPoD, Rachel Ray had not yet launched her master plan to become our new imperial overlord.

When I started NERPoD, the only “reality” television show on the air was MTV’s The Real World.

When I started NERPoD, there was no such thing as a “euro.”

When I started NERPoD, I still used “Pine” to check my e-mail.

When I started NERPoD, my waist was three inches smaller.

When I started NERPoD, there was no such word as “blog.”

Summer Can't Last Too Long

Okay – I am not inclined to have the last post as the “most current” one at CoG, particularly since I don’t update like I used to update. The whole queer blogosphere needs to move forward and allow time to work its magic potion of forgetfulness.

In the meantime, I thought that since summer is over half over we could check in with the plans that I made for myself way back in May. How much has GayProf accomplished? Here are the goals that I wrote and how far I have come:

* Complete the Never Ending Research Project of Doom. Yeah, this has been on my list consistently. This time, though, I really mean it.

Progress is being made – Edits being accomplished. Will I make it in time? Ugh -- So much stress! We'll keep this one in the "active" file.

* Ruthlessly exploit friends and colleagues by having them proofread drafts of the Never Ending Research Project of Doom.

Sadly, two of my friends are now blind, one is institutionalized, and at least five others won’t return my calls or e-mails. And yet I am still finding typos. Ugh.

* Invent a new cocktail and name it the Gravitas.

I am thinking of making this into a blog contest. What do you think? Otherwise, I do have a cocktail idea in mind.

* Attend an all-day meeting to discuss matters deemed critical for the direction of my academic department.

Yes, I did this thing. It really was all day long. The good news: They served lunch. The bad news: The lunch did not include cyanide.

* Single-handedly heal the wounds of the Democratic Party once they finally decide on a candidate. The key will be baking enough delicious Bundt cake for everybody.

You know the effects of that delicious Bundt cake would take effect sooner if Obama would stop swinging to the right.

* Lose eight pounds. I am at that awkward stage where my regular clothes are a tad tight, but my fat clothes are still too large.

Hey, I actually accomplished one of these goals! Eight pounds and more have been shed thanks to my secret diet plan: Strep Throat.

* Take my Honda Civic for much needed service. It’s odd that at the point that I finally paid it off, I decided to see if I could destroy it by not bothering to get its oil changed.

My Civic is fully serviced with a top lube job. Huh – It’s funny how the metaphor for sexual activities still sounds sexual even when it's not a metaphor.

* Quash my environmentally dubious desire to purchase the insanely hot Dodge Challenger. I am not ashamed to say that I would probably have sex with that car. I would do it on camera too as long as I could keep the car afterwards.

Well, gas reaching $4.26 in MFT probably did kill some of the desire. Still, it is a hot car. Nobody from Chrysler has yet to approach me about that video deal.

* Vigorously shake working-class whites until they realize that the Republican Party is their worst enemy.

See my comment about the Bundt cake.

* Spend ample time in the sun to obtain a much needed tan and to stave off rickets.

I got a tan – Then it faded. Then I got a new tan, then I got strep throat. Now I don’t have the leisure time to restore the tan once again. So, I think that I have staved off rickets, but have a slight problem with skin cancer. And I still don't have a rosy glow.

* Travel to New Mexico for research purposes.

Ugh – When will I have time for this? This might be pushed into the fall. And it would so help my tan, too!

* Enjoy refreshing TaB cola.

It’s TaB-ilicious. Ow, my kidneys!

* Enjoy even more refreshing tequila.

If you are thinking about a potential Gravitas cocktail recipe, let me offer some advice: TaB and tequila do not mix. Actually, I think that combination produces a toxic vapor.


* Travel to Philadelphia and New Jersey for an event on my mother’s side of my family.

I did this as well. Good times were had by all. I also learned that the Midwest is not the only part of this empire nation that is crumbling and falling apart. I am amazed that a bridge didn’t land on our car as we were driving.

* Contemplate just how much worse traveling by air will become if we allow Delta and Northwest Airlines to merge. Do we even remember that this nation once had anti-trust laws?

I wrote this before they started charging for baggage. The airlines are screwing us. If they raised their fairs a little bit, instead of charging for baggage, it would be a temporary raise in price. Once they go down the road of charging for such “frills” as baggage, however, it will never be revoked. Let’s start trimming the salaries of those CEO's. They are the ones who drove their companies into bankruptcy, why are they still making so much money?

* Solve the mystery at Lilac Inn.

The maid did it. Now I am off to Red Gate Farm.



* Use my federal tax stimulus check to buy a single week’s worth of gasoline.

Sometimes I forget that I can be pretty funny on this blog. That check couldn’t possibly stretch far enough to buy an entire week’s worth of gasoline.

* Update CoG more often (Unlikely if I want to accomplish the first thing on this list).

Um – Pass. Next item...

* Remind the nation that allowing John McCain to assume the presidency would be to install somebody who has no moral conscious; enjoys war as a pastime; voted against the federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.; has promised to continue the disastrous economic policies of the Bush presidency; and smells like Bengay.

Alas, I would still take a right-wing Obama over a right-wing (and incompetent) John McCain.

Hey, nation, John McCain literally doesn’t know how to turn on a computer. This is no joke. Use a mouse? Forget about it. Do you really think that he is touch with the lives of working Americans? Or this economy? Wake up and smell the old person.



* Watch films that center on an alcoholic industrialist with a metal suit; a cowled misanthrope with abandonment issues; and an aged archeologist who probably also smells like Bengay at this point.

I saw one of the three films listed here.

* Wonder aloud about why Gwyneth Paltrow has a screen career. Conclude that it has to do with the U.S.’s incredibly low standards for acting.

Unfortunately, the one film of the three that I saw involved Gwyneth Paltrow.

* Change my currency into something less likely to lose its value than the U.S. dollar – Like the Colombian peso.

Well, I am going to need to do this before going to New York. I think that they only accept Euros there now.

* Purchase a new bed and/or couch – Depending on whether I imagine that I will have more house guests or overnight guests.

I decided I should look for a couch that turns into a bed.

* Laugh at the fact that the media/government is trying to spin the loss of jobs in the economy as a sign of growth. Hey, we didn’t shed as many jobs as we expected, so things are looking up. That’s a great strategy that I am going to start using with my credit card companies. Hey, my check wasn’t nearly as late as I thought that it would be, so, really, we are ahead.

I would laugh, if only I wasn’t living in a state with crushing unemployment. You might have heard of my state's new license-plate motto: The Land that Democrats Forgot.

* Completely redesign the syllabus for one of my fall classes (Unlikely if I want to accomplish the first thing on this list).

Looking over my evaluations for my classes from last term, I noticed that students complained about the reading load. Huh – Maybe I shouldn’t have increased the number of books that I am assigning in the Fall.

* Wrestle control of the Federal Reserve Board away from the incompetent and dangerous Ben S. Bernanke and the other conservative white men who currently staff it (Yep, all conservative white men on the Fed – Nobody else seems to have noticed that).

Hey, nation, did you know that the Federal Reserve Board is supposed to have seven (7) members? Did you also know that the current Board only has five (5) members (one of whom's term has expired)? In the midst of an economic crisis, do we really think this is a good idea to be short staffed? I mean, couldn't we call a temp agency or something?

* Spend some quality time playing with my Mego Wonder Woman doll.

I like her blue wrap-around dress the best.



* Convince my friends that spending quality time playing with my Mego Wonder Woman doll is not evidence of the long anticipated mental breakdown.

I could be more convincing if I hadn’t made that statement about her blue dress -- or if I wasn't in the middle of a long anticipated mental breakdown.

* Celebrate the genius of Dolly Parton.

Why – WHY? – Why didn’t I go with my friends and see her when she was in Decaying Midwestern Urban Center? Damn you, NERPoD. Damn you!

* Be grateful to Guadalupe that I don’t have to move this year (unlike the previous three years).

I am grateful. Man, I haven’t finished unpacking from the last move.

* Start a movement to finally dump the 1789 Constitution and replace it with a parliamentary form of government for the U.S.

Maybe I’ll stick with reforming the Federal Reserve for the time being.

The Blogger in Question

The gay blogosphere is a buzz with the recent revelation that (yet another) blog turned out to be an elaborate fraud. Because of these recent events, I feel it is important to offer up some honesty about my own blog. Knowing the pain and destruction that has come about from this other revelation, I feel it is only right that I am finally honest.

Here is the truth: I don’t actually look like Wonder Woman in real life. There – I said it. I hope that the healing can begin for all of us. What a weight off my back!

***

Such is the problem with the internets. They are more fantasy than reality. In the end, I was suckered into the fantasy of the phony blogger more than most.

I don’t want to rehash all of the details, but it basically boiled down to an individual creating an elaborate blog persona that s/he used for both a blog and private correspondence. We all marveled at how “somebody so young” and “so inexperienced” could create such dramatic and captivating prose. It turns out that “somebody so young” couldn’t. Instead, s/he cobbled together prose from other bloggers, newspaper columns, and short-stories on the internet, claiming them as hir own. This wasn't plagiarism in the sense of borrowing a clever turn of phrase or taking a writing shortcut. This blogger claimed other people’s experiences and memories as hir lived reality.

Blog readers became invested in hir stories and the appealing autobiography s/he created. Indeed, s/he walked away with some small departing gifts thanks to the generosity of hir readers.

Many people on the blogosphere are angry, most are sad, and everybody is very, very confused. The constant refrain is a desire to know the “truth.” Who is the “real” person behind the fictional one? There is evidence that this is not the first time s/he created a fake blog persona.

Conveniently, an explanation has been offered that involves, among other things, a type of dissociative identity disorder. There is also the statement that there is “one blogger out there” who can confirm the details of this new story. Perhaps this new story is the “truth,” maybe (most likely) it is not. I am not entirely sure it matters or solves the unanswered questions. The “one blogger who knows the truth” sounds like another internet phantom to me, but such is the way it goes.



Some people, though, have written me asking if I am that “one blogger” who can confirm the “reality” of the situation. They ask this question because I did have an extended e-mail correspondence with the blogger in question. Indeed, GayProf was more duped than most. With substantial embarrassment, I admit that not only did I care a lot about the nonexistent blogger, but I even developed an internet crush on that persona. Pathetic? Yes, a bit. I had no insight into the depth of deception at play. (Update: Based on comments on other blogs, it also seems that I was not alone on this).

Since the revelation has come out, I have read the comments and responses. One of the most telling pointed out that there was a certain will-to-believe among bloggers. No matter how fabulous, internet people are never “real.” Even when we do the best to present ourselves on-line, there is always a certain act of persona creation. We choose to accept these internet personas as truth because they fill some type of gap in our daily lives.

Certainly, this was the case for me. In retrospect, if I piece the story together, I notice that I was most drawn to the fabled person when I was also feeling the most lonely in my real life. I created a person in my mind as fictional as the one that the blogger created online. It was easy to fill in the missing bits of the story or to skip over the obvious inconsistencies (Of course, I have also done this same thing in real life. I am surprisingly willing to overlook untruths).

Yep, I was deceived, but I also wanted to believe at the time. I used some mighty poor judgment to be sure. In the end, though, a fake internet persona is hardly novel. If anything, the internet is supposed to be a place where we can experiment with such fantasies. I am sad that the blogger appropriated other people’s stories to live out that fantasy. That, to my mind, is the really dreadful part.



About a year ago, I started to wise up a tiny bit when things about the blogger just weren’t adding up anymore. Plans to meet in real life fell apart on two occasions, certain elements of the story were inconsistent, and I became convinced that the person on the other side of the e-mail was dishonest (though I still never imagined that the entire persona was fiction – It was that good). I stopped reading the blog or corresponding, but kept a link to the blog on my own blog because I figured the person involved was basically good, just really immature and inexperienced. That is where my (limited) knowledge ends.

Apparently the blogger continued to develop elaborate stories and events, most of which I don’t know. The blog made it again on my radar when it was supposedly the subject of an internet attack (It later turned out that the plagiarism had simply been exposed). I never knew anything about the second blog until recently.

So, where does that leave me/us? Alas, hopefully it leaves me/us a little wiser. We all like to imagine that we either have too much “street smarts” or too much “book smarts” to be fooled by such a scheme. In reality, people who pull off such elaborate masquerades have much more experience creating them than we have in detecting their deceptions. And, let's be honest, it doesn't even take all that much cleverness to pull off such a masquerade on a blog.

It reminds me of another such event in my life when I was in college. When I worked as the switchboard operator for a hospital (No, the switchboard didn't look anything like the one in the picture below. It was really just a giant phone), a new employee arrived in the accounting department. Let’s call him “Tim.”

Gosh, everybody just loved Tim. He had time and a joke for any one: secretaries, administrators, nurses, doctors, patients. His supervisors constantly praised Tim’s work and I think (though I could be wrong about this detail) that he even dated some of the women who worked there. Tim also had a sob story about why he was so grateful for his job at the hospital. You see, he had been through a messy divorce in some other state. His wife, that cruel harpy, was keeping him from seeing his own children! His job at this hospital meant so much because he was just putting his life back together. Everybody wanted to help Tim. We gave him gas money or bought him lunch. He was, after all, a great guy.



One morning the secretary in the accounting office opened the doors to find that the place had been ransacked and all of the cash that the hospital kept on-hand had been stolen. At first, everybody believed it was a simple breaking-and-entering. Well, we believed that until Tim didn’t show up to work that day or ever again. Tim, it turns out, had skipped town.

Many weeks later, the police revealed that “Tim” had stolen his real-life brother’s identity. Tim had worked in many offices across the southwest. He followed a common pattern of sticking around for a month or two, then robbed them blind. Nobody, apparently, ever imagined that Tim would do such a thing.

In terms of the blogger, I am not angry at all. In many ways, the recent events are simply a coda to disappointments that I discovered some time ago. The blog and e-mail correspondence that I had, though obviously fake in retrospect, served a purpose for me at the time.

None of the “truth” is good, of course. I hope, though, that s/he finds what ever it is that s/he wants. It would be nice, too, if s/he wouldn’t drag people into a nest of fabrications in that process. Hopefully hir motives in this case were not malicious.

In the meantime, don’t take any wooden nickels, people.

Call Her Back

For the past several days I have been in Pennsylvania and New Jersey for a family reunion. This involved my mother’s side of the family, the Irish-American side. My relationship with this family always felt more distant because they seemed so far away. They probably seemed that way because they were far away.

As a contrast, my father’s family were almost entirely in New Mexico when I was growing up. We saw them almost weekly, if not daily. None of my mother’s family, though, were in New Mexico. They were divided between California and the Northeast. At most, we saw them annually and, among other reasons, they always seemed less familiar. Perhaps to remedy this situation, they have worked to build periodic reunions in particular locations now that we are all adults. This time around, it was a return to the communities where that side of the family lived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It has been some time since I have traveled. Alas, my fragile economic circumstances (an on-going result from my breakup of two years ago -- sigh) has kept me mostly grounded with the exception of the occasional work travel and holidays in New Mexico.

Maybe because it had been some time since I traveled, but certain things about this nation struck me. First, and most obviously, this is an obscenely obese nation. On my flights, the number of people who were overweight by twenty or thirty pounds easily outnumbered the people who were a healthy weight. I used to only notice this when I flew from Texas. Now, however, it is the case universally (including children). No wonder the airlines are paying so much for fuel. Lugging around our extra poundage has to be costly. Each passenger is now 1.5 of a passenger from twenty years ago.

The other main insight involved cell-phone culture. This technology has seemingly loosened the divisions between public and private space. As a I waited in an unending airline customer-service line (I use the term “service” with irony), the man behind me in the queue became increasingly agitated during a telephone conversation with his wife. Among other things, he accused her of infidelity, grand-theft auto, alcoholism, abandonment, and general dishonesty.

I felt sympathy for the man as things were clearly going badly for him. All the same, the ubiquitousness of cell phones has meant that these types of conversations are no longer restricted to the privacy of office, homes, or even phonebooths. It made me wonder at what point we decided, as a society, that such tings were best discussed while in the middle of a crowded airport? I appreciate the need to multi-task, but do you really want to initiate a divorce at the same time that you are calculating the mileage on your frequent-flyer account? I wondered if he was going to carry on this conversation straight into the jetway.

In another instance, I went into a men's room at a restaurant where a man in his twenties was talking with great animation. "Why?" he pleaded into his cell phone, "Why did you tell my brother that I got drunk and slept with that girl? I am at dinner with him now and he asked me about it. . ." As I emptied my bladder, I learned much more about his familial and romantic relationships than I really needed to know. Call me old fashioned, but I think that men's rooms should only involve two purposes: peeing and creepy, closeted Senators cruising undercover cops. Even then, the latter should only be around to expose the hypocrisy of the Republican party. It's not the place to debate your past judgment or to consider entering AA. Do we imagine that cell-phones generate a cone-of-silence as soon as we dial?

Obama's Fiesta Platter

HistoriAnn recently had a snarky critique of Barack Obama’s not-so-sudden swing to the political right. Maybe it was more snark than even I dare give out, but she had a point. Given that I never really imagined Obama as the “progressive candidate” that people claimed he was, this move does not surprise me (I was not, as I am sure you all remember, a Clinton supporter either. I would likely be as displeased with her had she been victorious – Remember: gravitas).

Certainly, though, I have been less than impressed by Obama’s ill-advised attempts to attract white conservatives to his cause. Moreover, I was literally made nauseous when Obama announced plans to continue the “faith-based” shit initiated by George W. Bush. Why? WHY would he support the faith-based initiatives when even Republicans didn’t really care for them? Actually, given that George W. Bush is the most hated president that we have ever had, why would any candidate endorse anything that he has done? If I were running for president, I wouldn't even admit to wearing the same brand of shoes as George Bush. Whatever the case, collapsing the distinctions between religion and government makes both worse.

As a gay man who has seen the religious right use their faith as an excuse to eliminate my basic civil rights, I am particularly horrified to see any politician wanting to give religion a bigger role in government (plus tax money). It made Obama look like he was wants to get into bed with the bigots. Yuck! And if he knew anything about their religious beliefs, Obama would know that they are strongly opposed to being in bed with him.



While I still intend to vote for Obama, support for such measures is making it difficult for me to do so. After that faith-based nonsense, it is only my fear of John McSame that keeps me in the Obama camp (for the time being). McSame is a bitter old man trying to buy power with his wife's beer money. The nation won't survive another four years of that horror. Push me a bit further, though, and I might not be able to stomach Obama's right wing tendencies either.

If I feel this way – Somebody who will support the Democrats for pragmatic reasons despite being much more on the left than they – I imagine that he is in danger of alienating a great number of the voters who would be most likely to bring him to the White House.

Pandering to those who would rather die than see him take power is a one-way road to doom. Talking to people who want him to succeed is a better choice.

Obama would be well served to remember that conservative white men are the minority in this nation. A real winning strategy for the Democrats (and I often wonder if they actually want to win elections) would involve getting out the majority of voters in this nation. Yep, the majority of voters are the combined strength of left-leaning racial minorities, women of all backgrounds, and the racially-diverse GLBTQ community. Do all of these groups vote 100 percent Democrat? Obviously, no. But majorities in all of those populations do -- which, when we combine them, means a majority of the nation does. If we all voted (or were allowed to vote honestly (which is a topic for another post)), we would easily defeat the right wing over and over again. Mysteriously, appealing to these groups, the core of the Democratic Party and the nation, seems to be Obama’s biggest failure right now.



This problem didn’t appear out of nowhere. Obama showed that he had serious problems during his never-ending primary with Hillary Clinton. He never could get the gays on his side, for instance, despite the fact that his and Clinton’s position on “queer issues” were virtually indistinguishable (and equally offensive). Even more telling (and even more foreboding) was his failure to attract Latino/a voters.

The media, of course, spent considerable time discussing the “Latino Community’s” support for Clinton. Yet, despite the many hours of wasted video tape that went into the issue, they never offered any significant reasons about why Latino/as preferred Clinton. That would have involved talking to actual Latino/as -- and the major networks really prefer not to do that.

Part of the answer, of course, is that there is no such thing as a monolithic “Latino Community” or consistent bloc of “Latino voters.” Cuban Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and the various other groups that fall under the racial umbrella of “Latino” have distinct histories and interests that result in different voting patterns. Cuban Americans have more often voted Republican, for instance, than other Latino groups (despite the fact that Republican victories have cut or eliminated things that are critically important to Cuban Americans like affirmative action or bilingual education (poor whites don't have a monopoly on voting against their own best interests)).

Any attempt to attract Latino/a voters requires a recognition that they have a diverse set of concerns. Puerto Ricans and Mexican-Americans in New Mexico, whose concerns center on a century-plus of U.S. imperialism in their homelands, might or might not connect their concerns with second-generation Mexican Americans or Colombian American voters. Economic class, likewise, can be as divisive within the “Latino Community” as in any other segment of the population.

So what is the key for a political victory among “Latino/as”? Hell if I know. If I did, I would rule this nation with an iron fist. Alas, though, I can only comment on how pitifully Obama has been in his efforts to this point.

I am surprised that Obama has found it so difficult to understand the complexity and diversity of Latino/as in this nation. His own personal history reveals a greater diversity within the “African American” community, another group that is often imagined to be flat and monolithic. Why has he been unable to transfer his personal experience and identity to his political message to minority groups?

Instead, Obama depends on the most broad statements possible. Recently I visited Obama’s campaign web page to see how he tailored his message for Latino/a voters. It turns out, he really can’t be bothered to do so. There is a paltry Spanish-language section that was seemingly last updated weeks ago (!). It offers a fraction of the information that is offered on the Anglophone site.



In addition to the pitiful Spanish-language section, there is also a separate English-language “Latino” section comparable to his sections for “women” and “environmentalists” (because politicians still prefer the notion of separate and easily distinguished marketing niches). For Latinos, his staff apparently could only come up with half-a-page of text to explain why Latino/as should support Obama’s campaign. Compare that half-of-a-page with the 12 pages of text devoted to "Americans Abroad" or the 7 pages of text under the "Women" section.

Much of that measly text aimed at Latinos, moreover, is entirely boiler-plate. If you deleted the word "Latino," you would have no idea that it is supposed to be addressed to a specific group.

In his “[Latino] Education” paragraph, Obama does not endorse bilingual education, address Latino/a dropout rates, discuss access to higher education, or the need for diversity in the curriculum. Instead, he promises a vague English-only policy as he will “hold schools accountable for teaching English-language learners.” English-language learners? Does he mean like George W. Bush?

Such calculated prose seems designed to cater to skittish white voters who fear a multilingual nation rather than actually providing real bilingual education (which, btw, would help white students as much as Latino/a students compete in the global market (if that is our goal)). He doesn't even come close to addressing Latino/as' real frustrations with their place in the U.S.-education system (the Latino dropout rate hovers around 20 percent -- Meaning that one-fifth of Latinos in the U.S. education system will not graduate from high school(a dropout rate three times higher than whites)).

Obama also touts his Health Care plan and his Iraq policy in the Latino section, but offers nothing specific about why Latinos would see those issues as important. In terms of Iraq, he might have mentioned a 2003 Pew Hispanic Center study that indicated that Latinos serving in the U.S. military are over-represented in the categories that get the most dangerous assignments (infantry, gun crews) -- and make up over 17.5 percent of the front lines despite being only 9.5 percent of the enlisted forces. Or he could have even noted a study that showed that nearly half of all Latino voters have somebody close currently serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

As for health care? “You Latino people get sick, right?," the site might as well say, "I mean, we aren’t certain about that as the market research hasn’t come back. But we are pretty sure that you get sick. If you elect Obama you will be marginally less likely to be completely devoid of health insurance.”

Finally, Obama offers vague wording about immigration that promises to fix “our broken immigration system” and “enforce our laws" and "reaffirms our heritage as a nation of immigrants.” The rabidly xenophobic Lou Dobbs could just as easily support that empty statement as Latino/a voters. Hell, Lou Dobbs could have written that statement.

Here is a hint to the Obama campaign people: When the words “fix” “immigrant” and “problem” appear in close proximity to each other, Latino/as are almost always left with the assumption that this is going to involve a program of racial profiling and police harassment regardless of citizenship status. Why? Because that has been the history of such rhetoric in this nation for the past 160 years. It doesn’t help matters that Obama signed onto the same immigration bill as John McSame.

Now, I am not naïve. I understand that modern politics is about building as vague a message as possible to attract the greatest number of voters. In the case of Latino/as, though, I get the impression that Obama isn’t even trying. This is supremely foolish.

Latino voters could potentially swing a number of states, including places like Michigan and Ohio (The Mexican/Mexican American section of Detroit, for instance, is one of the few places in that urban wasteland that has experienced economic growth). Instead, Obama seems content to either ignore Latino/as entirely or to depend on crude stereotypes and assumptions.

Let’s take a look, for example, at the campaign ad that he ran during the Texas campaign:



Really? Mariachi singers? Really? For real, that is all that Obama came up with for tejano voters? Could he have aimed for a bigger stereotype? Was Speedy Gonzales unavailable that day? Did the Frito Bandito declare in favor of Clinton?

Who on the Obama campaign decided to get the costumed mariachi singers? Alas, it wouldn’t totally surprise me if some Latino in his campaign came up with this idea, but they should be fired for doing so.

Don’t get me wrong, I actually like mariachi music a great deal. It is just one of many musical genres unique to the Mexican-American community. Trotting out costumed mariachi singers, however, raise red flags when they are deployed by somebody who obviously has no connection with Mexicans/Mexican Americans. Mariachi singers suggest that Obama thinks very little about Latino/as beyond stereotypes. Tell me, how much different was that Obama ad verses a recent Taco-Bell campaign?



Was Obama really surprised that Mexican Americans rejected such ploys? Sorry, Barack, we've been served those same old beans and cheese since ¡Viva Kennedy! in 1960. We expect more.

If Obama really is the “savior” candidate that his self-created hype promises, I want to see a new vision of the United States from him. A Democrat who tries to sound like a Republican is neither progressive nor likely to enter the White House. A Democrat who sounds like he spent more than two seconds thinking about the diversity of this nation could make me feel a lot better about having to vote for him.