May 31, 2002
our own Heart of Darkness
America's agenda, while it clearly does not include any real consideration for the welfare of the world outside, excludes most Americans as well, with the notable exception of only the very very rich, who remain the beneficiaries of our tender...
The original Nancy Drew
Mildred Wirt Benson died tuesday at the age of 96. The author of the very first book and 22 others in the earliest series of Nancy Drew novels confided to a NYTimes reporter in 1993 that her esoteric fame could...
war at home
Back to the sixties---or worse! It's not the good parts this administration wants revived, but the infiltration and monitoring of political, religious and activist groups suspected of being critical of the government. The NYTimes has it right in a sober...
Don't skip your Greens!
The Green Party nominees for New York state offices carry background credentials a progressive voter normally only dreams of. Compare them to the candidates of the two "major" parties for office anywhere at any time. What do we betray or...
but too late for Mike Lyons
Things are looking up a bit for the gay or lesbian partners of those lost in New York and Washington September 11, but not everyone is here to see it. The emergency funds made available after Sept. 11 came too...
still safe!
The Onion's roving reporter "Opinion" box this week quotes one imaginary member of the public, in reply to a question about suicide bombers in our midst, as follows: "The U.S. is safe, so long as the terrorists don't see us...
May 30, 2002
for a greater New York
What a legacy! Yes, but while still alive, for most of her eighty years, Antonia Pantoja must have been just a dazzling, inspiring, sometimes daunting, everyday reality for those who shared her life and for those whom she helped. In...
more on Weakland, spot on!
The New Republic includes the first critical look at the Catholic Church mess in Milwaukee, and makes it clear that this one is not a story of child abuse, the sexual importuning of a teenager, and most probably not even...
the World Trade Center today
An editorial in today's NYTimes pauses to observe the completion of clearance work at the World Trade Center site, and the portion of the text which addresses the recent past manages to be surprisingly gentle. Most of us have found...
Anything but marriage
Interesting that some people who think about these things are now arguing that in opposing same-sex marriage, social conservatives may actually be encouraging the legal recognition of such relationships, and in fact hastening the demise of marriage as an institution!...
May 28, 2002
Are we done yet?
Seven minutes in Cathedral Square, half an hour in the Hermitage, and an especially-miniaturized "Nutcracker," all in a day's work for the emperor who already knows all he has to know. President Bush's father, when he was in the White...
Bushie pans literacy
In Paris yesterday an American reporter was the target of the ire of the unelected one, because the NBC News White House correspondent deigned to ask the French President in French the same question he had just asked Bushie in...
May 27, 2002
even hero gays must remain invisible
It's official! Only those legally part of the heterosexual system can be heroes. Wednesday the House Republican majority killed a bill, passed unanimously in the Senate, which would have extended death benefits to the survivors of gay chaplain Mychal Judge...
Don't just sit there!
Every graduating class needs a Tony Kushner a lot more than it needs some suit. Invited to address this year's graduating class at Vassar, the activist and playwright told its members and their guests that the future did not look...
Oh those wacky sports fans
Is this what the F.B.I. had in mind when it warned us about light aircraft? An attempt to honour a dead baseball fan's last wish went horribly wrong on Friday, forcing the evacuation of Safeco Field, the home of the...
May 26, 2002
toys for W
Bush---Little Boy the World is Not Your Toy! (sign held by a protester in France as Bushie arrives) But unfortunately it is! And we supposedly gave it to him....
Gay and liberal? You're out!
Two men, two stories. The Boston Achbishop conceals felonies and exposes (real) children to the predations of child molesters, but that's ok with the Pope in Rome. The Milwaukee Achbishop* has an ongoing consensual relationship with an adult, and he's...
May 25, 2002
noble Bonobos
We saw a wonderful new play, This thing of Darkness, by Craig Lucas and David Schulner, directed by Lucas, at the Atlantic Theatre in Chelsea last night. (We're going back a second time, and I never do that.) Lucas' stageworks...
May 23, 2002
New York drops the ball!
And draws a big zero. Suddenly, out of nowhere, "they" have decided how the WTC site and its environs will be rebuilt, and they don't really care what you think, above all if you have imagination or a real aesthetic....
The sky is falling!
Horrible to know not only that we can't expect intelligence or competence from the Bushies, but do we also have to be frightened out of our wits in the process? Can't Chicken Little at least pretend to have a little...
Taste of Berlin
As Bushie arrived in the German capital, an anti-Bush banner hung from a Berlin Church reading "Peace for the world, pretzels for Bush." Across Western Europe, the sharp criticism of the Bush administration's perceived unilateralism that predated Sept. 11 —...
May 22, 2002
Intelligence a secret?
Reuters reports that Cheney is worried about people finding out stuff. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney said on Wednesday he feared a new Sept. 11 inquiry proposed by the top Senate Democrat would leak intelligence secrets and undercut...
You didn't hear this from us!
We, or those with the necessary resources, have to hear this from, yes, the Israeli press. Shoulderchip describes the story being kept from Americans. No wonder we can't understand what's going on in the world. The U.S. State Department on...
Co-op boards on the front line!
Let's hear it for the co-op boards! Maureen Dowd finds one bright spot in the "war on terrorism," even as she slams those who tell us they're fighting it from Washington. I have no faith in the ability of the...
May 21, 2002
Ashcroft takes no chances!
I guess he doesn't trust his god enough. Our Attorney General stopped taking commercial aircraft last July, ". . . just as the intelligence 'chatter' about a possible al-Qaida strike on US soil was getting louder."!!! Shoulderchip has the scoop,...
Is this a government or what!
I'm feeling so good these days about my government. Look at the first five headlines on Reuters as I write this: N.Y. Police May Issue Landmarks Alert-Official Rumsfeld: Extremists to Get Weapons of Mass Destruction Federal Official Rules Out Firearms...
At the mercy of our fears
Ok, we just found out that the world is a dangerous place, but America is making it more dangerous, in fact as well as in its imagination. We are like a nation that has had a psychological break and is...
Political compass
I also took the Political Compass test, and I found I'm even more lefty and more libertarian than Mr. B: Economic Left/Right: -6.38 Authoritarian/Libertarian: -9.51 About the same as Ghandi if he were more radical. Here is the Libertarian Left...
need more democracy
Castro is apparently no longer a threat to the Western Hemisphere, but only a weight on the shoulders of his own people. Bushie says we must continue the embargo designed by our Cold War, but now it is because he's...
Feel safe yet?
So, this supposedly democratic nation with its famed Bill of Rights cannot keep us safe without disregarding its own principles and standards. And, since we have been told that the "war on terorism" will continue until there is no terrorism...
May 20, 2002
Just what have we accomplished?
Are we really sacrificing our liberties, and those of much of the rest of the world, and ignoring almost all domestic problems, to virtually no effect in the "war on terrorism?" Say it ain't so! In the past six months,...
dreams---ours in theirs
Stuart Hawkins has a magnificent show mounted in Priska C. Juschka's new space in Williamsburg. We had seen different work of hers, no less extraordinary, at the Scope show in the Gershwin Hotel earlier in the month, but the video...
picking a mechanic
How did we get here? How many times have we heard that so many people voted for Bushie because he was the kind of guy you'd want to have a beer with (whether or not he would want to on...
nothing real until she was 50
Sent down from Smith because her educated father thought too much education would make her unmarriageable, over sixty years later she returned to the school she had loved so much, completing her degree this spring, at 87. In the meantime...
May 19, 2002
. . . but they'll love you later
Apparently we don't always know what we look like to others, even if we try to live two lives. Warren Allen Smith, 80, sat at the corner table looking clean and gray, dressed in dark corduroys, a sweater, an orange...
Talking about chaos
The following quote is posted not for the status of its source (modest), but for its pithy timeliness: It is more than investigation of possible counterterrorism oversight that [the Bush administration is] resisting. They are resisting the erosion of the...
May 18, 2002
Silence=concentration camp
"Finally victims will be rehabilitated -- even if many are already dead," said a campaigner friday, aparently with no irony, after Germany's parliament passed legislation allowing around 50,000 gay men prosecuted by the Nazis because of their sexuality to be...
May 17, 2002
Pim Fortuyn
It's not easy for Americans to grasp complex political concepts, especially in this wonderful age of concensus, but Richard Goldstein offers to help us to understand a man who definitely did not fit into our simple categories. The anxiety that...
So, what's he gona do now?
Dan Rather is ashamed that he, and the American media generally, has not taken on the Bush administration over the war on terrorism, because of misguided ideas about patriotism, and of course, out of shear fear! "It starts with a...
May 16, 2002
WTC sacrificed for a pipeline?
Just a thought. But there are more and more stories, and more and more corroborations, of an alleged connection between oil and gas industry profits and "The War on Terror." Since the Bushie administration is essentially an oil and gas...
Searching for wisdom in the wrong places
Bushie's only response to the growing uproar over his administration's foreknowledge of a terrorist attack, foreknowledge kept secret until now, is to ask God for wisdom. Well, we know we won't get it from Bushie or his handlers, especially if...
May 15, 2002
Incandescent Obsession
Hugh Hicks never met a lightbulb he didn't like, so he collected them all. He was not above what might be termed stealing, and he proudly displayed stolen bulbs in a group he called 10 Hot Types. In the Paris...
May 14, 2002
We're not that close!
Still two countries, Georgie! Would it be better to believe the Unelected One was simply under a misapprehension, or just generally stupid? Here are his exact words, as heard in news broadcasts, and as printed in the NYTimes today: "Today,...
This time we really really mean it!
The headline of the day, or even more, from Reuters: New NATO-Russia Partnership Ends Cold War Again...
May 13, 2002
priestly sex---the scoop
For a non-hysterical discussion of gay sexuality in the Catholic priesthood, read the interview the NYTimes published May 11. The interviewee tries to distinguish pedophilia from an attraction to sexually-mature teenagers, but messes-up in his conclusion. But as I understand...
May 11, 2002
The dishonest broker
It's more than frustrating to fret about the errors, not to say duplicity, of American foreign policy when it appears there are no Americans who know or care what that policy is. To make it worse, while the facts clearly...
May 10, 2002
Pretty little head
Ok, it's pretty and very important, and maybe a lot of people would love to look at it all day long, but heck, it's a three-dimensional print (seven casts exist, according to the New York Times), so $18.1 million seems...
This just in!
Fascinating relics of perhaps the world's first real efforts at photo-journalism showed up in London this week. Up to now I'd only read about the quaint old Parisian custom of picking up paving stones and assembling them in neat piles...
Americans more sceptical than ever?
Noam Chomsky, within the text of an extraordinary discussion (in an interview with a Croatian journalist) of the events since September 11 and of broader topics, joins other progressive commentators in arguing that Americans really are not asleep! So, we...
Who is Arafat?
It takes more than epithets to deal with complex problems. It never hurts to do some thinking. Sharon is almost an open book these days, but many of us want to know why we have such a problem with Arafat?...
May 9, 2002
Look to the children!
We pride ourselves as a nation on many things, but we are beginning to realize the extent to which there is much false pride. To include our treatment of children in the list may surprise many of us. The other...
Justice or vengence?
Beautiful in its simplicity and its morality, and an argument against the blind anger and fear that surrounds us all, this letter in the New York Times today should pull us all up short. Some 30 years ago, a Hebrew...
May 8, 2002
Egan's Law
From SatireWire a modest, almost Swiftian proposal. Trenton, N.J. (SatireWire.com) — Under a new law designed to protect minors, local police departments will now be required to inform residents any time a known Roman Catholic church moves into their neighborhood....
Progress! But weird.
Certainly Taiwan has one up on us at least in this issue, but the argument and the teminology used in this latest development is as idiosyncratic as it is weird. Defence Minister Tang Yiau-ming told government lawyers that the ban...
May 7, 2002
There'll always be an England!
It's her Jubilee! She deserves at least one very cute streaker. No, we all do! She certainly seems amused. The streaker was pounced on by at least four police officers and forced to lie face down, spread-eagled on the ground....
"Oh boy! Now it's a felony."
Reno, now more than ever. The NYTimes visits Reno's new show and Anita Gates finds it ". . . consistently, energetically, loudly funny." Reno sticks to her politics, no matter what the current fashion. At a recent performance her anti-Giuliani...
Never forget
A reminder from some who were impacted the most by the neglect and malignancy of the late, unlamented Giuliani adminstration. Shame on the Episcopalian hierarchy! Their generally tolerant and progressive members deserve much better, as does all of New York!...
May 6, 2002
more than a jewish mother
This is a quite wonderful little reminiscence of a part of our shared culture whose story presses quite a few buttons even today. "Come will and come may, I must face it," she would sigh. [Her husband Jake"s] role, where...
Gay Jerusalem
. . . don't have to be jewish to be gay; don't have to be jewish to be Israeli. Not everyone has a problem with co-existence in this city of both jews and palestinians. Sometimes it helps to be gay....
May 4, 2002
Cardinal Miss Franny
Before moving to New York in 1985 I spent twenty years in the distant, yet not-so-provincial, province of Rhode Island, and even in 1965 every faggot with a pulse knew about the notorious promiscuous sexual adventures of the leading American...
May 3, 2002
"A Word To The Wise"
(The five words above comprised a notice painted handsomely and permanently on the blackboard in my third-grade homeroom, above a changing list of pithy admonitions, all in different-colored chalks. Funny, only years later did I learn that the complete sentence...
Holy Land
The Onion reports this week, in banner headline, "God Re-Floods Middle East." JERUSALEM—In what theological and meteorological authorities are calling "a wrathful display of Old Testament proportions," the Lord Almighty re-flooded the Middle East Tuesday, making good on last week's...
Religious metaphor
If I can be forgiven , just this once, a religious metaphor of the sort loved by all true americans, allow me to suggest that our appointed government is driving us all to hell in a handbasket. Just think about...
May 1, 2002
Reno rules!
[JAW---Actually, the category should read, "General, Culture, Happy, Queer, Politics," but the program won't accept that.] Reno has been nominated for the Drama Desk Award for "Outstanding Solo Performance!" We've seen an earlier form of this show and were totally,...
