My Final Post (I Promise) On Gay Marriage

I don't really want to write this piece, but there are a few things bothering me which hopefully this exercise will purge from my system.

First of all I'm behind--all the sturm und drang that was going on about a month ago seems to have died down, and the matter effectively resolved, for the foreseeable future at least. I have to admit I have less interest in the outcome of this issue than in the tone of intellectual triumphalism adopted by many (most?) of the pro-gay faction, which I found to be rather insufferable, as well as wildly overstated. Indeed, if I have any opinion on the subject at all, it is that I don't think the debate, as least as far as most of the public perceives it to be, has been particularly rigorous or serious by the timeworn standards of philosophical discourse. My admittedly feeble perception of the logic which seems to be at work in this case is that, once a critical mass of the populace became unable to believe, or reluctant to say, that homosexuality as a general practice (so long as it was practiced by consenting adults, and especially if it made a show of adhering to some variation of bourgeois respectability) was wrong, or even less optimally desirable than other practices, that it must be admitted to be morally, and in the case of marriage legally equivalent to heterosexual behaviors, and any argument to the contrary must be dismissed as absurd. I don't think it follows quite so easily, and I think the pro gay-marriage faction does itself a disservice by its flippancy and focus on the hyprocrisies and inconsistencies inherent in heterosexual marriage rather than soberly and respectfully acknowledging and addressing serious questions--and regardless of how coolly dismissive progressive people of such concerns, there are serious questions--as to why it is necessary this should become legitimized in the very structure of society and public life, when no previous society that I am aware has found it necessary or desirable to do so.

A substantial part of the pro-gay marriage argument has centered around obtaining the right of access to one of the potential spouse's health or other financial benefits. I am actually surprised by how unabashed people are in pushing this aspect of the issue, maybe because I find it hard to believe the people in charge of doling out these resources are likely to embrace a change in the social model that require them to pay out more money, but maybe they have crunched the numbers and determined that this will be more profitable for them than not. One day on NPR there was a guest on who had married a Korean War veteran, much older than himself, the veteran had died, and the widower was suffering from some kind of condition and was trying to assert his case for being granted such health benefits as an opposite sex widow of a veteran would be (the military does not yet recognize gay marriage, at least for benefits purposes). My visceral responses to the situation predictably were 'Why the hell would this person be entitled to Korean War veterans' benefits?'
and 'What kind of a man would argue that he was?' This was not how the host of the program and nearly all of those who called in saw the matter, however. They thought he was justified and had a real case. Personally, all of the fighting that goes in this country over access to benefits is more demonstrative of the desperation people have for those benefits, and extending access, where it applies, to same-sex spouses is not addressing the real problem, and I suspect may exacerbate it on the larger scale, as I presume the origin of family insurance plans dates to an era when 'family', and the roles of the various people constituting it, were more strictly defined than they are today. That is to say, if 'family' can be redefined on a large scale, than certainly notions of what properly constitutes family benefits can also be redefined on a large scale, which in the current climate probably means to something much less that prevailed formerly. Gay marriage in itself would not be the direct cause of this, but I certainly think it contributes to a sense of confusion and uncertainty in these matters. It is not so simple a matter of being legalised and simply adopting all of the tax breaks and insurance benefits that are available to married couples without those benefits being affected in any way.

One point that has been frequently made, or at least implied, in some of the snark directed at anybody who wants to inject such questions into the dialogue, is that childbearing is not central to the institution of marriage because, first, not every marriage produces children, and second, because women past childbearing age have always been permitted to marry a member of the opposite sex if they could find one who was willing to have them. This seemed to me obfuscating, for it is pretty obvious that most of the customs, laws (such as those forbidding marrying one's cousin or sister, though perhaps these laws are not in effect if the wife is post-menopausal) and emotional interest that have been invested in supporting the institution assume the centrality of childbearing and rearing and the union of two identifiable bloodlines for all future time. I suppose I should look this up, but I would guess that legal later-in-life male/female marriage was a later or secondary, development in human history, for the purpose of delineating, or giving respectability to, the economic arrangements or concerns involved. Legalised gay marriage would have a similar "acknowledgement of reality" aspect to it, especially since apparently so many same-sex headed families now include children, and no one thinks anything of it--ironically, the anti-childbearing argument aside, I suspect the growth of these households with children was important in the campaign for marriage, because the presence of the children is the strongest argument for the necessity of having the parents more firmly bound by some legal tie. It is in any event a useful argument to be able to make. Many progressive people have seemingly already internalized the narrative of homosexual romance leading to home-sharing and marriage and perhaps even children as something beautiful and essential, perhaps moreso than traditional marriages and families, about which we are permitted to be much more cynical. But how invested are they really in the sanctity of these marriages and families as bulwarks of society? I admit to having my doubts.

Many people mocked the idea that the marriage of two loving people of the same sex could in any way negatively affect a heterosexual marriage, but if one of the partners--probably a strong wife--is a zealot for the cause and the other--a weak, modern, nominally liberal but so ineffective as to not really matter one way or the other husband--maybe is lukewarm at best towards the whole subject, I could see real strife breaking out. Contemporary liberal women are almost fire-breathing in their championship of all things homosexual--I'm not sure how or why this happened, where women of this class apparently love gays far more than the heterosexual men in their circles, including oftentimes their own husbands. My wife is not especially militant, but if I were actually to express myself in some stammering way (I know that if you state things strongly enough and control the conversation and brook no opposition from women, such as the Muslims and alpha males are said to do, you can bend any female to succumb to your will in matters of ideology--but I would never be able to do that) to be against gay marriage, or in agreement with the boy scout policy against gays or some such hideous thing, she would certainly be mortified, declare that she did not know me, and our relations would come to a crisis--over the rights of homosexuals. So it is disingenuous of activists to scoff at the idea that this is having no effect on straight marriages...

Religious Activities Update

After the scandal of the adulterous priests which rocked the (protestant) church which I have found myself maneuvered into attending 15-20 times a year for the sake of various aspects of my children's development, the committee charged with selecting the new head priest evidently determined to hire the least exciting candidate that could be found. I have no doubt that the new reverend is exquisitely well-intentioned, and I should note that she has glorious credentials-- reading over the schools and seminaries she has been affiliated with and the positions she has held briefly provides the brain a jolt of the pleasurable imaginative agitation that her actual presence is incapable of inspiring--and certainly she has succeeded in fostering a nonconfrontational atmosphere, and I suppose a welcoming one, assuming one has the desire to be welcomed into an airless and tomblike community. Everybody besides me who I can find that is willing to offer an opinion on her however claims to think she is 'great'. Great at what? I wish the lady no ill-will, but if there is anyone I know for whom the modifier 'great' does not apply in any instance (including negative ones), it must be she. It has been explained to me that she does not like to preach. Why take up this line of work than? If you like the prestige of the position and what appears to me to be the healthy middle class--maybe even greater--income that comes with it, to my primitive mind the primary visible function of the holder of this position is to display spiritual leadership, to which end, other than a tireless Mother Teresa-like presence performing humble acts of charity, preaching is the most obvious vehicle. One can opine that modern congregations, particularly those holding a substantial number of the well-educated and well-heeled, do not require nor have any taste to be preached at on traditional moral and theological points; but it is still the minister's part in the charade to carry on somewhat as if they do, and to make an attempt at displaying leadership beyond what any stiff from the audience could carry out within the realm of the service. This is especially true if you are still going to exhort people with a straight face to give you money in terms of percentage of their income as if this were 1640 and the minister and the church represent the primary authority and institution in everyone's immediate life by a vast margin. It is almost comic. Jeremiah Wright has fifty times a more serious claim to being a religious leader than these Episcopalian ninnies.

You would think then that I must have been happy when this recent Sunday featured a guest sermon. But of course, I was not. The speaker was a lady, apparently a clergy member of some sort, who happened to be up from Haiti, where she operated a music school in addition to performing spiritual good works and whose sermon was in large part a report of the conditions there. What her connection was to the dust-dry church in Concord, NH or why she happened to be speaking there last weekend was not made clear to me. As is my wont, I took an immediate dislike to this admirable and compassionate servant of God. She was middle-aged, overweight and smug--yes, I know she has devoted her life to hard, real and significant work and recently survived an earthquake which collapsed the building she was working in and killed a hundred thousand people--love comes harder to me to feel as I get holder. She told us about the stoic Haitians singing hymns of praise to God while having their limbs amputated without anesthesia and stated out loud the question that the story already implied--whether we soft, trivial and spiritually undeveloped Americans could imagine ourselves showing such fortitude in a like event--which clumsy didacticism in speaking doubtless distracted me from the substance of her words. The answer to the question, for me of course is no, I would be crying and screaming and cursing and begging to die in the most disgraceful manner conceivable, which everyone knows already, so I probably resented having it asked out loud, as it were egregiously. My reaction then took on the character of muttering that if the Haitians are, as they seem to be, so spritually developed, and indeed, that they are culturally rich musically too, such that most knowledgable people are concerned that an increased exposure to Americans and their methods will destroy this richness and turn the beautiful-souled Haitians into generic, soulless, fat, inarticulate, imaginatively dead, etc--people rather like me and my children, in other words--then why are you there? The spiritual and cultural wasteland, we are always told, is middle-class whitebread America. It is we who need the ministry and the music school most desperately. The Haitians need doctors and engineers and economists and managers and perhaps math and science teachers, and maybe even a language arts/history teacher or so. But priests and music instructors would appear to be the two outside influences they least need.

Why, the hypothetical reader would be asking by now, am I sitting there so hateful and petty--for I admit that I was. Doubtless part of it was resentment at my own failure to make people turn to me for leadership, or to impart instruction or wisdom; part the sense that other people had figured out how to do substantial and interesting things with their lives and brains while I was tied down with a bunch of children and deteriorating in intellect more and more every week; doubtless a third part was that I was feeling a fat middle aged woman who had an obvious chip on her own shoulder had gained ascendance over me, or the generic type of me, and was in some degree revelling in it, while I had to sit there and take it. I knew even at the time that under the circumstances the response I was having was neither the mature nor the appropriate one. I admit I have still not sure what, in the ultimate sense, the object of the talk on Haiti really was--there was not any great pitch to donate money that I can recall, and these usually take on such a predominant character that I do remember them--but I have no good reason to automatically assume the basest motives merely because I operate that way myself. I need to let go of my need to be deeply respected, and looked to for leadership and instruction. No one has done this, and no one is going to do this, because the qualities which inspire this confidence and admiration in other people are not there. They failed to develop. I do not understand why they failed to develop so completely and spectacularly, and I would like to find out to some extent what different things I might have done because I do have 4 sons and I do not want them to find themselves in middle age in the unpleasant state of consciousness that I am in currently. For myself however the usefulness of the religious discipline may be in teaching me how to accept living in a condition of humility and worldly subordination to my better-trained and realized fellow citizens, which is the main struggle I have been dealing with for the past several years. I would do well to stop trying to impose my own dubious importance and insight onto both formal and informal settings, and listen to and follow the lead and good advices of others. Nietzsche of course was correct in asserting that the teachings and habits of religious life are primarily crutches for the feeble-minded, but none of these scientists and philosophers who have no use or need to learn humility in their own lives address the circumstance that denying the rituals of religion to the weak will not make them strong, it simply renders their position and state of existence even more inscrutable. It gives them no model to fall back on which holds out the possibility of dignity. I suppose the master and inferior strictly secular model can be conceived as a way to offer dignity to the inferior in the outstanding discharge of his particular function, but that entails a certain grandeur of attitude and vision on the part of the superior both to create and appreciate the role of the lesser, which is a level of cultivation and development that I do not think most contemporary superior people possess.

My current task is to cease craving and pretending to a status that I have not earned, and do not understand how to even go about earning.

More Temporary Preoccupations

I sometimes try to post comments on other blogs that seem like they attract a crowd I could possibly relate to, hoping also in this way to draw some attention to my site, but I can't do it. I get halfway through my comment and it occurs to me that I don't know these people, that my comment is not really that important, or does not fit into the dialogue, or is not exciting (I do not know how to be simply aimiable and ingratiating, so my only hope is to go for the spectacular impression, which comes off), so I give it up. The form of the comment is conversation, a direct response to another person, and I just have no feel for that.

I have also been perturbed by some articles I happened to read, some by, and some about a guy I went to high school with and actually spent a lot of time with, though he and I were not exactly friends, who has sort of established himself in the New York writing and film scene, though he is not especially prominent or highly regarded. He has managed to get a couple of films financed and made, though neither of these achieved a wide distribution and the first one at least got pretty brutal reviews (I have not found any reviews of the second one). This guy was a twerp in high school, not well liked, obnoxious, and a very pushing sort of fellow; he doesn't appear to have changed much. I knew him because he had a habit of forcing his company on a couple of friends of mine who were fairly popular who he wanted to get in with, and they being generally good-natured did not dismiss him outright, as he himself certainly would have done to someone in his relative position, though they made fun of him a lot. He despised me especially, I suspect because he regarded me as deadweight in the group who was both of no use to his own plans for social advancement as well as occupying a position of pretty close intimacy with the actual cool guys that he craved and considered he would be able to put to much better uses than I did (which was probably true). I will admit that he was intrepid, if usually frustrated, in his pursuits, and had asked a number of girls out on dates, many of whom had said yes, though these had only been one time deals and nothing, even kisses, had come of them. He did use to boast to me about these dates because I was the only person who geuninely impressed by his feat; the cooler guys had mocked him for taking the girls to the movies and not being able, or even tried to grope their breasts or tongue-kiss them, but I was rather floored that the likes of Melissa S and Erin K, girls of the sort I often thought I might try to talk to someday if I should happen to gain thirty pounds of muscle and made all-league in some sport before graduation, had gotten in a car and sat in a movie theater alone with this dork. Erin K later got a boyfriend at another school who was good at surfing and other aquatic activities, but Melissa S--who had a kind of ethereal, high to late-Victorian (but not pre-Raphaelite) look going on--remained out there roaming dreamily through our halls and eating her apples unmolested in window seats in the back corner of the cafeteria, apparently unappreciated by anyone except for me and my 5'6" bright orange-Jew-fro'ed rival; I could not bring myself to speak to her however. On a somewhat humorous note my enemy who is now a filmmaker always claimed to have gotten laid once by a girl at summer camp, or kibbutz, or whatever it was he went to, in Israel. As you can imagine our cooler friends had a field day with this story, which they did not accept as true for a second, and it was a cause for great sport among all of us.

What made me angry however was that my old schoolmate was very condescending of our hometown (Portland, Maine, for the record), calling it a boring place to grow up and referring to the people in one place as ignorant lunkheads. As to the boring part, compared to most places where teenagers actually have to endure living in America, Portland is not especially boring by any reasonable standing. Manhattan and San Francisco and L.A. and Miami and a few places like that aside, though I know these are the standards by which everyone measures themselves, everyone who is cool thinks their hometown was lame. But then this guy isn't cool. If he had gone to the big suburban high school outside Philadelphia that I went to my first two years he sure as hell wouldn't have been going to the movies with cute girls on the level of Erin K and Melissa S, or going to any parties, or been able to play on the tennis team. From the minute I met him I thought that all the people at this school, and growing up in this town, you buddy, are the luckiest of the bunch. Really, in Philadelphia, somebody would have tossed this joker out of a window. The lunkhead comment was especially unforgivable. Portland is an unusual city in that there is a true mixture of social classes in the high school; however the top 75-100 students in each class must rank among the top 1-2% of all public high schools in the country in terms of academic achievements. This guy was hardly Newton among the illiterate farmers as he seems to like to give out, though I know the people one meets in New York are impressive and serious and all of that and can cloud your perspective, but if this guy is supposed to be an artist, it seems to me he has written off a lot of valuable experience and potentially interesting subject matter as nothing (a movie about Melissa S's secret life would have been ten times more interesting than the nerd chasing New York career girls thing he put out; I would have paid to see it anyway.) Again, compared, to most towns in America, large parts of Portland are old, beautiful, walkable leafy neighborhoods, our school was an elegant, in some ways gorgeous 1924 structure with lots of windows in the middle of one of these picturesque neighborhoods (it is to average public high schools approximately what Wrigley Field is to average baseball stadiums), both the smart and the dumb kids were in truth much more interesting, had more individual personalities, and had better senses of humor, and the smart kids were better and more diversely read, had less anxiety and social pathologies than in typical suburban high schools. I thought overall there were at least as many cute girls, too, after the scruffy New England manner, of course, but no one agrees with me on this.

I should add that another oddity about my relationship to this person is that both of us applied, without conferring with the other beforehand to Columbia University. Needless to say he was accepted, I was not, and the rest is, to this point at least, a very small piece of history. I was not a great candidate, I did not expect to get in, and of course I ended up going to St John's College, where I probably learned more things of a fundamental intellectual nature and had a more heartfelt experience than I would have at Columbia, although I do not seem to have learned how to be really successful in a worldly sense, which everyone seems to learn at these other kinds of colleges, though perhaps this is a quality that cannot really be taught. I thought I compared favorably to this other fellow in several important areas, including certain academic measures, though obviously he was able to impress on them that he had great drive, which clearly I lack, though I did not realize this was an important factor at the time. Indeed, when the announcements came, I had to say, that if this renowned institution, having been able to examine the both of us, really preferred to have him over me (being young and stupid, of course my opinion of my charms and abilities was inflated), there was nothing more to be done, for I would never want to be like him. Yet, he lives in New York, and writes and works in the arts, directs plays and so on for a living, which is like an unfathomable fantasy world now to me, and appears to have a lot of friends there in that community who appreciate him (though it is true he is not married), while I live in complete social and intellectual isolation in the middle of nowhere. So perhaps it is I who have missed the point of everything that is valuable to cultivate in a human mind and personality. The results would certainly seem to suggest that this is so.