I had occasion to write my first ever letter to a columnist last week. Amid his jumping up and down for joy, in his haze of excitement, Mark Morford wrote this column Eleven New And Happy Things Antrum dead, religious right imploding, Bush whimpering in the corner. Can we all exhale now? on the election and its outcomes.
Eleven stupendous things about the Democrats retaking both the House and the Senate. A moron like Rick Santorum, who supported drilling in Alaska for oil, who equated homosexuality with pedophilia and bestiality, and who tried to play doctor-god off video tape stalling poor Terry Schiavo’s slip into the big sleep for nothing more than his political benefit, gone. Out of a job. Fabulous.
True, too, that Californians got rid of Pombo, a man who would probably have been just as happy cutting down Muir Woods as walking in it. Finally, California’s crunchy side, you know, the side north of Carmel, asserts its power.
And yes, voters in South Dakota recognized that they really didn’t want to be the most back-assward state in the union and rejected a complete ban on abortion in all cases.
I’m so glad, too, that the rest of the world can heave a sigh of relief now that Dubya has been made toothless (they don’t have to deal with the ramifications of his complete buggery of the American political and judicial systems for the rest of their lives; I’m so happy they’re relieved, though).
All these are good things, I wrote to Mr. Morford. Yes, we’re all doing the Snoopy dance now that the neo-cons and the hypocrites from the right are out; you’re correct about that.
True, the cynic in me says the smart money is on the Dems pissing away any advantages they have, giving just as many corporate giveaways, albeit to different parasitic organizations, and providing more tax cuts for the rich while the middle class gets squeezed harder than a 15 year-old’s acne and the poor get even poorer with no health care and a “poverty line” that is too ridiculous to mention. Still, there is something to be celebrated about the sanctimonious twerps getting their comeuppance. Except…
Anti-gay marriage bills passed in every state in the union where they were on the ballot except Arizona (based on the number of extremely kinky folks I know in Tucson, I’m sort of unsurprised by this).
So…I should be celebrating having to sit, still, at the back of the bus and have no rights?
Wake me, I told him, when the hedonists are in charge, perhaps then I’ll dig out my good Oregon pinot noir and go sky clad. Until then I’m still planning for the apocalypse.
Then Thursday he comes up with this
Then you get down to it. You get past these half-baked and rather childish notions and, well, something odd happens. You drill down to the real reason given by just about every conservative with an actual brain who is still willing to speak about the subject of gay marriage.
What would happen to the nation were it to become legal? Real answer: They really don’t know. Probably nothing. So why is gay marriage so wrong? Because, well, it just is. What was that again? It. Just. Is.
And there you have it.
This is, I believe, the last remaining detestable thing. It is a vagueness of mind, of spirit, a tepid sort of oatmealy hate that knows no real reasoning or heat or nuance. It just is. It is the banality of evil, distilled into a single phrase, a fuzzydumb but yet weirdly powerful mind-set that means nothing but which still lashes out at the world.
This is my guess: Most Americans, even if they voted to ban gay marriage, really have no clear answer as to why they did it. Deep down, if they really looked, they would know: There is no threat. There is no danger to children, the economy, sunshine, puppies. They are merely scared to death of change, of the Other, of their own buried impulses.
In other words, they don’t like gay love because it’s not what they do and it’s not what their neighbors do and therefore it must be evil and wrong and bizarre, and, being Americans, if we don’t understand something we either kill it or ban it or poison it or vote against it about 1,000 times until we exhaust every possible angle of idiocy.
Did I have anything to do with this column? I doubt it. It’s probably just serendipity, or the fact that he has to produce a column twice a week. If I get an answer back, I’ll be sure to post it here.