Dogged Blog

Christmas Eve

Ah yes, life in the boonies. No sooner did my life settle down enough for me to blog than the weather deities decided I needed to have some power outages during a big storm blow out my surge protectors, my battery backup, and my cable modem. Comcast just got me back up and running, I cleaned up the spam comments that snuck through the filters, and downloaded 2700 emails or so. Ouch.

For some serious holiday cognitive dissonance, I suggest the Irish Tenors' newest Christmas CD, which I bought for my mother. My brain very nearly exploded when they began singing, with appropriate tenorian orchestration, the Pogues' Fairytale of New York. You know, that wonderful Christmas standard that begins "It was Christmas Eve in the drunk tank" and contains the immortal lyrics:

You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last

Needless to say, the Irish Tenors edited out that particular stanza. The rest actually holds up quite beautifully to the smoothed out, over-produced, blandized treatment, which is true of many of Shane McGowan's messy, brilliant, lyrical, sloppily sentimental songs - just take out the obscenities and drug references and sing them happily on St. Patrick's Day. Or Christmas.

Still, I'll take toothless, drunken, word-slurring Shane any day, and I beg the Irish Tenors to promise not to ever, ever cover another Pogues' song.  It's highly unlikely I'll survive the experience.

In the spirit of true godless liberalism, I wish everyone a wonderful holiday season. Snark.

She Blogs

Straight Americans need... an education of the heart and soul.  They must understand - to begin with - how it can feel to spend years denying your own deepest truths, to sit silently through classes, meals, and church services while people you love toss off remarks that brutalize your soul.  ~Bruce Bawer

My friend Gina over on Dogma advised me to blame Typepad for the fact that I haven't blogged in a week and a half, but alas, I didn't even realize Typepad had gone down for a few days.

It's not that I had nothing to say. It's not even that I've been Christmas shopping... excuse me, HOLIDAY shopping, I forgot that as a liberal I can't use the word "Christmas."  I suppose most of the reasons I haven't been blogging are way too journally to go into here.

But I will mention that, thanks to a free one-month trial of Netflix, I recently saw the five-year-old made-for-cable-TV series "Queer as Folk" for the first time. I was talking about it to my friend Travis, getting a little worked up over something in the first episode I saw, and after  listening for a while he gently said, "You do realize this is a five year old conversation, don't you?" I guess the entire gay universe and much of the straight universe already had the debate over that particular controversial element of the series while I was stuck out here in the country without premium cable channels and totally cut off from most of the major cultural debates of the era.

So, this is not exactly news from the cutting edge, but last night I watched the final episode of the first season of the show, in which Brian, the narcissistic, rejecting older boyfriend of 18-year-old high school senior Justin, shows up at his prom and dances just once with him, to the strains of "Save the Last Dance for Me." There is no question this scene should have been embarrassing as hell. Anything that happens at a prom is almost guaranteed to be embarrassing, after all, and the picked-upon (but cute) blond gay teen dancing with his boyfriend doubly so. But somehow, it wasn't. It was, frankly, the sweetest, most romantic piece of television I've ever watched. I actually got tears in my eyes.

And then immediately afterward, in the parking lot, Justin gets his head bashed in with a baseball bat by one of his classmates.

So, there I was, sitting in the dark caught on the edge between the dance and the baseball bat to the head. I was thinking about a time I was standing in line at an ATM in San Francisco, near Kaiser Medical Center, with my friend Yvette, who had spiky hair and a leather jacket. A guy walked up who was of the opinion that lesbians shouldn't be allowed to access their bank accounts in public places, and smashed my head into the windshield of a parked car while kicking Yvette in the ribs and calling us dykes. It wasn't the first time something like that happened, starting with the word "Fag" being spray painted on my locker door at my all-girl's Catholic high school (I'm guessing there was a bit of an illiteracy problem there, but whatever), to various kicks, shoves, pinches, punches, broken car windows, slashed tires, and hateful words of varying degrees of threat being showered on me from the day I entered high school until I was in my 30s.

So, is this politics or is this journaling? I ask because as long as I'm talking about marriage equality or some other tangible, legal aspect of being gay in America, it's clearly politics. But I don't know what it is, when you're forty-six years old watching a trashy television show and start to cry because a boy is dancing with his boyfriend at his prom, and then someone tries to kill him for it, and then you remember what it feels like to have your head slammed into a windshield by a guy calling you a dyke. I just know if  politics can't encompass that particular kind of broken heart, then politics is crap.

Seasonally Generic? Better Watch Out!

"There are some upon this Earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us." -Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

In 1843, Charles Dickens wrote a story lamenting the loss of true Christmas spirit. That story, A Christmas Carol, has gone on to be one of the  most popular holiday tales of all time, performed on stage and screens both large and small.

Despite this evidence of more than a hundred and fifty years of bah humbugging, creeping commercialism, and all kinds of anti-Christmas sentiment in the western world, in the last couple of years the American religious right has decided this is a brand new phenomenon. No, not a phenomenon... a PLOT. A LIBERAL plot.

Yes, once more, we liberals are undermining the true meaning of Christmas. How so? No, not by ignoring the poor and hungry. Not by being intolerant of those different from us. Not by failing to seek peace on earth. No, it's none of those things.

It's by saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."

I got dragged into an argument the other day with someone over this, and not for the first time. I offered the opinion that maybe, just maybe, true believers should be GLAD that corporate America and the giants of retail are getting their sticky claws out of the religion business, but no. I'd forgotten the lessons of Lakoff, that the right has no actual concern over the spirit of Christmas or indeed, of Christianity itself, but only the enforcement of their values on their culture and society.

Hence the demand to have "Merry Christmas!" emblazoned everywhere, from the county courthouse to the White House, from the town square to the local mall, from the store on the corner to the biggest of the big box retailers. Hence the focus on the letter of the law and not a word on the spirit of Christmas, the part where we feed the hungry and clothe the naked and let the homeless sleep out of the snow, and other subversive liberal plots to undermine America.

Of course, Mark Morford said it better than I can... just like he always does, the jerk.

Screw joy and togetherness. It's all about retail, just like Jesus would have wanted.... Oh sure, there will be a handful of stories about charities and stories about how poorly poor people fare this time of year, all tainted and undermined by the story of how the increasingly porcine and spiritually repellent Jerry Falwell and his litter of Christian lawyers are prepared to sue (as a fundraising stunt) any media outlet or public institution that dares to dis Christmas, everyone's favorite consumer orgy, which was originally a big, meaty pagan solstice sun-god Saturnalia that the church swiped wholly from ancient fertility cults.

Does Santa know how good Morford is?

Holiday Sighthound Blogging

Kyrie wonders what further humiliation I have in store for her this holiday season.

Doughal wonders if that was a really, really big Christmas tree or if he was just a really, really little puppy.

Rebel wonders if someone would call the humane society and send out an officer to talk to me about this problem.