The Invisible Library

Sydney Morning Herald:

Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.

They say the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city’s south-western suburbs.

They say Dr Allawi told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they ‘deserved worse than death’.

The Prime Minister’s office has denied the entirety of the witness accounts in a written statement to the Herald, saying Dr Allawi had never visited the centre and he did not carry a gun.

But the informants told the Herald that Dr Allawi shot each young man in the head as about a dozen Iraqi policemen and four Americans from the Prime Minister’s personal security team watched in stunned silence.

So, this is what Bush meant by bringing American Style Democracy to Iraq. And why the fuck do I have to get this news from Australia? We’re going to have to go back to the days of town criers in this country, just to get the headlines since our corporate owned, SCLM outlets can’t be bothered to tell us jack shit.

Link via Holden at Eschaton

Dan Savage, guru of kinky sex and relationships, has a fascinating article on the gay-strait marriage issue (warning: it’s on Salon, so you need a subscription or daypass to read the whole thing):

The double standard relentlessly promoted by opponents of gay marriage — and attacked just as relentlessly by supporters — is that marriage is about having children. Since gays and lesbians can’t have children, according to religious conservatives, we shouldn’t be allowed to marry. It has been almost comically easy to punch holes in this argument. Not all married straight couples can have children (the elderly, the sterile); many straight couples who can have children choose not to. And it’s not exactly a secret that thousands of gay and lesbian couples have had children or plan to have children through adoption or insemination. If marriage is about children, how is it that childless straight couples can marry but same-sex couples with children cannot?

By promoting this double standard social conservatives have unwittingly exposed the shocking truth about marriage in America today: The institution, as currently practiced, is terrifically hard to define. Marriage is whatever two straight people say it is. Kids? Optional. Honor? Let’s hope so. Till death do us part? There’s a 50/50 chance of that. Obey? Only if you’re a female Southern Baptist. Modern marriage can be sacred (church, family, preacher), or profane (Vegas, strangers, Elvis). What makes a straight couple married — in their own eyes, in the eyes of the state — is their professed love, a license issued by a state, and the couple’s willingness to commit to each other publicly. How a straight married couple chooses to express love, exactly what it is they’re committing to, is entirely up to them. It’s not up to the state, their reproductive systems, or even the church that solemnizes their vows.

This is the reason so many defenders of “traditional marriage” sputtered their way through appearances on “Nightline” and the Sunday morning news programs. Traditional marriage is just one option among many these days. A religious straight couple can have a big church wedding and kids and the wife can submit to the husband and they can stay married until death parts them — provided that’s what they both want. Or a couple of straight atheists can get married in a tank full of dolphins and never have kids and treat each other as equals and split up if they decide their marriage isn’t working out — again, if that’s what they both want. (It should be pointed out, however, that a religious couple is likelier to divorce than atheists who marry in a tank full of dolphins.) The problem for opponents of gay marriage isn’t that gay people are trying to redefine marriage but that straight people have redefined marriage to a point that it no longer makes any sense to exclude gay couples. Gay people can love, gay people can commit. Some of us even have children. So why can’t we get married?

I think Mr. Savage is the first person to bring up this point, that “Traditional Marriage” these days is anything but what the Bible Thumpers think of as traditional (unless you are the aforementioned Southern baptist. What fun for you). That modern marriage scarcely resembles what your grandma and grandpa did is a good thing. I wouldn’t want my wife to obey me any more than I want her to be barefoot and pregnant in the Kitchen. That’s not what gets our motors running, and neither is it what made us fall in love in the first place. That my wife is my equal in intellect, ambition and desire is the whole reason why we got married.

But notice that it’s only grandmas and grandpas of our society, the self-styled Guardians of Western Culture, that are getting their old fangled knickers in a twist over this little fact. They’re somewhat startled, but mostly jealous of the fact that we, the young modern married couples of the world, are free to pick and choose how we define our relationships. I’m sure in private, most of these elderly finger waggers are kicking themselves for not adding a little kink to their lives when they had the chance (not that they still couldn’t. It’s not like swinging’s the exclusive domain of the young). But instead of adding a little spice to their winter years, they decide to chastise anyone who doesn’t conduct themselves in the mythologized manner of Tradition with a capitol T (which seems to be little more than baby rearing and middle-aged resentment, from what I can tell).

That these traditions they flog so mercilessly are fairly recent on the historical scene hardly registers at all. The traditions they dance around were contrived by Victorian era moralists, and even then were more rhetorical suggestions than practical guidelines. A gentleman of the 1890’s might talk a good bit about family and virtue and the glory of the empire, then kiss his wife goodbye for the evening and stroll down to the brothel or out to the club to play cards with the fellows and twirl around with a dance hall girl. And let’s not even get Biblical, as some of the more laughable wags have; do we really need to rehash the rules detailing multiple wives, concubines, slaves and when it is appropriate to impregnate your daughter?

Modern marriage is a wide open and varied thing¹. That it has become so over time, gradually, with hardly anyone noticing until now, is a testament to our culture’s flexibility. Which makes it all the more ironic that those who talk so much about protecting all that is good and right with our culture have so little faith in it’s ability to persevere and adapt.

Senator Santorum, self appointed Arch-Moral Whip and Chain of the GOP, has made quite a name for himself, promoting slippery slope analogies about how if we let the gays in to our gold ring club, then the swingers and kinks and disciples of De Sade will sneak along in their back pocket. He’s simply not been paying attention. The real freaks are already in the clubhouse. We’re the ones who decide to get married, despite every reason in the world not to.
__________
1. Dan Savage also makes an interesting case for married nonmenogamy, suggesting that we regard three-ways, “the same way Bill Clinton regarded abortion: They’re best when they’re safe, legal and rare.”

Lucy doesn’t like it when I wake her up from a nap, especially when it’s nice and warm in the windowsill where she usually likes to sleep.

Michael Blowhard, of the always thoughtful 2blowhards, has some advice to those who, like me, dream of writing a book:

You say you’ve got a story to tell? Well, why does it have to be a book? You’ll burden your life with a tedious project for a couple of years, you’ll probably overstretch your material, and then no one will read the results. Why not realize your project in a manageable and pleasurable way instead? Put in a month of writing, keep it to a compact length, and post it to the Web. (There really aren’t many stories that need more than 50 pages.) It’s certainly true that no one may pay attention to your work despite its being out there on the Web. But at least you’ll have told your story, enjoyed the process, made your work available — and you won’t have ruined your life, or broken your heart.

I’ve been trying to write my book for the better part of four years now. I actually finished it, sort of, I just wasn’t thrilled with the results. The story was good but it could be better. But at this point the prospect of rewriting it for the sixth time really doesn’t appeal to me, especially considering all the obstacles that stand between me and a fruitful contract with a publisher.

According to Michael, who is knowledgeable about these sorts of things, there’s only a few hundred authors who make a living at their craft. That’s a few hundred out of hundreds of thousands. Now, I’ve grown out of my delusions that I’ll be the next Neil Gaiman. While I really enjoy writing, I don’t think i’d like the stress of his schedule. I’ve been reading Mr. Gaiman’s blog now on a daily basis for two years and he’s always busy, working on three or four projects at a time, screenplays, short story collections a new novel, jetting off to this conference and that convention. It just sounds a little too hectic to me. And what with the disastrous state of contemporary publishing, my odds of even getting an agent or publisher to look at my manuscript is next to zero.

So, I’m taking Michael’s advice. I’ve been leaning in that direction for some time now anyway. I’m going to write mys tories. they’ll be short stories or novellas and when they’re finished, I’ll post them on an adjacent page for the reading pleasure of my visitors. You can read them and if you like, make a donation.

And who knows, if there’s enough interest, and once I have enough stories together, maybe I’ll self publish a book and sell it here on the blog. That would be enough for me to realize my dream of being a published author, without all the hassle of dealing with the crooked industry more concerned with bestseller status and profit margins than telling a good story.

Michael Mcgrorty at Library Dust has posted his resume. It is a stunning example of what all Librarian’s resumes should look like. Heck, what all resume’s should look like. If more resumes were this honest and strait forward, they’d actually be interesting to read:

Next job: United States Navy (age seventeen). Served on three different ships; ran ship’s library, was drunk in many foreign and domestic ports. Read all of Shakespeare, Milton, Faulkner, Conan Doyle, Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, a few dozen others and as much of the Brontes as I could take.

Knowledge and Skills Obtained: Learned many impressive new curses in English and other languages; found out why the rest of the world craves American cigarettes; discovered that most of the world is poor. Avoided sexual relations with prostitutes around the globe. Managed to quit smoking. Found that they still have a silence rule in Australian libraries.

And check out his article, two posts down form this one that the future of Libraries. No truer thing will you read all day.

WaPo:

Gay Marriage Ban Headed for Senate Defeat

A proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage was headed for defeat in the Senate today, doomed by nearly solid Democratic opposition, sharp divisions within Republican ranks and a lack of consensus among voters over how best to deal with the issue.

Even with the strong backing of President Bush, the measure could have trouble attracting a simple majority of the Senate, GOP leaders acknowledge, let alone the two-thirds ’super majority’ needed to adopt a constitutional amendment. Yet GOP strategists hope the issue will help them in selected regions, and with crucial conservative voters, this fall.

This is good news. I’m sure most of the left end of the blogosphere will be blabbing about just how good and what it means, which is valid and needed. But I want to discuss this from a different standpint: that of a married man.

The thing is, I love my wife but don’t like marriage all that much. I don’t expect many people to fully understand this, so I’ll try and explain as best as I can.

My wife, Elvira, is a lovely woman. I adore her. At the end of October, we will celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary, though in my mind, we’ve been together since our first date, more than five years ago. The fact that we’re together is what is special, not that we underwent some goofy ceremony. Frankly, I could have cared less if we ever did the little dance or not. I was then and am still today perfectly willing to spend the rest of my life with Elvira. It didn’t take some dude in a funky hat waving his magic wand over us to make it so. And really, two people standing in front of their friends and family, making ludicrous promises they can’t hope to live up to is silly and to use this farcical ceremony as the standard criteria on which we base our civilization is absurd (How absurd? remember the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which the peasant is browbeating King Arthur for basing his claim to the thrown on the fact that some moist tart lobbed a scimitar at him. that’s how absurd).

To hear them talk, you’d think the fate of Western Civilization hinges solely on what happens in our bedroom. That’s quite a lot of pressure to preform, none of it warranted and certainly, none of it asked for.

My marriage is a verbal agreement between me and my wife. That we signed on the dotted line of some piece of paper is a mere technicality. Something we did to get the IRS off our backs. As Jonathan Richman says:

the tax form comes
fill out ‘married’
a technicality
but I’m tellin you
that I’m not married
I’m not single
I’m still me

I say ‘wife’
because it stops all talk right away
about the way we be
but ‘wife’ sounds like you’re mortgaged
‘wife’ sounds like laundry

Words like Wife, Husband and Marriage don’t mean a damn thing. All that matters is how people behave, not what you call them. So if two Queens in San Francisco or the nice “sisters” down the street want to spend the rest of their lives together and do so openly, honestly and in full sight of their family and friends, all that matters is that they do so with respect and love. But what really disgusts me is that the GOP is trying to politicize my relationship and use married people like me and my wife as tools to discriminate against a portion of the population, to keep them as second class citizens based on nothing more than superstition and farcical ceremonies.

I go on vacation for a few days and come back to find out that Bush is playing Dictator, again, this time by tossing around the idea of postponing the presidential elections in case of a terrorist attack (or if it looks like Kerry might actually win). Oh, but there I go, getting all paranoid. What will Kevin Drum think?

I still don’t think this is part of any nefarious plot to turn America into Amerika, but there’s not really much point in arguing about it. If you believe this, nothing I say is going to change your mind.

What’s intriguing, though, is that the paranoia is so thick that no one is bothering to talk about whether this is a good idea on a substantive level.

I don’t mean to single out Mr Drum, who is a fine blogger, if a little blinkered at times by his own success as a moderate commentator. There are others, I’m sure, who aren’t bothered by the fact that all that stands between our struggling democracy and a dictatorship is a four member pannel with executive powers, appointed by a President who has publicly stated that it’d be a whole lot easier to run things if this were a dictatorship. So here’s some substantive level talk for you, Mr. Drum, et. al.: This is a fucking stupid idea. Allow me to illustrate.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected the 16th president (and the first from the Republican Party). Durring his presidency, he assumed more power than any other president in U.S. history. He proclaimed a blockade, suspended the writ of habeas corpus for anti-Union activity, and spent money without congressional authorization, all in an effort to preserve the Union during the Civil War. You know what he didn’t do? Suspend the electoral process. Even with internal rebellion that resulted in some of the bloodiest battles in recorded history, being fought not only on our shores but on our lawns and in our parlors, Lincoln never felt that the process that is key to the well ordered continuation of our democratic system was in need of suspension. Not even a little bit.

Likewise, FDR never suspended elections, even durring World War II. Osama Bin Laden might be a bad guy (I might even go so far as to call him an “Evil Doer,” if it didn’t make him sound a little too much like Cobra Commader) but you’d be hard pressed to convince me he is worse a threat to democracy than Jefferson Davis or Adolf Hitler.

This is taking the long way around the barn to make a simple point: the idea of suspending the elections due to some vague potential threat is a bad idea, regardless of which president thought of it. That it was conceived under the watch of George W. Bush is not only bad but worthy of tinfoil hatted paranoia. So with all due respect, Mr. Drum and all you armchair moderates out there who don’t want to loose your cool, or your cushy little job as a paid blogger for the status quo, you’d better get paranoid. Because the last four years has proven that these people will abuse their power, and for far pettier reasons.

Is up now.

I’m taking a few days off to recover from classes, relax, enjoy the company of my wife and generally be unproductive. It should be fun. Don’t worry though, I’ll be back Monday with the Spiderman review I promised and much more.