Not a Particular Triumph

Good news, readers—however bad your day is, it can’t be worse than what Gerry Cahill is enduring.

He’s the CEO of Carnival, and he spoke—as you can see below—to the press before going on board the ship that suffered a major fire, lost power, listed dangerously to one side, and became a fourteen-story un-flushable toilet.

Well, Cahill looks the part—male, white, greying hair, craggy looks. Viewing the video, I remembered my Wal-Mart days of bumping into guys like this: guys who could work fourteen hours a day for six days a week; guys who knew the numbers; guys who always were taking seminars on servant-leadership, leading by example, coaching by walking around.

Leaders, you see, are not born but developed, which is very fortunate because that means—guess what!—you can build a nice little industry around it. Along with motivational speakers, the leadership guys routinely charged into Wal-Mart—eager to activate our sleeping potential and make us all proactive change agents, empower us, fan our self-development, and deliver added value and unexpected benefits to our associates and customers.

I wrote that sentence pretty much as fast as I could type, since I spent seven years writing the equivalent. Sometimes I wrote in Spanish, sometimes in English—in either language it was gibberish. I can report, however, that English is much more capable of gibberish than Spanish, though that could reflect my lack of prowess in Spanish.

Tens of thousands of dollars were spent on the two twin gods; motivation and leadership. Every monthly meeting had some section of it devoted to the topics. Had it had any effect whatsoever, we would have had a building full of generals.

It was as much a part of the building as the grey carpet and the blue walls.

“I’m going to the leadership seminar, so I won’t be in class,” a student would say.

“Isn’t there a leadership seminar tomorrow?” I would counter.

“Yeah.”

“So did you talk to Human Resources to reschedule?”

“Uh, no….”

“Isn’t being responsible part of being a leader?”

It was useless, and in the end I gave up and simply observed. My students were good people, all doing things that the organization deemed necessary. Some of them were in charge of selling fifty or sixty million bucks a year. Some of them were in charge of deciding whether it was Crest or Colgate that would catch your eye on the shelves. Some of them simply spent their days figuring out how the business was doing financially—whether the millions were rolling in at the necessary rate.

They were not, most of them, leaders. Actually, they were utterly content to be led, to be told what to do, to do it—often grudgingly—get paid, and leave. That was the name of the game: try not to get fired before you win the lottery.

My mother and brother took a trip out west, years ago, to visit Eric. Along the way, they came upon a group of Indians who were struggling to set up a teepee. It looked like a bit of diversion in a very flat landscape, so they stopped to watch.

Well, only Franny watched. Johnny got right into the action, and was soon directing the Indians on how to set up their teepee.

Say what? A Manhattan lawyer directing a tribe of Sioux?

Interestingly, none of the Indians complained, or suggested that Johnny take his white ass off their land, or told him to take the teepee and shove it where the sun don’t shine. They all parted the best of friends.

So Cahill—getting back to the Good Ship Norovirus—is going to go apologize for the five days of hell that 2300 vacations turned into. Typical move, a classic example of modern-day leadership. He’s taking charge, he’s owning responsibility, he’s standing in the front line.

He’s a fool.

Look, giving those cruise passengers a chance to vent is not going to do them or him any good. People are going to be filming him with their cell phones; it’s going to be all over YouTube, he’s going to look stupid.

What should he have done?

Gotten the passengers off the boat however he could have done it. Whether it was getting an aircraft carrier or another cruise ship—apparently several approached to provide food—or talking to the Navy, he should have found a way to evacuate the vessel and speed for home. A cruise ship can move quite quickly, and even if all the additional guests were stuck on the top deck for twenty-four hours—well, wouldn’t it be better than five days?

Carnival considered the idea, and decided no. Here’s a quote from an Email written by a vice president of the company:

"Regarding why we didn't use another cruise ship, we checked on this and all of our ships are in service right now, meaning that there aren't enough cabins available to accommodate more than 3,100 guests who are currently on the Triumph. Additionally, a ship-to-ship transfer at sea would be considered too risky," he said. 

Hmmm—all of their ships are in service? So you’re going to let 3,100 “guests” slosh through sewage for five days, just not to inconvenience other “guests” on your other cruises?

Nor do I know how difficult a ship-to-ship transfer would be. I’m suspicious, grammatically speaking, of any sentence that has this shaky, waffling construction—“would be considered too risky.” Is it risky or not?

It was all about the bottom line, of course. But I think it was about something more. All of our talk about leadership and core values and corporate culture has fogged our minds, blinded our vision, turned us into worse yes-men than we ever were before. Nobody had the guts to tell Citibank or Bank of America or Merrill Lynch, “hey, these subprime loans are gonna backfire!”

No one told Cahill, “hey, we gotta do whatever to get these people off the boat!”

Requiem for a Pope

There are, in fact, some things to like about him. He’s fond of cats—he fed them around the neighborhood, and was lent a grey tabby when he went to a festival in Australia. He’s also a good pianist, whose favorite composer is Mozart. True, he didn’t say what his predecessor said after a performance by the Chicago Symphony, but that’s a pretty funny line to beat.*

Right—so we’ve gotten that out of the way, we’ve stated the little good that can be said of him. Though there might be one other good thing for lesbians and gay men to say about Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger: he wasn’t on our side.

Look, would you want a friend like that?

“It was a failed papacy,” said a student, who attends mass every Sunday, who is on the editorial board of the biggest newspaper in Puerto Rico, and who reads The New York Times every day. That’s why he could tell me the remark of a cardinal speaking—of course—anonymously. “The single beneficial thing that this pope ever did for his church was resign.”

Ouch.

And now that he has put himself out of the way of doing more harm, my feelings may be turning a bit.

He was and wasn’t a Nazi. Yes, he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth, but that was mandatory. He also served in the German army during World War. Here's what one source has to say:

Joseph Ratzinger was a member of an anti-aircraft unit protecting a BMW factory that used slave labor from the Dachau concentration camp to make aircraft engines, but he was drafted into the military and didn’t have any choice in the matter. In fact, Ratzinger also says that he never fired a shot and never participated in any combat. Later he was transferred to a unit in Hungary where he set up tank traps and watched as Jews were rounded up for transport to death camps. Eventually he deserted and became a prisoner of war.

Right—so we have a pope capable of watching Jews being rounded up for transport to a death camp. I’ll be honest: one question that has haunted me for most of my life is what I would have done had I been, as Ratzinger was, confronted with the question of acquiescing or challenging the evil that was Nazism.

Ratzinger took the middle path. Serving in the military was obligatory, so he served. Others didn’t, though that came at a great cost. A few hundred yards from Ratzinger’s childhood home, a family was hiding a young soldier and member of the German resistance, Hans Braxenthaler. The SS regularly searched homes, so it was no secret that the resistance existed. As well, a neighbor whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau as a conscientious objector had this to say:

“It was possible to resist, and those people set an example for others. The Ratzingers were young and had made a different choice.”

Even more chilling, however, is that in 1941—when Ratzinger would have been 14 or 15—a cousin of his afflicted with Down’s Syndrome was seized and murdered by the Nazis under their eugenics program.

So we have a pope who confronts evil by joining in tepidly and then deserting the army in April of 1945. Did anyone notice? The army was in tatters at that point. 

After this, he resumes his studies in the seminary, and then becomes an academic. There, he excelled, earning praise from his students—he was diligent, committed, and always well prepared.

He should have stayed there, and probably wishes he had. But in 1977, he’s appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising. And it’s then that the first mud stain on the white robe appears. Ratzinger approves the transfer of a sex predator to another parish, barely days after the priest begins “treatment.”

Ratzinger then gets sent to Rome, where his is appointed Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This is current Vatican lingo for the inquisition, and Ratzinger is up for the job. Part of which is to stamp down on any whiff of liberalism that might injudiciously drift across his gaze. The Jesuits get kicked, as do liberal priests everywhere. The other part of the job was to enforce a document called Crimen Sollicitationis—a document from 1962 that declared that all investigations in the Catholic Church were confidential.

Yeah?

It’s true, Ratzinger didn’t actually say “don’t go to the cops if you’ve got a predator priest,” but did he have to? Given the culture and history, just saying “these investigations are confidential” is more than enough.

Worse, somebody did call him on it. In Milwaukee, the church had a real problem with a priest named Lawrence Murphy, who took time out from his loving care of deaf kids to molest some 200 of them. The Cardinal wants to defrock him, but guess what? The church statute of limitations had run out. What to do?

The archbishop of Milwaukee writes to Rome, to Ratzinger directly.

Twice.

And never gets a response. Here’s Wikipedia quoting Archbishop Weakland:

"The evidence was so complete and so extensive that I thought he should be reduced to the lay state," and complained that Vatican tribunals moved too slowly.[2]

Reduced? Your word, archbishop, not mine….

The ironic thing is that Ratzinger did it all right. He met with the victims, he prayed with them, he shared their sorrow. He apologized and apologized and then apologized some more. He did far more than his previous boss.

It wasn’t enough, and it didn’t go away. In the end, it will be the first thing one remembers about Ratzinger. His obituary will start, “Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, whose papacy was marred by the sex abuse scandal, died…”

For all his love of Mozart and cats, I wonder if in some way the guy had a chance. He grew up in a toxic environment. Here’s Ratzinger’s biographer on the subject:

John L. Allen, Jr. says that anti-Semitic violence, displacement, deportation, death, and even resistance turned the town into “an over-populated lunatic asylum of hopeless inhabitants.”

For all his hard-lined theological views, he appears morally weak, if not terminally ill or dead. All his life, he saw evil…

…and went along with it.

*Pope John Paul II left a Chicago church, where the Chicago Symphony Orchestra had just played Bruckner. A deafening roar rises from the crowd. The pope lifts his arms and silences them, remarking, “Please, I’m just the pope, not the Chicago Symphony.”     

Out There

She’s a nice kid, and she’s very good to me, as they all are. I give her two dollars and she gives me change and excellent coffee, which is a fair deal. Or I give her more money and she brings me food, and I sit and munch and feel that there are people around me. I need that—an empty house can be menacing when the husband leaves for work, and you remember a life that got shredded on a Friday morning two years ago.

So I like Nicole, and Nicole, it turns out, likes guns. I know this because I had printed a copy of the list of 33,050 randomly generated names and was showing it to her and Sebastián, her coworker. Sebastián is in my camp, Nicole is not.

Her father is an armed guard, and there are guns all over the house. Well, no—she says that her father keeps his guns in a safe at all times, except for the gun he keeps in his bedside table. And he taught her gun safety from an early age, even before she got a gun license at age thirteen. Keep your safety on at all times, he told her. Point your gun at the ground always, he advised.

The problem, said Nicole, is irresponsible people, not guns. She and her father are responsible people. And her father tells her repeatedly, “I hope you never have to use a gun, but I want you to know how in case you do.”

I told her—your dad’s a responsible guy. And at some point I began to see the difference between the gun people and the gun control people. I think I see it now, why there’s this gulf between us. Simply put, the gun people are living in and with fear, with the possibility of danger and violence. The rest of us are not.

Even on an island where crime is rampant and violent crime no less, it never occurs to me to be afraid. I did the trot this morning, greeting my neighbors, walking briskly towards a stranger. Did I think for a moment that he was anyone else but a guy getting exercise like me? Did it cross my mind—it’s just him and me. What if he’s packing?

Nah, I was too busy listening to Bach. 

But for some people, the possibility of danger and violence is real—so real that these people literally and figuratively arm themselves. And they regard the rest of us with a mix of incredulity and derision—can we really be so stupid about the world around us? Hey, it’s not always pretty, the stuff that goes down….

No, it’s not. But I have lived over half a century—more than half my life—and never been in a situation where I needed a gun.

I have been, however, in many situations or more precisely states where it would have hugely inadvisable to have a gun. There’s a reason for the term “murderous rage,” and I might not have seen dawn, those days when I was deeply depressed, if there had been a pistol in the nightstand as I rolled sleeplessly around in bed.

Taí writes an E-mail with some advice her friend gave to her. Get a bulletproof vest and wear it visibly, she says. And goes on to say—she’s a little uneasy too. There are a lot of nuts out there, as well as a lot of guns. And if a murder can happen at a public square at midnight—as it did a month ago, and no one has yet been arrested—it can just as easily happen in broad daylight.

The logic of this goes by me, since anyone who wanted to kill me could simply shoot me between the eyes. Or better, from behind me, at the base of my cerebral cavity. But that’s not my real fear.

My fear is of having to deal with the anger and scorn of people who feel threatened, who see me as an enemy, and who are in the mood and mindset to fight, not take flight. By good luck, I’m a tall guy, which has served me well. Nobody pushes me around.

Be honest—I hate fights. I hate raised voices and widened eyes and the chin thrust belligerently out. Even now, my stomach churns a bit, thinking about it. There are people who thrive on conflict—I do not.

So why do it? Why not sit home and write the letters and make the calls and post on Facebook? Why put myself out there, when I am so much not an “out there” kind of guy?

Maybe the answer is somewhere in the document below.

The bound copy of the list of 33,050 names

Plus ça change...

Well, well—time to dust off the high school French, which I did by consulting, as always, Wikipedia. So here it is: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Or I suppose I could tax my brains a bit and figure out who said—in Latin—that there is nothing new under the sun.

Certainly not the Caribbean sun, shining so brightly on tourists and dropping conveniently away when it’s time to do what we do very well down here.

Smuggling.

Here’s how it works. We send up the drugs. You send down the guns.

That white powder that isn’t talc but is occasionally mixed with it has to come through somewhere. It used to be Mexico, but then things got a little hot up there. So the game changed to Puerto Rico, which famously, in the words of an early 20^th century US Supreme Court decision, is not the United States but “pertains” to the United States. (Anybody up there who can explain that, please give me a call. Been wondering for years….) In other words, no customs. If you can get the drugs in, you can send them in any aircraft, cargo container, or package through the US mail or FedEx.

So the drug traffickers have recreated the Middle Passage, though in this case it’s South America to the Caribbean, not Africa, and now it drugs, not slaves. But don’t imagine that it was Sam Walton who dreamed up logistics, though he did further it a bit. Nobody loves an empty ship.

And here, I take a deep breath and concede—maybe—a point to the NRA. “Outlaw guns and then only the outlaws will have guns!” they cry. (Nice turn of phrase, hunh? Great little marketing slogan….) Because Puerto Rico has probably the strictest laws in the nation about guns.

For one thing, they’re not considered a right. But let the Orlando Sentinel tell the story:

Buying a gun legally in Puerto Rico takes six to 18 months to complete paperwork and convince a police board that the applicant needs a gun. Puerto Rico does not consider gun ownership a right, said Edgardo Nieves, Rossello's spokesman.

By comparison, Florida residents only need to turn to a flea market, gun show or their newspaper's classified advertising section to buy without restriction.

And happily for everyone but the victims, it’s quite profitable. You buy a gun from Craig’s List for three hundred bucks, and you can sell it for three or four times as much on the streets of San Juan.

Well, with a deal like that, everybody wants in, right? So you’ve got your own little business started and established—a punto that is selling cocaine and heroin and god knows whatever else. And then some punk decides to move in on your territory. You gonna let that happen?

Fortunately, there are people who can help you. Sure, it costs, but money is not a problem. This is a business expense.

Now there used to be a little honor—the hit man killed in the punto, not stores or restaurants, or anywhere they could find the intended victim. So if you weren’t suicidal, you stayed away from the puntos. Now, if you’re not suicidal you stay home.

Two points. I may not be ready to concede the logic of “only the outlaws will have guns” to the NRA. It may be if the rest of the nation had our strict gun laws, there wouldn’t be the price difference that makes trafficking them into Puerto Rico so attractive. It might also be that there would be far fewer guns in the fifty states.

Second point—I read yesterday about the Mayors Against Illegal Guns. They are a significant group of 800 mayors; the mayors of Clairon, Clarks Summit, and Felton—to name three towns in Pennsylvania—have all signed a pledge. They’re gonna fight illegal guns, which make up the vast majority of weapons in Puerto Rico.

Well, we have a new mayor in San Juan, a lady who is busy trying to come up with the 800 million dollars that she needs to run the city. That’s daunting.

But what about the old mayor? The guy that put up all the signs announcing the projects that never got the money to get done? He’d been around for 12 years; in that time, why hadn’t he signed on? The group, by the way, is headed by the mayors of New York City and Boston. So they found the time…..

I’ve written about two of the three ingredients in this explosive stew. Here’s the third…

…money.

An Inhabited Life

It’s well past obsession and most of the way into electronic stalking, this interest I have in Martha Argerich. It started out with seeing her play, which is a riveting experience. Here’s the conductor Antonio Pappano:

“It’s impossible to separate the person from the musician – she is music. First of all, what a dynamo! Despite all the energy and mercuriality she has in her playing she manages to get every nuance along the way – which very few pianists can do.

You can’t put her in a cage, you can’t put her in a box, she’s a free spirit. She has such class, such old-world elegance, it’s from another era, almost…  just wonderful!” says conductor Antonio Pappano.

True enough. What Pappano doesn’t comment on is her technique, for which the adjective of choice among commentators is “prodigious.” And she admits it: her natural preference is for a faster, rather than slower, tempo. To see her play a section of octaves in the Tchaikovsky Concerto is akin to watching a landscape from a speeding train. It almost makes you queasy.

She wears no makeup since her trademark hair usually ends up covering her face, anyway, so why bother? Nor is she entirely sure of her nationality, since she rarely returns to her land of birth, Argentina, and has lived in Europe most of her life. Her English is excellent, as is her French, Spanish, Italian, and German.

She arrives to study with Gulda at age fourteen; Peron made it possible by appointing Argerich’s parents to the Argentine Embassy in Vienna. At age sixteen, she has won two major competitions, and is travelling alone and performing in Europe. Here’s her description of the time.

When I was seventeen I lived like a forty-year old. I wanted to have the life of a young student, other people of my age were free, had fun, had no stage fright. I found that my life was sad. I’d travel a lot, on my own. I was very shy, I still am because I think that you stay shy. Today, it’s true, I have friends everywhere, and they look after me,” she smiles. 

Catch that reference to stage fright? Here’s the New York Times on the subject.

Like other legendary performers, including the cellist Pablo Casals and the pianist Vladimir Horowitz, Ms. Argerich has suffered from stage fright. “Sometimes I was in terrible panics,” she says ruefully. “I’d imagine the worst things, imagine a full hall. It’s terrible.” Her knees would tremble so forcibly, she says, that her feet would inadvertently bang on the floor, and she suffered chills and runny noses.

It’s hard to believe, looking at her, that she has anything but supreme confidence and nerves. And really, Argerich on her worst day would be way ahead of most concert pianists. But the anxiety and loneliness got so bad that she stopped her career when she was 19 or 20, went to New York, and, in the words of the Times, “spent a few years watching late-night television.”

She decided in midcareer that she really preferred making music with others, so she turned to chamber music, at which she excels. And she is not a lady who tells all, who reveals all. There’s a mystery about her, there are curtains firmly drawn in her life. She stated once that she wasn’t “lucky” in the marriage department, and that was that.

She surprises. No, she doesn’t enjoy playing, she’s working too hard, it’s not fun any more. She doesn’t know what she thinks about the second movement of the Ravel, and then corrects herself: she enjoys it if she’s hearing, not playing, the music. Her head, when she speaks, is so often bent to her right, as if she is pondering something. The eyes drift up as she considers her response. At times she answers the question instantly, at other times she pauses, thinks, ruminates. And always, she ends each response with a smile that lights her face better than a spotlight.

She is intense, private, and very intelligent. She’s a bit removed, distanced from herself and life. One senses—she has given more joy to others than she has herself received. And she has worked very hard to do so.

Has she lived? Or has she rather been inhabited by that prodigious technique, that enormous talent, that driving and driven demon that pushes her—nose running and knees trembling—onto the stage so many nights? 

Not Enough

There was a time when women had two paths to follow in life and no, you couldn’t choose both. You could go to the university, eye the male goods carefully, become engaged and then get married. You were then a wife and mother until the day you died, barring unforeseen events in life— divorce or death. The other choice was to become a “professional woman”—a name I still find funny—and that meant that, well, dear… you were doing the best you could. You couldn’t find a man. You might not even like men, and therefore…well, let’s just say no more, right?

“It was perfectly fine,” said Franny, when I asked her about it all. “Really, if you didn’t know there was an alternative, you just went along and never gave it a thought. It was only in the sixties, when women started protesting, that it got hard…”

Eric remembers a different story, when Franny was out chasing ambulances, remembering her days as a crime reporter. What was she going to do all day, since the kids were all in school?

I tell you this because I am, in part, in the same boat. There was a time when coming out as a gay man was sufficiently big, sufficiently challenging and risky that that was all you thought about. You hoped your friends and family would be OK. You also hoped that your career wouldn’t suffer and that thugs wouldn’t bash you as you left the bar going to your car.

What you didn’t think about was kids—they didn’t enter the equation. But yesterday I passed Hola magazine in CVS, and who’s on the cover? Elton John, his husband, and their two kids.

The world has changed, for some of us at least. Women can now have careers and babies; gay men can have kids. Which may be why I, after several scotches, left the party late that December night to steal away and cry. I had been watching Quique, Raf’s and my nephew, holding his four-year old daughter. It was a natural thing for him, parenthood, but a strange and wonderful world for me. One that I’ll never know.

And one that I wish I knew, and had lived in.

“I just feel additional,” I’m telling Jeanne. She had been hurt that I seemed distant, remote, more the Marc Newhouse Show than Marc. And it’s true—look, is any uncle important? Mine weren’t—one of them (sorry, Brian, if you’re reading this) was a religious fanatic, the other innocuous and married to a seriously stupid woman, and the third was a pederast. Right, the avuncular experience may not have been an F, but it was definitely below average.

When Franny was there, I was something. I was a son, which was a connection that was primal and primary. When she wasn’t there, I was just a brother or an uncle—which felt like, well, not much. I was the spear-carrier in Aida—decorative, but nobody’s gonna ask me to sing.

“I totally get that,” says Jeanne soothingly. It’s ten AM, I’ve left the house to go sit under the microwave towers for better reception, people are passing me on the street, and I am…

…bawling my eyes out for the children I never had.

She’s gone from being hurt and angry to understanding the situation. As do I. Somehow, the love that John and Jeanne can give me—and my nephew and nieces as well—wasn’t the love I wanted. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t a little girl who automatically grabs daddy’s hand to be pulled into a lap. It’s automatic, now, for Quique. He barely notices the child on his lap; I can’t take my eyes off her.

So we’re better, Jeanne and I, and I come home exhausted. What I should have done was go and cry—it’s better out than in. Instead I busied myself with a post, and then checked on Facebook. Where there was a message from a guy—Meek Mill. “I want a gay daddy,” he writes.

I think of Sonia: “the Puerto Rico gods are never subtle….”

OK, check out Meek Mill by going to Google. And yup, he’s there and he’s a…

Hip-hop singer!

Well, it’s true, that old cliché, about not getting to pick your family. So I steeled myself, I who had been listening to Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) that morning, to listen to Meek Mill. I devoted ten minutes to the task.

Sorry, Meek, but it was a YouTube clip that was best listened to with the mute button on. Every line ended either with “niggah” or “bitch.” It was music to accompany a riot.

Right—and why would a guy who apparently is well known in the hip-hop world want an aging, classical musician for an uncle?

Well, I didn’t know. Do I take it seriously? The clip had over a million hits, and the Facebook page had thousands of followers. Hey, I reasoned, maybe it’s legit! Maybe he’ll tweet about Iguanas—or even read it!—and then I’ll have a zillion sales and can retire to Cuba! Or we can do a cross-over album! Fame, fortune, stalkers and paparazzi! Wow!

One terrible thing about me is that I always assume that things are what they appear. A hip-hop performer in Philadelphia wants a gay daddy? No problem—I’m on my way to the airport.

It’s for this reason that I have doña Taí. She’s much more realistic, and has checked out Meek. And no, it’s not a hip-hop artist but a kid in Ghana who idolizes the real Meek and whose Facebook page has three prominent characteristics:

1.     Atrocious spelling

2.     Copious mention of weed

3.     Pictures of the guy with staggering amounts of cash

A kid who “worked” at Western Union but now, apparently, doesn’t and who is now my Facebook friend and gonna be my son!

Hmmmmmmm…….

Taí!!!!

Help!

Two Phelps and a Geek

Some days it’s a challenge, a daily blog. Is anybody reading? Is it worth it? And what to write about, today?

It happened, though, that Mr. Fernández announced the topic last night at the computer.

“Wow—two of Phelps’s kids have left the church!”

“WHAT!”

“Yeah, and they’ve issued an apology and been excommunicated or whatever from the church.”

OK, if you’re gay or Jewish or Chinese or even just sane, you do what I did: click off the iPad Sudoku and pop over to the computer. No, not because of any tendency of Mr. Fernández to lie—there’s just some stuff you’ve got to see.

For the benefit of anybody who’s been living in a salt mine for the last twenty years, the “Reverend” Phelps has been traveling the country for the last two decades protesting at fallen soldiers’ funerals, since God hates fags, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are God’s revenge or curse on the United States for being Godless and endorsing homosexuality.

This, practicing the understating for which I am famed, raised eyebrows of all of America and a good part of the world.  

They certainly practice no discrimination in who they hate. Actually, I’ll do it the opposite way, since compiling the hate list would wear the skin off my fingers. Here, then, is the one group they love.

The Phelps family!

Who make up the Westboro Baptist Church, which carries surprising weight for a congregation of forty (most named—guess what—Phelps! One thinks of Mark Twain, out in Utah, discovering that nine of ten Mormons were named Smith….) Well, if you stand outside a Matt Shepard’s funeral with a sign like the one below, you’ll get attention.

So much attention, in fact, that a British filmmaker, making a documentary, titled his work “The Most Hated Family in America.”

And one not unfamiliar with courtrooms. In fact, they sailed into the biggest court in the nation—you know, the one in Washington DC with the big steps—and came out an 8 to 1 victor. Oh, and Chief Justice Roberts wrote the decision favoring Phelps, saying that sure, it wasn’t pretty, but Phelps had every right to stand outside the funeral of Matthew A. Snyder and hold up signs like the one above. The father, feeling that the funeral had been trashed—gee, so many people with thin skins!—had taken Phelps to court.

Alito, the one dissenter, wrote:

Justice Samuel Alito, the lone dissenter, said Snyder wanted only to "bury his son in peace". Instead, Alito said, the protesters "brutally attacked" Matthew Snyder to attract public attention." Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case," he said.  (Note—gotta give some money to Wikipedia….)

Well, you know where I weigh in, of course. Look closely at the photo, and you’ll see the little child’s head beaming out against the American flag. And I think that’s child abuse—warping and twisting a loving child into a hate and attention-oops-that’s notoriety-seeking maniac.

But—steering hard here back to the head of the post—the two daughters of Phelps say no. Here’s what one of the wrote in her blog, medium.com:

We know that we dearly love our family. They now consider us betrayers, and we are cut off from their lives, but we know they are well-intentioned. We will never not love them.

Gonna have to think about that. As are the two sisters, Megan and Grace, who, according to The Guardian, are in hiding—at least nobody knows where they are.

I think of them, “trying to figure it out,” as they write in their blog, as they love the family that has cut them off, as they ponder the hurt and pain they have caused so many victims of their “well-intentioned” family. Nobody knows where they are, maybe even they themselves.

I know where I am—in front of my computer with my husband twenty feet away. I’m writing for my blog that from time to time addresses LGBT issues. On National Coming Out Day, I came out to my brother, who was slightly puzzled. I explained—having come out to everyone years ago, I had decided to start the whole over again.

I also know where Keith Orr is—somewhere in Ann Arbor, Michigan—probably working at his bookstore / café. And Keith was the guy who first thought up the most effective way of dealing with the Phelps family. Quick on his feet, Keith heard that his business was going to be picketed on 17 Feb 2001. Instead of a counter demonstration—which just gives Phelps more publicity—Keith sent off an email, asking people to spread the word and join the campaign.

Campaign?

Yup—donate what you can for every minute that the Phelps family pickets the café. The money—over 6000 dollars—went to the Washtenaw Rainbow Action Project, and yes, Sharp Reader, it’s exactly what you think.

Oh, and where was Keith? Inside with the hundred people of so who had donated, and who were having a party and counting minutes.

A curious thing—Keith inside with a hundred people, the Phelps outside with four adults and two small children. February in Michigan can be many things, but warm it is almost never. They were standing alone outside in freezing cold weather, their feet cold and wet, the wind whipping snow into their faces.

They had a message of hate; they were alone and isolated. Keith was warm, at a party, surrounded by support and love.

And Grace and Megan—one of whom ran the website godhatesfags.com—where are they now?

Cut off from their family. Alone, confused, wondering what they’ve done, and perhaps afraid.

Time for confession. I call him Keith, but he’s not. Not to me, or the handful of characters who made up a musical clique at West High in the 70’s.

Great work, Geek!

Question Time

It seems to be my destiny to have a callus on my thumb. For years, it was the left thumb, and the callus was the result of playing the cello for three or four hours every day. This week, it’s the right thumb, and it came about when I decided to compile a list of 33.050 randomly generated names, representing the 33,050 genuine (and nameless, officially speaking…) people who in 2010 died as a result of a gunshot wound.

There was a time about ten years ago when I was a computer idiot—in fact, I had a theory that my own electric-magnetic field collided with any electronic device, especially computers. The moment, it seemed, I tried to use one, it crashed, almost always fatally. So it was a big event, the day I announced to Mr. Fernández and doña Taí that I had done a copy / paste. Their eyes rolled like a drunken sailor at sea.

Well, on a Mac laptop, the only or at least the best way to copy / paste is with the thumb. And the list, which took over ten hours to create, took massive copy / pasting.

So what did I learn from the experience?

Here goes, in random order:

·    The list is in size 12 font (20 for the state), single space and occupies 724 pages.

·    California has the most gun deaths—slightly above Texas, which has, however, ten million more people.

·    There’s a huge range in mortality rate—lowest is Hawaii at 3.3, the highest in the fifty states (hear something coming up?) is Arizona at 20.3.

·    Puerto Rico lo hace mejor is the official tourist slogan assures us, but if we do it better, we don’t do it the best. Yes, with a gun mortality rate of 24.3, we’re pretty high. But unbelievably, the US Virgin Islands has a gun mortality rate of 59.7.

“Why are you doing this,” asked John with genuine curiosity.

And it is bizarre. Look, it is statistically more dangerous to send your kid to sleep over in a friend’s house if the parents have a swimming pool as opposed to a gun. Death by gunshot is about number fifteen on the list of leading causes of death—more people die of pneumonia that gunshot, so why aren’t I out protesting against Staph aureus? As well, there are more suicides by gunshot than homicides—though death is death, no matter who pulls the trigger.

And though the attention always goes to the crazy people with semiautomatic weapons, the reality is that most deaths by gunshot occur by handguns—the very weapons that we are earnestly (and ineffectively) reassuring the NRA we would never, never even THINK about banning.

So why spend all this time and energy—reading thirty thousand names in public?

Is it that guns are such a potently masculine symbol? Am I still, at the age of 56, dealing with being a man?

Or is it the randomness of the act? But wait, most victims know their assailant, and anyway a Staph infection is also random.

If we were going to be honest, we would be forced to admit—seeking a ban on semiautomatic weapons probably isn’t going to do much good. Every gun fanatic has gotten his hands on one or more now, and it’s the handgun that kills more often. So really we should be talking about increasing mental health funding and figuring out a way to reduce handgun deaths.

“So why are you doing this,” asked my brother. And here’s my question—at the end of reading 30,000 names, will I have found the answer?

Disobedient Flowers

I’m horrified to admit that it’s now past noon, and I haven’t written anything.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that yes, I was up by seven, I did the trot, and I’ve been pondering Robert Schumann and Emily Dickinson.

February is always a wrenching time for me, even if I have spent it, these last two decades, in a warm place. And it may be that a Wisconsin childhood will always trump a tropical adulthood. February—darkness. February—change.

And I am facing two potential losses, and starting to grieve for both. Which may be why the final movement of a—for me—unknown piece of Schumann hit me so deeply.

‘How often,’ you think, ‘can Schumann repeat that theme? And why, far from being bored, do I want to hear it again?’

Part of it is the modulation, the shifting from one key to another. Part of it is also the feeling that this is really a folksong, something Mother sings to Baby. A lullaby, really.

It’s marked langsam, the German word for “think glaciers as you play it.” And helpfully, Schumann indicates that it should be melancholic.

Yeah? There’s more blood on the page than ink, and it’s clear—they’re putting the sheets on Robert’s bed in the madhouse. Many people argue that Schumann’s music, in this last decade of his life, shows signs of his mental illness, rapidly cycling between manic elation and haunting grief. And there’s a bit of that in this piece—themes so poignant that you almost feel embarrassed to hear them: they seem to reveal so much so painfully. And yet the third movement is a joy—as playful as a dog chasing a Frisbee on the first day of spring.

So it’s another wonder, another discovery. As was another newcomer, the Master letters of Dickinson. Oddly, they’re from the same decade as the Schumann; the three letters were written between 1858 and 1862.

Time to confess—I don’t do poetry very well. A lot of it goes over my head. More often, it just goes through my head, and seems to stick as well as spaghetti thrown at the fridge. My mother could read Walter de la Mare; I cannot. I get to something like the following and think, ‘so?’   

“We wake and whisper awhile,

But, the day gone by,

Silence and sleep like fields

Of amaranth lie.''

My eyes glaze; my mind is fogged with poetic numbness.

But faithful to my commitment to the mid-nineteenth century, I soldiered through the Dickinson Master letters. And though I ordinarily like Dickinson a lot—seems like a safe thing to say—these letters completely stump me.

Had she been eating too many morning glory seeds? Was a Chinaman smoking opium under her window?

Nor am I alone. Here’s a guy smarter than I:

For nearly twenty years I’ve taught Dickinson and the Master Letters in my early American literature course, always hoping to come closer to the source of the mystery. Instead, just the opposite has happened. The mystery has deepened. The more I study them, the more we hash them out in class, the longer the shadows grow and deepen over their meaning.

That’s Nicholas Rombes, about whom I know nothing. But he has puzzled over lines like the following for 20 years, so he must think it’s worth it….

You ask me what my flowers said—then they were disobedient—I gave them messages—

Gotta be something I get from Jack. Write it simple, write it short. And if, after twenty years of puzzling you’re farther from the shore of understanding, isn’t it time to jump ship? Go on to another poet, and hope for better luck and lucidity?

At the end of his life, Schumann feared that he would hurt his wife. I understand rage and madness, how brooding anger and despair can flash—a match in the rum factory—at a look, a raised eyebrow, the turning of a back. I’ll listen, in these dark days within, to the Schumann again.

But twenty years of wondering about Emily’s disobedient flowers?

Catch you around!