On Sunshine and Smallpox

Nope—not today!

It’s so clear that I’ve been screwing up massively here, because the world, at which I’ve been hectoring, admonishing, tisking and tasking…this world of ours? Well, the fact that I’ve been singing—at times consciously, at times unconsciously—the song “Trouble in River City” from “The Music Man” should tell you something.

OK, I have stirred the Catholic Church to move from the late fifties to the early sixties on LGBT issues—I’ll give you that. Oh, and then I did a pretty good with SCOTUS on marriage equality. But gun control? Rising Islamic fundamentalism? The Mormons? I’ve failed miserably.

So what I should do today is to alert you to today’s piece of really awful news, the good part of which is that you can stop worrying, as I know you do, Concerned and Brow-Furled Readers, about whether to destroy those last tubes of the smallpox virus that are in some lab in the States somewhere. Yup, the issue is over! Done! Finito!

If—completely improbably, but just to be professional, here—you haven’t done your share of preoccupation on this issue, here’s the story: on any list of the ten greatest medical accomplishments in history, the eradication of smallpox in 1975 will be number one or two. Why? Because the disease killed a billion of us.

So we kept a few vials of the virus, and Russia has another, and everybody has been scratching their heads ever since about what to do with them. Get rid of them altogether (I’m raising my hand here!)? Or should we save them for “scientific purposes” (what for? Should we resurrect Hitler to see how many more Jews he can kill?)

Nope, the whole issues is moot because, according to The New York Times, the genome for the smallpox virus is online, and there is a technology—what the boys in the labs have been up to!—that essentially squirts the four building blocks of DNA into a test tube and then arranges them in any way you want. So—in theory, and maybe in practice, since I became so disgusted with the whole thing that I walked away—you, and any scientifically-minded terrorist, could make the smallpox virus.

Why do I think that there is something so typically masculine about this? Why do I think that no woman would either keep the damn virus or publish the genome on the Internet? Or is it that I’m just peeved because I’ve had a fight with Sunshine, the bearer of papaya leaves and thus my personal savior, who is working today on 1.000002 knees?

“I was running around the rainforest two weeks ago and I fucked up my knee,” said Sunshine, as he lurched, or Frankensteined, to get my coffee.

So what had he done about it?

Waited two weeks, went to the doctor yesterday, had an X-Ray, and will now have to wait a week for the results to be read….

“What,” I sputter, “that’s fucking ridiculous! Any intern can read an X-Ray! They can give you the thing, you can go back to your doctor, who will tell what’s up. That’s crazy!”

“Nah, man, it’s the government plan. I’m used to it….”

Remember Russian medicine?

So Sunshine was lurching like a drunkard, grabbing on to things and trying unsuccessfully not to wince, and that’s when I lost it—seeing him wash dishes in the kitchen. Right—that’s twenty feet from the cash register for us, twenty miles for Sunshine.

“I AM FUCKING WASHING THE DISHES!” I told him, and then I got two tall chairs and put one in front of the espresso machine and one in front of the cash register.

“You’re going from one to the other,” I told him, “and on one foot. I’ll do the rest. I mean, how many goddamn dishes have I done in my life?”

So I grabbed a dirty cup and HE grabbed the dirty cup, and we were both pulling the cup like kids pulling a dried wishbone, when we looked into each other’s eyes and realized—what happens to the wishbone could very well happen to the cup, and would Lady be pleased? Though come to think of it, having a dish fight in the kitchen of the Poet’s Passage—where I am completely prohibited so sue me, OK?—would be tremendously therapeutic.

So there we were, having the coffee cup equivalent of chicken, when it occurred to us: one of us was gonna have to veer. And guess who that was!

“Fuck you,” I told him, and fortunately the only other person in the café was a regular, limping himself from the chikungunya, and saying, “God, we’re all fucked,” as he passed us. So I’m blazing away at Sunshine—“IF YOU HAD A KID AND THAT KID HAD FUCKED UP HIS KNEE WHAT THE HELL WOULD YOU TELL HIM!”—and the guy is looking up, periodically, with all the insouciance of a cat (actually, the guy could teach the cat) and is it doing any good? Will I get this dumb, stupid, wonderful guy to fucking rest his knee?

Of course not, so I retreat, choosing to shout at him—remember, the café is virtually empty—“YOU SITTING DOWN, SUNSHINE?!” Or, when I hear him at the sink, “I HEAR YOU, DAMMIT!” 

That’s the thing about guys, of whom I am one, though being gay does—maybe—give me another set of eyes. Because right now, Lady has finally returned from Costco, and in normal times I would help unload, but today? No, since my hip is hurting.

So now a guy has come into the shop, and guess what! He’s asked for a goddamned, fucking glass of water, for Christ’s sake, and I fucking want to KILL the bastard! Can’t he FUCKING SEE that Sunshine is injured! SHIT! So now Sunshine has to limp over to get the goddamned water and it’s not even a sale and Sunshine—of course!—will get no tip.

Well, I’ve gotten up to inspect the sales area and guess what! One of the chairs has completely disappeared, and the other? Turned with its back to the cash register, and if I never heard a chair speak—and quite elegantly—before, well, I have today. And what was it saying?

Fuck you!

Which is too bad, because you know what?

I really want another cup of coffee!                  

Something Rotten in Wisconsin

Well, it’s been bugging me for a month now, but as the host of the world’s longest-running viral show, I didn’t have the strength to do it. But then Sunshine came through with the papaya leaves, and it turns out—dammit—that Montalvo was right. I am still have swelling and stiffness, but the energy is returning and the depression dissipating. So it’s time to look up north in Wisconsin to the Bad River, or the Penokees, which feeds into Lake Superior. For generations, the Ojibwa have fished for walleye there, as well as harvested wild rice.

The area, however, is blessed or cursed with more than that. There’s iron up there in Iron County—who would have thought?—and the area was settled later by, among others, the Cornish. So they were digging mines while the Ojibwa were hunting and fishing, and everybody—presumably—was happy. (Ooops, from watching the video below, I later discovered I was wrong….)

Eventually, all the iron that could be extracted by underground mining had been exhausted, and the industry collapsed decades ago. But there’s still iron there—in fact, two billions tons of it—if you’re willing to do an…

…open pit mine.

In the Wisconsin I knew, the citizenry would have been involved, the issue discussed, the “pro” of job creation balanced against the “con” of risk to the environment. And we all—most of us—would have trusted that the whole affair was being regulated and then monitored by whatever state agency was responsible. But consider this quote, from The New York Times article titled—tellingly—How to Buy a Mine in Wisconsin:

Newly released documents show that the (proposed) mine operator, Gogebic Taconite, secretly gave $700,000 to a political group that was helping the governor win a 2012 recall election.

So Walker survived the recall—though there were allegations of voter fraud on the part of the Republican Party—and then in 2013, the whole question of whether to allow open pit mining in Iron County began anew. And in case you’ve forgotten, we’re not talking about any little mine, but what could be the world’s biggest mine: up to 21 miles long and 1000 feet deep. Here’s what I said about that in my previous post:

21 miles? The average adult walks about three to four miles per hour. So leave your home tomorrow, Dear Reader of Unknown Location, at 8 AM. Walk in as much of a straight line as you can until 4 PM (I’m giving you an hour for lunch). That’s what 21 miles is.

Oh, and 1,000 feet deep? OK, get a night’s sleep, and then run out and find a high-rise apartment building. Step into the elevator and punch the 100^th floor. That—inversely—is how deep this pit will be.

We’re talking, in short, about a monster of a mine; nonetheless in 2013 the Wisconsin State Legislature approved it. Back to The Times, again, about that legislation:

The mine legislation was bad enough from an environmental point of view: It allows the operator to fill streams with mine waste, eliminates public hearings and reduces the taxes the operator would have to pay.

And the reason for why the Legislature approved a bill so substantially in favor of the mining industry? Well, as you can see in the video below, the Senate Majority Leader, Scott Fitzgerald, being greatly pestered by a guy with a camera, got frustrated and admitted the truth. And that is?

The mining company wrote the legislation.

This video has had less than 500 views—how can that be? And since when did a legislator become nothing more than a rubber stamp for whatever corporation is able to write him or her the biggest check?

Does the story get any prettier?

Well, who’s Bill Williams, the president of Gogebic? What’s his history?

Ready for some Spanish?

La cúpula directiva de Cobre Las Cruces irá a juicio por contaminar en 2008, con arsénico el acuífero reservado para consumo humano.

La Audiencia Provincial de Sevilla confirma la imputación de François Fleury, Bill Williams y Paz Cosmen, a solicitud de la Fiscalía y de Ecologistas en Acción.

(“The board of directors of Las Cruces Copper Mine will be tried for pollution in 2008 with arsenic in the reservoir reserved for human consumption.

The Audencia Provincial of Seville confirmed the charges against François Fleury, Bill Williams and Paz Cosmen, at the request of the District Attorney and Ecologistas en Acción.”)

Was that all? No, because according to the article, the same company was charged with construcción ilegal de balsas con aguas contaminadas, detracción ilegal de aguas subterráneas.  Balsas, by the way, are holding ponds.

And in case you’re in any doubt? The article concludes with:

El norteamericano Bill Williams dejó la dirección de la mina en enero de 2011 y actualmente es presidente de Gogebic Taconite, proyecto minero en Wisconsin (EE.UU), que amenaza gravemente el Lago Superior, los abastecimientos de agua y los cultivos tradicionales de arroz de la reserva de indios Chippewa.

Dejo / left

Actualmente / currently

Amenaza / threatens

Lago / lake

Abasticimientos / waste

Arroz / rice

Well, Williams and Gogebic Taconite certainly learned something in Spain: let’s head back to The Times again, referring to the Wisconsin legislation:

It allows the operator to fill streams with mine waste…

In short, they weren’t making that mistake, again, so what did they do? Bought off the legislature, and wrote legislation that allowed them to pollute.

Well, all roads lead to YouTube, where I discovered that Al Jazeera English had commissioned a Milwaukee company, 371 Productions, to make a documentary for Faultlines. But when I was writing my first post, all that was available was a trailer.

‘How could that be, I thought,’ and went to 371 Productions website. There, I discovered that the film was being shown to groups for public / community discussion. Oddly, at that time, Madison—the state capital and home of the University of Wisconsin-Madison—was not on the list of towns where the film was going to be shown.

As a former Madisonian, I found that weird. The city—the second largest in the state—has a long tradition of liberalism and activism: nobody in Madison was hosting the film?

Good news—someone now is. Here’s the screen shot from the website:

Perhaps it was a good thing, then, that the virus descended, because in my search for papaya leaves, and in the general misery caused by their lack, I put Wisconsin and the Bad River mine on the back burner.  And today, strength having returned, I found that Al Jazeera has put the whole film on YouTube, and here, Dear Reader, I have to confess: I despair of ever seeing the whole thing. Why?

…because for the last ten minutes, I have been stuck at 17.47 out of 24.27, while that stupid little wheel rolls and rolls. Know what I think? The café where I write just got crowded, and everybody is using up my Internet!

A month ago, when I first came on the issue, it occurred to me: we’re dealing with a new beast. Crooked politicians? We’ve always had them, and we’ve dealt with them, to varying degrees of success. But the crooked politician was motivated by greed, nothing more. What do we have now?

The crooked ideologue.

Yes, women and men who loathe big government, mistrust regulation, have a hatred for the poor, and merrily accept the big bucks that corporations—oooops, those are people now—are willing to contribute to their reelection funds. Secretly.

Crooked politicians were bad, but the crooked ideologue?

Way worse!

The Pope Moves Tepidly...

OK—this is the headline:

And here’s the lead:

In a dramatic shift in tone, a Vatican document said on Monday that homosexuals had "gifts and qualities to offer" and asked if Catholicism could accept gays and recognize positive aspects of same-sex couples.

“Dramatic?” “Shake Up?”

Boys? My Latin is rusty, but here’s the English version:

In a dramatic shift in tone, Pope Francis issued an official apology for the two centuries in which the Church has condemned homosexuality as—in the words of his predecessor, Pope Alumnus Benedict XVI—“intrinsically disordered.” He acknowledged that the Church’s position had caused “untold misery and suffering” for millions of Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered people, and had led to ostracism from their families, their communities, and their church. He deeply regretted those whom the church had rejected, and saluted those who had spoken up and pressed for change. In addition, he directed that the clause within so many Church contracts stating that the signee would obey church teachings be immediately voided. 

Guess what? That took me all of ten minutes to write, though I spent three of those kissing Lady and chatting in the kitchen.

Ten minutes—wait, it really took a lifetime, as I realized when I mentioned parenthetically to Sergio, whom I barely know, that I was gay.

“It’s really good that you can come out and be honest with yourself, ‘cause I know so many men who can’t….”

Here, Sergio echoed Jorge, who confided once, “you know, Marc, I swear: every man on the island is bisexual. I go out and before I reach the street corner….”

Sergio went on to say that his gay friends were—often—more loyal than his closeted friends, because hiding takes so much energy. It’s the archeology of fear: the first stratum is rejection by the family (yes, it still happens, and may be happening more, since kids are coming out earlier and earlier, and since gay has gone from being utterly taboo to being on the front page of the New York Times.) Digging deeper and deeper, you uncover the various strata: the fear of losing your job, the fear of being seen at a gay parade, the fear that your friends will reject you, and ultimately…

…the fear of yourself.

So let’s run back over to the Vatican and reread that statement: here are the two components:

1. homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer
2. could Catholics recognize positive aspects of same-sex couples?

The first implies that though most of the—sorry—fruit is rotten, we could cut around it and find something edible. So that takes us back about 40 years, when every woman knew that her hairdresser—whom she just adored—was…well, that way. Hairdressers yes, but CEO of a major corporation? I went looking for one through the fields of Google, and only now discovered that Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, got outed by “accident” by CNBC last June. My point? In every press release announcing a promotion, the last paragraph throws in a line that runs something like this, “Tim Cook is married to Rebecca Walters, a criminal lawyer, and has three children.” So however far we’ve come, we’ve still got a lot of guys out there who need to go farther.

Now then, could Catholics recognize positive aspects of same-sex marriages? Isn’t it curious, that phrasing—is the Catholic Church polling its members? Is it pleading? It seems a variant of the old let’s-pity-those-homosexuals-who-are-sick-and-doomed-to-lead-lives-of desperate-loneliness…. And what are the positive aspects? That those two boys will bring a fabulous quiche to your brunch? That with the two Lesbians on your softball team, you’ll knock the other team out of the ballpark?

As Frank Bruni so ably pointed out, the Catholic Church is obsessed with being gay, and most particularly, being openly gay and—gasp—getting married. Because we’ve all been reading cases in the last year of Catholic schools having no problem welcoming a gay teacher’s live-in lover of thirty years to faculty parties, but what happens when the couple ties the knot? Well, let’s hope that the teacher is independently wealthy, and just doing that teaching gig for fun.

You know, there’s a point in which parents of kids who have come out make—and I say this sincerely—a big step by just asking how the child’s partner is. For parents have to come out too, and who’s to know which coming out is more difficult? At least I was in charge of my life; I could call the shots. But my mother? Wondering if I would be another Mathew Sheppard? Would I find a good partner? Would I die never having been loved? She may have had the worst of it: I had the auxiliary verb “will,” she the more terrifying world of “would.”

Right—so the baby step of acknowledging a relation is small, but it’s a step. But the Catholic Church? Why is it that I’m so reluctant to believe that this amounts to nothing more than a mealy-mouthed attempt to appear less homophobic than they are?

And my last question—why do we all need to see this new pope as a wonderful change, a man who is breathing new air into the church, who will shake it up and regenerate it and finally, finally let us sit at the table?

My answer?

Richard Dawkins, if I recall correctly, once theorized that our need for religion is linked to the biological programming of children bonding to and obeying their parents. True? Who knows?

But I think that all the gay Catholics who welcome this new pope are doing what all the gay teachers were doing when they brought their partners to the faculty parties: they’re accepting scraps from the table. But what will happen when gay people really demand a place at the table: as priests, as parents, as pope?

Do you see a place setting there?

I don’t…. 

     

Storm Anxiety

Only my granite devotion to serving you, Dear Reader, has forced me from the task urged upon me by the governor, the head of the National Meteorological Service, and various officials charged with protecting my person and property. Even now, the governor is speaking—or trying to, since even the people who voted for him admit: he’s just slightly better than W in the speaking department. So what’s up?

Right—for those whose geography of the Caribbean has faded a bit, the four islands south of Florida are (from left to right) Cuba, Jamaica (south of Cuba), Hispaniola, and finally Puerto Rico. OK—so what is that menacing thing, its hour come round at last, slouching towards Puerto Rico to destroy?

Enter Tropical Storm Gonzalo, which formed last week, and which will arrive in 12 to 24 hours. Conversely, maybe it will not arrive, but slide 50 to 100 miles or so to the east of us. No one knows, of course, but every local channel has been obsessed with the storm since yesterday. And what guy would pass up the chance to look governorly and to issue statements urging us to maintain ourselves in a state of calm but acute awareness as the atmospheric phenomenon approaches? Oh, and under no circumstances should you LOWER YOUR GUARD!

The effect of the constant iteration—as well as seeing photos like the one above—tends neither to produce calm or awareness. Because I have no idea what the photo above is actually measuring: wind? Water vapor? Dust particles?

The point of the picture is to stir up anxiety, because what doesn’t the picture tell you? Well, the storm is barely a category one, most of the rain is expected to fall in the ocean, and anyway, there’s a big mountain—el Yunque—on the east coast, which will deflect the hurricane. So for all of us in the San Juan area? Consider closing your windows!

I’ve lived here for almost twenty-five years, and how many “alerts” or “warnings” have I experienced? Estimate—probably sixty or seventy. Right, so how many hurricanes?

Maybe two, only one of which qualified—since my definition of a hurricane is that you’re sitting in the dark, listening to a sound I cannot define. It’s actually a combination of sounds: the howling upper winds, thunder, the sounds of things being wrenched off buildings, the sound of things slamming into buildings—yours included—and the worst, for me, the sound of the doors first rattling, then shaking, then violently pounding. The demonic force wants in….

And if it did? If some killer hurricane with winds of 165 miles per hour came directly at our house—an atmospheric drone, perhaps—and the contents of our house—all the painting, plates, chairs, ornamental objects—became the most lethal flying objects?

Raf and I have it figured out: we’d leave, and then sit in the staircase leading to the second and third floor—boring but perfectly safe….

The hurricane presents a series of paradoxes. Most people fear the wind, but by far the greatest damage is the water. Most people dread the storm, but the worst period is afterward, when people up in the mountains are cut off for weeks, when you haven’t taken a hot shower in days, when you may have to wait months before your electricity agrees to come back, all the while watching your neighbor across the street—connected to a different line—drinking ice cold beer and watching his 60-inch flat screen.

The storm will be hyped, the shelters will be opened, and people living—often illegally—in the flood plains will come trooping in. This is a problem, since we are a gregarious bunch, and who wouldn’t like to hang all day, chatting with your friends and neighbors, complaining about the inefficiency, and accepting three free meals a day! The problem, one social worker told me, was not to get the people into the shelters, but to get them out.

Add to this the fact that today is Columbus Day, which some people are celebrating—OK observing—OK, getting the day off. So now we’ll have a really long weekend!

The penultimate paradox? The hurricanes that don’t come inflict almost more damage than those that do. Because if you have bought into the hysteria, fought for the last bottle of water, snatched the last can of salchichas—chicken sausages, and quite tasty they are—from your neighbor’s hands, and endured the annoyance of waiting for twenty minutes in line to pay for all of this, well, how would you feel when it only rained for ten minutes, and the wind never picked up?

You should be relieved. But you’ve been on high alert for two or three days—and now what? While all of this nonsense was going on, did anyone cover you at work? Answer your emails?

And everybody will be in the same position, which means even if you do manage to enter your job with a smile on your face, it will be eroded by 10AM.

But if the storm comes and you lose your roof? Well, no work for you, since you are waiting for FEMA to come and chatting with your neighbors and drinking cold beer because he has a generator and the trade off is that you’ll have his noise and he’ll give you cold beer. Then FEMA will eventually drift by, you’ll get the blue tarp for your roof, as well as, eventually, a check. Which means that you now have the down payment for a new car: autos sale went through the roof after the last hurricane.

Finally, the hurricane restores the inherent nature of the people here. A student once told me that after Hurricane Georges, all the neighbors got together, cooked on gas stoves together, shared food and stories, laughed, and enjoyed whatever breeze came by. The stars—rarely seen in Puerto Rico—were blazing brightly, since the entire island was dark. And so they passed several weeks, until one night—BAM all the lights came back on! People cheered, and everybody headed back home, eager to be in air conditioning and watching TV.

But my student?

She was at her window, looking at her neighbors—most of whom she hadn’t known well before the storm—in their homes, and wishing…

…they would all come back out again!