Notes From a Timid Man

There is, apparently, a misconception going on about me, if I read the reviews correctly of the people who have read Iguanas. “Moving and brave,” says one reviewer; “a story of great love and courage,” says another.

Wrong.

That was desperation, those months in spring of 2010, when I / we figured out what we were going to do with “old Mother,” as Franny deprecatingly called herself. And it was easy to be courageous around her—if she could do it, how could I not? And no, writing the book was also not brave—it was just a purging, in a way.

“Courage is knowing what to do in a dangerous situation,” Harry once told me—and he should know. He’s a philosopher; he’s told me a million times what the Platonic forms are (even now, I’ve only a muddled idea); this definition was some Ancient Greek’s, perhaps Plato himself.

OK—so let me tell you how dangerous the situation is.

Three weeks ago, a couple hundred thousand drunks decided to invade my neighborhood in order to progress to greater levels of inebriety, hear noise and make still more, as well as to expel body fluids in forbidden places. They called this Las Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián.

And one of the body fluids was blood. Yes, a man bumped into another man, an argument ensued, and the bumper ended up shot, with two different guns, and left dead on the pavement. The killer(s) logically left the scene, the mood of the crowd became a bit dampened, people whipped out their cell phones and took pictures to tweet and facebook. What didn’t they do?

Talk to the cops.

Yes, the “festival” was weeks ago, and no—nobody’s been arrested. People are afraid of retaliation.

Not convinced?

OK—there is a lovely town in the southwest of Puerto Rico. It’s historic; both Raf and I think it’s the second oldest town on the island. And the people there are gentle, sweet. Once, when Raf and I were looking at (and exclaiming over) a wonderful old house, the owner hailed us, brought us in, gave us a tour, and then made us coffee.

Welcome to San Germán!

Where there was a little basketball game that turned bad. Very bad. One player fouled another player, a discussion ensued, and the guy who had been fouled walked to his car, opened it, took out his gun, and killed the guy who had fouled.

Guys? A little tip, here. It’s a game, got it? Not something to shed blood for.

But there’s a lot of blood shed around here. Consider this…

About one in thirty murders in the United States occur in Puerto Rico. Compared to California—which has 11% of the population—we have about half as many murders. But our population is 1.19% of the US population.

Or this. New York City has three times the population of Puerto Rico and half the number of murders.

“So I can read those names, right?”

I was busy seeking free legal advice from my brother—hey, didn’t I nurse Franny all those weeks? I think of it often: my finest hour as a nurse, though the patient did die…. 

“Just a sec, I gotta take this call,” he said.

I felt a bit bad for him. He had been on a conference call earlier; he keeps getting interrupted by affairs oddly more important that mine; he has not so much taken a vacation as moved his practice to Mexico, which is where I have tracked him down.

“Everybody thinks I’m crazy, but I’d think strongly about it.”

In legal terms, that means “no.”

I’ve told him the plan. Thirty thousand people die of gun shot wounds every year. I want to wake up every morning, take a público (the minivan that gets the un-carred around the island—eventually) to a different town, set up my video camera on the tripod, sit in the plaza and read 100 names. This I will do for three hundred days. And around about the time Christmas is running in, I’ll be done. Hopefully, people will come by, ask questions, tell their stories. Lots of material for the blog, and I can also stick the footage on YouTube, where it will instantly turn viral—who can resist a mad gringo running around Puerto Rico reading thirty thousand names! Wow!

I was, of course, filled with excitement—as fervid as I was when I announced the plan to the CEO of Wal-Mart Puerto Rico to get the annual bonus. Just build an extra supercenter and Sam’s club, and don’t tell Bentonville. See? Thinking outside and OF the box!

My question to Johnny—who was probably salivating for a golf course—was whether I could use the names of actual victims that I had found on a website. The names had been submitted by the mourning families—to me it was public record, or implied consent, or something, but what do I know? This is why I have a lawyer brother—though he may not see it quite that way….

Well, Johnny had a reaction essentially similar to the CEO’s.

“You know, it’s possible that one member of the family put the name of the victim on the site and it was really another member of the family who shot the victim by accident and that guy is a member of the NRA so he goes running to them and they file a lawsuit and they’ve got bigger pockets than you, pal!”

Right, it’s also possible that the pope is conducting satanic masses in the basement of St. Paul’s Basilica.

Well, we agreed—if I use those names, I’ll first put all my money (about 300 bucks) in a Swiss numbered account.

“You know, I just can’t stand bullies and bastards getting away with it,” I said.

You know of whom I was speaking….

“I have only a voice,” I thought today, on the trot. And then wondered—where’s that from? Feels like a poem or something. Well I googled it, and couldn’t find it. But I did find a little gem, with which I leave you.  
  

Making Amends

By Allison Grayhurst

The night is caught

like a mouse’s tail caught

between a cat’s shining teeth.

  Once I believed in recognition

and the glory of making a name.

Now it’s only time before me,

and the ashes of my loved one.

  The world and its shallow passions

is not a place to put my hopes in,

is only the grand flame of ‘me’

and my short span.

  Loving a child is what matters.

No words, no pat-on-the-back,

no cry out for justice or the soft sniffles

of fickle brilliance.

  Soon I will join a tree or even a flower.

The sloping roof with the snow on top -

that is stillness.

  The wind pushes its way under my door

like a maddened bird.

I have no ambitions. I have only a voice

that must continue its singing.

Copyright © 2002 by Allison Grayhurst

(Poem reproduced here with written consent from the author.)

Two Women and a Masterpiece

Well, it was a lesson in comeuppance. I prided myself on being musically literate, well-heard or well-listened, or whatever the musical equivalent of well-read is. But there is a problem with being a musician: you have to learn how to play the instrument. That means that you sit in tiny little rooms with terrible acoustics and try to hear yourself since, of course, there is a tuba player on your left and, inevitably, a trumpeter on your right.

That gives you an excellent excuse to do what you really want to do, which is put the cello down and go hang out and listen to another cellist who somehow has managed to get not just the adjoining practice rooms free but also an entire AISLE empty. So you hang and listen to him or her.

“Wow, that sounds GREAT!” you exclaim completely falsely when he or she comes out, ostensibly to go to the bathroom but really to drive you away. That’s OK, because now you can go hang out with your friends and say snakes and toads (sapos y serpientes—a good Puerto Rican expression) with your pals.

“Yup, the Dvorak…”

“What, she can barely play The Swan!”

“Heard it!”

Multiply this by four years and you have—if lucky—a Bachelor’s in Music, affectionately called a BM. If you have spent enough time in the practice rooms, you may be able to make a career as a musician. If you have spent enough time in the halls, you’ll also have learned a valuable skill. Scratch that word “valuable” and replace with “essential.” Because with the curious exception of those at the absolute top, the average musician is backbiting, hypocritical, insecure, and frequently backstabbing. And cellists, I’m sorry to say, are the worst.

Now then, you’re in an orchestra. That means you are likely to play perhaps fifty odd pieces over and over again for the next forty years. Yes, I exaggerate, but not by much. And you may never listen to any other music again.

OK, look, maybe it’s different now. But it was very uncommon thirty years ago to meet a string player who had listened to Dichterliebe (my red squiggling friend, there ARE some things you don’t know), perhaps the most famous of Robert Schumann’s song cycles.

So I was quite smug, since I thought that having heard a lot of Schumann, I could comfortably be sure there were no surprises. Which is to say, I could ignore the rest of his life’s work. So I was surprised to discover, yesterday, that there was a piano quintet that is well…

…major.

Actually, more than major. It’s at the pinnacle, it’s sitting up there on Mt. Olympus with the gods, and of course EVERYBODY knows it but Marc.

It was written in 1843 in Schumann’s chamber music year (well, I did know about that, though I learned of it only recently), and was first performed, as you would expect, by Clara Schumann, the preeminent pianist of her day.

Although it may not have been she, it might have been Felix Mendelssohn, whom Schumann idolized. Clara was sick for either the first or second performance, so Mendelssohn sight-read for the event.

“Only a man can play this piano part,” said Schumann of the piano quintet opus 44. But the legend is that he said it in a moment of jealousy. She was the hot item; he was on occasion asked if he could play the piano too. (Answer, by the way, is yes—but by no means as well as she….)

She was one tough lady. Her father was very strict, and she was programmed from childhood on to be a concert pianist. She bumps into Robert Schumann as a teenager, and he is smitten. They marry, against her father’s wishes. Robert, of course, goes nuts, and spends the last two years of his life in the madhouse. That might be enough hardship for the average Jane, but the gods apparently seemed to think she needed more. Wikipedia time!

Her family life was punctuated by tragedy. Four of her eight children and her husband died before she did, and her husband and one of her sons ended their lives in insane asylums. Her first son Emil died in 1847, aged only one. Her husband Robert had a mental collapse, attempted suicide in 1854, and was committed to an insane asylum for the last two years of his life. In 1872 her daughter Julie died, leaving two small children. In 1879, her son Felix, aged 25, died. Her son Ludwig suffered from mental illness, like his father, and, in her words, had to be "buried alive" in an institution. Her son Ferdinand died at the age of 43 and she was required to raise his children. She herself became deaf in later life and she often needed a wheelchair.

“Punctuated by tragedy?” How about “saturated?”

Well, she was the breadwinner all her life since Robert was, in his words, “always living in the realm of the imagination.” An excellent place to be, except a dinner time….

And however caring she could be, she spoke quite frankly. She is “hostile”—in Wikipedia’s words—to Liszt. She is “scathing” on Wagner. She calls Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony “horrible.”

It was the custom of the time for pianist to include one or two of their one compositions—she does that, but gives up composition in midlife. But she does more—instead of the showy pieces common in recitals of the time, she treats her audience seriously, giving them the real stuff.

OK—let’s do a better job here. These are the composers she played early in her career: Kalkbrenner, Henselt, Thalberg, Herz, Pixis, Czerny. And here are the guys she played later: Chopin, Mendelssohn, Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and—duh—Robert Schumann.

Oh, and by the way, she teaches for many years at the conservatory. Here’s our friend again:

In 1878 she was appointed teacher of the piano at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main, a post she held until 1892, and in which she contributed greatly to the improvement of modern piano playing technique.

Just reading about her makes me yearn for a nap.

Fitting, then, that the pianist in the clip below is a woman at the top of her game. One hopes that Clara—her work done at last, the money brought in, the household organized, the students taught and the concerts played—is sitting, doing nothing, hearing without the need of playing, seeing another woman as able as she playing her husband’s great music.

Her husband, “who is always living in the realm of imagination.”

The Dying of the Light

Here’s the good news first: not having to do much of anything (one thinks of work), I have plenty of time to learn about wonderful, fascinating places.

And the bad news?

They’re usually being bombed, looted, and destroyed.

And so it is, apparently, with Timbuktu, which I have invoked a gazillion times without being sure if it really existed.

Well, it’s cultural snobbery, I guess, that’s afflicted me all these years, because the city has an old and illustrious heritage. It was founded in the twelfth century, at the crossroads of several African trading routes. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject.

In its Golden Age, the town's numerous Islamic scholars and extensive trading network made possible an important book trade: together with the campuses of the Sankore Madrasah, an Islamic university, this established Timbuktu as a scholarly centre in Africa. Several notable historic writers, such as Shabeni and Leo Africanus, have described Timbuktu. These stories fueled speculation in Europe, where the city's reputation shifted from being extremely rich to being mysterious. This reputation overshadows the town itself in modern times, to the point where it is best known in Western culture as an expression for a distant or outlandish place.

All of this was taking place well before it got into Columbus’s head to check out whether he could get to the Orient by boat.

In fact, in almost exactly the same year that Columbus set sail, Leo Africanus was being expelled from Spain.

It was a disaster for Spain, the Reconquista—it robbed the country of a significant part of its cultural and intellectual life. Think of the Jews who fled Germany in the years before and during Hitler, and then got together to make that little bomb we dropped on Nagasaki….

And Leo Africanus must have been a character. He was born El Hasan ben Muhammed el-Wazzan-ez-Zayyat (don’t blame me if this isn’t right—I copy / pasted from Wikipedia) in Grenada and then, in 1485, gets kicked out of the country. Right, so he goes to Africa, studies, and then accompanies his uncle on diplomatic missions in Northern Africa. Then—here comes the fun part—he gets captured by pirates who decide to present him as an brilliant slave to Pope Leo X.

Speculation break—did the pirates reveal their professional activities to the pope? I can imagine it: a group of pirates wandering into the Vatican, turning a corner, and discovering the pope deep in prayer in the quiet gardens of his palace. “Yo, pope, wanna take a little look-see at this slave we captured,” one of the pirates calls. Head jerks up, “hey, bring him on,” shouts back the pope….

All right, historical fiction may not be my strongest point. Leo talks to the slave, decides to free him, baptizes him as Johannis Leo de Medici (sorry, it may be my cultural bias, but I think it’s a step up from El Hasan ben Muhammed el-Wazzan-ez-Zayyat….) and commissions him, shrewdly, to write an account of his travels in Africa.

Isabel, dear? That’s what you should have done with all those guys….

(Sorry, can’t help it—one wonders how Johannis felt about being baptized. Did he welcome it? Did he have any say in it? Does being captured by pirates lead to a sort of philosophical equanimity about such life events? One imagines him shrugging and saying, “oh well, what the hell…”)

Shrewd because for the next several centuries, all that anyone knew about Northern Africa came from Leo Africanus. Who had been, by the way, to Timbuktu at its heyday, and described it thus:

The rich king of Tombuto hath many plates and sceptres of gold, some whereof weigh 1300 pounds. ... He hath always 3000 horsemen ... (and) a great store of doctors, judges, priests, and other learned men, that are bountifully maintained at the king's cost and charges.   

Sounds like a place you’d want to be, hunh? Here’s more….

The inhabitants are very rich, especially the strangers who have settled in the country.  But salt is in very short supply because it is carried here from Tegaza, some 500 miles from Timbuktu. I happened to be in this city at a time when a load of salt sold for eighty ducats. The king has a rich treasure of coins and gold ingots.

Well, forget the salt, it was—more speculation—those gold ingots that grabbed the attention of the Western World. The city was closed to non-Muslims, and there’s certainly nothing like gold and mystery to whet the imagination. So finally, in 1824, the Société de Géographie puts up a 10,000 franc prize for the first non-Muslim to enter the city. Four years later, the reward is claimed by René Caillié, who enters the city alone and disguised as a Muslim.

Time passes, Timbuktu is no longer rich, no longer influential. North Africa falls under French rule in the Scramble for Africa (and yes, that’s an historical event—the big boys of Europe having decided that it was better to get together, drink some port, smoke cigars and decide among them how to slash up a continent—rather than waste their sons’ blood fighting wars about it. This is civilization, see?). Eventually, Timbuktu became part of Mali. And that was one of the beacons of democracy in African.

One of the tragic things about a civilization is the speed at which “is one of the beacons of democracy” can become “was one of the beacons of democracy.” Timbuktu has or had things like this:

It’s the Djinguereber Mosque, built in 1327. Or how about these?

It’s one of a famous set of tombs that the fundamentalist Islamists who overtook the city months ago decided was idolatrous. And you know what happens when those guys get that idea in their heads? Remember the Buddhas? Well, here the tomb is today….

Oh, and all that learning, all that intellectual activity? Those documents that one scholar had compared to the Dead Sea Scrolls? Those documents, some of which had not been examined or even catalogued, much less photographed?

Might be there, might not. On their way out, just before fleeing the city, the militants set fire to the library. Even now, the damage is unclear. But we may never know what we lost.

It’s a story of fanaticism, hatred, stony refusal to come anywhere near reason. Only Pope Leo gets it. Once, the Islamic world was the center for learning and culture. Once, Spain had a Golden Era. Once, Timbuktu was a city of riches and scholarship.

Dylan Thomas had it right: rage, rage against the dying of the light.

On Shrinks and Singers

“You really should review Iguanas,” I said to my shrink, to whom I had given a draft (and a very rough one at that) on my first visit early last year.

“I’m not gonna commit to that,” he said.

‘Hmmm, that’s very close to where “no” starts,’ I thought.

Well, those long years of toiling in the Wal-Mart fields taught me a few tricks.

“You know, your life is not gonna be fulfilled until your read that book,” I said.

He just laughed.

I should have known he wouldn’t buy in. True, he is a bit unschooled. He has only one diploma in his office, unlike the dozens any respectable doctor would have. So apparently he just attended that little school up there by the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You know, the one founded by…

…John Harvard.

Right—so we can move that concern to the inactive list.

If you’ve never done it, the process of seeing a shrink is curiously personal and impersonal. There’s the shrink, who knows a lot about you. There’s you, who may know very little about the shrink. It’s a one-way window—the psychiatrist peering in, the patient seeing his own reflection.

Which may have been why I felt like a bit of a stalker, when I spent half an hour this morning this morning researching the guy. I had looked him up before my first visit; you really should know into whose hands—rather brains—you’re entrusting your psyche.

Here’s what I read:

Alan del Castillo was raised in Puerto Rico, the son of British and Spanish parents. He has pursued a rich variety of musical disciplines parallel to his medical career. He has traveled often in Latin America, absorbing musical influences from throughout the continent. He first fell in love with South American music when he was studying medicine while living in England. There he met Chilean refugees who deeply influenced him. He performed classical music with the University College Choir and Chorus of the Philharmonic Orchestra of London for 3 years, as well as recording for the BBC. After moving from London to Boston, he continued to play South American music with the trio Andanzas, recording and touring widely. He currently lives in Puerto Rico, where he practices psychiatry, though more often than not he comes to the U.S. to tour with Sol y Canto, particularly since the 1999 release of their CD, "En todo momento," which prominently features Alan as a vocalist. A talented singer, Alan's soulful quena and ocarina playing is one of his fortes.

OK—I’m a cellist, he’s a singer; that might work. Then I met the guy, liked him (which is nice) and trusted him (which is everything).

Well, does he pass the litmus test? That is, is he one YouTube? (Confession, I am not—so who am I to judge?)

The answer—very appropriate for a psychiatrist—is maybe. Sol y Canto is there, and is (with the exception of the songs aimed at children) wonderful. It’s clear—these are talented and committed people, the Amadors and company who make up the group. Rosi Amador is one hell of a singer, and her husband Brian is a great guitar player.

And they’ve attracted attention—garnering reviews from Billboard, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, and People en español.

Right, but where’s the good doctor, with his soulful quena and ocarina? In addition to “En todo momento” he also has recorded “El doble de amigos.” So I went to the group’s official site, logically if not very originally called solycanto.com, and listened to the little snippets they give you as musical samples. Besides Rosi, there’s another singer, a tenor.

But is it del Castillo or Brian Amador?

Fitting, somehow, that I don’t know, as I also don’t the man. I get glimpses, of course—he is blessedly far from being the sphinx that most Freudians are. He’s a gentle man, with a dry sense of humor, and—says Raf, who met him at a party—a very good mimic. He hates to drive, and thinks of retiring in a small Spanish town. He gets my being gringo, but can become very Puerto Rican on seeing an old friend—a receptionist who used to work in the office. He’s my age, but is still running around with a backpack—hasn’t he figured out he’s not back in Harvard Yard?

He uses silence, of course, as a good shrink should do. Which means that he’s quite happy to let the silence grow—he doesn’t return the conversational ball immediately. He’ll wait and see—is there more?

Or perhaps he’s reflecting, testing my comments in his mind. Or observing.

And though I suspect the thrill of being a shrink may have dimmed some for him, he does it with consummate skill. I’m lucky to have him.

Now, doctor, what about that review?

Ridiculous or Sublime—You Choose

OK—here’s the way I figure it. You have enough stuff in your life that makes you crazy—why read a blog that’s a constant rant?

Right—so no raging about the NRA, no screeds on The Fellowship, no angst today.

And that leaves us….

Where?

My shrink, as he often does, has the answer.

Where the hell is Matt.

You probably know the guy—but if you’re not among the people who have seen Matt 43,000,000 times on YouTube, you should check it out. This guy has a unique dance—vaguely resembling the prairie chickens’ mating ritual—and guess what! He’s gone all around the world getting people to dance with him.

People write him emails, inviting him to their city to dance. Occasionally, he’ll post a notice on his website announcing that he’ll be in a city, and invite people to come out and dance with him. Almost 200 people turned out in Madrid, but only a handful in Viejo San Juan. No matter, he photographs everyone, gets a signed release, and then they dance.

There are some places his doesn’t get emails from. So what does he do?

Kids—they’re naturals. Until, of course, they get the bright idea of going straight up to the camera and sticking their tongues out. And he’s got it figured out—better not to give money directly to the kids, but rather the teachers. The money gets better spent.

What’s great about Matt is that he’s making a living doing something he loves. And he’s apparently quite successful—he’s managed by Creative Artists Agency and has a corporate sponsor.

So today’s post gives you a choice. An idiot having good goofy fun with half the world, or 10 or 15 people playing and singing a sublime piece of music.

Of course, you could always do both!

Oh Yeah?

Readers of this blog will know about Doug Coe—the secretive force behind the National Prayer Breakfast.

Oh, and much more.

He makes no bones about it, though he doesn’t say much—really anything—publicly. He, and his group The Family (also called The Fellowship) minister exclusively to the rich and (especially) politically powerful. They form “cells” around congressmen and women, Coe can enter virtually any office and be received with hugs. Face time with the president? No problem! (At least with W.—don’t know about Obama….)

And he has a curious tendency to invoke Hitler as a supreme leader—a man with consummate rhetorical skills (can’t be denied….), a man with a gift for organization (true), and especially a man who starts with a handful of men and almost changes the world permanently (can’t dispute that). 

Now then, let’s move to Uganda.

Say what, you exclaim!

Bear with me.

There is in Uganda a transgendered man who is fighting—against horrific odds—against virulent homophobia. How virulent, you ask? Consider this:

Or this quote from Pepe Julian Onziema, the man adduced above:

I am here, still, in 2013, but I dread things as simple as shopping at a kiosk for groceries, because the owner has told me he doesn't sell to "such people." If I insist, he said, he will "teach me how to be normal." A full night's sleep is thwarted by the fear of a stranger who has followed me home or the neighbors who have formed a mob. My personal struggle is a small reflection of the entire LGBTI community's everyday apprehension.

That’s from an article in CNN entitled “Living Proudly in the Face of Uganda’s Anti-Gay Bill.” Here’s Onziema on the topic:

Since 2009, my community has faced the potential passage of an anti-homosexuality bill that threatens Ugandans in same-sex relationships with life imprisonment (there are conflicting reports on whether the original death penalty provision remain). This year, many Anglican Church officials and other leaders have declared the legislation's speedy passage as their New Year's resolutions, with the bill scheduled for discussion when Uganda's parliament reconvenes in February. As a transgender man, I am not safe.

I knew about this, of course, and signed an online petition against it. So did a lot of people. But the click of a mouse is a minor thing, a few minute muscles flexing, a little electronic blip going out into the world. The Ugandans may pass the bill. Onziema may end up as dead as his partner David Kato, with whom he founded SMUG—Sexual Minorities Uganda. This is the second anniversary of Kato’s…

…murder.

This would scare the bejesus out of me. How do you get that courage, that strength, to live with the constant fear of everything? A Cuban friend told me once a very simple definition of a free society. You’re in bed at two o’clock in the morning; you hear footsteps on the pavement outside your house. You yawn and go back to sleep.

That’s a free society.

Your body tenses, you sweat, you know you should run but are paralyzed.

Police state.

Well, the guy is still fighting, and still has hope. And one glimmer of hope is thrown lightly into a paragraph:

And I hope to win a U.S. lawsuit against American evangelist Scott Lively for the anti-gay terror he exported to my country.

Well, that rang a bell. We’re back to Doug Coe and The Fellowship, whose influence goes far and wide, into the little countries that no one knows about or cares about, or even knows where they are. But some of those places have minerals or other resources, and maybe even a little domestic strife, in which case a nice little weapons deal can be brokered with the (for now) leader who is, by the way, your brother in Christ. Oh, and want to sit at the president’s table for the National Prayer Breakfast? No problem!

And in fact, I knew that a group of Coe’s “fellows” had ventured down to Uganda, to talk about that ole devil, the gay menace!

Click, and I’m on Wikipedia reading up on Scott Lively. And it seems he is lively in several senses (you could see that on the horizon, couldn’t you?). I joke, but it’s not funny. Lively and company arrive in Kampala in 2009, and here’s his account.

"Thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians," reportedly attended the conference.[4] Lively and his colleagues "discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how 'the gay movement is an evil institution' whose goal is 'to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.'"[4] Lively wrote days later that "someone had likened their campaign to 'a nuclear bomb against the gay agenda in Uganda.'"[4]

Nothing like thumping the Bible to stir up a little hate! And the guy is an author too (as well, by the way, as an abuser of women—he assaulted a woman in 1991, she sued, he got stuck for 31,000 bucks)!

You can guess the topic. But the title?

The Pink Swastika.

Here’s Wikipedia again:

Along with Kevin E. Abrams, he co-authored the book The Pink Swastika, which states in the preface that "homosexuals [are] the true inventors of Nazism and the guiding force behind many Nazi atrocities."[5] Several historians have questioned the book's claims and selective use of research.[6][7][8][9][10]

“Several” historians? Is there ANY historian—who doesn’t happen to be a religious nut case—who could possibly NOT question the book’s claims?

I take a pill that reliably wakes me up in the middle of the night with a craving for food. (OK—carbohydrates…) That gives me time to look into the crannies of the Internet, the places I ordinarily wouldn’t go. So I found myself spending time last night with Ruth Maier, often deemed the Norwegian Anne Frank.

An Austrian from a cultured family (father had a doctorate in philosophy and spoke nine languages), Ruth escapes to Norway, her sister—more luckily—makes it to Britain.

The footsteps on the pavement outside, one night, became her worst fear. She was deported to Auschwitz and gassed immediately.

And yes, she left behind a diary—one critic compares her writing to Hannah Arendt and Susan Sontag (wow!) And she had, it seems, a passionate affair with her soul mate—a woman called Gunvor Hofmo. They were, if my 2AM reading serves me, lovers.

Well, the Norwegian government apologized, almost exactly a year ago. Here’s more copy / paste from you-know-what….

The Holocaust came to Norway on Thursday 26 November 1942. Ruth Maier was one of the many who were arrested that day. On 26 November, just as the sky was beginning to lighten, the sound of heavy boots could be heard on the stairs of the boarding house “Englehjemmet” in Oslo. A few minutes later, the slight Jewish girl was seen by her friends being led out the door of Dalsbergstien 3. Ruth Maier was last seen being forced into a black truck by two big Norwegian policemen. Five days later the 22-year-old was dead. Murdered in the gas chamber at Auschwitz. Fortunately it is part of being human that we learn from our mistakes. And it is never too late. More than 50 years after the war ended, the Storting decided to make a settlement, collectively and individually, for the economic liquidation of Jewish assets. By so doing the state accepted moral responsibility for the crimes committed against Norwegian Jews during the Second World War. What about the crimes against Ruth Maier and the other Jews? The murders were unquestionably carried out by the Nazis. But it was Norwegians who carried out the arrests. It was Norwegians who drove the trucks. And it happened in Norway.

—Jens Stoltenberg, prime minister, 27 January 2012

There were 532 Jews deported that day.

An apology is an empty thing unless it gets backed up by something. Actually, an apology is a debt, an obligation to change, for which you will pay and struggle until the change is complete.

Half a million homosexuals were exterminated in the Holocaust. An American writes a slanderous book, piling blame on the victims. The Anglican Church of Uganda wants to rewrite and relive history.

To my knowledge, I haven’t played a part in any atrocity.

But anybody who doesn’t speak up is complicit.

I’ll borrow some words from the woman who gave me as much moral compass as I have.

“SCOTT LIVELY, GO STRAIGHT TO YOUR ROOM AND DON’T COME OUT UNTIL YOU’RE GOOD AND SORRY!”

¡Basta ya!

Let me tell anyone reading out there a little secret.

The world is a mess. Our country is a mess. Yes, the economy is slowly improving; some of us even have jobs! But there’s lots of stuff to do. We should be worrying—and maybe acting?—on global warming. We’ve got big issues like the widening disparity in wealth, the horrendous question of the national debt, terrible problems in our mental health system, to say nothing of a huge group of vets who are facing posttraumatic stress disorder.

Into this picture steps Dianne Feinstein, to whom I cheerfully gave four minutes of my time this morning (not, happily, having a job to have to get to…). 

Well, you can imagine that of course I like Dianne Feinstein—I was happy to be the choir at which she preached. Though I did find myself getting a bit annoyed with her. She was rational, she had done her homework, she was explaining one of the criticisms of the 1993 ban on automatic weapons and going into great detail about how gun manufacturers had gone around the law by removing one bolt or piece on the weapon, and boom! Legal!

So why was I annoyed? Don’t I want my senators to be intelligent, articulate, prepared? (Answer, for those who may need it—yes. Actually—with a nod southwards here—I’d really like my president to have the stated characteristics…)

Guys—how much time are we gonna spend on this issue? How many gazillion hours are we going to waste talking rationally to zealots who will never, never, never change their minds on the issue?

Oh, and by the way, didn’t we use to have a democracy, before the NRA roared into town, bought all the senators and representatives they could, and cowed all the rest? And weren’t there guys called journalists, who let us all know what was happening?

I spent four years of wincing as I watched Obama trying to reason with Tea Party republicans. And I felt the same way—almost—just now with Feinstein.

Well, well—I turned from that to the clip below. I knew that the fifteen-year old kid in New Mexico had taken his family out. And I know that apparently he had thought to go see my old pals at his local Wal-Mart—and no, not for those every-day low prices! He had the minivan all packed with his then-dead dad’s semiautomatic weapons.

So what happens? He decides to go to his church, instead. And spends the day there, hanging with his friends and girlfriend. A parishioner tells the pastor—something isn’t quite right with the boy’s family.

Well, by one of those things I call coincidence and more churchy people do not, there’s a guy on hand doing a drill on what happens if there’s a mass murderer in church. (Pretty obvious, I’d say—dive under the pews and pray!) So the guy giving the talk / drill speaks to the fifteen-year old kid, and they decide to go check it out. The kid has said, “yeah, I came home and discovered my whole family dead.” But he hadn’t called the cops, or told anybody but—presumably—his friends. Somewhere on the way to the murder scene, the former cop / now security consultant gets the whim-whams. He feels evil in the back seat, where the kid is riding. So he stops the car, pulls out his cellular, calls 911.

“Do you feel that you may have prevented the next Sandy Hook,” the reporter asks the pastor. The pastor thinks maybe.

Wrong question.

Well, we now live in the land of Google, where most questions now have answers. And so I looked into it—are guns an effective means of self-defense? Jack, my father who had a gun (kept in his underwear drawer—Sigmund? You in the house?) always said no. You hear a noise in the living room, it’s two in the morning, you get up, see the bastard, lift your gun, squeeze the trigger and BAM!

Killed the fucker!

Your fifteen-year old son, who had a little craving for cookies and milk.

And Google, predictably, has the answers. Guess what? According to something called guns4U.com (invented, but you get what I mean) the answer is….

OK, scroll down to a study by Harvard University. Of course the NRA won’t trust it, but the rest of us do. So what do they say? 

 Across states, more guns = more unintentional firearm deaths

We analyzed data for 50 states over 19 years to investigate the relationship between gun prevalence and accidental gun deaths across different age groups. For every age group, where there are more guns there are more accidental deaths.  The mortality rate was 7 times higher in the four states with the most guns compared to the four states with the fewest guns.

Miller, Matthew; Azrael, Deborah; Hemenway, David. Firearm availability and unintentional firearm deaths. Accident Analysis and Prevention. 2001; 33:477-84.

Now can we get down to work?