So, I’m no tech-head–not by a longshot–but this uTOK thing looks kinda interesting. At least, I think it does. As I understand it, it’s sort of a freestanding guestbook for every webpage on the planet. Anyone out there given it a test drive?
Truth be told, cookiepuss, I have a habit of lusting after unlikely TV personalities, too. Luckily, I’m not alone.
Storms in New Orleans are sudden and violent and intensely beautiful. I can’t imagine living without them.
The opening speech of Angels in America: Millennium Approaches is one of the most powerful ever penned.
Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz, speaking at a woman’s funeral, touches on issues of nationality and affection and identity and…well, it’s pretty amazing in scope (to me, at least). The thought that this speech was at one time just stuck in Kushner’s head, or saved to a flimsy floppy disk, or scrawled on a crumpled piece of paper–the thought that it could have been lost makes me weak in the knees. I’ve copied out a selection I find particularly moving. Don’t let me know if you hate it.
This woman. I did not know this woman. I cannot accurately describe her attributes nor do justice to her dimensions. She was…. Well, in the Bronx Home of Aged Hebrews are many like this, the old, and to many I speak but not to be frank with this one. She preferred silence. So I do not know her and yet I know her. She was…not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania–and how we struggled, how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would not grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted. Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America, you and your children with your goyische names. You do not live in America. No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppes–because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in Flatbush, and she worked that earth into your bones, and you pass it to your children, this ancient, ancient culture and home.
Looking back over my last post, I think Jay probably said it better–and in far fewer words. I bow to your eloquence, monsieur.
HEY! I’m about to get EXTREMELY pedantic here. You might wanna click back later when I’ve got something a little more lighthearted to share. I’m just sayin.
Huzzah! There’s the sort of Britcrit we know and love! I knew he’d find that pesky text lying about somewhere or other.
So his fundamental question is this: “Why are married people being financially rewarded?” And my response: I dunno, maybe it has something to do with a little thing called Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman! …Oops. That’s from something completely different. (I hope someone out there knows what I’m talking about.)
Seriously. It all boils down to that quirky-but-lovable economic system we’ve gradually adopted as our own: capitalism. More specifically it has to do with capitalism’s raison d’etre, private property.
Private property–be it land, t-bills, or an entire collection of original, boxed Barbie dolls–is just that: private. It belongs to an individual or a specified group of individuals. When those individuals shuffle off, their private property remains (unless of course they’ve made arrangements to be buried in the manner of those decidedly anti-capitalist ancient Egyptians) and must therefore be passed on. And, of course, the legal family makes for convenient lines of such inheritances, conserving property and power among bloodlines. Marriage perpetuates and extends those bloodlines, thereby maintaining the family’s wealth.
Oh, and let’s not forget: building family = building the nation.
So, basically, as long as we’ve got private property, the family will be of central importance, because, yo: it’s all about the benjamins (and keepin’ ’em around for your hunny). That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t open ourselves up to more diverse sorts of legal unions: if Jonno and I were to decide that Tom was really top-notch in our book–and who’s to say we won’t?–we should be able to form a three-way hitch that’d ensure the proper handing-down of all our photos, mementos, and my sizeable collection of McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. (Actually, you can have ’em all, Tom. Jonno can’t stand ’em.)
So given all that, is it any real shock that governments favor the family unit? I mean, maybe when we start mowing down people at 30 like they did in that lovely Logan’s Run, maybe then we can talk about nixing financial breaks for the old married folk. But given our current position, I think it’s a bit unreasonable.
Besides, legal unions ain’t all that. I mean, married folk have to attend twice as many family functions, which takes all the fun out of saving a couple hundred bucks on annual taxes.
The great thing about it, of course, is that I think Tom, Jonno, and I would probably agree on a lot of the same issues. I’d even send him an email if my #@$%! SMTP server was working properly….
I’ve just come from a grants review session in which the panel discussed more applications from organizations with horrid acronyms than I can possibly recount here–groups like ARTISTS: ARTs In Schools To better Society. No, really. Such convoluted names always remind me of that passage from Metropolitan Life in which Fran Lebowitz ridicules the entire phenomenon with fictional organizations like HURTS: Hemophiliacs Usually aRe Terribly Sick.
The session wasn’t all bad, though. I got to re-read a big chunk of Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, which I’m teaching on Thursday. If you haven’t read it, well, I don’t know what you’re waiting for, but hop to it!
As a little interesting lagniappe, the author of Angels, Tony Kushner, is from Louisiana’s bayou country (somewhere out near Grand Mamou, I think), though he now lives in NYC. Interesting mix of identities the man’s got going on: Louisianan, gay, Jewish, intellectual….
Yes, boys, it seems as though someone has taken an uncharacteristically Foucauldian/poststructuralist stance on the matter–unusual for a Brit, since they all seem so keen on materialist/Marxist philosophy.
(Um, sorry. That’s just my years of highfalutin’ grad school jargon coming out. Sometimes I slip. I’ll keep it to a minimum.)
I mean, I understand what he’s trying to say: historically, marriage has been a sort of institutionalized inequity, so if queer politics are about reshaping norms and ideas of what’s acceptable and getting rid of social inequity, why adopt marriage as one of the planks in our platform? Unfortunately, that sort of philosophy falls on some very hard rocks in the face of legalities that prevent g/l/b/t partners from securing inheritances, visitation rights, and countless other benefits that legally joined partners enjoy (except, of course, in the great state of Vermont). And yeah, people who prefer triads or quadruple relationships should have those rights, too. Ultimately, the point is that “marriage” or some sort of legal union is beneficial for partners who’ve chosen to share life, love, a house, and the good china. Just because marriage hasn’t always been fair doesn’t mean we need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Oh, politics, schmolitics. This makes my early-morning head hurt. Follow Sparky‘s lead and read the new issue of Handbag. It’s British, too, just to keep the Anglocentric thing going.
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