Category: Genitalia

Political Dickheads

June 20, 2011: J. Rosencrantz


The absurd “Global War on Terror”, initiated by handlers of Supreme Court-appointed President George W. Bush in the wake of 9-11, was quickly turned into framework through which the U.S. could wage war abroad and assault civil liberties at home.

After aggressive war based on lies, secret prisons and torture, as well as illegal  spying programs on its own citizens and other blatant violations of the Bill of Rights, the Bush regime and its corporate collaborators received protection (and even “retroactive immunity”) from the leaders of the Democratic Party as soon as they came to power — upon winning the House in 2006, Nancy Pelosi infamously asserted that “impeachment is off the table” and, after winning the Presidency in 2008, Barack Obama directed the country to “look forward, not backward”.

Meanwhile, last week the hapless and narcissistic Congressman Weiner (himself an errand boy for Wall St. and AIPAC, btw) was pressured to resign by these very same Democratic Party leaders.

His offense? Sexting pictures of his dick, in violation of no laws whatsoever.

This comparison “summarizes everything one needs to know about our political culture“, suggests Glenn Greenwald.

Of course, by this point Obama has his own very good reasons for overlooking or condoning certain types of offenses while prudishly condemning others.  For the current Imperial Executive has not only continued the criminal trajectory of the Bush regime, but escalated and expanded it.

Under Obama, the Nobel Peace Warrior, the U.S. is now at war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, with “covert” operations in Somalia and beyond.

And in terms of assaults on civil liberties, the current administration has surpassed its predecessor in radical violations of civil liberties and the rule of law — whistle blowers are targeted by the “Justice” Department, Guantanamo is still open (despite celebrated promises to close it), Bagram’s population of extra-legal prisoners grows, U.S. citizens are targeted for pretrial assassination, and new wars are started without bothering to consult Congress. And all of this is justified by means of the continued use of the dark art of Orwellian Newspeek.

UPDATE 6.22.11:

Regarding today’s expected announcement of a “troop withdrawal” from Afghanistan, ThinkProgress has posted a chart putting the numbers in context:

The “troop withdrawal” that Obama is expected to propose today will leave “far more troops in Afghanistan than it did when Obama came into office and more than at any point during former president George W. Bush’s administration.”

The “Military-Marriage Goal”

January 11, 2011: J. Rosencrantz

With the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, the state will now recognize openly gay men and women as worthy to fight and die in its imperial wars.

On the one hand it is great that the U.S. is beginning to recognize openly gay citizens as fully human — and likely will continue to do so in the nearish future by conceding also the right to marry.

But to get married and become soldiers?  How did these things become the focus of the fight for gay rights?

It wasn’t always like this.  In the wake of Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front issued a Manifesto that located the root of the oppression of gay people in the very form of the Patriarchal Family, “consisting in a man in charge, a slave as his wife, and their children on whom they force themselves as the ideal models.”

The Manifesto argued that “gay liberation” required more than mere reforms to such oppressive social institutions — it required nothing less than revolutionary social change, including a rejection of the very ideal of monogamy.  And of course gays “openly serving in the military” was not even on the radar.

Part of the story of how we got here from there is that the rejection of the ideal of monogamy was made difficult by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and in the ’90s a conservative reaction emerged which fetishized “normality” against the earlier radicalism. A brief history of that debate can be read here, but I’ll quote Judith Butler’s succinct summary of the conflict in her essay “Competing Universalities“:

The lesbian and gay movement, which in some quarters has extended to include a broad range of sexual minorities, has faced a number of questions regarding its own assimilation to existing norms in recent years. Whereas some clamoured for inclusion in the US military, others sought to reformulate a critique of the military and question the value of being included there. Similarly, whereas… some activists have sought to extend the institution of marriage to non-heterosexual partners, others have sustained an active critique of the institution of marriage, questioning whether state recognition of monogamous partners will in the end delegitimate sexual freedom for a number of sexual minorities…. the enstatement of these questionable rights and obligations for some lesbians and gays establishes norms of legitimation that work to remarginalize others and foreclose possibilities of sexual freedom which have also been long-standing goals of the movement. The naturalization of the military-marriage goal for gay politics also marginalizes those for whom one or the other of these institutions is anathema, if not inimical. Indeed, those who oppose both institutions would find that the way in which they are represented by the ‘advance of democracy’ is a violation of their most central, political commitments.

So, what is really to be gained by the repeal of DADT?

First, it must be granted that because gays have been barred from a public enterprise on the basis of their sexual orientation, the repeal of DADT can be seen as an advance of “civil rights”. But there is a moral principle of equality at work here, and it stands in tension with more global considerations. The equality won by the repeal of DADT comes with a built in and nefarious limitation, since it is merely an equality among U.S. Americans in good standing — those outside of the imperial in-group can be (and in fact are) annihilated or disappeared with impunity. In this case an advance in “civil rights” is an affront to human rights universally.

Second, given the general hero-worship of those who sign up to be imperial pawns, gay soldiers stand to gain a satisfying increase in social respect and cultural acceptance from the repeal — but only at the cost of agreeing to follow orders from demonstrably untrustworthy imperial managers.

In these respects, fighting for the right to serve in the U.S. Military looks like a slavish response to Baby Bush’s Manichean Challenge — “We are with you! We are with you!”

In the end, the only thing gained is to be more completely recognized as a part of the imperial in-group, set against the global dispossessed. So winning the right to openly participate in the U.S. military is indeed a victory of sorts, but certainly not a victory for humanity generally speaking.

So much for what is gained. Now what is lost?

Self-described “queer” Medical Student Jess Guh asks this question in a thoughtful essay.  Guh is saddened by the repeal of DADT, in part because she had seen the exclusion of queers from the U.S. military as an “insurance policy against any eventual draft”.  In the event of a draft, she could have simply revealed herself as queer and thereby escaped conscription.

In that sense, the repeal of DADT is the loss of an asset for draft dodgers.

But, she continues, it is also the loss of a “huge opportunity to make more significant gains.”

Like the teen-aged Vietnam War draftees who fought for the right to vote, gay rights activists could have used willingness to participate in the U.S. military as a concession in a negotiation for other rights they lacked:

…equal marriage rights, rights to have a family through adoption, and discrimination protection (the federal Equal Opportunity Employment Law still doesn’t bar firing or harassment over the issue of sexual orientation).  Partners of queer military personnel won’t even be eligible for health benefits, because that benefit requires a marriage certificate.”

Estimating the number of “homosexuals” in the U.S. is a complex project, but it is fair to say that a significant portion of the population fell under the category prohibited from participating openly in the armed forces. Since “a substantial portion of current and future military personnel” are “queer”, Guh asks:

…what would have happened if every queer soldier and ally refused to work, fight? What if queer folk just refused to enlist?  From infantry to engineering to culinary services, all fronts of the American military would have been crippled.  Would we have been able to demand equality in more controversial areas in addition to the simply right to serve?

This would have been negotiating from a position of power.

And actually, such a move remains a possibility. It is also possible (for everyone) to make participation in the military contingent on a just and legal cause — conscientious objectors can come in any flavor.  But as far as I know, the DADT debate was abstracted from any question about the justice or legality of the U.S. military project.

And really, from an anti-imperialist perspective, it is strange to speak of the “right” to “serve” in the military. Why is it considered a “right” to “serve” an aggressive war machine? And is this right universal and human? If so, then what of the universal human rights of those on the receiving end of this machine?

______________________________

Some sources for the collage:  The gay pride revelers come from an amusing satire from the Onion; the Navy officer is retired Reserve Commander Zoe Dunning (Ret.) and her partner; the central body in black and white is from genderqueer, a blog featuring “images of gender-bending, trans and queer people of all sorts, meant to empower and celebrate the beauty within all gender expressions.”; Dan Choi is a prominent activist who worked to challenge DADT.

The portrait of a gay soldier hiding his identity is by Jeff Sheng, from a beautiful series I first encountered at the Manifest Equality artshow in L.A.

Totally Non-Nazi Penis Scraping

October 12, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

In the late 1940s, just as Nazi doctors who had experimented on human subjects were being condemned to death by U.S. military tribunals at Nuremberg, U.S. doctors were themselves experimenting on human subjects not only in Tuskegee, but also, we now find out, in Guatemala.

By now, every school child has heard (or should have heard) about the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which the U.S. “Public Health Service” withheld penicillin from syphilitic African-American men for the sake of a scientific study, with deadly results, even decades after penicillin became the standard treatment.

Now it comes to light that some of the same doctors were actually actively infecting Guatemalans with the disease.

According to the Susan Reverby, the medical historian who broke the story, the doctors chose Guatemala for their dark enterprise because prostitution was legal there, so in order to spread the disease they could simply hire syphilitic prostitutes to sleep with unsuspecting men in insane asylums.  But since this didn’t spread the disease quickly enough, they decided to scrape the inmates’ penises to facilitate the spread of the disease.  Reverby explains:

Syphilis is not an easy—there’s a reason it’s a sexually transmitted disease. You can’t just draw blood from someone who has syphilis and give it to somebody else. You actually have to create an inoculum. The disease—the bacteria that causes the disease can die when it’s in the air, which is why it has to pass through liquids and body fluids, primarily. And that’s why it’s sexually transmitted. So they created an inoculum using the ground-up testes of rabbits that already had the disease, and then they abraded or scraped the arms of people in the prison and in an insane asylum and in an army barracks. They used their arms. They used their cheeks. They also looked for men, frankly—I mean, this is the really, to me, absolutely unbelievable part that makes it look like a B-movie—they found men who had long foreskins. They took their penises. They moved the foreskin back. They abraded the head of the penis. They made the inoculum and put it on a little cotton—what’s called a pledget, or piece of cotton gauze. They held the penis for an hour and a half or two hours and hoped that they could transfer the infection this way.

These two “doctors” both conducted syphilis experiments on human subjects, and are themselves the subjects of a PBS Nova documentary called “The Deadly Deception“.  Dr. John Heller, on the right, who headed the Tuskegee study at the US Public Health Service in the ’40s, promoted penicillin as a treatment for syphilis at the same time as he “continued the policy of denying treatment to the [black] men in Macon County” even in the face of “undisputed evidence that men were dying, no penicillin was offered.”

Dr. John Colter, on the right, was involved in both the Tuskegee and Guatemalan experiments.  Even decades after the experiments ended, he defended the decision not to withhold treatment from people suffering from the disease:

It was important that they were supposedly untreated, and it would be undesirable to go ahead and use large amounts of penicillin to treat the disease, because you’d interfere with the study.

The power of self-exceptionalism is such that these doctors not only failed to recognize the subjects of their experiments as fellow human beings — they were black and brown and poor, after all — but they couldn’t even perceive themselves in the mirror of the Nazi doctors condemned to death at Nuremberg.  Historian Jim Jones relates this story about Heller:

I asked him specifically about Nuremberg and whether that gave him any pause. And he said, “Absolutely not.” I asked him if—whether he ever drew any associations between what they were doing and what the Nazis had done, and he said, “Certainly not.” And then he looked at me with a kind of wounded innocence and said, “They were Nazis.”

“Personhood” and the 14th Amendment

March 4, 2010: J. Rosencrantz

Welcome to the relaunch of The World’s Got Problems. We have been dark for a few weeks but of course the darkness of the world’s problems continues unabated.  So in this inaugural post of the relaunch, I will take a step back and look at certain recent developments as they relate to what I find to be an underlying problem – the dominant political culture’s selective and variable application of the 14th Amendment and the concept of “personhood”.
WGP_Person_2

Three Fifths of a Person

The United States, at its best, is a political order based on Enlightenment principles of human rights and liberty. But compromises were made at the very beginning, most notoriously by writing slavery into the Constitution. In Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 a distinction is made between “free Persons” and “other Persons”:

“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”

The “other persons” were of course the population of black slaves, not so distant ancestors of the current President’s wife and children, who counted as 3/5ths of a “free Person” for the sake of determining appropriate levels of taxation and representation in the House.

After the Civil War, this “3/5th Compromise” was rendered moot by the 13th Amendment’s abolition of chattel slavery, while the 14th Amendment superseded Acricle 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution and guaranteed “due process” and “equal protection” to every “person”.

Corporate Personhood

What is good enough for a freed slave is good enough for a corporation, apparently – within only a couple of decades, “equal protection” began to be applied to non-human “legal persons”.  In 1886, before hearing arguments for Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, Chief Justice Morrison Waite asserted from the bench:

“The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the 14th Amendment…applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”

Although this “obiter dictum” was not officially part of the Court’s decision, court reporter (and former railway president) Bancroft Davis included it in his summary – and it has served as faux precedent ever since.  From Mother Jones:

After Santa Clara, federal judges began granting more and more rights to nonliving “persons.” In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that the Pennsylvania Coal Co. was entitled to “just compensation” under the Fifth Amendment because a state law, designed to keep houses from collapsing as mining companies tunneled under them, limited how much coal it could extract. In 1967 and 1978, businesses prevailed in Supreme Court cases citing the search-and-seizure provisions of the Fourth Amendment as protection against fire and workplace safety inspections.

Corporate lawyers have also taken a shine to the First Amendment. In 1978, the Supreme Court agreed with corporations claiming that the state could not limit their political spending in an antitax campaign. Almost two decades later, a federal appellate court struck down a Vermont law requiring that milk from cows treated with bovine growth hormone be so labeled. Dairy producers had a First Amendment right “not to speak,” the court said. In California, Nike invoked the First Amendment to fight a lawsuit arguing that the company’s public relations materials misrepresented sweatshop labor conditions.

Most recently, the Retail Industry Leaders Association has relied on the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause to fight Maryland’s Wal-Mart law, designed to force the company to expand its spending on employee health care. The retail group has also sued Suffolk County, New York, which last fall passed a similar ordinance aimed at nonunionized supermarkets.

Which brings us to last month when the Supreme Court reasserted the application of legal “personhood” to corporations in their ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which overturns previous campaign finance law and grants corporations (and unions) the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence federal elections.

For Chris Hedges, this marks the final nail in the coffin of democracy. We are now living in a state of “Inverted Totalitarianism“. You can find some some more analysis at the SCOTUSblog. (BTW, the “corporation” icon in the image above is taken from the excellent documentary, The Corporation.)

“Detainees” are not persons.

But while the Supreme Court assumes that corporations are included withing the set of “persons”, actual human beings are still being excluded from the category.

The Obama Administration, for example, decided last month to follow the Bush policy of imprisoning detainees without charges, denying them what the 14th Amendment guarantees to all “persons” – not just citizens.  Glenn Greenwald has analysis of this decision here, where he criticizes the hypocrisy of democratic leaders and liberal pundits who were opposed to these measures under Bush – but defend them now that their guy is in charge. Also, he points out the sad irony of the timing of this decision:

“…today is the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s Executive Order to close Guantanamo within one year — an anniversary the administration decided to celebrate not by fulfilling its terms, but instead by announcing that the central feature of Guanatanamo — indefinite detention with no charges — will continue indefinitely.”

Keep in mind that these “detainees” are merely terrorism suspects – but many have endured torture and years of imprisonment.  Although torture and imprisonment without trial are clearly unconstitutional, those “people” who ordered and legally justified torture brag about their accomplishments, teach at universities and work on their books – without any fear of reprisal.

The US versus THEM mentality that rose from the ashes of 9-11 is still operational under Obama, though it has become more insidious because it appears in intelligent, bipartisan blackface – and therefore now a largely unquestioned feature of “liberal” as well as “conservative” world-views.

Also, it is the perfect mirror of Al-Qaeda’s theological justification for slaughter of civilians – an “American Takfiris”

Homosexuals are people – more or less, sooner or later.

After the 14th Amendment was adopted, there was a wave of marriages between former slaves. But many southern states maintained miscegenation laws which prohibited marriages between the races. It wasn’t until Loving v. Virginia in 1967 that these laws were declared unconstitutional – again by appealing to the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.  According to that decision, marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man”.

And yet gay people continue to be denied this right to in all but five of the United States, and the Federal Government does not recognize gay marriage due to the so-called Defense of Marriage Act signed into law by President Clinton.

The two lawyers on the opposite sides of Bush v. Gore are teaming up to challenge California’s Proposition 8 in Federal Court. You can listen to these strange bedfellows argue the case for marriage equality in an interview with Bill Moyers here. (Moyers, always the seeker of truth, plays devils advocate.)

Also, Gay people still can’t serve openly in the military, also a lingering Clinton policy.  Things look like they are turning around here, however, now that the top defense officials are seeking the end to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.

“NON-LETHAL” WEAPONS AND ITCHY TRIGGER FINGERS

August 24, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

Pictured above, indicating the type of penises they wished they had, are brothers Tom and Rick Smith, founders of Taser International.

At their 2009 conference, they dressed up in gay outfits to hawk their increasingly popular products. Witness the limp-dicked flag-worship fully on display.

At the end of their Keynote Address, they launched into an uplifting sermon about how their company should be “celebrated” for “swimming against the tide of history” by providing weapons intended to “preserve life”.

Meanwhile, between 2001 and August 2008, these “life preserving” weapons were used to kill 334 people, most of whom were unarmed.

Moreover, this myth of taser non-lethality gives cocksucker cops everywhere the excuse (and the legal cover) to torture grandmothers, pregnant women and kids. From Scott Thill:

Did you hear the one about the pregnant woman who was tasered because she wouldn’t sign her speeding ticket, or the pregnant woman who was tasered at a baptism party thrown by her father, a bible-study teacher who was charged with public intoxication in his own backyard and whose wife and son were also tasered? How about the officer who tasered a pregnant woman while inside the police department?

Or the cop who tasered a girl, no lie, in the brain, because he couldn’t chase her down on foot? Or the one that shoved a taser up a man’s ass in Idaho? Or those who tasered and pepper-sprayed an umbrella-wielding man in a Dollar Store bathroom, and after finding out that he was both mentally disabled and deaf still decided to charge him with resisting arrest, failure to obey a police officer and (of course) disorderly conduct, charges which the on-duty magistrate refused to accept? And don’t forget the belligerent baseball fan, the 72-year old grandmother, the bride and groom tasered at their wedding, the bicyclists who were tased after cops tried to run them off the road. And what about that guy who burst into flames? What about the six-year-old who was tasered after threatening to cut his own leg with a glass? (That’ll teach him!)

You can read other stories about tasers here, or watch more cops out of control here.

(By the way, the link between the Taser and Schutzstaffel logos – so subtly expressed in my collage above – was suggested by this post from the Infinite Unknown.)

UPDATE 08/26/09: On second thought, to call these guys ‘gay’ is to flatter them. But I still suspect that they are limp dicked.

HIJAB MARTYR

July 19, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

This woman, Marwa Al-Sherbini, was stabbed to death in a German courtroom in front of her 3 year old son. She was about to testify against her attacker, who she had accused of calling her a “terrorist” and a “whore” because she was wearing her hijab in a German park.

When Sherbini’s husband tried to stop the attack, the police shot him. She was three months pregnant.

She is now mourned in Egypt as the “hijab martyr”, and in Egypt her death has become a rallying point for resentment of the west.

The story is also covered here, here, here, and there is a heartfelt video here.

CONTINUITIES 4 (OF JULY)

July 4, 2009: J. Rosencrantz

To commemorate the 4th of July, here is another update on some of the many ways Obama has proven continuous with Bush:

Civil Liberties
Foreign Policy
Environment
Transparency
Sense of Humor
Gay Rights

And for the fuck of it, here is Howard Zinn questioning the necessity and value of the U.S. War of Independence.

(And btw – the Bush/Obama digital mash-up face is not mine. I just jacked it and placed it in the 4th of July context. I would credit, but I can’t find the original artist. And here is another good image on the same topic.)

BLACK UP, GAY DOWN

November 5, 2008: J. Rosencrantz

M.L.K.’s words in D.C. seem, in retrospect, to have been a blueprint for victory in the presidential personality contest between Obama and McCain. The content of Obama’s character – his obvious intelligence and genuine fair mindedness, his unassailable calm, his love for his family – won out against the white skin of his irascible opponent.

Yet as the first mixed race candidate was elected President of the United States, four of those States passed discrimination laws against homosexuals.

California, Florida and Arizona all passed ban-gay-marriage amendments, and Arkansas made it impossible for gay couples to become adoptive or foster parents.

In the two of these states that Obama won – California and Florida – Blacks and Latinos were instrumental in passing the discrimination laws.

In California, according to AP polls, 70% of African Americans and more than 50% of Latinos supported Prop 8, a state-constitutional ban on gay marriage.

The passage of Prop. 8 also puts into legal limbo the marriages of about 18,000 same sex couples, including that of Robin Tyler and Diane Olson. (Pictured above in black and white, they were the couple whose lawsuit defeated the previous California same-sex marriage ban, and were the first legally recognized same-sex marriage after the original ban was found to be unconstitutional.)

Although Obama did oppose Prop. 8, he didn’t do so very strongly and in fact supporters of the gay marriage ban could quote him accurately in their fliers:

“I’m not in favor of gay marriage…”
UPDATE (9/9/08): Of course, nothing in the above post is meant to excuse anything like this. Obviously, homophobia is not limited to African-Americans, and not all African-Americans are homophobic. And there are African-American homosexuals.