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Our Bodies, Our Sports! - Washington, DC June 23
Tuesday, June 7, 2022
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Tuesday, May 31, 2022
Yes Virginia, there are UFOs
If you spend any time on the internet, you will daily see geographical ranking listicles: the best colleges, the best small towns, the best places to retire, the cities with the worst drivers, the states with the worst tippers or the rudest residents.
Apparently whoever or whatever is behind the UAPs (the acronym for the new bureaucratese “unidentified aerial phenomena” - what we used to call UFOs) that the Senate Intelligence Committee will soon tell us about - also seem to have a list of where they prefer to visit.
Former national intelligence director John Ratcliffe hinted that the report will be surprising, telling FOX News anchor Maria Bartiroma, “We are talking about objects that have been seen by Navy or Air Force pilots, or have been picked up by satellite imagery, that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain, movements that are hard to replicate, that we don’t have the technology for or are traveling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom.” By now everyone has seen or read or heard some mainstream media coverage of UFOs, but almost no one seems to be talking about the UFOs preferred destinations.
The National UFO Reporting Center maintains a database of reports of UFO sightings and it organizes them by state, as well as by shape of the UFO and other categories. NUFORC, which is not a government agency, is run by Peter Davenport, a man with a variegated career who recently bought an abandoned missile silo in which he has built his home. NUFORC is coincidentally located in Washington state, a state that had an early UFO sighting in 1947, and which is also high in NUFORC’s rankings.
If UFOs become as hot a political issue as the Electoral College has been recently, NUFORC may come under attack for its methodology. In NUFORC’s rankings, the state of Virginia, for example, is 35th in the rankings, and California is even lower at 45th place.
But now that the government is about to tell us what it knows, we see fairly constant interviews with people like Navy pilot Lt. Ryan Graves about daily incursions by UFOs into restricted air space, often over waters near military bases. Graves saw them over waters near Virginia Beach, Virginia, telling 60 Minutes “The highest probability is it’s a threat-observation program,” said the pilot, adding: “If these were tactical jets from another country that were hangin’ out up there, it would be a massive issue. But because it looks slightly different, we’re not willing to actually look at the problem in the face. We’re happy to just ignore the fact that these are out there, watching us every day." Other military pilots report seeing or following them in Florida and California.
NUFORC does its rankings by dividing the number of sightings in a state by the population of that state. It’s almost operating under the current notion of “equity” plaguing education and other public policies. It would be “unfair” to rank a big state like California highest, even though it has the most reported UFO sightings in absolute numbers - California accounts for over 10,000 of the 90,000 sightings in the NUFORC database - (with Florida second) because populous states have more eyes with which to see them. The result is that relatively unpopulated states - Idaho, Montana, Maine, and New Hampshire - top the NUFORC’s rankings for UFO sightings, even though as an actual count of sightings they have relatively few. Local newspapers and online publications actually cover NUFORC’s rankings often. Maine’s Portland Press Herald was so pleased with the state’s high ranking in the sightings that it even generated a handy map in which the Northwest and New England are the dark blue regions of intense UFO activity, and the rest of the country, including California, Florida, and Virginia, are light blue regions of little interest to the UFOs.
This gives an inaccurate picture (literally) of where most sightings are. After I wrote a first draft of the article below the FAA actually released statistics on where both UAP/UFOs and also explained unmanned aircraft like drones are concentrated, and the Virginia/North Carolina coast and another circle from Arizona to San Diego are the two major American hot spots.
Perhaps in these low density states civilians really are better able to see the truth that is out there: less light pollution from big cities means whatever happens in the night, from shooting stars to UFOs, is easier to see.
If you get rid of NUFORC’s division of sightings per capita, the listings change. California and Florida are in first and second place, whether you are looking at only reports in 2020 or at NUFORC’s total cumulation of sightings by states and Canadian provinces. Virginia rises from 35th to 14th, with the states in this order: California; Florida; Washington, Texas, and Pennsylvania clustered together; Ohio, Arizona, and New York clustered together; Indiana and New Jersey with similar counts; then Colorado, Illinois and Michigan; and then with only slightly fewer Virginia, followed closely by Georgia and North Carolina.
The waters off of North Carolina are the same Virginia Beach and Norfolk area waters where Lt. Graves said he was daily seeing UFOs. If you put Virginia and North Carolina together, as a kind of UFO equivalent of the Census Burea’s MSAs (metropolitan statistical areas), they leap to third place (though that is true of several other combinations of adjacent small and mid-sized states.) If you scan through the NUFORC reports for Virginia, Virginia Beach, and surrounding coastal areas (known to pilots as Warning Area W-72) are well represented. Virginia Beach military personnel have been having UAP/UFO encounters for years before Lt. Col. Graves appeared on “60 Minutes.” In 2020 the New York Times reported that the “Navy Reports Describe Encounters With Unexplained Flying Objects” covering Virginia Beach sightings starting in 2013.
This list of the top 16 states visited by the little green, or grey, men doesn’t align closely with states of large area that might have more geography free of light pollution. Only five states - Texas, California, Arizona, Colorado and Michigan - are in both the lists of the 16 largest states and the 16 with the most UFO activity. Alaska, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Wyoming, Minnesota, Utah, Idaho, Kansas and Nebraska are large states but don’t have so many sightings.
A better overlap appears if instead we look at the 15 states that receive over $10 billion in defense spending in 2019. Ten of them are also on the list of states most popular with UFOs: California topped the list in 2019 with $66 billion, and Virginia came in second at $60 billion (only 0.3% of which, $22 million, was spent on the Pentagon’s UFO program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program), along with Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, New York, North Carolina, Colorado, and Georgia. Only five of the top 15 states for defense spending are not among those most visited by UFOs: Maryland, Alabama, Missouri, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. I have a suspicion that if one isolated only Air Force, or perhaps an aggregate of Air Force, Space Force, and naval aviation spending by state, the overlap between a narrower category of defense spending and UFO sightings might increase. (My “study” here is pretty back of the envelope, but some statisticians published an academic paper showing that in France, where about 20% of UFOs are never explained away, UFOs seem to favor visiting nuclear facility sites. And there is a heavy overlap between civilian and military nuclear programs.)
Not having any previous acquaintance with UFO enthusiasts - beyond enjoying science fiction - and having only been to the Virginia Beach/Norfolk area four or five times, I decided to reach out to people in Virginia who work in each area.
A survey of the various local coastal Virginia tourism agencies produced a pretty universal reply that they were unaware of any subspecies of tourism motivated by seeing a UFO, the way one might take a cruise to see a whale. One did refer me though to a local businessman, Tom Van Benschoten of Rover Cruises, who very entrepreneurially replied “Good morning! We have not received that request yet but might be a good idea for a future cruise!”
Virginia actually has a wealth of UFO enthusiasts who have devoted decades to a study of UFOs and have their own theories about them. One, a (now retired) emergency room medical doctor, Dr. Steven Greer, was profiled by the New Yorker in an article this year on why the Pentagon now treats the topic more seriously. Dr. Greer, who started a group called the Sirius Disclosure Project, has been on record since 1999 saying he does not trust the government to honestly disclose what it knows about UFOs, and he reiterated that this week: “The new Pentagon report continues a 75 year long disinformation campaign.“
Whether the government can be expected to tell the truth about the UFOs, we still want to know: Why do the little green men seem to stalk our military, especially here in Virginia?
Another Virginia UFO researcher provides one theory. Jessica Youness is the founder of the UFO Club of Virginia. When I asked her for her theory of the concentration of sightings near Virginia Beach, she opined that there are extraterrestrials visiting us because they use the ocean to hide: “Of course there are patterns, most Ufologist/Researchers know this because they, as I, have been studying sightings for decades. Depending on the area, for example the East Coast, the relation to the pattern would be the ocean. Water makes the perfect location for a base or short term stay on Earth because they will be 'unnoticed' and hidden from public view. Humans are limited to what they can do in the ocean and Extraterrestrials can protect themselves under the ocean by simply moving quicker and hide where humans cannot go. Therefore, more UFO Sightings.” This of course fails to explain why they are hiding, or rather being sighted, in coastal waters, rather than making their visits in deeper waters far from shore.
Another answer is given by Andrew Follet, a writer skeptical of whether there are UFOs. Writing in National Review (and conservatives, from Tucker Carlson on down, were until this month leading both the coverage of the UFOs/UAPs and the discussion of what their implications are), Follet argues that we should all “calm down.” The reason military aircraft keep picking up weird images in restricted airspace is because at the extreme speeds the aircraft travel, their sensors are subject to distortions that cause images of things that aren’t there. It is hard to know which is more concerning for our military readiness: that our restricted military airspace is being daily invaded by UFO/UAPs or that our military aircraft have sensors that don’t work when they fly at the speeds they would need to obtain in a conflict. Though Follet and other skeptics don’t want to consider explanations involving extraterrestrial intelligence, they may be fighting a losing public opinion battle. In a 2020 Ipsos poll 45% of Americans believe there may be aliens, up from 35% two years earlier in a Chapman University poll. (It will be interesting to see what the poll results will be after the Senate Intelligence Committee releases its report.)
Another explanation is offered by the left-wing, anti-American (or anti-American military) writer from Australia, Caitlin Johnstone. Johnstone’s hypothesis was actually the basic plot for Christopher Buckley’s 1999 comic novel, Little Green Men: the Pentagon fakes UFO sightings (and even abductions) so it can ask for bigger military budgets. (Jessica Youness also advanced what could be considered a different but slightly similar version of this hypothesis for why we are getting disclosures now: “My expectations are different than the general public's. As a Ufologist and researcher in this field of study, I am more aware of events and sightings all over the world, the general public is not. What I expect the 'Senate Intelligence Committee' will release (and they will release something) in specific is more video from the Navy in particular. This will also show the location of these sightings within the video. There will be more of course, but this will help the government get more money for the Space Force, the DOD and other space related trips, inventions, committees for monitoring Extraterrestrials, etc.”) On the one hand you could criticize this theory by pointing out that Biden is increasing most government agencies budgets by around 16%, while freezing defense spending (each of which will effect different parts of Virginia in different ways), so the coming disclosures (which were actually mandated by President Trump) aren’t working. On the other hand you could argue that having DoD budgets frozen would drive the military to make - or make up - disclosures it hopes will encourage the public to support more military spending.
There are other explanations, one suggested by a new science fiction show, NBC’s Debris, which just wrapped its first season (update: and has now been cancelled). Debris borrows its plot from the 1976 David Bowie movie, The Man Who Fell to Earth. (Or perhaps news reports of the celestial object dubbed Oumuamua that passed near the earth in 2017.) A derelict alien craft has entered our solar system, and pieces of it crash to earth as meteorites. The U.S., British, Chinese, and Russian intelligence agencies are in a race to see who can retrieve the most, and the most potent, pieces of this advanced technology, with an eye to reverse engineering and harnessing it for its weapons potential. At one point a character who is one of the scientists trying to do the reverse engineering has a bit of dialogue that reads like a libertarian public choice theorist: “Governments are created to serve the public interest. And everywhere, inevitably, they serve their own.” What if real world government officials - the same ones who lie to Congressional Committees about illegal domestic spying on American citizens or lie to Presidents about how many troops are stationed in Syria - have captured crashed alien craft and are trying to steal the intellectual property therein? And the aliens are not happy about the theft and haven’t licensed the use of their technology? This hypothesis accounts for the - growing? - sightings of UFOs and for why they so often enter restricted military airspace.
And if it creates a hostile relationship, it fits in with our long history of government policies that have disastrous unintended consequences and require spin and cover-ups for those who implemented them.
-----
Another version of this article appeared on the excellent Virginia politics blog, Bacon’s Rebellion.
Monday, May 30, 2022
Are Gays Amoral?
If Randi Weingarten is the witch who eats Hansel and Gretel, will Pete Buttigieg be the Grinch who stole Christmas?
Recent events - first, the rape of a 13 year old girl by a male student wearing a skirt, in a wealthy DC suburb, where the male student was protected by the Loudoun County (Virginia) school board's transgender policies, second, the head of the Human Rights Campaign (a major gay lobby) helping cover up Governor Andrew Cuomo's history of sexual harassment - raise the question of whether the LGBT movement has become amoral.
We used to think just being gay was immoral. Just thinking about gay people involved what philosopher (and left-liberal feminist) Martha Nussbaum called an "ick" factor. Odd in a way, since the anatomical concatenations available to two men or to two women are virtually all available to and used by heterosexual couples (with some recherche exceptions).
Of course some schools of natural law theory might press harder, and suggest that many people's icky feelings were not over particular acts which gay and straight people both perform, but over something else: giving up procreation, giving up gender-specific roles in sexual coupling, giving up having children that are produced with the one you love.
Modern medicine has overcome the first of these objections: lesbians could always easily become pregnant and have children, but now gay men, from Bravo host Andy Cohen on down, can have biological children as well, at least those gay men with enough disposable income.
The third objection, being unable to have a child that is the genetic fusion of yourself and your spouse, is a serious downside. Though I know at least one gay male couple who have two children, each with a different one of the two fathers, but both from the same mother, so that the children are biological half-siblings, and everyone in the household is biologically related to at least one, if not two, members of the family. One suspects biotechnology is going to provide a solution here as well.
The middle objection - that men in gay couples must at least sometimes be unmanly and women in gay couples must be unwomanly - is probably the objection that makes people feel the "ick." It's probably why people - even “CIS gender” gay people - feel uncomfortable with transgender and nonbinary and gender fluid people. (And Merrick Garland.). Whether this is a ... fruitful ... line of inquiry is questionable. There are heterosexual couples who seem to reverse roles about who is more aggressive and who more passive, both in bed and out. And if as most gay people believe, they were born that way, opposing their legal equality or social respectability because of what then would be rightly seen as a birth defect, would be cruel and itself a moral failing. Even if, as with many defects and deformities, one feels an “ick.”
But this is not what is involved in the gay amorality we are seeing in the public square today.
Neither is the now regular stream of famous gay people who are exposed for major moral failings. Ellen Degeneres is ending her famous talk show in part from being accused of being a mean and racially bigoted employer who allowed her immediate underlings to sexually harass her lower staff. Rosie O'Donnell seems to have a problem with drink and is unable to keep a wife, despite being fabulously wealthy. CNN anchor Don Lemon is charged with groping a man in a bar. Actor Kevin Spacey comes out as gay to deflect from charges that he sexually assaulted an underage actor. Actor Jussie Smollette lies about being the victim of a hate crime to further his career. Director Bryan Singer leaves a long and lucrative association with the Marvel X-Men franchise because of accusations of sexual harassment of actors and underage males. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who like Vice President Kamala Harris, ran a somewhat fraudulent Presidential campaign just to get a job in the Biden administration, then disappeared furtively into paternity leave exactly at the moment of a national crisis the oversight for which his Department is responsible. (I leave aside as ancient history Congressman Barney Frank's fixing parking tickets for the johns of his prostitute lover.)
This
parade of moral turpitude by America's homosexual celebrities is
interesting in that each failing seems to involve a gender inflected
failure: the lesbians are mean, when women are supposed to be nice, and
the men are cowardly and furtive, when men are supposed to be brave.
It is also interesting that after the #MeToo movement (and other popular
culture campaigns) we are all now expected to view heterosexual men
(especially white heterosexual men) as suspect, because of Harvey
Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Anthony Weiner, and
Richard Epstein. (And Teddy Kennedy and Bill Clinton.) But we can't
have stereotypes of mean lesbians or cowardly gay men, no matter how
many children are abused by the gay woman in control of American
schools, Randi Weingarten
of the American Federation of Teachers. (If Randi Weingarten is the
witch who eats Hansel and Gretel, Pete Buttigieg is about to be the
Grinch who stole Christmas.)
This pattern of celebrity immorality is also not what I am asking a question about, but it does get closer. You can now make all the jokes you want about male lechery and bad behavior. But you can't joke about us gays. Comedian Dave Chappelle responded to some gay activists criticizing the black community for not rushing to support victim Jussie Smollete, by observing that black people were supporting him "with our silence," because he was so obviously lying. Chappelle added that if he were Smollette's father, he would have "broken a doll house over his head."
For making jokes about the un-manliness of Smollette's dishonesty and attention-seeking, Chappelle is now a prime target of gay activists. In Chapelle's new and great (but often misinterpreted) comedy special, The Closer, Chappelle observes that black people are shocked and awed by the progress of the gay community in America. Gays have leap frogged over African Americans, moving from being held in contempt in the 1950s as mentally ill, immoral, national security risks, and a threat to children, to now being the group that above all one dare not criticize, or make the butt of a joke, in public. Even if you happen to be black or are America's greatest stand up comic.
Earlier this year there was a piece in the Washington Blade, Washington. D.C.'s oldest gay newspaper, revealing a curious disregard by gaydom for another oppressed group that started the movements for civil rights for people in marginalized communities. In a review of a biography of Billie Jean King, the Blade's regular arts and book reviewer, writes "King, a feminist and lesbian, is believed to be the first woman athlete activist." Thus overlooking Wilma Rudolph, the black woman who won Olympic medals in the early 1960s and insisted that her hometown of Clarksville, Tennessee desegregate the homecoming parade it wanted to throw in her honor. And then went on to lead lunch counter sit ins, start a foundation, and meet with President Kennedy. Over a decade before Billy Jean King.
This
solipsism is part and parcel of official gay activism's disregard for
women and racial minorities, whose movements for civil rights were the
template for the gay activism that has been so successful. Of course,
gay activists do not think they are anti-woman or anti-black. After all
they support Democrats in every election! Recent events suggest gays -
or more precisely what Chris Barron,
the founder of the defunct conservative gay Republican group GoProud
called the GayTM - have become entitled, solipsistic, callous,
thoughtless, and believe they not only can no longer be joked about, but
don't have to answer any questions about their failures or the failures
of policies they push. Policies they push that are often little more
than grist for the gay lobbies’ fundraising mills.
Though the official gay movement, the gay PR team for the ruling political class, decided some time ago to throw women under the bus by agreeing to adopt the transgender demand to destroy the women’s sports that Billie Jean King (and Martina Navratilova and others) built, by allowing biological men to compete in them, recently political class gays have been caught in hiding sexual assaults against women.
Alphonso David, the head of the largest gay lobby, the Human Rights Campaign, was fired for helping Governor Cuomo strategize about how to cover up his history of sexual harassment. But not pro-actively - neither the New York Democrats nor the HRC Board of Directors took action against Cuomo or David when they were covering up sexual harassment, but only when the story became too public to hide.
A 13 year old girl is raped by a biological male student wearing a skirt in Loudoun County, Virginia. The transgender student is then discovered to be a serial rapist, who has been protected by the local school board, eager to enact transgender inclusive policies, by being moved from school to school after accusations, rather than being suspended and immediately charged with a crime. When the father of the victim tries to speak at a school board meeting, he is beaten, stripped (maybe unintentionally), handcuffed, and arrested.
Since the accused rapist was given increased access to female students by the school system's transgender policies, and since the school officials seemed to have been covering the crimes up, perhaps in their minds to prevent criticism of these transgender policies, one might think the local LGBT activists would be out in front denouncing the rape and criticizing the presumably faulty implementation of the transgender policies they advocate.
Local suburban Virginia LGBT groups routinely email anyone on their mailing lists asking that they show up at local school board meetings wearing purple, carrying rainbow flags, and speaking on behalf of policies allowing transgender students to pick their bathrooms and locker rooms, regardless of anatomy. As I was writing this I received an email from the gay activists in neighboring Fairfax County:
"Friends,
If you are able, sign up to speak to the school board this week: either
1) in support of LGBTQIA+ stakeholders in our schools; or 2) in support of preserving accurate history teaching in face of false claims of “CRT” in our schools; 3) in support of inclusive schools for all; or 4) any other topic.
Deadline for registering is Tuesday 10-19-21 at 7 p.m.
https://www.fcps.edu/school-board/citizen-participation …”
The email went on to give the address of the school board meeting and tips on parking. But no mention of the rape in Loudoun County schools.
I wondered when and how local gay activists would address this rape and its cover up.
I posted a link to investigative reporter Luke Rosiak's piece breaking the story in the Loudoun/Fairfax gay Facebook group. I received an immediate reply from a member of the group: "The Daily Wire is not a credible news source."
Curious about whether any local gay movement spokespeople were going to address the issue, I contacted one of the few sane reporters at one of the two DC area gay news publications (both of which are mainly run by Democrats whose partisanship veers into delusion, with one even having a former Bella Abzug staffer as its chief political columnist).
This sane journalist emailed me back:
"Bruce,
I'm working on this story now. Thanks for sending this commentary piece from the [Washington] Examiner.
The one thing it omits is that the Loudoun County Sheriff's department has arrested the teenager who committed the sexual assaults and filed multiple rape related charges against him. But due to the secrecy requirements for juvenile offenders, I and other press people have had a difficult time trying to confirm what is happening.
The few gay activists I talked to, who do not wanted to be identified, say the Loudoun school officials should have said the student who committed the sexual assault should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, but that this was an extremely rare case. They say after years of pro-transgender laws in cities and states across the country, this type of thing simply does not happen. They appear to be saying all trans kids should not be blamed for the action of one kid any more than all conservative political activists should not be blamed for the action of one conservative activist who is a rapist."
Of course, what we don’t know is how many other “woke” school boards are covering up cases of sexual assault as Loudoun County did. The LGBT activists (and their “straight allies”) behind the policy of letting males enter women’s locker and bath rooms hide and the media don’t question them because they are a “protected class,” like rioters and looters who are protected from criticism because of their race - even as they burn down small businesses owned by people who are also racial minorities.
This story took days to appear (and I worried that the author might forget that you can't say "him"). No gay activists from Loudoun County have commented publicly. But the group Equality Loudoun did hold a picnic this past Sunday in Vienna, Virginia. No elected officials have commented on the story either, nor has anyone at the Department of Justice, nor have the Democrats running for office in Virginia. (The Republican candidates for Governor and for Attorney General did speak out about it after a few days of coverage.). The National Association of School Boards, the group that wrote a letter to President Biden about the domestic terrorist soccer moms threatening school board members is also silent - apparently whatever best practices they have for their members does not include urging them not to cover up rapes.
As this story was breaking I was filling out an online survey, the Pride Study, for a California non-profit run by gay people that collects data on gay people. The questions in the survey are somewhat tendentious - it is clear that what the researchers think is important to know about is how much sex you have with how many people, which forms of prophylaxis you are informed about and employ if any, and how safe you feel in your family and community or at work with being public about your sexual orientation or gender identity. The survey also asks about your experiences with sexual harassment and assault. But only as a victim, not a perpetrator. The survey nicely asks you for suggestions and questions at the end. So I asked if, since they were asking questions about sexual harassment and assault, why not ask those surveyed about being the aggressor as well as the victim. I was not particularly thinking of transgender people or of schools when I suggested this question, but more of occasions like house parties with overly inebriated gay adult men where the less inebriated might become a little too handsy with the more inebriated, or other same sex situations that might more easily allow for same sex sexual harassment. I received this response from a Pride Study director:
"Hi Bruce,
Thanks for your question and your long-term participation in The PRIDE Study.
There
are an infinite number of questions we could ask LGBTQ+ people in The
PRIDE Study. As part of our research plan, we engage with LGBTQ+
community members across the country to learn what health information we
*need* to be collecting in our research. There are so
many domains of our overall health (physical, mental, and social health)
that are unstudied, and which really benefit from research. As a
result, our team struggles to find the right balance of important
physical, mental, and social health questions to include, without making
surveys so long that too many people will not want to finish them.
When
we consider adding ever more questions to our already-long surveys, we
think: how would the collection of this data help support LGBTQ+
wellness, and how might the collection of this data reduce stigma
against LGBTQ+ people. While your question is intellectually
interesting, collecting that data would likely add to the stigmatization
of LGBTQ+ people. Adding questions like that to our already-long
surveys aren’t a priority for us right now.
We appreciate your continued participation in The PRIDE Study.
Best wishes,
Micah
Micah Lubensky, PhD
(Pronouns: he, him, his)
Participant Engagement Director
The PRIDE Study
http://www.pridestudy.org/"
I wonder if the victims of sexual assault - gay or straight victims - feel “stigmatized” by the refusal to address sexual assault by this one protected class of people committing these crimes?
The message is
clear: we can't ask uncomfortable questions about LGBT people or what
are claimed to be pro-LGBT policies. Indeed, when Stacy Langton - the
Fairfax County mom who has been complaining about pornographic materials
in the schools (and who is explicit that she is not asking for a ban on
LGBT literature, but only any literature depicting such things as sex
between 4th graders) - continued to speak out at school board meetings,
she received detailed threats against herself and her children by
someone who clearly follows her physically and knows her daily schedule.
Gay
people are no more intrinsically moral or immoral than heterosexuals,
but those they allow to represent them in public are failing in a way
that seems like it will boomerang politically. A few gay people -
journalist Katie Herzog
in a recent interview with Megyn Kelly - have come to the conclusion
that gay people need new leadership. And I would add: new allies,
party affiliations, and political affiliations. (Perhaps Senator
Kyrsten Sinema can be our Moses.)
The question is: will enough people come to this conclusion before the boomerang comes back?
A slightly different version of this piece ran earlier at Splice Today.
Sunday, May 29, 2022
Intersects and the City
"Were the ethnic festivities to your liking?"
If the past few years have plagued you with worry, do not fear. Whatever vexes you today will have been replaced in a few decades with fresh dangers on the horizon. Fifty years ago Americans worried about the super power rising, Japan Inc., and very smart people like Jonathan Rauch wrote books on how the Japanese would soon dominate the world economy and replace the United States as the leader of the free world and the globe.
Much of what these critics had to say, especially about the poverty of American public schools in comparison to the culture of education in Japan, remains true. But Japan may have been kept from dominating the globe by one of the other concerns of the intelligentsia of the 1970s and the 1980s, The Elder Question.
The late Governor Richard Lamm of Colorado argued that elderly people, especially ill elderly people, have a “duty to die,” because of how costly they are to society in consuming healthcare resources. Philosopher Leon Kass wrote extensively on “The Case for Mortality,” arguing that besides the expense of life-extension, “immortal” human life becomes frivolous, and also blocks the young from finding unoccupied rungs on the ladder of success. My fellow libertarians wrote extensively on how the growing number of long-lived Americans would bankrupt social welfare ponzi schemes like Social Security and Medicare.
Covid - and all the other “gain of function” bioweapons the research departments of the American, Chinese, or other militaries will no doubt continue to generate - may have solved Governor Lamm’s problem, and perhaps even helped with that of the libertarians. The Imperial States may have created little biological agents that will eliminate the elderly when they become too fat or too sick, so that the subjects who can no longer generate tax revenue, or breed new taxpayers, or serve in the military (or as interns) will all have a shelf life and an expiration date. Like the rise of Japan Inc., the surplus of elderly may no longer be something to worry about. (Our future plagues may all instead be acronymic: PC, UFO, ET, CO2, M2F and F2M, AI.)
But some people may slip past the respiratory euthanasia nanobots - the wealthy or the healthy - and they will still face Dr. Kass’s prediction that lives without ends are lives without purposes. And for something of a peek at what that could be like, we might turn to the resurrection of Sex and the City, HBO’s And Just Like That.
The title suggests our surprise at the passage of time. The show picks up over a decade after the original series ended, and it begins in loss. Mr. Big (Chris Noth), who had eventually married Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) dies “just like that” in the first episode, after a workout on a Peloton. In our world the actor Kim Cattrall refused to join this production, so in the dramaturgy her character Samantha is lost to Europe, having moved to London, but appears in the show via texts, condolence cards, and conversations among the remaining three friends (Parker along with Cynthia Nixon and Kristin Davis) of the original foursome. But perhaps the biggest loss is the loss of looks. Nixon, whose character was always the bookish nerd of the group is now a grey haired old lady. Parker, who critics of the original series sometimes denigrated as horse faced and only saved by hair and makeup artists and luxurious costumes, is here in many close ups just an old Jewish lady. Kristin Davis, always the sweetest and prettiest of the group, remains the cutest, but the lips and face have so clearly been worked on by doctors with imperfect results, and the WASP princess’s generous curvy derriere the camera sometimes showed in the original series is now an enlarged square box that produces a shelf when in a tennis skirt. Kim Cattrall, though a decade older (born in 1956, while the other actors were all born in 1965 or 1966), actually looks younger. (Fan and writer Megan Fox - not THAT Megan Fox - reports that the writing team for the new show includes no one from the older show, and argues that the producers of the new show are sadists who are torturing viewers by making these characters look older and less attractive than they actually are.)
The fact that these women now look much older than the characters we had grown to love is relevant. We do actually expect women more than men to be attractive, physically attractive, and though there are many fields of endeavor where this should not matter, is a popular TV show one of them? In real life an elderly woman could be a brilliant novelist or she could be loved by her grandchildren. But a TV siren has to have sex appeal. The only alternative would be to be remarkably talented and funny. Betty White could get away with being as old as Betty White. Larry David can - just barely - get away with looking like Larry David. Nixon, Parker, and Davis don’t have that level of talent, they only have our nostalgia to count on - we loved them long ago and they have to hope that we will want to see them again just because of that. Even though they aren’t actually our mothers or grandmothers. (Even in their own dramatic world the ones of them who have children seem to rank their friendships over their relationships with their children, or their spouses). There is a reason Greta Garbo decided at a certain point to be a recluse.
Another oddity of the show is that it is no longer a foursome. I’m not sure why, but the foursome does seem to be an important element of the 30 minute situation comedy, from The Honeymooners to Hot in Cleveland: Lucy, Ricky, Fred, Ethel; Archie, Edith, Gloria, Meathead; Jerry, Kramer, Elaine, George; Will, Grace, Jack, Karen; Samantha, Darren, Endora, Larry Tate; Barney, Andy, Opie, Aunt Bea; Turtle, Vincent, Johnny, Eric. (The successful comedies that have another number in an ensemble often do it by having multiple ensembles, for example one at work and one at home…and one ensemble will be a foursome: Frasier, Niles, Daphne, Martin; Mary, Mr. Grant, Murray, Ted.)
Without the sex appeal of looks or youth and without whatever the magic dynamics are of the number 4, And Just Like That has to find something else to make itself interesting and so it is saved by a current concern, intersectionality. And Just Like That replaces Samantha with not one, but four new friends, at least one for each of the remaining three characters. And even without being a Netflix product, the four new friends are each a different color, as if Samantha were a ray of white light being decomposed by a prism into beams of different hues. It’s “Intersects and the City.” It’s a little like 3 pale ancient vampires have reconnected with their mortality and their humanity by preying on ethnic groups that have higher birth rates and lower average ages. I kept thinking of the scene in Bring It On where the inner city black school’s cheerleaders confront the suburban girls who have been stealing their routines with the question “Were the ethnic festivities to your liking?”
The original Samantha character was described by critics and fans twenty years ago as actually being a gay man but played by a woman. (Partly because the show’s creators, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King, were gay men, though the story is based on the writing of Candace Bushnell.) Urban and unashamedly promiscuous, Samantha bedded everyone she fancied, including even one woman (played by Sonia Braga). In the new show Samantha’s characteristics are distributed among four new characters. Sara Ramirez plays “Che,” a Latina non-binary sex positive butchy bi/lesbian who is Carrie’s boss and eventually Miranda’s (Cynthia Nixon’s) lover. Nicole Ari Parker plays a very proper upper middle class private school super mom, Lisa, who is Charlotte’s (Kristin Davis’s) friend, dubbed by one character, as if they were Barbie dolls, “black Charlotte.” Karen Pittman plays an assertive African American law school professor who teaches and becomes friends with Miranda. Sarita Choudhury plays Carrie’s Indian-American realtor who helps her sell the home she lived in with Mr. Big. Altogether the four women embody variously the style, sexuality, success and sass that was Samantha.
Choudhury’s presence is interesting since her career famously began with one of the original “intersectional” films, where she played Denzel Washington’s love interest in Mississippi Masala (1991). Like FX’s Pose, Mississippi Masala was organically intersectional, a story about people of different races and cultures interacting with each other. And Just Like That risks instead being intersectionality porn, where the “diversity and inclusion” is grating and artificial, as in all those Netflix remakes where characters are re-cast as another race, leading to complicated families with lots of biracial half-siblings and step kids.
Samantha’s being a gay man in a woman’s body was essential to Sex and the City. All women (and men) were being taught that they could and should live as gay men did - especially as gay men lived, before they could marry and adopt or have kids, and before AIDS connected gay sex to mortality much more directly than straight sex ever was, the latter simply generating those who will replace us. The pill, gender equality, and capitalism’s creation of jobs for women and household appliances that could do the work of wives meant that marriage and children were no longer necessary and could certainly be postponed. The only one of the foursome that was ever eager to both marry and procreate was Charlotte, and she delayed it so long that she ended up having to marry outside her faith and almost could not conceive. There is a reason this resurrection of Sex and the City is titled And Just Like That and not They Grow Up So Fast.
Gays always had a special auxiliary role in Sex and the City, which may be why the show was popular with gay men as well as young single women. (In DC’s Dupont Circle gayborhood, one bar, Duplex Diner, put whatever vodka concoction the ladies were drinking on screen on their menu, and had watch parties where hushed gays would swill Absolut lemontinis while following their adventures.) When you don’t have a husband and you have a fight with your girlfriend, to whom can you complain? When you don’t have a boyfriend but need a male escort, where do you turn? When you want a man to tell you you look good and need to actually ask him, or when you even want a male assessment that is objective, you can’t ask a male lover (actual or prospective), so whom do you ask? (Sex and City had the extra protective step of keeping the gay male friends much less handsome than the four women.)
In the original show Carrie and Charlotte each had gay best friends (and sometimes their pets did not get along). In the new show a new gay man is tossed into the mix, gay actor Jonathan Groff, who plays a young and juicy plastic surgeon who offers Carrie advice on what she could do to make Sara Jessica Parker’s aging face more youthful - but while telling her she is beautiful and doesn’t really need to do a thing. But let’s just see what you would look like if we did this…. His computer shows the alterations, and like magic Carrie is once again the SJP of old.
Since And Just Like That is an HBO offering, viewers can also watch additional material, including interviews with the actors. Sara Ramirez (in real life married to a man) has one such interview in which she spews wokeness, telling us her gay non-binary character of color represents a breakthrough because the original show had only one kind of gay (i.e. gay white CIS gender men), thereby erasing a whole season’s story arc where Samantha had an affair with a Latin woman played by Sonia Braga, or another season’s subplot where Charlotte traveled with a posse of A-list art world lesbians who danced and drank all night (and helped her career) until one wealthy Chinese lesbian who took an interest in her made her declare whether she was gay or not, replying to Charlotte’s vague affirmations that she enjoyed the sisterhood of being with women that it all came down to whether she ate pussy or not. Ms. Ramirez more crucially does not understand how the original show was all about how young single Manhattan women could now live as if they were gay men. (As an actor though, Ramirez - and Choudhury - are commanding presences in the new series, more than holding their own with the remainder of the original cast.)
That the cast is so woke they don’t understand the original show is not surprising. HBO has other shows that savagely skewer wokeness and modern liberalism, particularly Curb Your Enthusiasm and White Lotus. The latter show also had extra clips with interviews with the actors who absolutely had no clue that the show was a reductio of upper middle class liberalism (the writer-creator-director of the show, Mike White, a white gay man, is in interviews not as clueless).
The march of the intersectional warriors may destroy television and movies, as it has tried to destroy comedy. Some in Hollywood warn of organized attempts to dis-employ first white men, including the Jews, and then anyone who is not politically correct.
I’m hoping instead capitalism can solve the problem. Just as cable TV allowed us to have BET and TeleMundo and Logo (and its closeted friend Bravo) and other channels for minority audiences the old FCC regulated monopoly networks had to ignore, a free global market in streaming services should mean someone somewhere can produce non-woke shows. (Update: Ben Shapiro’s Breitbartean Daily Wire site released a feature film after this article was published and has two more scheduled for release.) Until then we may have to watch Carrie and friends imbibe faddish ideology and repeat popular jargon to fill up their empty and never-ending lives.
A shorter version of this review appeared in SpliceToday.