The boogie man.

Well I never would have believed it, but Jesse Helms ended up sharing a characteristic with Thomas Jefferson! They both died on Independence Day. Of course, down in Old Dixie, this means that for years to come July 4th will take on added gravity as a day of remembrance for a fallen son of the Old South — the antebellum South, that is. But it will also be marked in other places — as an additional reason to celebrate. And not just for the obvious reason that we are relieved of one of the most hateful men who ever held public office in this country, but for the not so obvious benefit that he provided to those he hated the most.

Helms’ reactionary policies and statements are legendary — loyal support for foreign fascists such as Pinochet and Ian Smith, unrelenting opposition to civil and reproductive rights in his own country, and, of course, virulent hatred of gay people. The man who once said, “I have tried at every point to seek God’s wisdom on the decisions I made, and I made it my business to speak up on behalf of the things God tells us are important to Him,” also said of gay people suffering from AIDS, “It’s their deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct that is responsible for the disease.” But his hatred went beyond mere condemnation. When he repeatedly opposed funding for the Ryan White Bill to fund AIDS research it was obvious that his intention was to assist what he considered to be God’s judgment in its deadly work.

And yet, ironically, his unadulterated enmity toward the gay community was one of the most effective galvanizing forces for a previously ghettoized and marginal population. There is a great virtue in having a clear enemy who acts as a locus around which opposition can cohere. In political struggles where radical change is needed the greatest danger comes from enemies that diffuse distinctions — which is why Jim Crow and its “separate but equal” sop was so effective for so long in delaying the conflagration that had to come to end American apartheid. It took a Bull Connor and his dogs and fire hoses to lay bare the face of racism and galvanize disparate groups of people to radical action. For gay people, Jesse Helms was our Bull Connor. I’m almost tempted to say we should thank him. Almost. I wonder if he was ever bewildered by the steady advance in civil rights that gay people have enjoyed since the AIDS crisis struck. I’ll bet he was.

The thought of it makes me happy.

In the wake of AIDS, with the gay community furiously trying to reinvent itself as a caricature of 1950’s domesticity, one can barely remember what gay sensibility was like back in the 1970s. A bit darker than images of beaming pairs of grooms slicing into a wedding cake, to be sure. Growing up in a small upstate town, the images of homosexuality that made their way into my little backwater milieu were rare, often absurd and sometimes frightening — a glance at a Life magazine photospread about gay subculture, replete with shadowy shots of hirsute men in strange leather uniforms; the odd appearance on TV of flamboyant character actors like Charles Nelson Reilly and Paul Lynde; the furtive peek at Playgirl (which even I knew was targeted to men as much as women). And then there was The Boys in the Band. I saw it on TV when I was very young and it scared the living hell out of me. The movie was meant to be an honest look at the experiences of gay men living in Manhattan, but its over-the-top portrayal of every hysterical stereotype extant approached Grand Guignol. Most frightening of all was “Harold” — a blasé character at the center of the storm, so embittered and disdainful that he can barely make an utterance that isn’t delivered like a lancet. I suspected I was queer and I dreaded that Harold was to be my fate. But the world would change before that could happen.

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Cheer up girl! It could’ve been worse… you might’ve won.

Could it really be just two interminable years since this humble blog [declared] with such ballsy confidence that Hillary Rodham Clinton didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being president? My… how times have (not) changed. Well, now that the rest of the world knows it, the only remaining question is: what does she get as a consolation prize? The slackjawed political punditocracy — who have managed to be wrong about almost every aspect of this election — are boosting the Hillary as Veep meme. Looks like they will continue their perfect losing streak at prediction. Obama is unlikely to select her as his running mate for the simple reason that he seems to want to win and he well knows that, outside of the Democratic Party (and thesedays even inside it…), she is radioactive. The Republicans are playing all innocent, scuffing the floor with their Buster Browns and whistling nonchalantly during this discussion, hoping not to give away their absolute need for Obama to select her — it’s the only thing that would get disgruntled Republican donors to open the money spigot for McCain. No, she won’t be vice-president. But what will she be?

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Victims of police brutality: Michael Stewart, Eleanor Bumpers, Antoine Reid, Abner Louima, Patrick Dorismond, Amadou Diallo, Ousmane Zongo, Timothy Stansbury, Sean Bell

“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
– Robert Kennedy, quoting Aeschylus, following the assassination of Martin Luther King.

This week, 3 New York City police officers were acquitted of the wrongful death of Sean Bell, who was gunned down in a hail of 50 bullets after leaving a bachelor party the night before he was to be married. The details of the case can be recovered from the [New York Times] site and I won’t recount them here. I’ll just comment on the fact that when I heard the judgment, which I was dreading, I felt sick. I dreaded it because I feared that it would play out as so many similar cases in this city had over the years: police officers in a tense situation overreact and apply deadly force in a situation that did not warrant it. The police would be acquitted because in an ambiguous situation the onus is on the victim — especially if they are black — to avoid death. This case, as those that preceded it, reminds us in the starkest way that black people in New York City live in a state of siege. Sequestered in ghettos still, disproportionately vulnerable to the ravages of crime and too often assumed to be dangerous by those who are charged with their protection.

The first night I lived in this city as an adult, in 1983, I was wakened from sleep on a blisteringly hot September night by the sounds of a man screaming for his life. I got out of bed and looked down into Union Square to see a group of police officers crowding a crumpled figure lying before them on the ground. “Good,” I thought, “they got him,” thinking that the figure on the ground must have been the one attacking the unseen victim. The next day we learned that the crumpled body had been Michael Stewart, a young black graffiti artist who had been beaten to death by the police following his arrest for spray painting a subway car. The officers involved were all acquitted.

Cases like Stewart’s and those represented in the photo focus our attention, but you can’t live in this city without being made to face, everyday, the commonplace soul-destroying injustices that are perpetrated against black people and that become the perverse representation of normalcy. Every time I see a cab driver pass by a black woman with children because he’s afraid she will bring him into a black neighborhood, or a group of young black men given wide berth on the street because of what they are wearing I can’t imagine how so many people can endure so many hurts for so long. Living a life where just leaving your house in the morning becomes a test of courage.

It’s just like the SATs all over again! Eli is to Tom as Barack is to Hillary.

Hillary Clinton spent part of Sunday night watching the Super Bowl at a bar called Dixie’s in St. Paul MN. Of course, her enthusiasm for the Giants was about as authentic as the tears she’s been known to shed on cue (do you think she even knows who Eli Manning is?) and she whooped and hollered with the best of them when Manning’s already legendary drive defeated the sure-bet Patriots in one of the biggest upsets in NFL history. But I wonder if the irony of the situation was lost on her? Her putative hometown team aren’t the only guys making late drives at formidable opponents: CNN [released a poll today] showing that Barack Obama has not just caught up to Clinton in nationwide polls going into Super Tuesday, he may have surpassed her. The storied game plan from the Clinton camp has been that the rush of contests on Tuesday, coming so soon after Obama’s big win in South Carolina, will benefit her because her established name and reputation will trump his nascent momentum. But they may have underestimated the depth of Obama’s appeal and the dissatisfaction level toward Clinton’s candidacy within the party.

If Obama pulls off an upset the contest will drag on to the convention. That’s a long time for allegiances to settle into stony loyalties that will not easily switch come general election time. Some people are muttering about an eventual “dream ticket” of Clinton-Obama, or vice-versa. That’ll never happen — whoever wins the nomination will have to start running to the center to beat McCain and will need to pick a centrist running mate. Someone like Evan Bayh.

Meanwhile, just across the aisle, McCain looks to put a lock on his nomination on Tuesday, giving him plenty of time to shore up his right flank and prepare his assault on the eventual Democratic nominee. Alas, no Giants-like come from behind upset for Mitt Romney. He’s done.

Meet your new President.

It has become a cliché among the political punditry that the only thing standing between the Democrats and the White House are… Democrats themselves. With the notable exception of Bill Clinton, Democratic candidates and their party faithful seem congenitally incapable of putting together a candidacy that can win the support not just of Independents and the scant Republican crossover voter but of their own motley base. Barack Obama’s resounding victory in the South Carolina primary pretty much rings the death knell on the chances for a Democratic victory in the fall and, I would say, guarantees that our next president will be John McCain.

It would appear that Democrats learned nothing from the debacle of the 2000 election. That election showed the profound impact that a fracture in their base could have — had Ralph Nader not shaved just a few percentage points off the totals for Al Gore, there would have been no need for a Supreme Court coronation of George Bush. This time it’s worse. As has been noted [many times], outside of the Democratic party Hillary Clinton is not a very popular character. Her chances in a general election were dicey to begin with unless she faced a particularly weak Republican and, as McCain ascends, that looks unlikely. A full-on challenge to her from within her own party is evidence that even Democrats are not satisfied with their choices. And the nature of the dissatisfaction — as evidenced in the South Carolina vote — must encourage the Republicans. Obama won South Carolina with overwhelming support from blacks (78%) and women (54%), but fewer than one out of four white Democrats voted for him. And these are white Democrats. A Democrat cannot win the general election without picking up Southern states and they cannot win Southern states without white votes.

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Just like clockwork, the 1968 anniversary articles have begun. For creatively-challenged journalists across the country — but especially here in the East — 2008 should prove to be an irresistible “perfect storm” of then-and-now comparisons that filter current events through the dusty lens of that fateful year. Unpopular president executing an unpopular war? Check. An election year suffused with issues of race and class warfare? Check. Columbia University planning to expand into Harlem amid protests from long-time residents? Check. The New York Times kicks off the trend with a couple of articles in their Education section that describe resurgent activism on local campuses. A red diaper baby of 60’s radical parentage, Thai Jones (now a grad student at Columbia, natch), [writes] with unrestrained sympathy about recent protests on campus that show an abiding heritage of lefty commitment at the Ivy League school, while [another article] by (surprise!) a Columbia faculty member describes the recent reanimation of the Students for a Democratic Society at the tiny New School in Greenwich Village.

What both articles evidence more than anything else is a poignant nostalgia for a radical time that passed with the demographic blip that created it. Pace Dylan, the times changed. Jones reluctantly acknowledges in his piece that the modern Columbia protests (which included a short-lived hunger strike over a perceived lack of multicultural studies) failed when a far larger number of counter-protesters who were offended by the strikers’ tactics mobilized on Facebook, and the New School kids are clearly oblivious to the ill-fated history of the group they espouse. Perhaps a field trip is in order — all they have to do is go out the back door of their college on 11th Street and walk down to the house at 18 W 11th, where the Weather Underground, the radical group that succeeded the S.D.S., blew themselves to smithereens while making bombs on a cold day in March 1970.

Last prayer, or fat chance?

Al Gore, having won an Emmy, an Oscar and now the Nobel Peace Prize, is on a roll. There’s just one prize left that many would like to see him claim that has eluded him — one that he came within a hanging chad’s breadth of receiving in 2000. It’s a sign not only of his popularity but also of the rising sense of panic among Democrats that they seem destined for a ticket headed by Hillary Clinton. The [grumblings] in the lefty media about how to stop our gal from Illinois Arkansas New York began about the time that wunderkind Barack Obama started showing [signs of flagging] in his media-fueled race for the nomination. Suddenly [stories] about the nascent Draft Gore movement increased in frequency and, now with the Nobel win, have reached a fevered pace. CNN [reports] on the pressure on him to join the race (including a hilarious quote from Jimmy Carter, who has been badgering him for so long on the issue that Gore finally had to ask Carter to stop calling his house), while the Washington Post [raises questions] about whether he could successfully raise enough money this late in the primary run-up. That would certainly be a significant obstacle to overcome were he to decide to join the race, but I think there’s an even bigger factor weighing against him, so to speak: he’s too fat to be president.

The Presidential Body Mass Index (PBMI)

[Click to view] chart of US presidents ranked according to their Body Mass Index

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