10.31.07
Posted in politics, sexuality at 9:38 am by Hanne Blank
Dear Closeted Conservatives,
I’ve been holding back from saying anything because really, I have better things to do, but clearly, you need some help. Yes, I mean you, and you and you and you and you.
You need some help because you keep getting yourselves into trouble when really, all you’re trying to do is get your knobs shined. And I agree with you, it’s a free country, and assuming everyone is of legal age and consents, there is nothing at all the matter with wanting to bust a nut.
Nevertheless, this is something that thousands, even millions of people succeed in doing at every hour of the day, every day of the year, without falling on their faces in some egregious stupid way and getting to enjoy a steaming helping of public humiliation in the newspapers.
If they can do it, so can you. Here are some tips to help you get the lovin’ you crave without all the blackmail, arrests, career damage, and public shaming you don’t.
Tip #1: Come out, come out, whatever you are!
Seriously, this is why a lot of people come out of the closet. It’s not because there is some inbuilt queer mandate to share the details of one’s sex life. Coming out, more than anything else, simply makes for accurate perceptions. When folks know you’re queer, they’re not shocked, surprised, offended, or prone to run hooting to the paparrazzi when you turn out to be… queer. All you have to do is belly up to the adult responsibility bar and say “hey, I’m gay” or “hey, I’m bisexual” or even “hey, I’m a horndog and an opportunist and I say any port in a storm.” Really it’s just a matter of honesty. You know, being straightforward and truthful about the things you do and will do, the things you care about, the things you stand for. Or behind, as the case may be, I’m not judgmental. Practice in front of a mirror until you can say “I am queer” without twitching. Then try it at a press conference.
Tip #2: If you can’t be bothered to come out, at least try not to look like you’re an utter jackass and an idiot to boot when you get caught.
Let’s face it, gentlemen. People who suddenly can’t remember that they fucked someone whom they just fucked look like tramps. Stupid tramps. And no, no one is going to buy a roofie sob story when you’re still wearing the trashy polyester lingerie under your suit, li’l buckaroo, so you might as well stand up straight and wear your trashy lingerie with pride. (It worked for Tim Curry.)
People who change their tune when confronted with the fact that they were having, or even merely seeking, sex with someone not their lawfully wedded heterosexual wife look like furtive schoolboys trying to hide the Playboy they shoplifted before the teacher finds out.
People who inexpertly cruise public tearooms expecting not to get busted, then wave their title and office around thinking that it’s going to get them off the hook, look like they have a gigantic entitlement problem, and believe that a title or an office makes them above the law.
People who claim they weren’t behaving in an inappropriately sexual manner when they clearly were, or who claim that they weren’t lying about their sexual lives when they clearly were, just look like lying liars who lie badly. This goes double, maybe quadruple, for anyone who is gonna stand up and say with a straight face that they thought offering someone a blowjob was a good way to avoid getting jumped. Seriously, guys, if you’re gonna lie, learn how to lie like Nixon did. Have some style.
Tip #3: Don’t hold up your wives and children as proof that you’re not queer.
As the unfortunate example of Brit and K-Fed attested, any two people can get married in this country, as long as they are not both of the same biological sex. Hell, you DOMA-sucklers are all about that. But there isn’t a marriage license in the world that’ll spontaneously combust if a queer person puts a signature on it. Furthermore there is no Wasserman test to sniff out any of that evil queerness before the Justice of the Peace will let you say “I do.”
Say it with me, gentlemen: Marriage is not proof of heterosexuality, it is a legal contract.
Similarly, queer people have kids. All the time. They even did it before artificial insemination. Many of them, in fact, did it through the expedient venue of actual legal marriage (see above). Queerness does not in fact create reproductive malfunction. It just means that you may be less likely to procreate by accident.
Repeat after me: Heterosexuals don’t make people. People make people.
For those of us who already know these things, it doesn’t make you look any better when you stand there next to your thin-lipped, grimly present wives, your children beside you barely able to keep themselves from rolling their eyes at being dragged into yet another idiotic photo op on behalf of Daddy’s career. It makes you look like you’re an asshole who disrespects and lies to his family and then shamelessly uses them to bolster his own sagging ratings in the public opinion polls. Remember Tip #1? Yeah. Your family doesn’t like it when you don’t have the cojones to be honest up front, either.
That’s it! Be honest up front, don’t lie and cheat and squirm if you get caught, and stop disrespecting your families. That’s all it takes! See, it really is all about good old fashioned American values after all.
Good luck!
Your friend,
Hanne
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05.23.07
Posted in outrage, patriotism, politics at 7:14 am by Hanne Blank
Any of y’all read National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51 or Homeland Security Presidential Directive/HSPD-20? Came out from the White House in May?
No?
Can’t say I blame you, it’s a pile of some of the most deliberately obfuscatory governmental gobbledygook I’ve seen in a long time, and I’m a person who reads federal “abstinence education” policy for laughs.
Even if you haven’t read it, though, you should know what it says. Because it says, in far more words, that if something happens that the President considers sufficiently catastrophic — let’s say a big earthquake, or another Katrina-esque storm, or even an actual attack on a domestic target (launched by whomever… no reason we have to look outside our own borders for terrorists, natch, says the woman who was living in the greater Baltimore/DC area during the period of the Beltway Sniper shootings…) — the President may arrogate unto himself sole responsibility for the entire Federal government.
Not just his usual branch of it. The whole shebang. Supreme Court. State Department. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. Coast Guard. Post Office. IRS. FEMA. The FAA. FDA. EPA. CDC/NIH. Even the Capitol Hill cafeterias. All Your Freedom Fries Are Belong To Us.
Additionally, in such an event, the President becomes the agent responsible “for ensuring constitutional government.”
I won’t speculate on whether or not the current administration has the integrity necessary to refrain from creating a suitable incident. After all, the nature of such an event is so deliberately undefined that they’d hardly have to. I mean, really, Gay Pride marches could just about constitute a terrorist crisis by the terms of this legislation.
(You, over there? Please pass this box of tissue back to the sobbing Constitutional Law professor in the back row. It is a nasty shock.)
A quick and dirty rundown of the newly-signed law can be found here: http://progressive.org/mag_wx051807
The text of the directive itself can be read here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070509-12.html
Do you wonder why none of the news media have been covering this story? I sure the hell do. I think I’m going to find some time today or tomorrow to write and call my local newspapers and my local TV news, and to drop a line to CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS news, as well as the BBC and CBC.
Because Bush may not be King just yet. But it wouldn’t take much, now, would it?
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03.01.07
Posted in cooking, culture, food, health, politics at 10:34 am by Hanne Blank
I’ve been reading, here and there, about various efforts to force restaurants — primarily of the quasi-fast-food inexpensive chain eatery sort, like Pizzeria Uno or TGIFriday’s or The Cheesecake Factory — to identify the calorie counts and other nutritional information of their menu items in their menus. Citing items which contain whopping numbers of calories per restaurant serving, and enough fat to make the ghost of my gallbladder scream like a banshee just reading about it, these dietary watchdogs seem convinced that if only the nutritional information were more readily available, Americans would “make better nutritional choices,” for which we are meant to read “choose not to eat these things.”
The dual bogeymen of obesity and heart disease, natch, are the poster children for these campaigns. Clearly, just as all lung disease is caused by smoking cigarettes (and has nothing to do with, say, industrial or automotive air pollution, toxic chemicals used in household furnishings and surfaces, or even genetic predisposition), all obesity and heart disease are due to crappy, greasy, oversalted, oversugared, deepfried platefuls of Generic USAian Processed Food Substances. And not, say, to some combination of what people eat, how people incorporate their eating lives into the rest of their lives, what sorts of physical activities they engage in and how much, the tastes and other eating sensations they’ve been enculturated to find pleasing, their particular genetics, and simple luck of the draw.
I’m not saying this to defend the TGIRubyAppleUnoCheesecakeTuccis of the world, or dump on the folks who happily eat their food. I’m not even saying this to criticize the aims of the people — many of them with medical affiliations to the billion-dollar bariatrics (obesity) market — who want to improve the availability of nutritional information in these places. I’m all for people knowing what they’re eating, and I am all for people eating whatever the hell they want.
The reason I raise the issue at all is because it strikes me that everyone concerned, restaurant chains, chain-restaurant diners, dietary activists, and all, are both suffering from, and failing to take into account the potency of, sheer willful American-style denial.
You know what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the denial that lets restaurant chain management claim that because they offer salads, they’re in the clear as far as offering “healthy” eating options, even though your average restaurant-chain salad, laden with cheese and/or meat and/or the heavy creamy dressings so beloved of such places, is about as “healthy,” by the standards typically used to assess what constitutes a “healthy” dish, as a Snickers bar and some shredded carrots wrapped in a lettuce leaf.
Yes, this denial is partly willful failure to perceive the distance between genuinely healthy eating and the stuff these restaurants exist to sell. It’s also calculated marketing of things that these restaurants know will sell, the “but we’re only selling the stuff our customers want!” cliche. Handwaving, and the careful use of words like “fresh” on menus and images of crisp, dewy vegetables and fruits on advertisements, go a long way, marketing-wise, to making sure that the people at the customer end, as well as the customers themselves, buy into the corporate management’s assertions that their products are “healthy.”
And as far as the corporate folks are concerned, that’s just fine. The customer ultimately chooses what to eat, or not. They’re just trying to offer choices. It’s not their fault if what the customer seems to enjoy is stuff that isn’t very good for you if you eat too much of it too often.
Which is, of course, the next level of denial. Most Americans — myself sometimes included, although for reasons having partly to do with health issues like allergies and partly to do with economics and partly to do with food snobbery, I have become a lot more aware and careful about this — eat less well than they could.
By “eating well” here I don’t mean being a crazy food Nazi and monitoring your every mouthful for maximal nutrition or minimal calories or carbs or fat grams or whatever the hell it is this week that you’re not supposed to eat. I mean eating good, nutritious, wholesome, tasty food that gives your body all the things it needs and not too much of the stuff it doesn’t, and while that’s different for everyone, for the human animal generally it seems to mean a fairly large amount of vegetable matter and grain food, with some high-protein food in there on a regular basis, and some sweet things now and then for the fun that’s in them. (Now-obligatory shout-out to Michael Pollan’s recent “Unhappy Meals” piece in the NYT Magazine, which if you haven’t read, you should.)
However. We tell ourselves, assisted ably by our national mythos of America as Land of Plenty, by “eat your dinner, children are starving in Bangladesh,” by the reassuring presence of fortified foods on the shelves and governmentally-mandated nutritional information boxes on packages and innumerable articles and books and TV shows about things most of us haven’t got the training to understand like amino acids and vitamins and antioxidants and phytoestrogens, that of course we eat well… we’re Americans. And indeed, we are fortunate that we have the luxury to have this mythos be so operational in our lives. Worrying about whether you have enough of the right kind of antioxidants in your food is a pretty darn cushy problem compared to worrying about whether or not you’ve got enough food so that you don’t starve to death.
Speaking of starving, too, there is that portion of our makeup to contend with. Because we are animals, on some level our brains believe that as long as we have a plentiful supply of food, we are eating well. This is particularly true with high-fat food: if you look at the foods traditionally eaten by peoples living north of the Arctic Circle, you will find that above all, high-fat foods are prized, for the simple reason that calories equal body heat and body heat equals survival. Our lives are, for the most part, nowhere near so physically demanding as those of, say, seal hunters or reindeer herders. Or, indeed, of even our fairly recent ancestors, who did not have nifty modern conveniences like cars, central heating, and household appliances, all of which substantially reduce the caloric burden we require to survive. Thing is, you can’t simply rewire an organism that has for millennia regarded high-fat, high-calorie food as a desirable advantage. Neither my DNA nor yours, neither my backbrain nor yours, give a sweet goddamn that they don’t really have to worry about keeping themselves warm through the body’s own thermogenetic capabilities all winter long. It doesn’t matter to that part of us that thanks to the wonders of the technologies our big sexy monkey brains have come up with, the job of keeping us alive until suppertime can be accomplished quite nicely on a handful of granola and a banana. They’d like a nice juicy cheeseburger, thanks just the same.
And of course, we have also evolved this distinctively American (or so it seems to me) tendency toward buy-now-pay-later eating: we have made eating, in our minds, into a sort of economic activity. If we “overspend” our budget of calories now we can “work it off” later on at the gym, or through some bout of insane (and thus almost inevitably short-lived) crash dieting. Or so we tell ourselves. Whether we do it or not is another matter entirely, and whether it actually works that way, in terms of our biology, is yet one more.
To put it another, shorter way, there are a lot of different forces — biological promptings, social cues, and psychological urges — that tend to make it very easy for many of us to eat less well than we might, and to eat meals that are very imbalanced in the direction of things that are not, in excess, all that good for us. (I’m not even going to get into the economic issues, or the history of the corporate food culture, or why and how things have gotten to the stage where eating well (as I define it) on a regular basis is now beyond the economic reach of many people. Another rant for another time.)
At the same time, we’re not stupid. We know full well, if we stop to think about it, that no, most of these meals are not healthy. You don’t need a professional nutritionist to know that a meal of, let’s say (looking idly at the T.G.I. Friday’s menus available online) Crispy Green Bean Fries, a bacon cheeseburger, fries, and a (full-sugar, full-caffeine, why not get your money’s worth if you’re paying for uppers?) Coke is probably not something you really want to think about in terms of its number of fat grams or calories.
Which is it, right there: people know this kind of food is high-calorie and high-fat. That’s not news. But they don’t want to have that be the deciding, or limiting, factor in whether they eat it. So it isn’t. It simply isn’t. It’s called denial.
There are excellent compelling reasons that it happens, and not too many that are nearly so compelling as to regularly cause people to override the denial. Clearly the fear of becoming fat isn’t enough to do it. Nor is the fear of heart disease. Hell, even the fear of feeling bloated, gassy, queasy, or getting diarrhea — all extremely common reactions to eating too much high-fat food — isn’t enough to keep people from doing it, and those sensations set in a whole heck of a lot quicker, relative to the moment of eating, than weight gain or a heart attack.
Sure, it’s counterintuitive. But human beings are perverse creatures and what we do is often that way. In all seriousness, I know a number of people with substantial allergies to cow’s milk who will, knowing full well that it will make them feel ill if they do it, eat ice cream with gay abandon right up until the moment that they have to run to the bathroom. I used to be one of them, before my dairy allergies got worse. Only when things got to the point that the negative repercussions created such misery that I wasn’t willing to put up with them any more to get to that sweet, sweet butterfat did I finally manage to break off what had been a lifelong love affair with ice cream.
This is where the other kind of denial comes in: the denial, on the part of the researchers and campaigners who are pushing for transparency in the menus of these table-service chains, that frankly, It’s Always More Complicated. Putting calorie and fat-gram counts in menus isn’t going to slow that many people down. They’re on packaged foods everywhere already. I honestly don’t see it putting a big dent in potato chip sales. The forces at play are a lot more complex, multivalent, and quirky than that.
Me, I wouldn’t mind seeing restaurants selling unitized, corporatized, pre-quantified meals having to list their ingredients and their nutritional information, if only because it might — and I emphasize might — make some of them come a little cleaner about what they’re feeding people, and be a little more honest about the quality of their ingredients and their emphasis on using ingredients that are actually food, and not the sometimes dubious products of food science on which such restaurants lean so heavily. I do think that some people would appreciate having the information. I know that I would, because finding out the hard way that I just ate something that contained a dairy product when I didn’t expect it to is really not so much fun. But in all honesty, I rather doubt, all other things being equal, that knowing how many calories are in that club sandwich is going to make me skinny or reprieve me from whatever heart disease may conceivably lurk in my future. Nor is it going to do so for anyone else.
On the other hand, not being in denial about the ways that what I indiviually eat might affect my individual biology and my own personal health? That’s done me quite a lot of good, thanks. Giving up dairy products for good was not easy for me, but without question it has produced an enormous improvement in my overall health. Learning to cook and eat a lot of Chinese and Middle Eastern dishes, with small amounts of meat and large amounts of vegetables, has similarly made me feel better and improved various aspects of my overall clinical health. These are things that I discovered, through trial and error and over time, were what this particular human animal requires in order to be the most efficient and happy troublemaker it can.
But, I hasten to note that I think that’s not a process that any amount of white-coated finger-waggling or posting calorie counts in recipes is ever going to produce. For me, or anyone.
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11.17.06
Posted in arrrrgh, outrage, patriotism, politics, women at 12:34 pm by Hanne Blank
… in the Bu$h administration, it seems, to hand-pick for administrative appointment the precise kind of people who will be the biggest prickliest possible burrs under the saddle of reasonable egalitarianism. The harder they are for anyone else to remove from their hand-picked posts, the better, too, so that the burrs will stay in place as long as possible, and for the remainder of the Shrubidency at the very least.
The latest in this long and infuriating list is a guy named Eric Keroac. You’ve probably never heard of him before. (That’s another Bush hallmark: if you pick people no one knows, it’s less likely that people will have reasons to complain about them. Except, er, not in this case, that’s for sure.) Here’s a little bit of what the WaPo has to say about Eric Keroack [Link]:
The Bush administration has appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as “demeaning to women.”
Eric Keroack, medical director for A Woman’s Concern, a nonprofit group based in Dorchester, Mass., will become deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in the next two weeks, department spokeswoman Christina Pearson said yesterday.
Keroack, an obstetrician-gynecologist, will advise Secretary Mike Leavitt on matters such as reproductive health and adolescent pregnancy. He will oversee $283 million in annual family-planning grants that, according to HHS, are “designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them with priority given to low-income persons.”
The appointment, which does not require Senate confirmation, was the latest provocative personnel move by the White House since Democrats won control of Congress in this month’s midterm elections. President Bush last week pushed the Senate to confirm John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations and this week renominated six candidates for appellate court judgeships who have previously been blocked by lawmakers. Democrats said the moves belie Bush’s post-election promises of bipartisanship.
The Keroack appointment angered many family-planning advocates, who noted that A Woman’s Concern supports sexual abstinence until marriage, opposes contraception and does not distribute information promoting birth control at its six centers in eastern Massachusetts.
“A Woman’s Concern is persuaded that the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness,” the group’s Web site says.
You know what’s really demeaning to women? Assuming that not having any voluntary control whatsoever over their fertility ennobles them.
You know the address to write to about this, right? 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, D.C., 20500.
I always have the feeling I should be using really short words when I send nastygrams to Shrub, but have yet to actually give in to the temptation. You do as you will on that score. But do be a good patriot and write and tell Mr. Bush that he’s making a wrong choice, won’t you? The wellbeing of your fellow countrywomen is on the line.
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