Recently in Politics, Business and Economics Category

Check out this fabulous piece in the new issue of OUT, by Dustin Lance Black about queer activism in SLC. And then, if you haven't already, check out Queer Gnosis, the blog by my friend Troy, who is discussed (and photographed) in the essay.

I would say that watching this made me feel sick, but illness is too risky these days, given what's going on.

Here's a link I found way back in July or August on a friend's Facebook page. I saved it to blog about and look how long it has taken me... It seems appropriate to post the link after yesterday's entry on loss, since these images of the Ruin of Detroit all depict great loss. They are gorgeous photographs of tragic and appalling ugliness and waste. I personally HATE tragic and appalling ugliness and waste--I mean, it really, really upsets me.

I have never been anywhere in Detroit except the airport, but I flew in and out of it enough times to thoroughly assimilate the fact that "Detroit is in the eastern time zone" (I could even understand the Chinese version of that announcement) and so developed an affection for the city. Plus it's my friend Jim's hometown. Plus, it became the Motor City only because my old home of Erie turned down Henry Ford's request to build an automobile factory there.

See, Henry Ford wanted to build his factory in a port city very close to the ports of Buffalo and the steel mills of Pittsburgh. And there happens to be a port city almost midway between Buffalo and Pittsburgh, which is--that's right--Erie.

But Erie city fathers told Mr. Ford, no, we don't want your nasty factory. Take it some place else. So he went to the port city on the other side of Lake Erie, which was Detroit.

Erie is solidly in the rust belt and has plenty of urban decay, but it's nothing like Detroit. So perhaps the decision of Erie's city fathers, which seemed very foolish long about 1950, was actually wise in the long run.

Ditto.

see also this really great piece by Deborah Orr, "Is feminism really killing the family?" Short answer: no.

watch both parts.

This combines two of my favorite topics: military history and gay rights. It's awesome.

I don't plan to make a habit of embedding Glenn Beck clips on my blog, but this one--it's a doozy, and I just have to comment.

This man is so intellectually and artistically impoverished that the best he can come up with when he wants to evoke an earlier, simpler time in US history is A COUPLE OF ADS. That's right: to Glenn Beck, what represents America in its best incarnation are advertisements, which are as manipulated and crafted and unreal as anything can be in all of US culture.

It makes sense, though: Glenn Beck works for an ersatz news organization, and his whole agenda is to manipulate. Most of his emotions, even if real in themselves, are caused by something unreal--a past that never existed, a future that can never exist, a present that bears no correspondence to truth.

His whole shtick is as realistic and likely as a little kid offering a football player an ice-cold, opened, unsipped-from bottle of Coke in the passage to the locker rooms in a major league football stadium--but hey, it chokes people up, so it's all good.

I'll admit that this clip did take me back to an earlier time in my life. It took me back to my childhood, to testimony meetings in a ward with a decent share of crazy old people. Baffled and horrified as I am by this strange tirade, at least I can put it in a context: Beck is crying and emoting because he's "feeling the spirit." He invokes a mundane, didactic, adolescent analogy (staying out past curfew and knowing you'll get in trouble when your parents find out, but having to tell the truth because that's what people in good families DO) because Mormons perennially cast themselves as adolescents, as that is the best way for them to relate to their authoritarian god, and one more reason it's difficult for them to achieve spiritual or moral adulthood.

Also present in this clip is a good dose of the crazy factor. Beck is bearing a totally wacky testimony because he's totally wacky.

Beck has been Mormon for, what, a decade or so? And in that time he's become a kind of uber Mormon, out-Mormoning even lifelong Mormons in his weepy weird delusional didacticism.

At times I fear the church of my childhood. But when I see Glenn Beck doing this, I fear FOR the church of my childhood. I hope his approach remains what it was for ages: a wacky performance you just roll your eyes at and endure.

In case you didn't see it on your own, here's Keith Olbermann naming not one but TWO Mormons to his "worst persons in the world" list. Dallin H. Oaks is there for being a pompous, dishonest, blind homophobe, and Glenn Beck is there for being Glenn Beck.

One of the traumas of growing up Mormon in the 1960s, 70s & 80s was having to deal with the crazy people who subscribed to the crazy political ideas of Cleon Skousen, a nut job so extreme in his right-wing insanity that the church unofficially repudiated him and officially distanced itself from him. Turns out Glenn Beck lists Skousen's work as among his most important influences. This piece from Salon on the man who changed Glenn Beck's life is just so damn depressing, and forced me to relive some of the worst parts of my adolescence--moments where I KNEW, thanks to basic logic, that the stuff someone was spouting was batshit crazy, but their immunity to logic made argument impossible, especially since, being young and still relatively uneducated, logic was all I had on my side, while the crazy grownup had all this "information."

Ugh.

I just can't believe we're here again. I remain firmly agnostic on the question of god's existence, but at moments like this, I definitely believe in pure, malevolent evil. It's the simplest explanation for why Glenn Beck actually has influence in this world.

I never understood Labor Day. It made no sense: there's a holiday to celebrate work? You celebrate work by taking a day off? What?

This morning I read this essay by Michael called Who are the wealth creators? in Salon.

Well, who are the wealth creators? That is one of those questions I never really had to confront growing up as the happy child of white-collar capitalists. Sure, I took a semester-long course in free enterprise in high school--you had to to graduate--but I swear we didn't really confront this question. I think we just assumed that wealth was like matter: it had always existed, or else it had existed for so long that there was no point of imagining a time when it hadn't existed. Without ever really thinking about it, I was sort of willing to operate on the assumption that one of my in-laws explicitly avows: "Wealth is limitless, not a pie. The fact that someone else has a really big piece doesn't mean that my piece necessarily has to be any smaller." And although I was sort of smart enough, even as a high school student, to know that wasn't true, I didn't care, because I didn't really know any poor people--or at least, if I knew poor people, I didn't know they were poor. Every student in my tiny school showed up each morning reasonably dressed. No one looked underfed. How bad could being poor be? It probably wasn't all that much worse than not being rich, which we weren't, but we didn't suffer particularly from want.

Of course, I've come a long way since then. I've realized that being poor can be pretty bad. But more concerned with the question of "who controls wealth?", I never stopped to ask the question, "Who creates wealth?" until I was confronted with it. Turns out different schools of thought have different answers to that question. Lind writes,