Like many of you, I'm sure, I've been very dispirited by the manufactured rage against Health Care reform of any type being waged in town halls across the nation. Luckily, not all Senators and Congressmen were caught unaware by the backroom orchestrations going on. The memos went on on the 'net and elsewhere, including the chief Capitalist/Republican pipe organ, FauxNews.

Watch the following clip and listen how Vidal mentions that the Right is masterful of projecting their own faults onto their opponents. This is especially relevant in terms of how Obama was labeled first a communist, and lately, a Fascist (with capital "F") and a Racist. Somehow the man who was raised by a white mother turned into the bastard love child of Angela Davis and Malcolm X once elected, and "hates white people."

I recommend watching other RealNews youtube clips with Gore Vidal. He can be pompous and elitist, but damn if he isn't right on the money.

So, it's already August. It seems summer just goes by so quickly. Earlier, in July, I had a nice week-long stay in New England where I saw fireworks over the lake front in New Hampshire followed by a stay in Provincetown for about a week. Both events were very enjoyable.

The New York Times has an article about how Beirut is becoming the Provincetown of the Middle East. The analogy just doesn't quite fit right. I mean, really, the bars in P-town close at 1:00 AM, which is early by any U.S. standard...it's never been quite the party town that more decadent places like South Beach and New Orleans can brag about. I also worry that calling attention to the sliver of tolerance on the Mediterranean would just paint those places as the next targets of Hezbollah or even worse, the Phe1ps Family.
Maybe the tiny country sees a cash cow in being slightly more fun and less of a war-torn mess like it was for too long. I've read essays where a theory was set forth that the entire Middle East has been changed by the goings-on in Iran right now. With Ahmadinejad's stolen election and a general discontent over the ruling Ayatollahs the change could not come too soon.

. . . . .

I've given consideration to closing this place down. Either start a new blog, or just give up the enterprise entirely. I've wanted to buy a camera so that all pictures shown would be from my own eye, and not lifted shamelessly from the abundant internet. I know I'm not a great writer, and I've felt I really don't have much to say that is said elsewhere better. Like I said, I'm thinking about it.

. . . . .

Right now my hair is getting out of control. Getting it cut tomorrow. Reminds me of the Seventies when everyone had so much wonderful bushy, long, blow-dried hair. This is a great song to listen to with the top down and wearing sunglasses on the way to the beach. Keeping in the summer theme, a blast from the past:



Special thanks to MoondogMayne for this Youtube clip.

Some things I can watch over and over again...

Love the little guy in leather, especially...thanks to my friend Dan Nash for the tip.

On Memorial Day

This map from James Fallows says it all.

"I promise you a police car on every sidewalk." --Marion Barry, Mayor of Washington, D.C.

I first saw Marion Barry back in the early 1980's at a Gay Pride celebration. He was on the stage between drag queens and lesbian folk artists explaining his raison d'être: "There are two things a politicians like...votes. and money. You got both." It was hard to forget the real reason this man was able to run successfully three times. I voted for him for second term, but not the third. He probably would be an elder statesman, well respected and honored talk show habitué has not his third term been such a disaster. There was the time the police raided a "nightclub" on 14th Street called "This is It?"

“If you take out the killings, Washington actually has a very very low
crime rate.” — M. Barry, Mayor of Washington, DC

When I first came to Washington, for a few weeks I thought Popeye's was a strip joint. I thought this because it anchored a notorious block on 14th Street between H and I, which housed businesses such as the Olympic and Astoria Arms baths, the Le Salon Theatre and peepshows, the Benny's Home of the Porno Stars, and the Butterfly. It was one of those Times Square-esque (seedy 1970's version) places that make one want to take a shower after walking through. Well, anyway, the police decided to raid "This is It?" at around 2:30 am one night and found the mayor in the backroom. This was a cocaine drug bust, the mayor was there, as he explained it with a straight face "there for a fund raiser."

“First, it was not a strip bar, it was an erotic club. And second, what
can I say? I’m a night owl.” — M. Barry, Mayor of Washington, DC


Then came the career-ender. (Or what would have been a career-ender anywhere else on the face of the planet.) The Mayor of Washington was arrested in January, 1990, after getting caught on video smoking crack with a woman who was not his wife. Of course, the well-known phrase entered our national lexicon "The bitch set me up. Goddam bitch."

"What right does Congress have to go around making laws just because they deem it necessary?"
--Marion Barry, Mayor of Washington, D.C.


Mayor Barry would be sent to jail, and exile for a couple of years before bizarrely in 1994, win the office of mayor after a weak slate of primary opponents, followed by an astonishingly strong opposition from Republican Carol Schwartz in the general election. He would not have much power as the city would come under the scrutiny of a federally-appointed control board. In 2004, he would return to the city council, representing the poorest and mostly African-American Ward 8 in Southeast Washington.

When you look at his biography, he started out of the gate from Itta Bena, Mississippi with an impressive string of noble accomplishments, including graduating from Fisk University with a Masters in Chemistry. His first couple of terms, he did bring the city back from the brink by encouraging construction of office buildings downtown and the movement of people back into the city. Some in the gay community were suspicious of his broad coalition that including not only gays, but the city's African-American poor and middle class, and crucially, many of the Baptist ministers that dot the landscape of the poorest neighborhoods.

"All hell is going to break loose. We may have a civil war. The black community is just adamant against this." -- Marion Barry, City Councilman, Ward 8.

Recently, the man who used to be referred to in the local City Paper weekly as "Mayor-For-Life Marion Barry" popped back up in the headlines as the champion of Christian Morality.

For many in the gay community, this was a stinging rebuke, an about-face for a man who for so long seemed to be on our side. Like the stands of the likes of Barbara Mikulski and Paul Wellstone, and our current President and Secretary of State, it seemed like there's only so far they will go for gay rights. But this seemed to go a bit far.

"What you've got to understand is 98 percent of my constituents are black and we don't have but a handful of openly gay residents," Barry said. "Secondly, at least 70 percent of those who express themselves to me about this are opposed to anything dealing with this issue. The ministers think it is a sin, and I have to be sensitive to that."

I guess that says it all, doesn't it? Watch the video, have a pail ready to vomit.

Special thanks to Randy Shulman and Metro Weekly for the video. Here is Part Two.

In memory of Bea Arthur