Thought That Came Unbidden

This is my second shuttle explosion. I distinctly remember watching the Challenger disappear on live television. The one-minute-it’s-here the-next-it’s-gone feeling of utter and complete disbelief. Until September 11th nothing compared to it in shock value. Perhaps that’s why I’m able to look at the Columbia explosion from yesterday with a bit more distance. What I find disconcerts me the most about it is the media’s apparent inability to not blow it out of proportion.

Yes, it was shocking. Perhaps even a tragedy, this sudden loss of life for no apparent reason. But, when did dying for no apparent reason become the sole criterion necessary for being declared a hero? Let’s take a look, shall we:

hero: 1a) a mythological or legendary figure often of divine descent endowed with a great strength or ability; 1b) an illustrious warrior; 1c) a man admired and emulated for his achievements and qualities [Webster’s Seventh Collegiate Dictionary © 1963]

Based on this definition, the guy who is kind to animals and nice to the little old ladies who are regulars on the bus he drives qualifies as a hero. But isn’t it something more than that? Being an astronaut does take a certain set of skills, and a special measure of bravery (or stupidity depending upon your viewpoint) but it’s no different than any other job. So, does just doing your job make you heroic? I suppose it depends on the job.

Don’t get me wrong. Every single man and woman who was going up the stairs in the World Trade Center towers while most folks were going down is a hero, and they’d be heros even if they had survived the experience. They signed on for a job that they knew put their lives and their survival at a lower priority than that of the folks they swore to protect. So doesn’t declaring some folks who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time merely cheapen the sacrifice, or potential sacrifice, of true heros? Will we finally reach a point at which words are completely meaningless, when the concepts of heroism and sacrifice are obscured by media hype? Are we so desenitized that deaths like this, while sad, have to be overblown for us to feel anything at all?

Another week of avoiding the newspaper.

So Joe Millionaire narrowed it down to three this evening. Despite some heavy camera work suggesting who might be eliminated, I guessed wrong.

This is my first reality show experience. I skipped all the Survivor shows. I just couldn’t bring myself to care about whether or not any of those people got off the island/out of the desert/away from the jungle. American Idol…please. As if an A&R rep is actually going to release an album by one of those contestants. Or it could happen.

Reality TV reminds me more than anything of Heisenberg. But do you think anyone involved has ever contemplated the concept that by observing the event they are, by their very observation, changing the nature of that event?

See, I think that the "reality" in these programs is not only not-real (as in not spontaneous and unplanned) but it is even less genuine than scripted drama. With scripted drama, at least, the actors are making a real effort to make the audience believe in the characters and their motivations. With this type of television, what the actors are trying to make us believe is in their very existence. There is no collective fiction that we are entered into a joint work of art. There is no nod-and-wink process of the leap of faith that is the play.

What does it say about us as a society that we need to have our spontaneity plotted out for us? Whatever it is, it is also being manifested in our desire to control nature. Take a close look at the next SUV commercial you see. Nature is wild but “man” in his mastery rolls in and controls it for the brief period he needs it and once he leaves it goes back to being wild, but slightly better because of contact with humanity.

When will our culture reach the point when it is all an illusion? When it’s all manufactured in little image factories somewhere? All too soon I fear.

Superbowl Sunday…the pinnacle of American consumerism. Most people probably think that is the Christmas holiday season, which now begins shortly after Halloween. Sad to say, as someone who only watches football one time per year, and then only to watch the show within the show (aka: the commercials) I can only conclude that what Superbowl Sunday represents is everything that is just slightly off about American culture.

First of all, let’s get this out in the open, I think football players are a bunch of wimps. How can you think anything else about a bunch of guys who are payed millions upon millions of dollars per year to work for 3 hours a week?

Yes, yes, I know, it’s a contact sport. So what. You want a contact sport, watch a hockey game (and for the record, no, I’m not a hockey fan). Hockey players take just as much of a beating as the average football player and most starting line-ups play at least three times a week, and their season is about twice as long as the professional football season.

Look at baseball players. No, baseball is not a contact sport; this much is true. However, the baseball season is not only almost a quarter longer in calendar time but it is also about three times as long in terms of the number of games played (and yes, I am a life-long baseball fanatic). Baseball players, like hockey players, work every two to three days, multiple days in a row.

Basketball…fast becoming a contact sport (otherwise, while all the uproar over Magic Johnson’s HIV status?). These guys run, far more than football players and about as much as hockey players, and they too play every two to three days.

So why then do we deify a bunch of meat-head wimps? It’s simple…bread and circuses.

Superbowl Sunday is about excess. It’s about the two “toughest” teams in the “world championship” (would now be a good time to mention that the world includes more countries than the U.S.?) playing out the fantasies of a very average 13 year-old boy. The game is about being tough; the commercials are about being amused, and being sexually aroused (like the commercial for the pro-bowl and the hockey all-star game with the two girls in the bikini’s running was about anything else?).

More than that, though, Superbowl Sunday is about selling America its view of itself. That we’re rugged individualists who know how to be tough and show everyone a good time. But if someone is having to sell us our identity, what kind of identity is it really? How can you claim to be an individual if all your ideas are manufactured in ad agencies somewhere?

And can someone please tell me just how it takes 95 minutes to play 24 minutes of football?

Next year, I’m going to the movies.

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision in the Supreme Court. It also marks the fourth day out of six that we’ve had some sort of demonstration or march in DC.

You’d think, being the free speech advocate that I am, I’d be happy about this. I’m not. Saturday my spouse and I went down to the peace rally at the Capitol with two of our friends who’d flown in from Dallas.

I have to say that I admire people, regardless of whether or not I agree with them, who’d travel thousands of miles to march for what they believe in. What I don’t admire is the lack of respect that marchers of every stripe show the people who actually have to live in this city.

They don’t think in the subway. They drive their cars and buses and vans to the city and then bitch when there’s no place to park (no, heightened security hasn’t had any effect on daily life here in the Nation’s Capital). And they stubbornly refuse to realize that the first amendment protects my right to tell them to shove the protest sign that’s hit me in the knee for the fourth time right up their ass just as much as it protects their right to march and shout about their chosen cause.

What really bothers me, really, really bothers me is the laisez-faire attitude of city services. Metro has a monopoly in this city. Public transit is all about the WMATA. You’d think with the permits that these marches have to get and the hellish process people have to go through with the MPD’s emergency response board (trust me, two years of running gay & lesbian pride in this city will teach you a thing or two about jumping through hoops) that city services like the MPD and like Metro would be able to plan for snarled traffic, confused visitors, hassled commuters, and a lot of people having trouble getting from there to here.

Instead, we get broken down buses, lines that stretch up and out of the subway stations because the trains are too short and not running frequently enough, and people standing in sub-zero weather waiting more than 60 minutes between buses when they are scheduled to run no farther apart than every 11 minutes.

Not my problem how Metro keeps its schedule. Station buses along the route. Run short on other routes. Put some long buses on routes that would normally have little, natural gas buses. I DON’T CARE. Just keep the damn schedule.

My 25 minute commute took two hours this evening. So just how is Metro going to pay me back for the hour and forty minutes of my life they stole because they are to lazy to plan for an event that happens on the same day every year?

I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

One of the concepts that was impressed upon me when I first came out was the idea of “chosen family.” The idea being that so many lesbian and gay people are rejected by their blood families upon coming out that their friends assume a much more important role in their lives, effectively becoming a family. The older I get, though, the more my definition of friendship changes.

I used to believe that a friend was someone you stuck with no matter what, someone that if she were stranded on a desert island for a year you’d be happy to see when she got back. Friendship was more about loyalty and allowing people to be who they are without judgement. Lately I’ve come to realize that honesty may be significantly more important than loyalty and that a true friend is one you can count on to call you on your prejudices, pretensions, and predispositions.

Friendship is not constant querying, obfuscation, and avoidance.

It means telling someone when you’re angry and why.

It means giving someone you consider a friend a little bit of wiggle room to be self-centered, or absent minded but also being clear about your boundaries, and about when you need your friend to give back to you.

It means being willing to be hurt because you’ve invested in another’s opinion of you.

It means being vulnerable and sharing your life.

Friendship is a two way street.

Today, I gave up on a “friend” who would not give back. The really sad part is, she’ll never know why.