felis_ultharus

Well, the American election is over. I don't expect the US to transform into a utopia and I expect there's going to be a lot of disappointed people -- no one gets to be president without being friendly with megacorporations, and you don't step on those people's toes without losing all your funding for the next election.

Still, there'll probably be some changes for the positive. He's talking about closing Guantanamo, and it's after the election so he has no reason to say that unless he really intends to. Let's hope Omar Khadr can catch a break.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad he won, but mostly for the things he won't do than for the things he will. He's not likely to invade Iran just because it's there, not likely to strongarm Canada into further nasty trade agreements. He's not likely to take his economy (and the world's) into another tailspin.

It's also nice to have a neighbour who at least pays lip service to socialized health care and cap-and-rade policies. It'll take the wind out of the sails of our neo-cons, who are constantly harping on about we should be more like the US.

But what this election was really about was keeping the Pandora's Box of the uglier aspects of the US psyche firmly closed. It was those uglier aspects that Sarah Palin embodies -- that combination of might-makes-right evil and intolerance of all things different from the evangelical Chrisitan worldview. The better half of America's psyche won out for four-to-eight years.

That buys time. But there's got to be some serious changes -- structural and cultural -- or every election a near miss of this kind. And there's nothing the rest of the world can do except watch, so that change has got to come from within the US.

And a good reminder of how close a miss it was, was Proposition 8 in California. The lid came off that Pandora's Box just enough to strip a people of their fundamental right to equality. The theocrats got the measure passed. And while activists are already working hard to overturn it in court, the fact that it passed at all is a major moral failure for the state.

So I made it successfully to Victoria, and I've been on the run most of the time I've been here,seeing old friends.

I've been writing in the mornings, and I'm sadly not as far into my major edit as I'd like (only 15% so far).

I haven't had time to read my friends' pages -- I will when I get back. Let me know if I've missed anything vital. I'm keeping up mostly on Facebook, as it's faster.

In the meantime -- so this is more interesting than just an update post -- some real news and fake news:

Real news: Gay Italian man has to retake driver's test for "sexual identity disturbance." Apparently, being gay makes you dangerous on the road. Who knew?

And this is why I love The Onion -- a perfect sense of irony. In this case it's being used to explode that loaded term in the American media of "values voters" (which they use to refer to homophobic, anti-abortionist, anti-woman evangelicals). Probably not work-safe, unless your workplace is really fun:

( video follows )

I finished Gentlemen of the Road yesterday. It was a brilliant novel. At first the pacing seemed odd -- too breathless -- until I discovered that (true to its 19th-century style) it was originally published in weekly instalments in a newspaper. Probably, also, it's that Chabon is used to writing 500-page novels, not 200-page ones.

It really does have all the hallmarks of a Victorian adventure story. It's meticulous in its portrayal of dress and historical details, but fully modern in its morals (modern in this case being 21st century, not 19th). There's a vaguely anachronistic mood hanging over it that's hard to pin down to any one thing, but just seems to be the characters' conception of the universe.

Also, I note that all the drawings are just slightly inaccurate. Knowing Chabon, this is probably intentional. He did write those missing-the-point footnotes to Kavalier and Clay, that miss the point exactly how actual footnotes would have.

Now I've on to much heavier fare -- Pink Blood, an examination by a Canadian journalist of a hundred homophobic/transphobic homicides in Canada over a ten-year period, and more than 300 violent acts over the same period.

Before I move on to the utter uselessness of the Canadian justice system when dealing with hate crimes, I'd like to point out that even Janoff -- for all his brilliance -- still uses that poorly-translated tagline of Michel Foucault's, the supposed, "The sodomite was a temporary aberration; the homosexual was a species."

Actually, Foucault said, "The sodomite was a relapsed heretic [relaps]" -- that is, someone who reverts to their original state, rather than adopts a temporary new one. So Queer Theory's been marching under a motto that's more apocrypha than canon.

Brad Wall, the Conservative premier of Saskatchewan, is suing the Canadian Press newswire because he feels he was misrepresented by one of its headlines: “Tape with Sask premier and Tory MP has racist, sexist, homophobic comments: NDP.”

The problem? Premier Wall only mimicked a bad Ukrainian accent to mock Roy Romanow, the child of Ukrainian immigrants. He feels that the headline unfairly links him to sexism and homophobia, when he was only being racist.

The premier must be trying to capture that elusive gay-but-racist-against-Ukrainians swing vote that makes or breaks Saskatchewan elections.

Pride Montreal

In case you haven't heard, Montreal's local pride parade, Divers/Cité, has been cancelled this year. This comes after years of strange experiments, like holding the parade at night (which pleased no one), everyone is wondering what the Divers/Cité committee is thinking.

In 1994, the city of Victoria organized a pride parade. It was a simple march with no floats, few banners -- just people marching, with a few in drag. Only 500 people marched, and I was there.

What Victoria could manage in 1994, Montreal can't seem to in 2007. I say we just take out a city permit and go for a no-frills march here like we did in 1994 in Victoria.

Naturally, with the news, the usual people are already coming out of the woodwork asking why a parade like this is necessary.

( Rant continues )

This one ain't going behind an LJ-cut.

"Four years after the end of the brutal excesses of the Taliban government, Afghan authorities supported by the U.S.-led coalition, including Canada, are still jailing teenagers convicted of homosexuality and women accused of adultery, eloping or running away from their husbands."

From Les Perreault of the Canadian Press, on 365gay.com.

In other words, we're possibly helping to round up gay and bisexual men and lock them up in prisons -- prisons that are still in a horrible condition.

Major Ron Locke, from the Canadian unit assigned to train the local security forces, protests that "We are in a different culture. Different laws and different treatment standards are normal here."

This is sickening. There have to be limits to moral relativism. Our troops are there, so at this point it's not a question of getting involved in a foreign country. We are involved, and if even one person has been sent to jail for homosexuality with our help, that atrocity is on the hands of the whole country.

The Postmodern Plague has clearly clouded our judgement if we're aiding and abetting authorities to enforce homophobic and misogynistic Taliban law -- the modern equivalent of Nazi law. No legal system that included homosexuality as a crime deserves any respect whatsoever.

Anyone wanting to protest this can write to members of parliament. Postage is free, if mailed in Canada. The address is the same for all of them, so I've listed it at the end.

( List of relevant MPs to write to )

Sorry for the early-morning rant. I hope it's coherent -- I haven't had coffee, yet.