Sex Offenders?

Let’s be honest: I am a leftist, a true liberal to my core. But there are some things that must be enforced: the right to one’s person is part of a free society. We are our own property; our bodies are not the property of the State, the Church, or God or the Devil. I believe that laws regarding the violation of a person’s sexual boundaries are well placed and deserve to be fairly enforced. I am the father of daughters: God help anybody that hurts them. I may be a leftist, but I would become the very hammer of God where their welfare is involved.

An item on the news today: a middle-school boy was charged with a felony – yes a felony – for having playfully smacked a girl on her bottom. Was this appropriate behavior? No and Yes. Preadolescence is where we learn about our bodies and sexuality; should a person be touching another person’s “intimate body parts”? That is a matter of consent. Kids do dumb things. They touch each other and begin to learn what is appropriate and in what context. Context and relationship make all the difference.

To have charged this child with felony sexual battery is the triumph of the absurd. I’ve watched kids this age. Both sexes do things that they would be less apt to do later in life unless they understood that there was consent. A boy smacks a girl on the butt and he is a rapist? Pardon my Y-chromosome, but doesn’t this trivialize rape?

I had a friend who was raped. She was a friend; trust was part of our platonic relationship. There was nothing trivial about the pain or the humiliation that she felt. It took her at least a year to be able to think about sex without violence being attached to it. This was terror and theft of that which was most intimate and personal. We trivialize the most revolting acts by lowering the bar that defines what is truly horrid and what is merely in bad taste.

We have to get past our cultural pre-pubescence and see that sex is natural and good. The natural process of development is not a bad thing. We all have done some dumb things. I smacked a girl on her bottom, made jokes about tits, talked about what I wanted to do in the locker-room like all boys that age did. But that does not make me a sexual predator; it made me a thirteen year old boy that was curious about girls, who were curious about boys.

If there was a rape with that incarceration it was a rape of justice and a slap in the face of people that have suffered sexual violence.

Ah, but I am only a fool…

Loyal Opposition?

I heard on the news that the President recently had a colonoscopy: I wonder if they found his head? OK, that was terribly obvious. I have never been a fan of our current president; mission accomplished, the “surge” (a nice euphemism for what people of my generation called “escalation of the war”), and – of course – a declaration of war on an idea. My sarcastic comment about having located Mr. Bush’s so-called and somewhat addled brain stands in the mainstream of the most American of virtues: the right of dissent.

Applied Dialectic
The object of a rational dialog is to resolve a disagreement through a logical proposition of thesis and antithesis to reach a synthesis: that is some resolution that is both reasonable and regards the original proponent’s viewpoints. This seems to be central to the ideals of our constitutional republic: we have a system that is filled with checks and balances. This is not terribly effective if measured in terms of hasty completion of tasks, but does tend to create points of dialog where truth may be discovered. Any dialectic method has, as its aim, the discovery of a common truth that may not be self-evident and requires a good deal of parsing to discover.

The fact that dialectic supposes opposition suggests that the confrontation is not a bad thing; quite to the contrary, it warns against the presumption of absolute knowledge of truth by requiring that any supposition of justice be subject to the test of loyal opposition. For any dialectical method to function there must be an advocate of the antithesis, that is to say an opposing viewpoint.

Accountability: Checks and Balances
Since when is calling our leaders to account for actions taken on our behalf – Do you recall the creation of a government by and for the people? – an unpatriotic act? Apparently this is the position of our current administration. Senator Hillary Clinton was rebuked by the Under Secretary of Defense, Eric Edelman, for asking questions deemed to be inappropriate: "Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda." Is the issue that a free exchange of ideas is a reinforcement of enemy propaganda? And just who is the enemy, terror? It would seem to this fool that when one is terrified that one cannot dare to speak the truth that is on one’s mind. Who is the terrorist in this exchange? The one that seeks to diminish the dialog that leads to truth.

In a free and democratic society public servants are free to speak their minds. This means that a spirited public debate is necessary to hear all points of view. It would seem that if there is any image to bring to the so-called enemies of freedom it is this: a great nation is open to dialog. I wish that I recalled who said it: In a war, the first casualty is the truth.

Beware of Absolute Loyalty
I fear for the welfare of my children when I hear our government demanding absolute and unquestioning loyalty to an ideal proposed by those in power. How dare they make this demand? And why are we not demanding their removal when it is made? This is not an issue of left and right, conservative and liberal: it is an issue of truth. Anybody that dares to question one’s loyalty because the veracity of our leaders has been called to account is a dangerous fellow that needs to be brought out of the shadows and into the light to be seen for what he or she is. The way that this is done is to dare to ask the questions and question the answers.

Dissent is the most American of virtues. I prove my loyalty by my dissent. I prove my patriotism by demanding accountability. Democracy is difficult. It presumes that we cherish the freedoms that define us as a nation. It presumes that we will work to make our legacy to our children this great democratic experiment that we call America. To do this we cannot fall into an ideological absolutism that precludes dialog and forbids the one who marches to the beat of a different drummer to speak the truth as he or she hears it. Indeed, we welcome dissent because the dialog makes us stronger. Away with the terror that requires blind faith in leaders that have been proven as liars.

Who knows, maybe they found Bush’s brain right next to the WMDs that were the reason for the war. They were right next to Osama Bin Laden’s hideout deep in the imagination of those who feel that mere bluster is an argument that will persuade. Ask the question. Question the answers.

Ah, but I am only a fool…

A rumination at my desk

OK… Fair enough: Six months is a long time to go without writing. I have been on a hiatus from daily ruminations. Life is good, but I’ve been busy getting my feet back under me. I realized that it has been this long when I tried to make a post on YouTube only to learn that my ‘blog had fallen into the nether world of ignored internet sites. Even now I am certain that I am the only person reading these words. Still, it was once well read and it began with one person reading it. So what can happen once can happen again…

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The United States has won the world’s record for speed eating. This is a competition that can only be waged by a nation or nations that are not only consumerist in their orientation, but have enough food to waste in such trivial pursuits. I kept wondering about people starving in this country. I’ve seen enough overweight homeless people to know that not all that lack shelter lack food; but there is extreme poverty in this country and poverty that goes to the point of being obscene in the world. Are there not famines enough to make one take a moment’s pause and wonder about the sheer decadent excess of such a thing?

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Scooter Libby has had a commutation of his sentence. Bushy-boy apparently thought that his family had suffered enough and that it was an excessive sentence for having participated in the lies and prevarications that led to the Iraq war. Out an operative of our intelligence community for political aims and look forward to a commutation and a potential pardon. What about all of the people that were executed under Bush’s administration when he was the Governor of Texas? I suppose that their pain was not really the point. They might have killed one or two people. Kill the fuckers…. To hell with the pain their families feel. If you are to be pardoned you have to contribute to the terror that is war waged on the basis of a lie: make no mistake, our President bears responsibility for the deaths of over 3,000 American soldiers, to say nothing of soldiers from the “coalition of the willing” and those Iraqis that have lost their lives. But Lewis Libby has a cool nickname that makes him sound like a kid with freckles, a missing front tooth, in a baseball cap, riding a skateboard… There is Americana in that name. So what the hell… (read these last few lines with a voice dripping with sarcasm).

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I’ve been playing the acoustic bass lately. I got an upright and am relearning my instrument. All of those low rumbles in Ventura are probably me making horrid noises with an instrument that is as tall as I am and equally wide. My cat loves to come in when I practice: he meows in Bb and has perfect pitch.

More later, and sooner…