Post by K-Box on Nov 28, 2008 3:27:49 GMT -8
... At the same time:
Unconditional love.
So, I've been spending the week with my cousin, uncle and aunt in the Bay Area of California.
Since most of my relatives live up in Washington and Idaho, relatively nearer to me in the Puget Sound region, I tend to see those relatives much more often than I do my California kin.
I know them, and we trade enough e-mails and phone calls to have a sense of each other as people, but there's a whole other side to my cousin's family, on her mom's side (her dad is my mom's brother), with which I'm only glancingly acquainted, and that goes double for their friends, with whom I shared Thanksgiving dinner tonight (or is that yesterday?).
My relatives up in the Pacific Northwest run the gamut from elitist liberal to redneck conservative, as one might expect, given the number of them who live in Idaho, but here in El Cerrito, which neighbors Oakland and San Francisco, I find myself, for once, a very blue member of a very blue family in a very blue state. I love my gun-collecting working-class uncle in Coeur d'Alene, but whenever the subject turns to politics, I always adopt a slightly defensive, slightly self-censoring stance, almost by reflex. This is not the case with either my ex-hippie uncle or my even more vocally leftist cousin in California.
At the dinner table, my aunt, uncle and cousin joined their friends in expressing their thanks for simple things, like still having jobs and money enough for holiday meals with friends. I noted that I'd made plans to visit them now all the way back in October, so I was thankful that the election had turned out the way that it did, lest our get-together resemble a wake, instead of the celebration that it was. We all laughed, throughout the night, as we talked about politics and media and the like, in slightly louder-than-conversational voices, but with the benefit of a few hours of hindsight, I wonder if my answer was too glib, because there's one thing that I have much more reason to be grateful for, and ironically enough, I realize now that it's precisely what makes me so goddamned upset with so much of the world, so much of the time.
Love is what makes me miserable. Or rather, what infuriates me is its absence, or more precisely, its deliberate deprivation from so many people's lives. In many ways, I've lucked out twice. Not only have I come from a family that's given me unconditional love, and instilled in me the belief that I was always deserving of the same, but I've also come from a place in society that reinforced both messages. When you're a heterosexual white male, American society tells you that you're goddamned near entitled to love, to the degree that there's an entire subgenre of movies devoted to promoting the notion that even the most socially retarded straight white guys deserve to have knockout supermodel porn stars fall in love with them for "just being themselves," without any onus being placed on those man-boys to change in any way.
And yet, in both fiction and real life, I see countless examples of brave, beautiful, brilliant people, whose hearts are capable of love just as valid and life-affirming as any that I could manage, who are nonetheless told that either a) their feelings somehow aren't as "real" as mine, or b) they're not entitled to receive the affections and companionship that I can take for granted, even in those moments when I'm not actually romantically involved with other people. Black women get overlooked unless their features are "white" enough to pass muster on the Eurocentric scale of sexual attraction, and even then, they all-too-often wind up being treated as second-class citizens, by both black and white men, as prospective romantic partners. Gay men and women are told, even by so many of the people who claim to "tolerate" their love, that their long-time, committed romantic relationships don't deserve to be called "marriages," nor to receive the secular legal benefits that come with such a supposedly morally sanctified status. And even in genre fiction, even straight white guy characters are frequently cock-blocked from so much as mere steady couplehood, because so many storytellers believe that the consummation of love represents the end of a story, when as any damned fool who's ever been in love knows, that's only the beginning of it.
A while back, Marc Guggenheim, one of the current writers of Amazing Spider-Man, made the head-scratchingly confusing assertion that anyone who's against the retconning of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson's marriage must also be in support of gay marriage. I call it a confusing assertion because Guggenheim was presumably making an argument in favor of retconning their marriage, and yet, I am against the retcon, and I'm also in support of gay marriage, for precisely the reasons he outlined - when a romantic relationship is given boundaries by outsiders, who dictate to those in love what it can and can't be (or even be called), that's inherently inequitable. I'm not saying this to confer anything approaching the same importance to the current writing of a comic book superhero that I do to the civil rights of 10 percent of our population in real life, but I've come to understand that it pissed me off for much the same reason, just as the mistreatment of Martha Jones on Doctor Who dismayed me so much more when I heard from black female fans how much Martha's romantic suffering mirrored that of so many gorgeous, gifted, strong, sensitive black women in real life. On an academic level, I've always endorsed equality between different segments of society, but in the past few years, some kind of weird trigger has tripped inside of me, because when I look at even the most minor of bullshit fandom stuff, I still see people in the real world who are being starved of love, for no goddamned good reason at all.
I suppose it's funny, when I think about it. After all, I'm an angry, mean-spirited, vicious, cynical, bitter bastard, who spews bile and venom and sheer, over-the-top, blinding hatred as indiscriminately, and as unrestrained, as hotel maids dispense breath mints on the pillows in their customers' rooms. And yet, I find this societally perpetrated rationing and invalidation of love between mutually informed and consenting adults to be one of the most morally offensive things that I can imagine. I mean, how dare you? With all the pain and ugliness and injustice that's inherent to even the most ideal human existence, how fucking dare you take away something so decent and inspiring and moving as the love shared between two people? How dare you tell that smart, sexy black girl that she needs to straighten her hair, and bleach her skin, to be seen as half as desirable as the skinny blonde? How dare you tell those two men, who have stuck with each other with more fidelity and mutual support than any number of heterosexual married couples, that they should consider themselves fortunate to be allowed so much as a "civil union"?
What the fuck is wrong with all of you sick, spiteful assholes, and why shouldn't I just pray for you all to die in a hellish nuclear holocaust?
In short, why do even the best members of humanity wind up reminding me of how many more of the worst ones there are out there, and why can't I even feel so much as simple gratitude without wanting to strangle the shit out of someone?
Goddammit.
Unconditional love.
So, I've been spending the week with my cousin, uncle and aunt in the Bay Area of California.
Since most of my relatives live up in Washington and Idaho, relatively nearer to me in the Puget Sound region, I tend to see those relatives much more often than I do my California kin.
I know them, and we trade enough e-mails and phone calls to have a sense of each other as people, but there's a whole other side to my cousin's family, on her mom's side (her dad is my mom's brother), with which I'm only glancingly acquainted, and that goes double for their friends, with whom I shared Thanksgiving dinner tonight (or is that yesterday?).
My relatives up in the Pacific Northwest run the gamut from elitist liberal to redneck conservative, as one might expect, given the number of them who live in Idaho, but here in El Cerrito, which neighbors Oakland and San Francisco, I find myself, for once, a very blue member of a very blue family in a very blue state. I love my gun-collecting working-class uncle in Coeur d'Alene, but whenever the subject turns to politics, I always adopt a slightly defensive, slightly self-censoring stance, almost by reflex. This is not the case with either my ex-hippie uncle or my even more vocally leftist cousin in California.
At the dinner table, my aunt, uncle and cousin joined their friends in expressing their thanks for simple things, like still having jobs and money enough for holiday meals with friends. I noted that I'd made plans to visit them now all the way back in October, so I was thankful that the election had turned out the way that it did, lest our get-together resemble a wake, instead of the celebration that it was. We all laughed, throughout the night, as we talked about politics and media and the like, in slightly louder-than-conversational voices, but with the benefit of a few hours of hindsight, I wonder if my answer was too glib, because there's one thing that I have much more reason to be grateful for, and ironically enough, I realize now that it's precisely what makes me so goddamned upset with so much of the world, so much of the time.
Love is what makes me miserable. Or rather, what infuriates me is its absence, or more precisely, its deliberate deprivation from so many people's lives. In many ways, I've lucked out twice. Not only have I come from a family that's given me unconditional love, and instilled in me the belief that I was always deserving of the same, but I've also come from a place in society that reinforced both messages. When you're a heterosexual white male, American society tells you that you're goddamned near entitled to love, to the degree that there's an entire subgenre of movies devoted to promoting the notion that even the most socially retarded straight white guys deserve to have knockout supermodel porn stars fall in love with them for "just being themselves," without any onus being placed on those man-boys to change in any way.
And yet, in both fiction and real life, I see countless examples of brave, beautiful, brilliant people, whose hearts are capable of love just as valid and life-affirming as any that I could manage, who are nonetheless told that either a) their feelings somehow aren't as "real" as mine, or b) they're not entitled to receive the affections and companionship that I can take for granted, even in those moments when I'm not actually romantically involved with other people. Black women get overlooked unless their features are "white" enough to pass muster on the Eurocentric scale of sexual attraction, and even then, they all-too-often wind up being treated as second-class citizens, by both black and white men, as prospective romantic partners. Gay men and women are told, even by so many of the people who claim to "tolerate" their love, that their long-time, committed romantic relationships don't deserve to be called "marriages," nor to receive the secular legal benefits that come with such a supposedly morally sanctified status. And even in genre fiction, even straight white guy characters are frequently cock-blocked from so much as mere steady couplehood, because so many storytellers believe that the consummation of love represents the end of a story, when as any damned fool who's ever been in love knows, that's only the beginning of it.
A while back, Marc Guggenheim, one of the current writers of Amazing Spider-Man, made the head-scratchingly confusing assertion that anyone who's against the retconning of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson's marriage must also be in support of gay marriage. I call it a confusing assertion because Guggenheim was presumably making an argument in favor of retconning their marriage, and yet, I am against the retcon, and I'm also in support of gay marriage, for precisely the reasons he outlined - when a romantic relationship is given boundaries by outsiders, who dictate to those in love what it can and can't be (or even be called), that's inherently inequitable. I'm not saying this to confer anything approaching the same importance to the current writing of a comic book superhero that I do to the civil rights of 10 percent of our population in real life, but I've come to understand that it pissed me off for much the same reason, just as the mistreatment of Martha Jones on Doctor Who dismayed me so much more when I heard from black female fans how much Martha's romantic suffering mirrored that of so many gorgeous, gifted, strong, sensitive black women in real life. On an academic level, I've always endorsed equality between different segments of society, but in the past few years, some kind of weird trigger has tripped inside of me, because when I look at even the most minor of bullshit fandom stuff, I still see people in the real world who are being starved of love, for no goddamned good reason at all.
I suppose it's funny, when I think about it. After all, I'm an angry, mean-spirited, vicious, cynical, bitter bastard, who spews bile and venom and sheer, over-the-top, blinding hatred as indiscriminately, and as unrestrained, as hotel maids dispense breath mints on the pillows in their customers' rooms. And yet, I find this societally perpetrated rationing and invalidation of love between mutually informed and consenting adults to be one of the most morally offensive things that I can imagine. I mean, how dare you? With all the pain and ugliness and injustice that's inherent to even the most ideal human existence, how fucking dare you take away something so decent and inspiring and moving as the love shared between two people? How dare you tell that smart, sexy black girl that she needs to straighten her hair, and bleach her skin, to be seen as half as desirable as the skinny blonde? How dare you tell those two men, who have stuck with each other with more fidelity and mutual support than any number of heterosexual married couples, that they should consider themselves fortunate to be allowed so much as a "civil union"?
What the fuck is wrong with all of you sick, spiteful assholes, and why shouldn't I just pray for you all to die in a hellish nuclear holocaust?
In short, why do even the best members of humanity wind up reminding me of how many more of the worst ones there are out there, and why can't I even feel so much as simple gratitude without wanting to strangle the shit out of someone?
Goddammit.
