224. AGGRIEVED OUT-GROUPS

“The future. What’s that?”
—Belisario, one of a group of hunter-gatherers who left the Colombian jungle to join the modern world, as quoted in yesterday’s New York Times

From the Archives

(May 2006) I read today that Christianists are urging believers to participate in an Othercott by seeing a different movie on the day The Da Vinci Code opens.

And here’s a telling factoid. Their alternate movie of choice is Over the Hedge, a nice little animated feature.

(Keep those blinders on, guys, while the world moves right on past you.)

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that the reverend Jim Garlow of San Diego is training pastors in methods to convince parishioners to throw Da Vinci Code parties in their homes because Garlow asserts that “it’s the task of the missionary to learn the language of the indigenous people” so that the missionaries can correct our ignorance.

(Interesting how he uses noblesse oblige empirespeak to justify his fundamentalism, huh?)

Meanwhile, writer David Brooks has announced that the problem with democrats is that we have become “a collection of aggrieved out-groups” who have not recognized that “multiculturalism and identity politics are dead.”

He sees democrats “purging the last vestiges of the New Left and returning to the older civic liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s” now . . . and yeah, I see a little of that too—but primarily from Republican wannabes who think assimilation with Bill Frist is how we move forward.

(Do you read “Forget The Queers” of “Forget Feminism” in this approach? How about “Forget Leadership?”)

Mother’s Day is this weekend, so perhaps David has been looking back fondly on the 1950s, when his mom no doubt wore a perky Ozzie-and-Harriet skirt and popped sleeping pills when no one was looking and filtered his daddy’s coffee through Eisenhower golf socks as she died inside.

Yes, David we all long for those golden days when the pill was unavailable and battered women’s shelters didn’t exist because no one saw the need for them and the thought of a husband being charged for raping or silencing his wife was unheard of. (But where would David have heard it anyway since women were so rarely admitted to positions of power?)

Dear Dave. Just so you know, we queers ain’t going away, despite how smugly you pronounce that we're passe.

Amazing how white men so rarely recognize that considering people unlike themselves to be special interest groups is just another example of their expectation of privilege.

Meanwhile, can you believe that the Senate approved a two-year extension of the boy emperor’s tax cuts that benefit the super-rich at the expense of the rest of us?

Turn off your television sets, boys and girls. This is reality.

SANG IN SHOWER: Holly Near’s “Simply Love”

READING: Donna Tartt’s Little Friend

LISTENING TO: Jennifer Warnes’ cover of Leonard Cohen’s “First We Take Manhattan”: I don’t like your fashion business mister. I don’t like those drugs that keep you thin. I don’t like what happened to my sister. First we take Manhattan. Then we take Berlin.