Destructive Anachronism: April 2009

4.09.2009

You stagger down the rows of buildings blinking cold in the half light. Life is but a colored reflection in a distant mirror cracked and frayed at the edges. Streetlights reel. What's out here on a Tuesday evening to be found? Time or no time, the abnegation of time. Time's a black machine spinning nowhere and you're stuck between spokes, falling empty in a rush of feathered silence.

Your liver hurts. You drop yourself on a stoop and reach for a cigarette, ignoring the slight tremor. Glassy-eyed, you take quick drags but hold the smoke back feeling heat feeling searing that never reaches a white peak. Snow behind your eyes, swimming in a clear fog that undulates like molten glass without the color.

They pass by on all sides and you don't look at them.

You turned your phone off because you don't want to be found. You can touch your ragged breath. The trains underneath quiver and shock your planted feet. You think about following them, chasing the fleeting red light into a maze of rusted pipe and concrete covered in orange and blue – Fick die Amerikaner, G. ist eine Hure, Ich bin der einzelne König... The last king of nowhere riding glass and scattered pebbles into something at the heart of it all. Speed moving in slow circles, recursive time.

Your cigarette's out and you pull yourself to the trees overhead. It's late spring and the air is still warm. You think about the things that have passed you by and take another drink from your pocket, a second of warmth dissolving in the mist. The voices come and go in clouds against the wind. Now it's hazy dark and everyone else is laughing and you're out of bitterness.

The city's on fire and there's no smoke but you're trapped. A slow burning withering up through your ankles and calcifying in your gut. You lean against the trunk and listen to the sap and the sway of the leaves. You smell like shit and haven't shaved. Another cigarette's an eye in cold flesh, an orange prophet crying words you can't hear and wouldn't want to. The man on the corner wants your change.

Soon you'll have to limp home wherever that is tonight. Take a train and hold a hood over your eyes but you're not Tiresias and you can see everything. The light hurts. Ren can wait another night. This was important, to see... to see... He's not important tonight. You don't want to think about it. You're full of cotton and parts of you are ripping away to the hurtling dark. There will be stairs to climb and water to drink and maybe it'll be okay. Smoke a little to take the edge off, it'll be fine.

Everything will be fine.

4.08.2009

A Great Day for Equality

If you had told me this two or three years ago, I would have believed it to be fiction. But today, Vermont joined three other states in granting full equality in marriage to gays and lesbians. Vermont joins Massachusetts (so proud to live here), Connecticut, and Iowa (IOWA!!!) in allowing individuals to marry the person whom he or she loves. More importantly, the measure was approved by the Vermont legislature, representing the first instance of legislated equality on this issue (in MA, CT, and IA, state Supreme Courts struck down statutes limiting marriage to the union between a man and a woman). More importantly, the Vermont legislature mustered two-thirds majorities in both houses to override Gov. Jim Douglas's veto; the winning coalitions involved Democrats, Republicans, and Progressives.

This a huge moment for a number of reasons. One, the fact that both Iowa and Vermont recognized same-sex marriage within a week of each other gives some momentum to the equality movement -- as residents of these two states discover, as Massachusetts and Connecticut residents have, that LGBT people pose neither a threat to the institution of marriage nor to civilization, attitudes toward LGBT people will improve, and the "hot-button issue" of gay marriage will lose saliency as a political wedge tactic.

Moreover, the fact that Vermont legalized gay marriage entirely through the legislative process deprives the right-wing fearmongers and bigots of one of their primary talking points and faux justifications of maintaining inequality -- that "liberal activist" judges were responsible for overturning the will of the people. The fine senators and representatives of the Vermont state legislature represent the will of the people. You can almost hear the sound of exploding heads in the RedState/FreeRepublic crowd as they flail about for some justification to perpetuate discrimination that doesn't amount to their true reason: bigotry, ignorance, and selective readings of religious texts.

Finally, Iowa and Vermont show that hatred and discrimination against the LGBT community will die out year by year, as support for LGBT equality soars in the under 45 age bracket (I saw another poll elsewhere that had broader crosstabs, which really show strong support for gay marriage in the under 30 crowd, but despite about half an hour of searching, I couldn't find it, so we'll stick with the CBS poll). To my generation, this isn't an issue, and with each passing year, more of my generation votes and determines the course of the nation. To sum up what Iowa Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal said to a Republican lawmaker seeking to start the process of amending the state consitution to reverse the court's ruling, "You've already lost."