Author: Josh Philip Ross

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[why i live in new york city]

In the warmth on Saturday, Jenny and I went for a long walk through Prospect Park. On our way we were passed by a Haitian protest supporting Aristide and denouncing American and French intervention.

The next day, I went to a John Edwards rally at Long Island University. On a stage full of soldiers, black people and Chassidim, he gave exactly the same stump speech he always gives, except he said he was glad to be at LIU and welcomed all the Deaniacs to his camp. I could hardly see him — the stage was actually lower than the gallery where we all crowded around — and the whole thing had the surreal atmosphere of being inside of a giant infomercial. Which is, more or less, my problem with Edwards: like a good infomercialist, he has one pretty good speech that he performs pretty well. And that’s it.

Probably the best thing about the whole event was waiting on line next to a Trinidadian woman who wandered up, asked what we were lined up for, asked if it was free, and declared, “Well, I’m stayin’ then.” She shared her views on all the candidates. She liked “that little guy from Ohio,” and she didn’t like Kerry, and she thought Edwards was okay, but she was going to vote for Sharpton on Tuesday because “He brings them to the table,” and without him, she said, the candidates would never have talked about Haiti or about black people. She has a point. Then she started in about her great dream of one day visiting Czechoslovakia (never mind that it doesn’t exist anymore). She’d heard Prague was beautiful, and that was where she wanted to go.

After the Edwards rally, I met Jenny at Satalla in Manhattan to hear Huun-Huur-Tu, the throat-singing quartet from Tuva, a small republic within the Russian Federation somewhere off near Mongolia. Playing soulful folk songs that are all about horses, they create fascinating harmonic overtones in their throats — something roughly like a Tibetan monk’s growl, or perhaps an astonishingly lovely burp, that manages to ascend into the higher registers and make melodies there that dance over the earthy strains of their bowed and plucked instruments. If they come to your town, go hear them; recordings don’t do the music justice.

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[late-winter forward]

Today my alarm went off an hour late. I got up, made my coffee, took my shower, checked the clock to see if it was time to go, and suddenly noticed that it was 9:03, not 8:03 like it was supposed to be. I guess somehow yesterday morning as I was whacking at my alarm clock to make it please … stop … beeping!, I must have moved the alarm an hour forward.

So I called in to work and explained, and no one seemed to mind. Except that now my whole day is shifted an hour forward. I ate lunch at 1 instead of noon, I’ll have my afternoon coffee at 3 instead of 2, and I’ll go home at 6:30 instead of 5:30. It’s like I’m living in a whole different time zone, like I’ve gone to Newfoundland for the day. Maybe I should try putting on a Newfie accent.

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[electronic voting]

My friend R over at Ambiguous.org has for a while been talking about the dangers inherent in new electronic voting systems, which could potentially be hacked. Well, R, you are now joined by this New York Times article:

For more than a year, [leading electronic-ballot manufacturer] Diebold … has been fighting conspiracy theories popularized on the Internet that say its Jetsons-at-the-polling-place wares serve as cover for an ongoing effort to stuff electronic ballot boxes on behalf of the Republican Party.

Diebold executives, along with outside computer security experts who are seeking to fix the voting machines, say the conspiracy theories are bunk. The company’s chief executive, Walden W. O’Dell, did not help matters, though, when he sent out a fund-raising letter for the Bush campaign last summer saying he was committed to “helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president next year.”

Sure, it’s an administration with a fuzzy record on fair balloting. And sure, it’s an impossible-to-audit new voting system developed by a company committed to this administration’s reelection. But surely democracy is too precious to everyone involved for them to tweak it. So let’s all just trust the powers that be to guarantee our freedom, safety and democracy. Because the price of freedom is eternally trusting our leaders. Isn’t that how it works?

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[why it matters]

Yet another reason why no set of contractual agreements can substitute for the legal protections of marriage:

[Rosie] O’Donnell said she decided to marry [long-time parnter Kelli] Carpenter, a former dancer and marketing director at Nickelodeon, during her recent trial in New York over the now-defunct Rosie magazine.

“We applied for spousal privilege and were denied it by the state. As a result, everything that I said to Kelli, every letter that I wrote her, every e-mail, every correspondence and conversation was entered into the record,” O’Donnell said. “After the trial, I am now and will forever be a total proponent of gay marriage.”

Rosie O’Donnell to Marry Girlfriend [Yahoo/AP]

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[look in the last place you left it]

NASA Rover Drills Martian Rock for Water. In a related story, Alan Greenspan suggests paying for tax cuts to the rich by cutting Social Security. And in yet another related story, the United States feels a new sense of urgency in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. (What is that, like when you have to pee and then it goes away and then it comes back again?)

Boy, our government sure is good at findin’ stuff! I bet they get that Plame leaker any day now, and also whoever’s been stealing Democratic memos in the Senate. You know, if they can take time out from defending us against queers and all that.

(And by the way, could there possibly be a better name for the Senate Seargent-at-Arms than Bill Pickle? No, there could not. I sense the ghost of Dickens past in this!)

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[interventionism]

The brewing crisis in Haiti has made the headlines in recent days, as has Bush’s reluctance to get involved militarily. But a story you almost certainly haven’t heard of — I only just learned of it myself — is the ongoing genocide in Darfur, a region of southern Sudan. Sudan’s government in Khartoum is Arabic Muslim and for decades has been waging a slow, grinding war against the black Africans in the South, who are mostly Christian or follow traditional tribal religions. The war has gained some attention among right-wing Christians in the U.S. who sympathize with their beleaguered brethren, and antislavery groups have made some noise about the horrific human trafficking that goes on, as blacks from the south are sold to Arabs in the north in a trade that most of us imagine ended by the 18th or 19th century. (A while back I read that singer Perry Farrell went to Sudan and put on an impromptu concert for a group of freed slaves.) But the Sudanese civil war has never made much impact with the mainstream American press.

While trekking in Nepal I met an Irish woman, Louise, who’d worked with an NGO in the region, helping to build schools and clinics. She told me that they build two of everything; that way, after the Sudanese army comes flying over in its aging Soviet Antonov airplanes and throwing bombs out the windows, you still have one school and one clinic left over. The war goes endlessly on because the Sudanese government does not want to give up its oil-rich territory in southern Sudan.

If America truly believed in bringing democracy to the oppressed, Sudan would be a fine place to do it. Its military is weaker than Iraq’s was, and the government’s crimes are current and glaringly obvious. But we don’t, because our government is concerned neither with spreading freedom nor with protecting Americans. As far as I can tell, our current regime is largely interested in increasing the power and wealth of its leaders. And so, despite our professed desire to spread democracy and defeat terror, Sudan remains completely off the radar.

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[he’s gone and done it]

A lot of people seemed surprised when the president of the United States declared today that he is backing a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman. But no one should be surprised. This is not a president who concerns himself with individual rights, and this is not an administration that wastes time on empathy for those whose views it does not share. Should we be shocked to learn that the administration that insisted on taking the White House despite losing the general election, then gave us the Patriot Act, the Guantanamo imprisonments, and perhaps 15,000 Iraqi dead, is now looking to enshrine discrimination in the Constitution?

For a lot of people, gay marriage is not an easy issue. I have a hard time understanding why, but I recognize that many Americans are deeply uncomfortable with the extension of the term “marriage” to homosexual unions, even when they are willing to countenance civil unions that provide the same rights. Americans were also uncomfortable with miscegenation, but we now recognize that the laws prohibiting interracial marriage were wrong and immoral.

Some argue that this is different — that while race is inescapable, there is nothing that requires an individual to enter into a homosexual union. But there was never anything that required people to enter into interracial unions, either — nothing but love and individual desire and the sacred right of each person to decide for herself when she has found the person she wants to marry and share her life with.

As with the random imprisonment of Arab-Americans and legal Arab visitors, as with the Patriot Act’s provisions for spying and harrassment, as with so much that this president has done, what we have here is a struggle between collective squeamishness and individual freedom. And as usual, George Bush Jr. has come down in favor of fomenting mass nervousness at the expense of personal rights.

Why would anyone expect any better?

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[democratic wedgies]

The Republicans have been taking a bit of a beating lately. But I’m beginning to think they’re just sharpening their wedges to divide the Democratic party from centrist swing voters.

The first wedge is already being deployed to ensure that Kerry, not John Edwards, gets the nomination. By engaging Kerry in a bit of sparring, the Bushies have made it seem like Kerry is already the nominee while diverting media attention from Edwards. The Republicans think they can beat Kerry, who has leaned left for most of his Senate career. Edwards, by contrast, has so little record that there is nowhere to attack him, and his populist message and folksy Southern style undercut Bush’s similar charms. Our political system is perverse enough to make Edwards’s inexperience an advantage, just as Bush’s was in 2000, and the Governator’s in 2003.

I imagine Republicans rubbing their hands with glee as they watch gay marriage sashaying into the center of the national debate. Much as I would like to see gay marriage legalized and gender-based discrimination eliminated from our legal system once and for all, a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that a mere 32 percent of Americans share my view, while 64 percent believe that “marriages between homosexuals … should not be recognized by the law as valid.” A Democratic candidate might bridge that gap by saying something like, “While I support gay rights, I believe that each state must make its own decision.” But I fully expect Kerry to alienate both supporters and opponents of gay marriage with some sort of tortured locution, followed by a retraction, followed by a counter-retraction.

Republicans are likewise drooling over the prospect of a national debate about Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was thrown out of office after he violated a U.S. Supreme Court order to remove a giant statue of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse steps. CNN/USA Today/Gallup found that a mere 19 percent of Americans dug that little decision by the Supremes, while a whopping 77 percent disapproved. A similar poll found that 70 percent of Americans would approve of a display of the Ten Commandments in a school or public building, but only 33 percent would approve of a monument with a verse from the Koran.

Guess what, folks? We live in a Christian country.

Democrats need to realize — and accept — that most of this country disagrees with them on religious and social issues. Bill Clinton was able to lead because he veered to the center (or the right), angering many long-suffering Democrats who wonder why their party has gone limp on traditional liberal social values, including strong separation of church and state and vigorous defense of minority rights. The answer, in part, is that these views simply don’t jibe with what America believes. We live in a country whose majority is still of the opinion that the world was created by God in six days and that the Devil is real. Like it or not, America is a Christian polity with conservative Protestant values that have always clashed with our egalitarian and libertarian strains. Democrats will win not by railing against those tendencies, but by sharing in the small-c-conservative values of honesty, fiscal responsibility, fair dealing and compassion — concepts the Bushies barely even acknowledge as existing. America may not be ready for gay marriage, but it’s ready for honest leadership, a balanced budget, help for those who are suffering in this economy, and a foreign policy tempered by compassion and wisdom.

Please keep all that in mind when you cast your primary vote.

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[tongue sandwich]

A New York moment:

Today during the lunch rush in a deli near Union Square, I watched an Indian counterman banter with customers in English, then do it just as well with other customers in Spanish. Then his Hispanic comrade, who was on the phone, leaned in to ask, “Yo, pita bread issoyo?” Issoyo is Korean for “have.”

“No,” responded the first counterman. “We’re all out.”

In other words, I just watched an Indian and a Hispanic using a mix of English and Korean to talk business. In Manhattan.

I love this city.