Category Archives: Homophobia

04/06/2015
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Homophobia, Martin Luther King, Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Ryan Lee Dawes, WFHB

Hot Air

Living Dangerously

The Pencil took a few days off — well, okay, I took a few days off — so I missed the chance to note the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death.

What must it have been like to know that hundreds — perhaps even thousands — of people are gunning for you, that at any moment the crack of a rifle shot might be the last sound you’d ever hear?

Then again, MLK prob. never heard the crack of James Earl Ray’s rifle. The bullet traveled from Ray’s flophouse bathroom window to the Lorraine Motel balcony faster than the speed of sound. One moment King was vibrant, alive, wondering what that local minister’s wife might serve for dinner that evening and the next, he was bleeding to death from a hole on the side of his face and neck the size of a fist. King in a fraction of a second was transmuted from a Nobel Peace Prize winner, the world’s foremost advocate of nonviolent resistance, a loud critic of the Vietnam War, a fighter for justice, wealth redistribution, and organized labor to the toothless, innocuous, marketable symbol of faux-kumbaya we insist on seeing him as today.

King Arrest

Unarmed And Dangerous

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Whoever wanted King dead — and a good goddamned many did — got precisely what they wanted.

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Faces Made For Radio

You should know by now that Bloomington’s community radio station, WFHB, has been a nursery for many voice and journalistic talents who’ve gone on to make honest dough at public radio stations. Our own WFIU features, for instance, Drew Daudelin doing local news breaks during each weekday’s Morning Edition program. Daudelin used to edit my copy when I wrote for the Daily Local News at ‘FHB.

And don’t forget Alycin Bektesh — News Editor Emeritus (Emerita?) — who’s doing freelance work for public radio stations out west now that she’s ditched us for the climes of Colorado and beyond.

Another great colleague from ‘FHB, Ryan Dawes, is doing scads of work for community radio in Minnesota. He oriented me the first day I reported for a shift at ‘FHB back in late 2009. He quit his gig as WFHB’s Assistant News Director, got himself hitched, and moved to Minn. a couple of years ago. Too bad for us. But we can still hear him thanks to the magic of radio — and the interwebs.

Here are some SoundCloud links to his recent projects:

  • A feature on moonshiners during Prohibition, featuring vintage recordings of Minnesoat still operators
  • A report on Ojibwe hip hop artists; they live in a remote part of Minnesota and must endure racism as well as try to find sound recording facilities — but they still get their music out
  • Skijoring — a winter sport wherein people on skis are pulled by a horse, dogs, or a snow vehicle
  • Canoes made from birch bark
  • “My nerdiest project, about devout fans of Sherlock Holmes“
  • Upcoming — “I’m going to produce projects on the Minnesota Conservation Corps (an extension of the New Deal’s CCC), Prairie For Lady Choir, and one about the organist for the Minnesota Twins.”

Radio, my good friends, is decidedly not dead.

 

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Entrepreneur Alert

Okay, who’s with me? Let’s start a business, proclaim publicly we won’t serve same-sex couples who want to get married, and then rake in the tens of thousands of dollars bigots’ll surely donate to our crowd-funding site. Seems simple enough. Look how many businesses this has worked for in recent days.

Anyway, let’s say our business would be selling something weirdly obscure, for instance, Leopard Pop Phone Handsets — they do exist: check out Real Simple‘s “13 Unique Bridesmaid Gift Ideas, item no. 13.” We stock, say, a half-dozen of them so the start-up costs won’t be too much. We print up a few business cards, crank up an eBay account, start a Facebook page, sell one or two to a friend or a cousin, just to show we’re a going concern, and then — ba-da-boom! — we announce our deeply-held religious objection to sodomy and forbidden lifestyles and all the other holy horseshit all these pizza restaurants and cake bakers have been shoveling. We wait a couple of days and then cry that our business has fallen off the table and we’re being forced to shut down because of all the pressure from “the gays.”

Handset

Our Product

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Next thing you know, we’re dumping bushels-full of cash over our heads in celebration!

Alright, alright, you’re shaking your head because — I know — ill-gotten gains and all that. So fine, we donate half our profits to the Human Rights Campaign or the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission and keep the rest. We still make out like bandits.

Emphasis on the word bandits.

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03/30/2015
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Abortion, Homophobia, Mike Pence, Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Roman Catholic Church

Hot Air

Religious Freedom

The question has been put to me (and others) by loyal Northern Indiana Pencillista David Paglis:

I wonder if those opposed to the Religious Freedom [Restoration] Act would be in favor of legally requiring Catholic hospitals to provide abortion services and if not, why not.

For whatever reasons, those Catholics who are most flamboyantly passionate about their religion seem to be passionate most about abortion. Capital punishment? Meh. War? Sometimes ya gotta do it. Nuclear proliferation? Silence. Abortion, though, gets the uber-Catholic blood to boil. The only thing approaching it as a sheer reactionary trigger is homosexuality.

A more pressing Q. might be What is it with Catholics and sex? But that’s a topic about as inscrutable as quantum electrodynamics.

Anyway, let’s tackle David’s query.

Acc’d’g to pretty much everyone’s interpretation, Indiana’s spanking new SB-101 2015, AKA RFRA, allows business proprietors to do things like refuse service to LGBTQ folks if their (the proprietors’) religion sees them (LGBTQs) as sinners bound for the eternal flames of hell. We’ll ignore the utter absurdity of our state legislators penning laws to accommodate peoples’ belief in inanities like eternal damnation and a flaming hell. A brief reminder: The calendar tells us this is the year 2015; hell, natch, is a Mesopotamian cultural concept, meaning it was a an attempt to understand our shared baffling mortality by the very first proto-civilized Homo Sapiens sapiens more than 5000 years ago.

I might hope we’d have learned a few things since then.

Nevertheless, an alarming swath of the American pop. still buys into the hell thing. So much so, in fact, that they loathe even being around those whom they’re certain are on a highway to the place. And so sure are they of this that they’ve pressured our democratically elected representatives to codify it.

Again, in the year 2015, in case you’ve forgotten.

The law tells us we can’t make people do things that are in violation of their religion’s tenets. Indiana University Maurer School of Law prof. Daniel Conkle (a supporter of the new law) suggested last week in an Indy Star op/ed piece that laws such as RFRA protect, for instance, Muslim prisoners in their practice of Islam within the confines of the joint. Conkle also cited a Pennsylvania state court ruling that people could set up soup kitchens in city parks in violation of municipal statutes if their religion demanded they feed the homeless.

The government wanted to make the Muslim prisoner shave his beard and hoped to force the soup kitchen operators to stop ladling broth in the park. Under similar “religious freedom” laws, per this argument, the gov’t was barred from doing so. Huzzah, Conkle concludes, for these laws.

No one, though, has attempted to argue that Muslims should be forced to eat barbecued (pork) rib tips at the Taste of Bloomington. Nor has anyone demanded that soup kitchen operators make their broth available to lawyers, doctors, and hedge fund managers. Quite frankly, those of us who despise this new law don’t give a good goddamn if Muslims eat pork or that hedge fund managers are being deprived of free soup.

Nor do we, as a rule, care that Catholic hospitals don’t do abortions. In fact, many dioceses and hospitals have banned even the dilation & curettage procedure because it is often used as an alias for abortion. That’s like refusing to let customers to enter a bank lobby because bank robbers always use the lobby.

In any case, we should be demanding that Catholic hospitals, especially those that are the only health care facility for many miles around, provide abortion services. If you’re going to open up an ice cream parlor in this free society, you should be compelled to serve everybody who comes in except those causing mayhem, are public nuisances, or pose a threat to public health. Same with hospitals. Abortion is legal in this holy land. It’s a medical practice generally regarded as safe. If you open up a hospital, that means you should treat everybody who comes in the door using every therapy and procedure that’s been okayed by contemporary medical science.

Otherwise, don’t open a hospital. And try to think a little bit less about how gross sex is. And lose the habits and wimples while you’re at it. It’s 2015, for chrissakes.

Here’s Gov. Mike Pence signing RFRA last week, surrounded by officials of the Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of Israel, the Rashidun Caliphate, as well as various ascetics, mystics, and fundamentalists. In the year 2015. In case you’ve forgotten.

Pence RFRA Signing

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03/26/2015
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2016 Presidential Election, Atheism, Barack Obama, Ben Carson, God, Homophobia, Mike Pence, Religious Freedom Restoration Act, Richard Lloyd, SB-101 2015

Hot Air

God

I’ve never tried to conceal the fact that I’m an atheist, either in this space or in any other setting. At the same time, I’ve always felt it was best to take a kid glove approach to people who do believe in a god.

I figured, hell, this world is mad, this life is crazy, and if believing in a distant, invisible being who created the universe and who, albeit rarely, will grant your wishes helps you get through it, fine. I use things like music and comedy and red wine and perhaps another substance or two — unnamed, natch — to negotiate the insanity. Who says my crutch is better than yours?

Now, though, I’ve reached the end of my rope. I’ve had it. The gloves are coming off. This mad, maddening, mad-making, so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Act that Gov. Mike Pence will sign in a private ceremony this morning is the deal-breaker for me.

Here’s the offending clause in RFRA, AKA Senate Bill No. 101, 2015:

Sec. 8. (a) Except as provided in subsection (b), a governmental entity may not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion, even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability

See what the bill says? The gov’t may not force a person to violate her or his religious standards even if her/his actions violate laws or the rights of another person. If the rest of us have to play nice and by the rules vis-a-vis other human beings under the law, you, homo-fearing, transgender-fearing, butch-fearing, effeminate-man-fearing, and — most importantly — god-fearing shop owner may deny service to those people whose appearance scares you to death.

All ya gotta do is say god told you so.

God

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Enough. Stop the madness.

You want to believe in god, go ahead. But keep it to yourself. Don’t make rules and laws based on the supposed utterances of a deity or his representatives, the vast majority of which inspire constant discord and strife even among members of your own club. If there are three billion people on this planet who believe in god, there are three billion who disagree over precisely what god wants them to do.

Take pleasure and comfort in your supposed solidarity with an ancient, pre-technology, pre-literate, nomadic desert tribe. Just leave me out of it. And leave my city, my state, my country, and my world out of it. Burn all the incense you want. Raise your hands and pray that the most powerful entity in all creation is looking down upon you with paternal love in his eye. Give all your money to your preacher. Teach your kids that there is only one true god — yours, of course. That’s your right.

My right? Not to be bothered by your bullshit.

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Horserace

Okay kids, here’s the early form chart for the 2016 presidential election.

2016 Odds

Business Insider Chart

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You want some advice? Here it is:

1) Bet $500 on Hillary. You’ll make a c-note that way and the risk is really, really minimal.

2) If you can stand merely breaking even on the election in a worst-case scenario, drop another hondo on Ted Cruz. If he loses either in the primaries or the general e., you’re covered. But if he wins — which I don’t believe to be too deranged a proposition (well, yes, a Cruz presidency would indeed be deranged but the possibility of it happening is not) — you’ll cop a cool thirty-three hundred skins. That should take a bit of the sting out of a Cruz victory.

With the way things are headed in this holy land, I’ve got a funny feeling about a Cruz long shot.

[h/t for the chart to Rich Lloyd, Vanderbilt University prof. and player emeritus.]

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Carson’s Diagnosis

This may be my fave headline of the month:

17983_10206042730892434_1570057174941120028_n

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So, the leader of this holy land joins an elite club including such luminaries as Charles Manson, John Warnock Hinckley, Mark David Chapman, the Unabomber, and even Norman Bates and Patrick Bateman. Golly gee, thanks for the clarification, Dr. Carson!

Psychotics

We Now Have It On Good Authority

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03/24/2015
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African Elephants, Ernie Pyle, Extinction, Homophobia, Indiana State Legislature, Indianapolis Star, Owen V. Johnson, Peter Shankman, Pope Francis, Religious Freedom Restoration Act, RFRA, Selfies, Ted Cruz

Hot Air

Do They Follow Or Lead?

The Indy Star tells us this morning the “religious freedom” bill that passed the Indiana House yesterday is “controversial.”

Indy Star

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Um, let me correct the equanimous editor who concocted that headline. The bill passed 63-31, which, in political horserace terms, is a goddamned landslide. You see, it’s obvious the entire nation is four-square against this gay marriage stuff and our esteemed statehouse representatives are merely reflecting that will of the people.

I mean, am I right? It couldn’t be that our state legislators are woefully out of touch with the zeitgeist of the 21st Century, could it?

Here in Indiana?

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Send Him To Hawaii

As of nine o’clock this AM, Owen V. Johnson has raised only $70 of the $3000 he’s aiming for in his gofundme effort to get to Honolulu. He’s hoping to get there so he can participate in a ceremony noting the 70th anniversary of the death of Indiana’s own Ernie Pyle, the nation’s most famous and beloved combat correspondent during World War II.

Johnson is a retired Indiana University prof. of journalism and is known as the nation’s foremost expert on Pyle. He’s been invited to give the commemoration address at the dedication of a new gravesite for the legendary Hoosier. The only things standing between him and the April ceremony are 4200 or so miles, airfare, hotel accommodations, cab fare once there, and maybe enough scratch for a few decent meals.

Johnson

Owen Johnson

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Johnson has set up the crowd funding page to cover his expenses. One of his biggest cheerleaders is City Council member Steve Volan who calls Pyle “one of the greatest Hoosiers who ever lived.”

Pyle, born near Dana, Indiana, in 1900, served in the US Navy Reserve during World War I and attended IU after peace broke out. He studied journalism here and edited the IDS. After graduation, Pyle went to work for the Washington Daily News where he eventually became something of a travel correspondent. His editor there described his writings as having “a Mark Twain quality.” His travel columns eventually were syndicated nationally.

Pyle became a war correspondent in 1942 and, unlike other journalists covering the action, he shunned hanging around the generals and commanders, preferring instead to hunker down in the mud with the grunt soldiers. His focus on the little guys endeared him to the nation’s newspaper readers. In fact, he even suffered what used to be known popularly as “battle fatigue” and was officially termed “war neurosis.” (It’s now called PTSD.) For instance, he wrote of visiting the French town of Falaise immediately after a vicious battle there: “Everything is dead. The men, the machines, the animals — and you alone are left alive.” Historian Rick Atkinson writes of Pyle’s mindset after Paris was retaken in The Guns at Last Light, the third volume of his Liberation Trilogy about the Western European campaign:

Among the Allied casualties was Ernie Pyle. “If I ever was brave, I ain’t any more,” he wrote a friend. “I’m so indifferent to everything I don’t even give a damn that I’m in Paris.” The war had become “a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit.” In a final column from Europe, he told his readers, “I have had all I can take for a while. I’ve been 29 months overseas since this war started; have written about seven hundred thousand words about it…. The hurt has finally become too great.”

Pyle recharged his batteries in the US and then went back to covering the war in the Pacific. On the atoll island of Iejima, he was riding with a regiment commander in a Jeep when the vehicle came under fire from a distance machine gun nest. Pyle and the lieutenant colonel jumped into a ditch until the firing stopped. The two peeked over the rim of the ditch and Pyle, smiling, asked the colonel, “Are you alright?” At that moment, he caught a machine gun bullet in the left temple. He was killed instantly. The date was April 18th, 1945.

Pyle

Ernie Pyle

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Pyle was buried first at the Army cemetery on Okinawa and then transferred to the National Memorial Cemetery in Honolulu. He was one of the very few civilians awarded the military’s Purple Heart.

If you figure it’s worth it to kick a few dollars into Johnson’s kitty for the trip, do so. Go here.

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Make It A Fair Fight

Al Jazeera America reported yesterday that the magnificent African elephant is nearly extinct. The cause? Poachers are killing the creatures for their tusks.

African Elephant

Beauty

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As of now, the elephants are just a few decades from disappearing in the wild. The world has lost some 80,000 members of the species to poachers in the last eight years. Man, I wish elephants could fire guns, just so they could have a chance against the bastards.

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Boggling The Imagination

The foreign-born Ted Cruz utilizes a secret weapon in his stump speech, according to a BBC online magazine post. He used the word “imagine” some 38 times during his candidacy announcement yesterday at Liberty University in Virginia.

Political reporter Anthony Zurcher writes that Cruz’s speaking style is a “cross between Atticus Finch and Tony Robbins.”

Cruz

Imagine This Man As President

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Zurcher cites political strategist Frank Luntz re: “imagine”:

‘Imagine’ is still the most powerful word in the English language because it is inspiring, motivating and has a unique definition for each person. When you want to inspire, imagine is the language vehicle.

In other words, “imagine” conjures up whatever the hell the listener wants to believe. Which pretty much encapsulates the strategy of too many of today’s pols.

Me? I see Cruz as a lot like Robbins and not so much at all like Atticus.

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Groupie Nuns

Sounds like a punk band name, no?

A gaggle of cloistered nuns almost knocked Pope Frankie over during his visit to a cathedral in Naples this past weekend. They charged him in an effort to touch, presumably, the hem of his garment.

Pope Francis

Rock Star

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On the other hand, one cardinal also in attendance shouted as the nuns surrounded the Pontiff, “They are going to eat him! Sisters! Sisters!”

Can the Catholic church get any psycho-sexually weirder?

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Selfie Nonsense

I thought you’d get a kick out of this:

Screen Shot 2015-03-24 at 1.10.45 AM

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In the real world that I inhabit, this poor dope would either be sucked out of the cockpit and tumbled to his certain doom or the force of the near 600-mph wind drag would sever him at mid-thorax like a deli slicer cutting through a fresh Genoa salami. That is if he could even get that cockpit window open, which he couldn’t because it’s a pressurized cabin.

The kicker is there are enough people in this mad, mad world who believe this kind of bushwa to constitute, say, an entire political party.

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Our World, Take It Or Leave It

From New York University prof and social media marketing guru Peter Shankman:

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12/09/2014
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Book Corner, Chicago Police Department, Christiana Ochoa, Homophobia, Jack Dopp, Jackson Lynch, Michael Dopp, Misogyny, Racism

Hot Air

Sympathy For The Devil

How scared do you want to be this AM? Plenty scared? Okay, Click on over to the weblog, Second City Cop. It’s an anonymous clearinghouse for the opinions, beliefs, and rants of some Chicago police officers.

Natch, since no one’s name is attached, the true and unadulterated feelings of the blog’s author as well as commenters come through loud and clear.

CPD 1968

Not Much Has Changed In 45 Years

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What do we learn by reading Second City Cop? A significant number of sworn officers of the law in the nation’s third largest city:

  • Are chronically aggrieved
  • Exist in a state of permanent rage
  • Consider themselves persecuted
  • Are contemptuous and insulting of those they disagree with
  • Despise protesters
  • Deny or minimize the existence of police misbehavior
  • Are homophobic
  • Are misogynist
  • Are adept at concealing their racism with weasel words and code
  • Are xenophobic
  • Disdain everything from simple altruism to government programs designed to help the less fortunate among us
  • Are four-square against minimum wage
  • Hate the NFL as a result of five St. Louis Rams players protesting the decision not to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson
  • Believe that FEMA concentration camps will be established soon

I can go on and on but I won’t. Read for yourself and weep. Chicago has a total of some 13,000 police officers. They carry deadly weapons. They are authorized to take your freedom away for probable cause or on a true bill of indictment. They work hand in hand with prosecutors and the courts against the accused in our adversarial system of justice. Under these simple, basic criteria they can be described as the most powerful members of our society.

If a mere eight percent or so of those 13,000 hold any fraction of the above-mentioned feelings, then a thousand of them are F-U’d and dangerous bastards whom you’d be loath to want to sit next to at Thanksgiving dinner. But they have guns and badges.

Now, try to breathe.

[h/t to Neil Steinberg.]

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Art Sells

A huge slap on the back for the son of one of Bloomington’s most beloved citizens, Jack Dopp.

Jack’s been delivering newspapers in our town for decades now through his Bloomington News operation. He’s the guy who makes sure the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Indy Star get to your doorstep or your neighborhood merchant every single day, regardless of the weather. Pushing 70 but still wiry and quick on his feet, he continues to play for several local slow-pitch softball teams.

His son Michael is an artist based in the Los Angeles area. Michael teaches art at Chapman University in the town of Orange. He also produces scads of paintings and is represented by LA’s Roberts & Tilton Gallery.

Michael Dopp

Dopp Art

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Jack tells The Pencil that Michael’s work was exhibited in the big-time Art/Basel show in Miami Beach last week. Art/Basel is an annual series of international contemporary and Modern Art exhibits held in south Florida, Hong Kong, and Basel, Switzerland. This year, the Miami Beach exhibit featured several hundred artists from our hemisphere.

The big news is Michael sold a painting on the first day of the show. Jack whispered a figure in my ear; suffice it to say loads of folks in this holy land would be able to live for a year on the check Michael pocketed.

Who sez all artists are starving?

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Smart Kid

Have you been worrying about kids today not reading?

Stop.

Working at the Book Corner, I know that countless imps are gobbling up books even in this age of smartphones and dumbing down. For instance, Indiana University Maurer School of Law  professor Christiana Ochoa tows her three sons into the Book Corner with some regularity. She tells me if it were up to the boys, they’d park themselves at the shop twice or three times as much as they do already.

The lads dig the BC so much that one of them, Jackson, the oldest at 12, created a video love letter the other day. Watch:

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My fave line: “From the outside, it may look small. But inside, it opens up entirely new universes.”

And this kid is only 12?

The future, babies, is in good hands.

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07/22/2014
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Daniel Orr, FARMbloomington, Feisal Istrabadi, Green Building, Homophobia, Iran Air Flight 655, Korea Air Flight 007, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, Michael Sam, Ronald Reagan, Safe House Restaurant, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Sophia & Dan Wasik, Sumit Ganguly, Terra Green, Tony Dungy, Uncategorized, Vladimir Putin, WFIU Profiles, Zaineb Istrabadi

Hot Air

Indian Affairs

Yet another one of our notable customers at the Book Corner is Indiana University’s Indian cultures and civilizations professor Sumit Ganguly. He and his family are insatiable readers, which makes them mahatmas indeed in our humble view.

Ganguly

Sumit Ganguly

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Ganguly took over the mic for WFIU’s Profiles program this past Sunday. He spoke with Canadian/American/Indian author Shauna Singh Baldwin (podcast link), who also runs Milwaukee’s noted Safe House, a spy-themed restaurant that’s been allowing customers who give the high sign to pass through its secret passageway for nearly 50 years now.

Baldwin has written a number of books detailing the south Asia experience and Ganguly grilled her on said tomes. She had some fascinating insights into a developing consumer culture in the subcontinent. Some people even see their children as show-off-able possessions in some quarters of India, she says. Of course, Americans have become quite adept at turning their spawn into trophies.

India, natch, is an amazing place. One of every seven earthlings lives in that country and some of its national traditions and celebratory migrations include hundreds of millions of people at a crack. Throw an ear at Ganguly and Baldwin. Apparently, I’m not the only one who conducts a good interview in this town.

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Al Fresco Professors

Speaking of Sumit Ganguly, he and IU Maurer School of Law professor Feisal Istrabadi sat in the cool sun outside chef Daniel Orr’s FARMbloomington restaurant Wednesday last week, enjoying lunch and, no doubt, solving the world’s problems. Now, if only the world would listen.

Istrabadi/UN

 Feisal Istrabadi At The UN

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Istrabadi, an IU alum, served as Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations after that nation reorganized itself in the aftermath of the US invasion.

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High Crimes

Feisal isn’t the only big shot Istrabadi in town. His sis, Zaineb, yet another Book Corner loyalist, is a senior lecturer in IU’s Near Eastern Languages & Cultures dept.

Istrabadi

Zaineb Istrabadi (Herald Times Photo)

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She points out a tragic irony in all the hubbub over the shoot-down of that Malaysian airlines jet last week. She wrote (coyly) on Facebook this weekend:

Istrabadi Facebook

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How quickly the rest of us forget. Back in 1988, long before the inventions of the printing press and TV, gunners aboard a US Navy guided missile cruiser shot down a fully loaded Iran Air jumbo jet. All 290 people on the plane perished.

For its part, Reagan Administration officials shrugged their shoulders and said, How were we s’posed to know it was a passenger jet? Considering the fact that an Airbus A300 is more than three times the size of a fighter jet, was following its normal daily flight path, and had identified itself as a civilian airliner, the US response in retrospect seems perhaps even more criminal than Vladmir Putin’s in recent days.

For his part, The Gipper never formally apologized to Iran for the loss of life and, in fact, both the entire crew and the air-warfare coordinator of the USS Vincennes received medals for meritorious service after their tour of duty in the Strait of Hormuz, from which the ship launched the surface-to-air missiles that downed the plane.

But wait, there’s more. Back in 1983 (guess who was Prez then, as well), our clients in far western Asia, the South Koreans, lost a fully-loaded 747 en route from Anchorage, Alaska, to Seoul. A Russian interceptor shot down Korean Air Flight 007 over the Sea of Japan, in Russian air space, resulting in 269 deaths. Reagan and his boys shook their fists at the Russians until strong evidence came to light that the flight had intentionally veered into Russian air space, most likely at our behest, just to see what them Russkies would do. Well, they shot the goddamned plane out of the sky; whadjya expect?

Knowing that the Russians have itchy trigger fingers and still sending a passenger jet over their turf is about as reckless as geopolitical actions get. In fact, this holy land (if the charges are true) turned hapless foreign civilians into cannon fodder without their knowledge.

So, let’s cut the bullshit about how appalled we are by Putin’s, Russia’s, and the Russian-backed separatists’ recent actions.

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Saint Alive

I’ve blogged in other venues (don’t ask me for links, I’m too pressed for time to retrieve them right now) about what a plaster saint and a blowhard former Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy is. He’s made a cottage career out of telling the world how it ought to behave. He’s written books for adults, young adults, and children, the central thesis of all of them his assertion that he possesses the secret of all that is right and good.

He’s back pontificating again. He told a reporter from the Tampa Tribune this weekend that he would have nothing to do with openly gay player Michael Sam if he were still in charge of a football team. Dungy said: “I wouldn’t want to deal with all of it. It’s not going to be totally smooth. Things will happen.”

Dungy

Tony Dungy Looks Heavenward

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In other words, accepting a player who happens to love other men isn’t worth a football coach’s time or trouble. You know, just like it would have been too much of a hassle for a baseball manager to welcome Jackie Robinson to his team.

This, by the way, from a man who thought the whole Miami Dolphins flap over teammate bullying that led a player to retire prematurely would have been, really, no problem at all. Dungy was quoted as saying that the scandal that engulfed the Dolphins team last fall could have been a good thing. The team could have come together around it, he said. Dungy added he’d have used the situation as a teaching opportunity.

But a gay guy teammate? Nah. Too much trouble.

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Clean Construction

My dear friends Sophia and Danny Wasik sold their first green house the other day. No, not greenhouse as in the place where you keep plants. That’s green house as in a domicile that’s energy efficient, uses recycled materials, and has minimal toxic chemical-laden features.

Dig the joint they built and sold up in Crystal Lake, a far northwest exurb of Chicago. It’s proof positive that people needn’t live in Stone Age hovels in order to minimize their carbon footprints. Or feetprint. You know what I mean.

The Wasiks have long dreamed of creating a biz wherein they’d build or flip retrofitted homes that meet or exceed current standards for eco-friendly construction. Now their operation, Terra Green, is making them dough while they advance the cause of good clean homebuilding.

Wasiks

The Wasiks, Surrounded By Green, Naturally

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Here’s hoping more of our local Bloomington friends get the itch to get into the same racket in these parts. B-town is the crunchiest of crunchy locales; surely scads of savvy homebuilders here can make plenty o’coin building green homes.

Call or email Sophia and Dan for info on how to get such a biz off the ground.

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07/12/2014
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Comiskey Park, Disco Demolition, Homophobia, Racism, Steve Dahl

Hot Air

Retro-agogo

[Today marks the 35th anniversary of one of Chicago’s great civic embarrassments: Disco Demolition. In honor of the events of July 12th, 1979, I thought I’d reprint a piece I’d written for Open Salon in 2010. Enjoy.]

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Best Of Big Mike: The Right’s Disco Inferno

Nearly 31 years ago, old Comiskey Park was overrun by a bunch of lunkheaded suburban white boys exercising their rights to free speech, vandalism, and general idiocy. On the night of July 12th, 1979, Steve Dahl staged his infamous Disco Demolition between games of a scheduled doubleheader. The second game never happened.

The event is known all over the world. It’s another of those Chicago identifiers that people from Des Moines to New York like to snicker about when the topic of our town arises. Every time I hear a non-Chicagoan bring up corrupt aldermen, Al Capone, or Disco Demolition I cringe a little.

disco

Like It Or Not, This Is Chicago

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Disco Demolition featured unbridled anger, a wild mob, and a bit of violence thrown in for good measure. Pray tell, why were an estimated 90,000 people so enraged?

They hated a genre of music.

Yup.  They felt put upon, abused, repressed, tyrannized, and diminished by, well, the goddamned Bee Gees.

As a result of their righteous ire, police in riot gear had to be called in to clear the field, some 39 people were arrested, and the Comiskey Park turf was wrecked, essentially, for the remainder of the season.

Even as a dopey 23-year-old, I knew that the bile wasn’t all the result of KC and the Sunshine Band records. As I watched the field full of knuckleheads running around like madmen, thrusting their fists into the air, trying to see out of cheap-beer-and-pot-slitted eyes, ecstatic in their triumph over the crushing evil that was Donna Summer, I understood that disco music was only a stand-in for the real object (or objects) of their loathing.

donna-summer-10

Down With That Cruel Despot, Donna Summer!

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The truth of the matter was these people despised spics, niggers, and fags. Oh, they didn’t mind the first two groups living in their holy city — so long as they kept to their own neighborhoods. But with disco having taken over the Billboard charts, the Disco Sucks crowd was petrified that their whole world was next.

Disco was made for and by Puerto Ricans, blacks, and gays. It was an equalizer, maybe the most democratic pop music ever.  White people who jumped on the Hustle bandwagon did so knowing full well that they’d be rubbing sweaty bodies with brown-skinned people and homosexuals on packed dance floors.

12studio54.span_cityroom

Colors And Genders and Races And Orientations — It’s Tyranny

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The very idea turned some people’s stomachs. What could be next? Miscegenation? Or worse — kissing a member of your own sex. Sheesh, no wonder 90,000 went bonkers on that steamy July night.

Does all of this sound familiar?

Really, don’t the Tea Party ragers and all the rest of the sputtering, fuming Obama=Hitler sign-carrying gang have as their forefathers the Disco Sucks kids? Just substitute socialism for disco, Barack Obama for Giorgio Moroder, and Glenn Beck for Steve Dahl.

DISCO DEMOLITION DISC JOCKEY STEVE DAHL IN 1979

Disco Sucks = We Want Our Country Back

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07/12/2014
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Adolf Hitler, BarbWire, Homophobia, Jeff Allen, Moe Howard, Rick Wiles, Right Wing Watch

Hot Air

Why You, I Oughtta….

At a certain point, all the verbal muck and mire that issues from the mouths of wingnuts will no longer alarm or anger me; the scaredy-cat Far Right, in fact, will entertain me.

The Three Stooges used to keep me enthralled in a similar fashion when I was nine years old. Really, today’s plaster-saint moralists and obsessive nostalgists for some weird American Eden that never existed already strike me as Moe-like; as in, they’re always mad, they lash out at the slightest insult, and they’d rather poke their kids’ eyes out than let them read a science book.

To wit: a couple of Chicken Littles from the starboard side believe the gay rights movement is actually a front for A. Hitler’s secret plan to weaken and destroy our holy land. You may remember Hitler from your history books. He died 69 years ago, in case, you’ve forgotten. Apparently church guy Jeff Allen and “journalist” Rick Wiles haven’t gotten that bit of news yet. Pastor Allen, BTW, is a proud Hoosier, huzzah!

Allen interviewed Wiles on the BarbWire website, a repository of misinfo that’s so far to the R. that even Ann Coulter strikes its operators as too liberal for the world’s good. Yee-oww!

Allen, acc’d’g to Right Wing Watch, sees the LGTBI gang as some perverse cross between al Qaeda, the Klan, and everybody’s fave baddies, the Nazis. In the interview, Wiles expands on this gay-view: Adolf and his buds had hoped “create a race of super gay male soldiers” who would eventually tear down these blessed United States. And, lo and behold, Hitler’s plan is succeeding even as we speak.

As far as I can determine, Jeff Allen is  a god-flack for the Grace Wesleyan Church of Shelbyville, Indiana. S-ville is located hard to Bloomington’s right (natch) on the map. If, perchance, I’ve gotten my Jeff Allens mixed up, I apologize to the Grace Wesleyan Church, the town of Shelbyville, the county of Shelby, and, for that matter, the entire human race for the slander.

Moe Howard

The Face Of The Far Right

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05/22/2014
1 Comment
Carrie Newcomer, Charles Van Zant, Cirkut Camera, Georgia Carry Law, Guns, Homophobia, Memory Chain, Rape, Sex Toys, The Weekly Special, Tom Roznowski, WTIU

Hot Air

Hands Up; Hands Off!

How weird is this country?

This weird: In Georgia, you can carry your artillery around with you into schools and government buildings. You can be as armed as the bastard child of Annie Oakley and John Wayne even when you stop off at the Chick-fil-a. If you’re loaded down with guns so much that your knees buckle, it’s cool. But you can’t buy a vibrator unless you have a prescription and many doctors are loath to write scrips for something (they feel) is so trivial.

Gun/Vibrator

Glock (l) & Dolly Dolphin (r)

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Remember kiddies: Guns, good; sex, bad.

America!

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Cool Shots

The Cirkut camera was patented in 1904. It allowed photogs to shoot super-wide-angle pictures, even 360-degree still scenes. WTIU has been presenting a series, Memory Chain, featuring historical pix taken by the rotating camera, as well as other compelling shots. Our town’s Tom Roznowski narrates and writes the series, a part of the public TV station’s Weekly Special program.

Have you caught Memory Chain yet? If not, here’s a taste:

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The Weekly Special airs Thursdays at 8pm and Sundays at 10:30am. Tom’s voice and take are perfect for the presentation of these images of Hoosiers from a hundred years ago.

For more Cirkut camera images, check out America by the Yard: Cirkut Camera Images from the Early Twentieth Century, published by WW Norton. Some Cirkut cam pix were five feet wide.

Thankfully there’s no evidence that Cirkut cam images exist of funny cats or You won’t believe what happens next… click bait.

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Carrie Live

Speaking of B-town musicians, Carrie Newcomer stopped by the Book Corner yesterday and reminded one and all that she’ll be doing a special show, Saturday evening, October 11, 2014, at the Buskirk Chumley Theater.

Newcomer

Carrie Newcomer

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I’d cop my tix now if I were you.

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Cry Rape

Campus cops around the nation may think they’re prepping rape victims for the rigors of potential trials by challenging their every statement during initial interviews but to many female students this third degree only makes them not want to report the crime.

One cop in New York explains, “For every single rape I’ve had, I’ve had 20 that are total bullshit.”

The quote’s from a piece in Aljazeera America on the college rape crisis.

The cop doesn’t explain how he knows fully 95 percent of rape claims are “bullshit.”

Rape

Rape (Image from The Guardian)

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Even though we’d like to think of ourselves as enlightened regarding violence against women, too many ⎯⎯ far too many ⎯⎯ people still want to put the onus on the victim because, well, they just don’t get rape.

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They’re Everywhere!

Some people think way, way, way too much about homosexuality.

From ThinkProgress

Rep Charles Van Zant (R-Florida, left) Is Obsessed (Click Image For Story)

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04/22/2014
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Billy Graham, Franklin Graham, Homophobia, Jason Molina, Miss America, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Nina Davuluri, Secretly Canadian, Vladimir Putin

Hot Air

Bittersweet Music

Do not fail to listen to an NPR Morning Edition piece on the late musician Jason Molina, who died just over a year ago.

As a relative newbie to this great burgh, I never knew much about Molina until now. I wish I was in on his nearly heart-breakingly beautiful songs while he was alive.

Molina

Molina

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By good luck, though, there’s a new tribute album, Farewell Transmission: The Songs of Jason Molina, plus there are his own discs, issued under the fabulous Secretly Canadian label, another of our local treasures.

Again, take a few minutes and cop an ear on the piece sometime today.

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I Told You So

How many times have I said this? The Wingnut Right is going to start really digging Vladimir Putin.

That is, if they haven’t already developed a tyrant-crush on him yet. Come to think of it, I guarantee Sarah Palin soaks her drawers thinking about the bare-chested beast.

Putin

O-o-o-oh, Vlad!

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Anyway, along comes one of god’s PR men on Earth, Franklin Graham, son of the Rev. Billy Graham. Billy boy was the Christianist go-to guy for presidents from Eisenhower to Bush I. As Neil Steinberg wrote yesterday, Graham pere “sat out literally every important moral issue of his day…. while groveling before power and babbling about the End of the World.” Little Frankie runs the family’s dog and pony show now, apparently, and he just wrote a fap piece about Vlad-who-impales-only-women-because-gays-are-criminals.

Check this quote from Frankie on the Graham clan website re: Putin and gays:

Isn’t it sad, though, that America’s own morality has fallen so far that on this issue — protecting children from any homosexual agenda or propaganda — Russia’s standard is higher than our own?

In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues. Obviously, he may be wrong about many things, but he has taken a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.

Our president and his attorney general have turned their backs on God and His standards, and many in the Congress are following the administration’s lead. This is shameful.

Then, on Easter Sunday, the fertility holiday the Christianists swiped from the pagans, Frankie appeared on George Stephanopoulos’s gabfest where he was queried about whether or not he supported Putin as a leader. Here’s his reply:

No, I think — I think Putin is going to do what’s right for Russia. And not what’s right for America, but for Russia. We used to have a president in this country that did what’s right for this country.  But we don’t seem to have that right now.

Putin is going to make these decisions that he thinks is best for the Russian people and he thinks taking advantage of children, exploiting children is wrong for any group.

See? These loons love the man-gravy out of Vlad Putin.

I knew it all along and said so. That’s why you have to read the Pencil every day, even when I don’t post — just re-read the old stuff for the hell of it.

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The Science Of Prejudice

We know about how relatively few women there are in the hard science fields. It’s a national disgrace.

But let’s not forget that blacks, too, are woefully underrepresented in areas like physics, mathematics, biochemistry, and other disciplines that probe and define reality.

Rock star astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson once was asked why so few Double-Xers get into the sciences. He answered by comparing the plight of aspiring girl scientists to that of little black future scientists, no matter their gender.

Neil de Grasse Tyson

Smart Guy

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Teachers and other authority figures literally push girls and blacks away from the sciences.They may not even realize it, but they do. For instance, when young NdGT told his teachers he wanted to be an astrophysicist, more than one of them advised him that maybe, just maybe, he’d be better off dreaming of becoming an athlete.

Female Scientist

Wouldn’t You Rather Collect Welfare Checks?

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Yow.

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There She Goes….

I’m not even going to write about that high school in Pennsylvania suspending a kid for asking Miss America to his prom. You know, the reigning M.A. was visiting the H.S. for whatever reason beauty queens visit schools and, during the assembly, some kid got up, gave her a flower and asked her to go to the prom w/ him.

Big deal, no?

Well, yeah it was a big deal to the petit tyrants who run that kid’s correctional facili…, er, high school. They suspended him for three days for causing a disturbance.

Oh hell, I lied. I am going to write about it. Here goes.

1) All of high school is hell, but assemblies are particularly hellish. At least the kid tried to make this assembly entertaining and fun for the rest of the kids.

2) Miss America wins her crown by being voted the most hot babe among 49 other contestants (or is it 50 or 51 other contestants? IDK: Does DC send a Miss? Any of the territories?) Anyway, the kid showed real spunk by asking the consensus hottest dame in his school to his prom. I say give him the Most Likely to Succeed award right now.

3) Schools still suspend kids? As if a day or two or three off is a punishment? And don’t the kids miss out on trivial little things like their lessons when they’re suspended?

4) Miss America, it has been revealed, visited the school “to discuss the importance of science, technology, and math studies.” Wait, what? What in the holy hell was she doing talking to them about that? Where was Neil de Grasse Tyson?

Nina Davuluri

Nina Davuluri, Your New Science Career Adviser

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5) I want the school’s principal to be suspended immediately. No, wait, fired. And booted in the ass as he leaves.

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