Author: jameswagner

carrying on regardless

Since the nineteenth century, the Mount Morris bathhouse has survived punctured realty bubbles, white flight, home plumbing, moral crusades, wars, racism, depression, fashion, homelessness and AIDS. A beautiful article in the NYTimes today helps us to understand how.

The Mount Morris bathhouse, the only one in the city that caters to gay blacks, has been operating continuously since 1893 and survived the [early 80’s bathhouse crackdown when panicked state officials banned many homosexual gathering places, but did little else] essentially for two reasons. First, it is far from the city’s gay meccas, on a quiet, unassuming block of Madison Avenue at East 125th Street, across the street from the offices of the Rev. Al Sharpton. Second, it has matured through the years, remaining a place to meet new people and enjoy a steam, but with the reality of the city health code’s prohibition on open sex.
“I always tell the clients, `If I can’t bring my wife down here, it isn’t right,’ ” said Walter Fitzer, who owns the place.

These particular baths offer much more than a place to “meet new people and enjoy a steam.”

It may also be the only bathhouse anywhere to employ an education director. His name is Dr. Eugene A. Lawson, and he has worked as a principal at a handful of New York public and private schools.
Five nights a week, Dr. Lawson, whose degree is in education, oversees a lecture series in the back room, where speakers from advocacy groups like the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the Minority Task Force on AIDS discuss topics of particular interest to gay men. There are lectures on being gay in high school and on gay men raising families.
“A lot of our fellows are bisexual,” Dr. Lawson said, “so we have lectures on that subject, too.”
Six years ago, Dr. Lawson persuaded a handful of teachers, all bathhouse regulars, to start a G.E.D. program for local youths who had dropped out of school. Today, the program counts 270 students.
“It’s a community thing,” Dr. Lawson said proudly.
Mr. Fitzer does his own work for the community. He allows a dozen or so homeless men to pay $20 a night to sleep in the bedrooms, not much bigger than telephone booths, which once had holes drilled in their walls to facilitate anonymous gay sex.
“They have to be out in the morning and everything they have goes with them,” Mr. Fitzer said. “I can’t run a hotel, but it’s the least that I can do.”

reading “OZ” differently

Interesting take on the HBO series, “Oz” from a letter in tomorrow’s NYTimes “Arts & Leisure” section:

[excerpt]
I like “Oz” for many reasons, but I suspect that it touches something in me that the article [“In the Brutal World of ‘Oz.’ a Rare Place for Women” by K.A. Dilday {Jan. 5}] did not mention: As someone who went to college in the mid-60’s, when women were locked into the dorms at night to protect us from the men, who suffered no such restrictions, I find the sight of violent men behind bars deeply comforting.
Mary McKenny
San Rafael, Calif.

Without taking anything from Ms. McKenny, for the record, I feel compelled to admit that, while I was a man in college in the 60’s, I too was locked into the dorm at night. Also for the record, I must admit that while there I enjoyed neither the horrors nor the rough pleasures of “Oz.”

Germans finally remember their own war suffering

They’re finally speaking about the trauma of carpet-bombing, ruin and displacement after a silence of almost sixty years. As a historian manque, I’ve collected some book knowledge on the subject, but also a few very real memories of my own, not of the war itelf, but of a postwar Germany which still showed its scars even if it never talked about them. I had always accepted this very obvious and perhaps unique phenomenon as simply a kind of embarassment, if not actually part of a penance, for twelve years of enormous suffering inflicted in the name of Germany, but there seems to be a much better explanation.
Peter Schneider, a novelist and journalist based in Berlin, writes in today’s “Arts & Ideas” section of the NYTimes, “Only in the past three years or so have German writers and historians begun to tackle a topic previously taboo: the sufferings of the German civilian population in the last years of World War II.”

At least one reason for the almost complete avoidance of this topic would appear to be self-evident: the critical authors of postwar Germany considered it a moral and aesthetic impossibility to describe the Germans, the nation responsible for the world war, as being among the victims of that war.

Schneider discusses W.G. Sebald’s recently-published “Luftkrieg und Literature” [“Air War and Literature”], exerpted in The New Yorker in November and to be published by Random House in February, but his own grasp of the complex issues seems more mature and more humanist than that of the essay he describes as brilliant.

Like Sebald, I belong to the generation that declared war on the Nazi generation with its rebellion in 1968. The student revolutionaries of 1968 simply banished from their version of history all stories about Germans that did not fit in with the picture of the “generation of perpetrators.” It was the frantic attempt of those born after the war to shake off the shackles that bound them to the guilty generation and regain their innocence by identifying with the victims of Nazism.
The fact that some Germans who belonged to the “generation of perpetrators” had ended up as its victims, and that some Germans had even shown civil courage and rescued Jews, seemed to weaken the force of the indictment. As far as I can remember, we never said a word about the Germans who were expelled.
. . .
However absurd these taboos may appear today, I still think there were powerful reasons for this more or less unconsciously observed list of forbidden topics. It was too much to expect our generation to identify the perpetrators of the Nazi generation on the one hand and to consider the fate of German civilians and of those who were deported on the other.

He closes with what is both gentle observation and great hope.

Probably it is only possible now, after the realization of the terrible things that the Germans did to other nations, to remember the extent to which they themselves became the victims of the war they unleashed.
That this is happening now seems to me to be a gain. It turns out that the belated recollection of suffering both endured and culpably inflicted in no sense arouses desires for revenge and revanchism in the children and grandchildren of the generation of perpetrators. Rather it opens their eyes to and enhances their understanding of the destruction that the Nazi Germans brought upon other nations.

_______________________________
[What appears below is my footnote, but it’s actually a paragraph from Schneider’s NYTimes text.]

From scattered diaries, eyewitness accounts, newspaper items, fragments of reports and prose texts, Sebald assembles a grandiose account of the firestorms that raged through the German cities in the last years of the war. Here, for example, are the consequences of Operation Gomorrah, the raids on Hamburg in midsummer 1943 whose aim was to inflict “maximum destruction on the city and reduce it to ashes”:
“Horribly disfigured corpses lay everywhere. Bluish little phosphorous flames still flickered around many of them; others had been roasted brown or purple and reduced to a third of their normal size. They lay doubled up in the pools of their own melted fat, which had sometimes already congealed. . . . Elsewhere, clumps of flesh and bone or whole heaps of bodies had cooked in the water gushing from bursting boilers. Other victims had been so badly charred and reduced to ashes by the heat . . . that the remains of families consisting of several people could be carried away in a single laundry basket.”
The apologists of a “just war” will hardly be able to read Sebald’s essay without asking themselves whether the adjective in this euphemistic phrase should not be replaced by a more modest word like “justified.”

Berkeley repents

The University of California has suddenly reversed its decision forbidding its own Emma Goldman Papers Project from printing quotations from Emma Goldman about war and the suppression of free speech. [See my post of three days ago.]

“Now I understand, maybe one tiny, tiny, tiny part of what Emma Goldman’s life must have been like in the sense of both taking risks and also appreciating what it feels like when your voice is really speaking for others who have similar concerns,” [the director of the Project, Dr. Candace S. Falk,] said.
She said she had been overwhelmed by public reaction to news reports about the deletions. Since Tuesday, Dr. Falk said, the Goldman Project had received more than 300 letters and e-mail messages from around the world, all but a few supporting her view that deleting the quotations amounted to censorship. The university had insisted the disagreement was about fund-raising techniques, not free speech.

This small victory is good news, but we still shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking it’s free speech if an authority (any authority) is permitted to decide when it’s not ok to speak freely, or even to decide when it is.

Washington being oily in Venezuela

I can’t take it anymore! The American media has been misrepresenting events in Venezuela, slavishly adopting the account, one of pure invention, furnished by the Right in both Caracas and Washington. Too much time has passed for me to believe that the reportage error is purely a matter of ignorance, especially when the NYTimes, normally more subtle about its heavy corporate slant, follows the cant so readily.
What we read and what we hear is a lie.

This is clearly an oil strike, not a “general strike,” as it is often described. At the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, which controls the industry, management is leading the strike because it is at odds with the Chavez government.
Over the past quarter-century PDVSA has swelled to a $50-billion-a-year enterprise, while the income of the average Venezuelan has declined and poverty has increased more than anywhere in Latin America. And while Venezuela depends on oil for 80 percent of its export earnings and half its national budget, the industry’s workers represent a tiny fraction of the labor force.
Outside the oil industry, it is hard to find workers who are on strike. Some have been locked out from their jobs, as business owners – including big foreign corporations such as McDonald’s and FedEx – have closed their doors in support of the opposition.

Read on.

“The United States of America Has Gone Mad”

Not my quote, but that of that wacky agitator, John le Carré, printed as the headline of his piece in The Times of London.

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.
. . .
How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.

Thanks to Fred H. for the le Carré tip.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

“. . . I knew that I could never again raise my voice agains the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.
. . . for the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr., April, 1967, Riverside Church, New York

“the SUV itself is such the ideal ethical lightning rod”

Egads, he’s so good he’s scary! Mark Morford make’s you glad you’re not on his wrong side, especially when he writes as he does in his attack on the new Hummer, in fact on all SUVs, and the perverseness of the very small world which created and continues to crave such monstrosities.
The illustrated and documented essay ends,

Perhaps it is worth noting, in this time of imminent, useless war, when our country is being run by, essentially, a failed Texas oilman, that it might be about time to rethink our all-American, bigger-is-better, screw-the-environment, high-fivin’, the-world-is-our-prison-bitch mentality.
Perhaps this is the ultimate reminder the Hummer makes so explicitly clear. Perhaps this is why the SUV itself is such the ideal ethical lightning rod in today’s global climate.
For in truth, it is exactly the mentality that gave birth to the SUV and the Hummer in the first place — the weak ego, the need to strut a phony toughness, the insecurity, the patriotic narcissism, the false sense that all is solid and protected and that we care for no one but ourselves — that has turned us into what we are today.
Which is to say, the world’s bully, the preemptive superpower aggressor, the Great Antagonist, the most openly reviled nation on the planet, equal parts loathed and bitterly envied and grudgingly feared and desperately in need of a long, deep sociopolitical colonic — to say nothing of a nice bicycle.

Footnote: Anyone who has been to Europe, Asia, or in fact anywhere outside this country, in recent years knows that there really is another way to design the automobile in the global climate of today, but we never see those solutions in the U.S. They’re too small, we’re told.

whupping it up for self-esteem

In a column whose overall message is the continued decline in Dubya’s popularity figures. Maureen Dowd hits a few bullseyes, but none better than her take on what passes for foreign policy in Washington these days.

It’s equally hard to fathom the president’s bipolar approach to nuclear threats. Yesterday he hurled new ultimatums at Saddam Hussein. “I’m sick and tired of games and deception,” he said, even as he responded to Kim Jong Il’s games and deception with pleas and promises to send food and oil to Pyongyang. There are inspectors in Iraq who are not finding nuclear weapons, while inspectors have been kicked out of North Korea, which has admitted to a nuclear weapons program.
So what’s the message here? If Saddam had already developed nukes, we’d send him a fruit basket? But since he hasn’t, we’ll send him Tomahawk missiles. We know Saddam’s weak, but we’re pretending he’s strong so America can walk tall by whupping him.