NOH8'n on Meghan

The Righteous and the Wicked - Red Hot Chili Peppers (mp3)
Left of Center - Suzanne Vega (mp3)

I like Meghan McCain.

Since the "are you saying she's hot" thing feels inevitable, I'll say OK, I think she's slightly hot.

Maybe she has a few extra pounds on her and will never fit down a drain like some supermodels. In that sense, she reminds me of a blonde Sara Rue back when Sara Rue was adorable and plus-sized and before she went all Christina Ricci with the I wanna be skinny like the other Stepford Actresses stuff.

She might lean a little too far right for my tastes, but she's a far more impressive speaker and voice for a younger generation than most anyone else getting their name out there and earning attention for it. If Meghan and Sarah Palin were on The Golden Girls together, Sarah would be the ditzy Betty White character to Meghan's Rue McClanahan, the slut who has flashes of wit and intelligence. (Barbara Bush would be Bea Arthur, and Ann Coulter would be the Estelle Getty old grandma.)

The young Ms. McCain will always have to fight the Ditzy Blonde stereotype, being that her life at times resembles that of Blair from The Facts of Life, but when you're rich and connected like Meghan, then you've got a better chance of fighting your stereotype than some poor black gal in South Dakota has of fighting hers, so I struggle to feel much pity.

I like Meghan McCain's writing. I enjoy that she's young enough to be honest, smart enough not to spout off about every little possible thing, and savvy enough to avoid being a mere mouthpiece or pawn for some portion of the Greater Political War. She can be shallow or quite insightful. In this country that feels increasingly Red v. Blue and decreasingly Purple, I find myself attracted to any and all signs of reasonable middle ground, which is to say I've given up on actual politicians, since they all seem to cater to their narrow "voting base" rather than real honest-to-God people.

This desire for purple ground found reward in the story of Meghan and her mom Cindy participating in NOH8, the campaign to lobby for same-sex marriage.

I'm sincerely excited that the discussion on homosexuality is slowly -- perhaps at glacier speed -- moving beyond a Red v. Blue issue. It's breaking down political barriers and increasingly being discussed as a civil rights issue, about freedom and equality rather than just Jesus and morality.

My cluelessness and insensitivity on matters of minority culture have been pointed out to me many times by friends and enemies, and I profess to be amazingly clueless about The Gay World, but it doesn't seem I need to know that much about the issue to believe, without reservation, that our country is better off giving them the same chances to fuck up marriage that heteros have enjoyed since Adam and Eve. God knows gays can't possibly fuck it up worse.

Part of me thinks we're scared of giving them this right because all of a sudden more gays might pull away from precisely the kinds of wilder lifestyle decisions that allow moralists and conservative Christians to trumpet the evil of their ways. The bathhouse and group sex stereotyping might be less popular if our society showed a willingness to view their relationships in the same light as those of opposite sex couples. If it's true that Paris Hilton only makes the Dumb Blonde stereotype harder to escape, maybe it's equally true that letting gays marry might help pull us back from the stereotype of all gay men being horny sex hounds and all gay women sneaking into smoky dyke dives for nooky.

The McCain women showing up in NOH8 propaganda is one more reminder of why -- before he sank into the game of politics and less "mavericky" -- I found John McCain so compelling and appealing as a political figure. A man whose wife and daughter can come out on the opposite side of a political issue from him is a man I respect, because it means they're allowed to have differing opinions under one roof and still get along.

This, obviously, is quite different from the Palin household, where Bristol accidentally reveals her understandably crappy opinion of abstinence as an effective method of birth control and is effectively hung from the rafters. She reemerges as some kind of national spokesmodel for Abstinence Only. In the Palin home, everyone eats the same amount of food at the same time and with the same utensils, or else Todd takes them out back and skins them alive.

The story of Levi and Bristol is a stark reminder that much of the Palin Family image is no more sincere than that of Lady GaGa. Were they allowed to live their isolationist dream in the far reaches of Alaska, perhaps they would have become more nuanced people. Slightly. But instead we pull them into the vortex and they become cartoon characters.

For now, at least, Meghan McCain has avoided becoming a simple caricature. Who knows whether it can last, since predictability and simple sloganeering seems to be the only real means to popularity in politics or culture, but I'm cheering for her even if I only agree with her 1/4 of the time. If she's the future of the Republican Party, at least I won't have to loathe it and can just respectfully disagree with it.

You go girl.

Sound Bites

Ten Years After--"I'd Love To Change The World" (mp3)
Pretenders--"Message Of Love" (mp3)

By the time you get through both conventions, even without watching them very much, you can get numbed by all of the party messages, catch phrases, chants, platforms, attacks, and everything else that came out of everyone's mouths for the 8 days of conventioning during the last two weeks.

I'm not much of a convention watcher, but I do enjoy going to a bar called Magoo's in East Ridge with a retired friend of mine every Thursday night. It's our way of keeping our friendship going even though I'm mired in the world of work and he's mired in....well, let's just say his yard is well taken care of.

The beauty of Magoo's is that for the longest time, it has pretended that it is a sports bar. What makes this funny is that they only have about 3-4 tv's, one of them pretty large, and they always run them with the sound off. So even when we were in there for the Vol's National Championship game back in 1999, we were crowded around a large table watching a game with no sound.

Hey, they don't turn the sound on for conventions, either. And that's where my insight (however small) kicks in. If you don't hear the misleading words that come out of people's mouths, if you only watch the people themselves, you can learn a lot.

For example, when you just watch the people in the crowd reacting to Sarah Palin's speech, you are immediately struck by the fact that virtually all of them are the same. I scanned the crowd, looking for differences, thinking that surely there was some diversity. But the virtual sameness of the faces only supported my conclusion, each time the camera scanned the crowd. Now, I know that this insight of mine isn't particularly original to anyone who saw the Republicans in action, but it does bear repeating and reminding yourself any time you ponder one of their positions--the delegates at their party's party do not reflect the make-up of our country.

I was driving back from dropping off a friend at car dealership this afternoon and just thinking about the America that I live in, as represented by about a 4-mile stretch of road through Chattanooga:

*the people driving around me on this main artery of a typical American city do not look like the Republican party I saw on TV

* the people in the 5 grocery stores I frequent regularly do not look like the Republican party I saw on TV

* the owners and the waiters and the workers and the ethnic offerings in the range of good restaurants in this city do not look like the Republican party I saw on TV

* even the well-to-do neighborhood I live in has a more diverse population than the Republican party I saw on TV

* more amazingly, the students at the exclusive, expensive, conservative, Christian school where I teach do not reflect the Republican party I saw on TV

So what gives? Who are these people and how do they think that they are pursuing a political agenda that is good for the rest of us? Don't get me wrong; I have nothing against Republicans. It's just that when I saw the absolute sameness of all those faces, I knew that what their party represents has nothing to do with me. The current crop seems to be even more cookie-cutter than ever before.


Oh, by the way, you didn't think I was talking about how all of the people on television at the Republican National Convention were white, did you? Heck, I am a white person. I'm practically a checklist for the website "Stuff White People Like." No, I'm talking about what I saw without the sound on--I saw mockery, derision, pettiness, sarcastic laughter, condescension, exclusivity. You think you can't see those things without the sound on? Well, you can. I saw the same thing on every face--man, woman, young, old. There was no dialogue, only the silent, open-mouthed chant of a mindless army.

And I thought of the America that exists here on the streets around me, and it was nothing like that. There was sharing, there was disagreement, a friendly wave, a thank you for a driving courtesy. Some were for, some were against--whatever it was. In the stores and restaurants, no one cared what color you were or who you were for, they were generally acting with basic decency and a willingness to give you a fair shake, no matter who you were.

Sometimes you don't need sound. Maybe during this election season, that is truer than it ever was. Because people are going to be saying a lot of things. And, even if you can't hear exactly what they're saying, my guess is that you can still tell, just by looking, whether someone is speaking to you from a position of basic decency. I hope so. Because that's what I think I'm voting for.

The Pretenders' cd, Pretenders II, and Ten Years After's cd, A Space In Time, are both available at Itunes.