My darling dear you look so queer...therefore, you were inelligible to serve, and thus you weren't maimed. Good deal!
So it looks like don't ask, don't tell won't be repealed any time soon. Not that it's a surprise or anything--heck, why SHOULDN'T a minority party stop dead in its tracks a bill that most Americans want passed? That's what democracy is all about, right?--but I can't help harping on things like this because I have a hard time even convincing myself that we're really living in such a deeply spiteful and stupid age. But there you have it!
Honestly, though, while dadt is symptomatic of our whole plumbing-the-depths-of-fucked-up-edness situation, complaining about it specifically strikes me as being somewhat akin to watching Nero fiddle as Rome burns and be most concerned about the poor timbre of his fiddle-playing. Anti-gay discrimination is nauseating and indefensible, yes, but we're talking about a government that has explicitly made it clear that its biggest concern is to make sure that the rich get richer and the poor get fucked; a government that, due to willful blindness and a breaktakingly insane set of priorities, is determined to not even make a token effort to hold off the upcoming environmental apocalypse. When you consider all of this, you sort of have to shrug and say well, yes, okay, I'm against this in a philosophical sense, but "oh no--gay people can't murder foreigners in the name of a monstrous government that hates them!" is a cry I'm somehow finding myself having trouble rallying around.
Honestly, though, while dadt is symptomatic of our whole plumbing-the-depths-of-fucked-up-edness situation, complaining about it specifically strikes me as being somewhat akin to watching Nero fiddle as Rome burns and be most concerned about the poor timbre of his fiddle-playing. Anti-gay discrimination is nauseating and indefensible, yes, but we're talking about a government that has explicitly made it clear that its biggest concern is to make sure that the rich get richer and the poor get fucked; a government that, due to willful blindness and a breaktakingly insane set of priorities, is determined to not even make a token effort to hold off the upcoming environmental apocalypse. When you consider all of this, you sort of have to shrug and say well, yes, okay, I'm against this in a philosophical sense, but "oh no--gay people can't murder foreigners in the name of a monstrous government that hates them!" is a cry I'm somehow finding myself having trouble rallying around.
posted by GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. at 9:11 PM
I'm with you except in so far as Nero actually helped to put out the fire, but was later smeared by rich Senators who thought his policies, in part, too egalitarian. This sort of gives your post an ironic twist.
Truth be told, everything I know about Roman history I learned from I, Claudius. If pressed, I would have assumed that the fiddling business was probably apocryphal, but I obviously knew none of the details. Thanks.