About My Best Photograph Of 2009
Taken at the May 26 protest against the California Supreme Court’s ruling upholding Proposition 8′s prohibition of marriage equality, held at Salmon Street Springs. The full photo set contains a total of twenty-four photos, including several others featuring this particular subject, but it was this one which The Progressive paid to use in their July 2009 issue.
Oddly, or perhaps not, marriage equality also was the subject of the coverage of which I am most proud from back in my Portland Communique days. Uninterested in marriage myself, but able to legally obtain one if I wanted to, the subject for some reason sparks some of my best work in any medium.
More generally, my best photographs — although I’m still judgmental enough to cringe any time I succumb to using “best” and “photograph” when discussing myself — tend to be those that capture moments, not objects, and certainly not (although there are apparent exceptions) subjects aware that they are being photographed.
Out of all my photography over the course of last year — of television panel events, high school plays, teabagging, comic book conventions, zoo animals, and even bicycle races — ultimately the visual happenstance of this shot comes first in capturing a moment not just from the event, nor just from that singular day, but from the necessary motion of history.
The Strange And Dangerous Offspring
The Family (Powells)
by Jeff Sharlet
Is fundamentalism too limited a word for such utopian dreams? Lately some scholars prefer maximalism, a term meant to convey the movement’s ambition to conform every aspect of society to God. In contemporary America — from the Cold War to the Iraq War, the period of the current incarnation’s ascendancy — that means a culture remade in the image of a Jesus strong but tender, a warrior who hates the carnage he must cause, a man-god ordinary men will follow as he conquers the world in order to conform it to his angry love. These are the days of the sword, literally — wealthy members of the movement gift one another with real blades crafted to battle standards, a fad inspired by a Christian best seller called Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of Man’s Soul. As jargon, then, maximalism isn’t bad, but I think fundamentalism still strikes closest to the movement’s desire for a story that never changes, a story to redeem all that seems random, a rock upon which history can rise.
I offer these explanations not as excuses for the consequences of American fundamentalism, an expansionist ideology of control better suited to empire than democracy, but to point to the defining tension of a creed that is both fearful and proud even as it proclaims itself joyous and humble. It is a martyr’s faith in the hands of the powerful, its cross planted in the blood-soaked soil of manifest destiny. It is the strange and dangerous offspring of two intensely fertile sets of stories, “America” and “Christianity”.
End of excerpt.
Republican Arguments Against Reform
In honor of the shameless performance of Representative Shadegg (R-AZ) on the floor of the House of Representatives today (“This baby can’t even control her own bowels, but I know she opposes Democratic health care reform.”) I offer to his fellow Republican obstructionists several additional arguments they are invited to make against health care reform.
- “This embryo isn’t even born. But I know it opposes Democratic health care reform. Or would, if Pelosi hadn’t personally aborted it.”
- “This cardboard cut-out represents a traveler from the future. He opposes the Democratic health care bill. Or, he will. It’s complicated.”
- “Dr. Doolittle, a doctor, can talk to the animals. Were he here, he’d say that this sugar glider opposes the Democratic health bill.”
- “This bowl of gelatin dessert can’t think or speak. But if it did, it would oppose the Democratic health care bill.”
- “I’m a Congressman. It’s like a Senator. So I’m like Ted Kennedy. So I can say that Senator Kennedy would have opposed the Democratic bill.”
I offer these arguments freely and waive all royalty rights should any Republican member of Congress wish to make use of them on the floor of the House of Representatives before debate concludes for the day. You’re welcome!
Ending The Blumenauer Gambit
“I was convinced that … it would somehow take the steam out of the Newt Gingrich-Tom Delay Congress,” writes Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR). “My hope was to simply move on and get to more pressing business at hand.”
Blumenauer offers this as background to an apology for what he calls the “worst vote” of his political career: Supporting the Defense of Marriage Act, which codified into Federal law a definition of marriage restricted to one man and one woman.
I’m not so much interested in the DOMA issue specifically here. Instead, I wish Democrats would come to understand the moral of Blumenauer’s story, even if he himself never actually draws this larger conclusion: If you give a sop to the Right it will only ever backfire on you.
Whether it’s an attempt to “take the steam out” of their overall efforts (as in the case Blumenauer describes), or an attempt to bring them to the table (as in the current case of health care reform), conceding ground to or “compromising” with the Right will only ever embolden them, and in fact not infrequently strengthen them.
They aren’t interested in discussion and debate, or in some deliberative legislative process in which the marketplace of ideas and ideals clash and parry, in the end yielding a constructive solution to this national concern or that. They’re interested only in leveraging every advantage made available to them to further their narrow, invariably narrow-minded, and often simply factually wrong agenda.
There is no common table at which to sit with the Right. There is no compromise with the Right. To them, a show of compromise by their opponents isn’t seen as an invitation to further discussion and common progress. It isn’t seen as civility.
To them, it’s simply a sign of weakness, the baring of one’s naked throat to their waiting teeth.
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