Defending the (Vacillating) Martial Flux in the United States
Over three billion years ago viable life on planet earth underwent a dynamic cataclysmic shift from previous sociological norms—it began to reproduce sexually. Long before bridal veils and bachelor parties, genetic DNA was bartered in lieu of nuptial bands in order to ensure the propagation of life on this planet. In his splendiferous essay "Same Sex Marriage—Should Gays Marry?" Marc Perkel, the self-confessed "most dangerous mind on the Internet" maps out the trajectory of human reproduction and evolution, the foundational genetics under which all human beings are currently governed. "An individual needed not only to be born, but also to survive to the reproductive age and reproduce before dying" (www.perkel.com). The axis of human evolution and the future history of mankind rested solely on the fact that our ancestors sexually reproduced.
In the same article Perkel further asserts that, "Marriage was born from primitive cultures that recognized that males and females mated and as a result produced children that needed to be cared for." Marriage was not an ordained function of the Church nor was it a concern of the state. Marriage was simply a buttress between two human beings to help further augment the survival and continuity of our current civilization.
Under the dogmatic aegis of Christian and Islamic law, marriage evolved into something of a commodity. Wives were submissive to their philandering spouses and donned the occasional veil to keep their demeanor in check. The marriage of church and state would later lead to laws that, in almost every Westernized culture, placed a greater emphatic interest on the Waspish male over his subservient conjugal.
The United States as a nation was christened under this biased perspective. It's almost gospel that when the third person pronoun was historically inked into the first sentence of the Constitution, the "We" did not refer to all people currently inhabiting the states, but conversely referred to a select group of elitist patriotic fops, who donned wigs and tights, harvested fields of marijuana, kept scores of slaves, enjoyed the occasional syphilitic bout and murdered the original inhabitants of the land they appropriated rationalizing much of their uncouth actions under the name of a deity whose opinion apparently mirrored their own misguided jingoism.
Marriage in the United States was fastened under this jurisdiction. The website ReligiousTolerance.org stresses that throughout the history of the United States, marriage and civil rights have always adhered to a somewhat malleable definition. In a recent diagnosis, Newsweek magazine states that the evolution of marriage has been vacillating for centuries. "The institution of marriage has been in a state of flux, always responding to the particular needs of that era"(Kantrowitz 40). African American's were not allowed to legally marry in all areas of the United States until after the Civil War. It was only in 1967, less than forty years ago, that the Supreme Court officially recognized interracial marriage. Until 1970, there was no such notion as martial rape because it was judicially inferred that a husband owned his wife's sexuality.
The greatest sociological slap to the purported sacrosanct union of matrimony in recent years has undoubtedly been the alarming rise in divorce. Over the last twenty years, the onset of the Nuclear family prematurely fostered a generation of overtly-cynical, politically despondent Gen-X siblings; the bastards of the baby-boomers growing up in an technology-laced society where parental marriage holds both the tenuous shelf life and fleeced superficiality comparable to a stale televised sitcom. According to a recent report released by the center of disease control and prevention and estimated forty-three percent of all first marriages will end in separation or divorce within 15 years, and all first or second marriages are more likely to end in divorce today than two decades ago (www.divorceform.org). The reason so many young adults seem dubious about their society, lackluster in their jobs, incredulous towards their governmental policies is because the first civil union they ever witnessed, the union of mother and father, was a failed campaign.
Viewed from this facet, marriage has sadly transitioned to the tune of the latest zero financed marketable asset. Even mega-conservative mongrel Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family states that, “If marriage means everything, it means nothing” (Religioustolerance.org).
But in the past three months, marriage has meant something; it has meant everything for citizens previously banned from the lawful hassle of declaring public declaration their love in the confines of a courtroom or comfort of a cathedral. In February rainbow flags were simultaneously raised all over the country in support of San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision to declare proposition 22—the 2000 California ballot that defined marriage as between a man and a woman—unconstitutional in terms of discrimination.
“I don’t agree with separate but unequal,” stated Mayor Newsom is a press release following his mandate. “Civil Unions are not good enough” ( Taylor, 40).
The results were astounding. In the first week alone over 6,000 couples were granted the legalities of a valid marriage. Six thousand couples whom, in their own lifetime, faced serious struggles in terms of sexual-identification and familial consent while battling “secular” inequity and political partiality brimming with bigotry. In one-weeks time, centuries of misunderstanding and malice were supplanted by bells and bouquets as over six thousand civil unions were cemented and declared lawful by a gracious government that has gradually taken its time inserting the universal ‘We’ back into the first sentence of the Constitution.
As was expected, the political right contorted from wing to fist, lambasting Mayor Newsom’s mayoral perspicacity. “It’s time for San Francisco to stop traveling down this dangerous path of ignoring the rule of law.” California Governor Schwarzenegger said. President Bush publicly admitted that he was seriously “troubled” by the recent support in minority rights. Even Dr. James Dobson postulated that the current pervasive trend of Gay marriage will inevitably mar marriages presupposed holiness. “Marriage will mean nothing to same-sex as well as to opposite-sex couples. The current decline of the institution of marriage will be accelerated (Taylor 40).
The trend towards universal marriage mirrors mankind’s immortal quest of self-realization in relationship towards another human being. While discussing the elusive nature of love and mysticism, poet and translator Coleman Barks commented to Bill Moyers that, “The fact that we are multiple is not so great as the fact that we are one.”
Barks was referring to an ancient poem by the Persian mystic Shams of Tabriz in which one-third of the poem consisted entirely of pronouns. “I you he she we/ In the garden of mystic lovers/ These are not true distinctions.”
William Shakespeare also seemed keenly aware of the hearts dilemma. In his widely anthologized Sonnet 114, Shakespeare urges his readers to, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ admit impediments Love is not love/ Which alters when its alteration finds/not bends with the remover to remove/ O no, it is an ever fixed mark” (Cohen 1962).
Unbridled love is indeed an indelible nagging urge. I myself feel blessed to have witness the event that transpired in San Francisco and anticipate the pending cultivation of acceptance of universal matrimony within the United States. In an age where even Christian conservatism remains skeptical over the future of marriage, I myself remain optimistic, acknowledging that nothing is perhaps more sacred than the marriage of true minds in an age where coifed conservative naiveté has reluctantly become fashionable. Even over the discourse of 300 billion years, sociological norms will continue to radically shift, thus allowing future evolution into the creature called man.
Quotations:
"Each individual's journey through life is unique. Some will make this journey alone, others in loving relationships - maybe in marriage or other forms of commitment. We need to ponder our own choices and try to understand the choices of others. Love has many shapes and colors and is not finite. It can not be measured or defined in terms of sexual orientation." From the Statement of Affirmation and Reconciliation by the Quaker meeting in Aotearoa.
"Because marriage is a basic human right and an individual personal choice, RESOLVED, the State should not interfere with same-gender couples who choose to marry and share fully an equally in the rights, responsibilities, and commitment of civil marriage." The Marriage Resolution, by the Marriage Project of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. 3
"If marriage means everything, it means absolutely nothing. It will mean nothing to same-sex as well as opposite-sex couples. The current decline of the institution of marriage will be accelerated. Increasing numbers of couples will elect to simply 'live together'." Dr. James C. Dobson, of Focus on the Family.
Because the errant button of yer reality is so much more than just a simple stage curtain, it is a passionate pergola of corporeal longing, a recital for every botched blessing that somehow, like your body creatively configured in hard-right geometrical angles of grace, is still to come.....
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Sometimes the wayward hippie still hatches out from my side...
Being Young and financially depleted In Bush’s America,
Jaded Jingoism and Wanting your Country Back
It’s hard for present day individuals to think about what they should be doing for their country in terms of patriotism and allegiance when they don’t presently approve of what their own nation is doing to other nations. It’s hard for a working class populace to support a maladroit-lipped president whose political chicanery has marred him with the global moniker of an international fabulist. It’s hard to personally evince any sort of emotion other than pent-up disdain and juvenile embarrassment at a man whose misdiagnosed jingoism has continued to, in typical republican stance, completely ignore dire amendments to State and Federal funded programs such as Education and Health care. It is hard to put stock in a man who seldom mentions the ever accruing national debt of $ 7 trillion, but further drains his country $100 billion in debt by orchestrating an unprecedented melee slaughtering thousands of US and Iraqi citizens in a war that appears to be nothing short of a military blunder (www.brillig.com). It’ll be hard for the bruised camouflaged souls of the infantry troops arriving back in the United States to feel appreciated for their efforts, when the American masses gradually begin to glean the disappearance of media capitalized acronyms such as WTC and WMD; entities that never again will exist in their original print forms or that perhaps never existed at all in the first place. It’ll be hard for the average Iraqi and Middle-Easterner not to seethe with abhorrence every time they witness superficial images of Americans on Television—coifed Caucasian, material driven, globally naïve about the conditions of his shared planet, oblivious that the majority of his six-billion neighbors do not have stable employment, harbor white skin, nor do they eat three times daily. It’ll be even harder for Iraqi’s who have lost loved ones not to foster future terrorist endeavors against the United States. If my country was invaded by a stuttering political demagogue who refused to heed the global shepherding and insight of the United Nations and if I lost a love one to an errant bullet, it would be hard for me as an individual not to pull the trigger, not to seek some sort of reciprocity in terms of vengeance. Junior high and high school students in our nation’s educational system brandish automatic weaponry when they feel socially ostracized or bullied in the confines of the classroom. What makes us think the same won’t hold true in the global auditorium?
Perhaps what is most significant is that it’s hard for a nation so inundated with projected marketable graphic images; a nation who is more justifiably worried about yearly trying to make their own individual financial ends avoid melting in the heat of the current recession; it’s truly hard for a nation to really empathize with the current conflict transpiring in Iraq when we already seem to have been collectively inured to Yahoo headlines detailing digits of the number of lives daily sacrificed in crossfire. It’s understandably hard for an American to slap one palm over their chests in pledged fealty while his fingers are monopolized right clicking images or padding down his own pockets in search of much needed forgotten funds. Being alive in America today a valid vacuity is prevalent among those under thirty--a feeling of emptiness growing up under the posh quip of social-slackers, the askance appellation of the Gen-X slogan serving as our umbrella, shielding us from the governmental plutocracy that has recently dominated politics. Sometimes today it’s just plain hard to understand what’s going on.
*
Not that we didn’t try to have any say in the matter from the outset. The United
States as a whole is a nation of political mutts and zealot inbreeds, famous first home of fanatical European flotsam and jetsam. A nation constituted under the notion of a foppish White man’s God. A nation whose boarders were significantly broadened through the butchering of its own native inhabitants. A nation who employed techniques of appropriation and attrition in order even though this fleece was entirely hypocritical to the documents that stated that all men were apparently endowed with certain innate parities granted through social impartiality. A nation whose divine conceit spurred the concept of Manifest Destiny into a religious caterwaul that ironically mirrors the current Bush administrations current plunge to wreck global havoc while simultaneously burrowing our nation ever-deeper into financial arrears.
The irony is, unlike our coined European, African and Native American heritage, we are a very embryonic nation long overdue for our waterloo. Historically we are still perceived to be a fledgling nation who in germinal stages of world leadership has who—somehow-- has unquestionably produced the most unprecedented republic ever chronicled in the canonized discourse of planet earth. At no other time during its evolution has mankind lived more comfortably. At no other time during the history of humanity has mankind engendered a accelerated utopia that continues still today, to serve as a global paradigm while, paradoxically, still grasping for its own national identity—perhaps still lodged in the political incubator, waiting to formatively peck at the shell of its own global individuality and collective ethos. Waiting for a message of hope to hatch.
*
On the eve of the current gulf war I had already been living in Bush-Regan era for almost 80% of my lifetime. Like most of my peers I thought that the war was completely unfounded but felt that the best way to voice my opinions was to protest passively. The last two years of my life had left me emotionally and financially pillaged. I was working eighty-hours a week at two jobs, living in the back of my ’92 Oldsmobile station wagon living off of starbucks and camel filters. I had just unexpectedly planted my father into the earth the previous spring, and my mother, because I was open about my vocation to write by dropping out of college, indulgently declaring myself an autodidact and academic insurgent (wryly noting that the all-too-obvious fact that there would be far more sentences in my novels than there would be scripted on my $80,000 caligraphic inked square) wanted little to do with me.
On the eve of the second gulf war I had lost everything. Riddled with debt, I worked as a teacher assistant at an alternative school during the day where I was cussed out every hour by students and superciliously informed by an insufferable social “mediators” that I obviously knew nothing about the lives these children were coming from. That I knew absolutely nothing even though I had spent fifteen years banging around the jaundiced hallways of academically deficient Peoria schools. Even though I myself lived off cafeteria lunches and had a mailbox that seemingly resembled a gas cap. Even though I myself worked third shifts at the campus library to afford the one three-hour educational class at Bradley University, the school where my Grandmother worked, where my father had received his Masters’—ironically, the school where I had originally dropped out of and the school whose infinite Campaign fund, amazingly, telephoned my Mom’s house soliciting cash only hours after my father had capitulated to cancer.
I apparently still knew nothing. Even though I was coerced into working around the clock, the majority of my cash siphoned back into Swords Hall to help finance the one class I later dropped due to yet another death. Even through all this, I obviously had no clue of where the future loud-mouthed Peorians of tomorrow were coming from much les where I as an individual was going.
I did however know that on the night of the second gulf war convened I was able to keep my hair pulled back in a pony tail and I was able to realize that, even through poverty and loneliness--twin dualities so rampant among working class Americans today- I was somehow blessed to huddle in the back of my station wagon on a dead end street, thousands of miles away from the erupting bombs of Baghdad, where people were killing each other—where global hatred and national contempt were festering, where a planet’s fingertips were itching for the discover of weapons our president swore were stashed somewhere in Iraqi soil.
Weapons that he was sure would prove mass-detriment to a nation who was already suffering from financial hangovers, feeble education and various healthcare crises.
Realizing this, that night in my station wagon, I felt like one of the luckiest fuckers on the planet. I realized that prejudice was a social hurdle that needed to be vaulted over for global assurance; I realized that the only country today, in our technology accelerated wireless culture, is the globe. I realized that, throughout all my gypsy wanderings and vagrant lifestyle, I would never be searching for something that was never there in the first place.
I was the luckiest human being alive.
Jaded Jingoism and Wanting your Country Back
It’s hard for present day individuals to think about what they should be doing for their country in terms of patriotism and allegiance when they don’t presently approve of what their own nation is doing to other nations. It’s hard for a working class populace to support a maladroit-lipped president whose political chicanery has marred him with the global moniker of an international fabulist. It’s hard to personally evince any sort of emotion other than pent-up disdain and juvenile embarrassment at a man whose misdiagnosed jingoism has continued to, in typical republican stance, completely ignore dire amendments to State and Federal funded programs such as Education and Health care. It is hard to put stock in a man who seldom mentions the ever accruing national debt of $ 7 trillion, but further drains his country $100 billion in debt by orchestrating an unprecedented melee slaughtering thousands of US and Iraqi citizens in a war that appears to be nothing short of a military blunder (www.brillig.com). It’ll be hard for the bruised camouflaged souls of the infantry troops arriving back in the United States to feel appreciated for their efforts, when the American masses gradually begin to glean the disappearance of media capitalized acronyms such as WTC and WMD; entities that never again will exist in their original print forms or that perhaps never existed at all in the first place. It’ll be hard for the average Iraqi and Middle-Easterner not to seethe with abhorrence every time they witness superficial images of Americans on Television—coifed Caucasian, material driven, globally naïve about the conditions of his shared planet, oblivious that the majority of his six-billion neighbors do not have stable employment, harbor white skin, nor do they eat three times daily. It’ll be even harder for Iraqi’s who have lost loved ones not to foster future terrorist endeavors against the United States. If my country was invaded by a stuttering political demagogue who refused to heed the global shepherding and insight of the United Nations and if I lost a love one to an errant bullet, it would be hard for me as an individual not to pull the trigger, not to seek some sort of reciprocity in terms of vengeance. Junior high and high school students in our nation’s educational system brandish automatic weaponry when they feel socially ostracized or bullied in the confines of the classroom. What makes us think the same won’t hold true in the global auditorium?
Perhaps what is most significant is that it’s hard for a nation so inundated with projected marketable graphic images; a nation who is more justifiably worried about yearly trying to make their own individual financial ends avoid melting in the heat of the current recession; it’s truly hard for a nation to really empathize with the current conflict transpiring in Iraq when we already seem to have been collectively inured to Yahoo headlines detailing digits of the number of lives daily sacrificed in crossfire. It’s understandably hard for an American to slap one palm over their chests in pledged fealty while his fingers are monopolized right clicking images or padding down his own pockets in search of much needed forgotten funds. Being alive in America today a valid vacuity is prevalent among those under thirty--a feeling of emptiness growing up under the posh quip of social-slackers, the askance appellation of the Gen-X slogan serving as our umbrella, shielding us from the governmental plutocracy that has recently dominated politics. Sometimes today it’s just plain hard to understand what’s going on.
*
Not that we didn’t try to have any say in the matter from the outset. The United
States as a whole is a nation of political mutts and zealot inbreeds, famous first home of fanatical European flotsam and jetsam. A nation constituted under the notion of a foppish White man’s God. A nation whose boarders were significantly broadened through the butchering of its own native inhabitants. A nation who employed techniques of appropriation and attrition in order even though this fleece was entirely hypocritical to the documents that stated that all men were apparently endowed with certain innate parities granted through social impartiality. A nation whose divine conceit spurred the concept of Manifest Destiny into a religious caterwaul that ironically mirrors the current Bush administrations current plunge to wreck global havoc while simultaneously burrowing our nation ever-deeper into financial arrears.
The irony is, unlike our coined European, African and Native American heritage, we are a very embryonic nation long overdue for our waterloo. Historically we are still perceived to be a fledgling nation who in germinal stages of world leadership has who—somehow-- has unquestionably produced the most unprecedented republic ever chronicled in the canonized discourse of planet earth. At no other time during its evolution has mankind lived more comfortably. At no other time during the history of humanity has mankind engendered a accelerated utopia that continues still today, to serve as a global paradigm while, paradoxically, still grasping for its own national identity—perhaps still lodged in the political incubator, waiting to formatively peck at the shell of its own global individuality and collective ethos. Waiting for a message of hope to hatch.
*
On the eve of the current gulf war I had already been living in Bush-Regan era for almost 80% of my lifetime. Like most of my peers I thought that the war was completely unfounded but felt that the best way to voice my opinions was to protest passively. The last two years of my life had left me emotionally and financially pillaged. I was working eighty-hours a week at two jobs, living in the back of my ’92 Oldsmobile station wagon living off of starbucks and camel filters. I had just unexpectedly planted my father into the earth the previous spring, and my mother, because I was open about my vocation to write by dropping out of college, indulgently declaring myself an autodidact and academic insurgent (wryly noting that the all-too-obvious fact that there would be far more sentences in my novels than there would be scripted on my $80,000 caligraphic inked square) wanted little to do with me.
On the eve of the second gulf war I had lost everything. Riddled with debt, I worked as a teacher assistant at an alternative school during the day where I was cussed out every hour by students and superciliously informed by an insufferable social “mediators” that I obviously knew nothing about the lives these children were coming from. That I knew absolutely nothing even though I had spent fifteen years banging around the jaundiced hallways of academically deficient Peoria schools. Even though I myself lived off cafeteria lunches and had a mailbox that seemingly resembled a gas cap. Even though I myself worked third shifts at the campus library to afford the one three-hour educational class at Bradley University, the school where my Grandmother worked, where my father had received his Masters’—ironically, the school where I had originally dropped out of and the school whose infinite Campaign fund, amazingly, telephoned my Mom’s house soliciting cash only hours after my father had capitulated to cancer.
I apparently still knew nothing. Even though I was coerced into working around the clock, the majority of my cash siphoned back into Swords Hall to help finance the one class I later dropped due to yet another death. Even through all this, I obviously had no clue of where the future loud-mouthed Peorians of tomorrow were coming from much les where I as an individual was going.
I did however know that on the night of the second gulf war convened I was able to keep my hair pulled back in a pony tail and I was able to realize that, even through poverty and loneliness--twin dualities so rampant among working class Americans today- I was somehow blessed to huddle in the back of my station wagon on a dead end street, thousands of miles away from the erupting bombs of Baghdad, where people were killing each other—where global hatred and national contempt were festering, where a planet’s fingertips were itching for the discover of weapons our president swore were stashed somewhere in Iraqi soil.
Weapons that he was sure would prove mass-detriment to a nation who was already suffering from financial hangovers, feeble education and various healthcare crises.
Realizing this, that night in my station wagon, I felt like one of the luckiest fuckers on the planet. I realized that prejudice was a social hurdle that needed to be vaulted over for global assurance; I realized that the only country today, in our technology accelerated wireless culture, is the globe. I realized that, throughout all my gypsy wanderings and vagrant lifestyle, I would never be searching for something that was never there in the first place.
I was the luckiest human being alive.
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