It is Monday and Oregon is up to its usual tricks again, teasing us with the loveliest weather since I've been here and then snatching it away as soon as it could.
Another weekend passes us, with a new cast of characters and plots unfolding. Highlights from the last several days include:
- Our Newest Friend. There is a new VISTA (actually there are two, but we only met one) (Is that the royal we, or have I started to think of Gabriel, Megan, and -- heaven help us -- Mike as extensions of myself?) (Let's go with the first one) in Roseburg, and her names is Lexington. Lexicon has already made positive contributions to the Good of the Whole, including being present for ultimate frisbee, buying me drinks on Friday, and being the only one of the McMinniman's crowd to come to Megan's and experience the Best Fire Ever. Yay for Lexus!
- I don't have a picture of Lex, but she looks something like this:
- Ultimate Frisbee. I think I have played this game once before, & hadn't really expected to do so again. In Oregon, though, it is the most important thing you can do after disc golf. So we gathered the Group at a very nice park to play. It turns out, I'm not very good at Ultimate Frisbee. Not even while drinking a beer. Not even while drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette.
- The Fire That Burned Everything. Some might say, it is unwise to place a bottle of lighter fluid into a fire to see what will happen. Others might suggest that when it takes you five minutes to notice that your foot is engulfed in flames, you are too drunk to be playing with fire at all. To these I say: Fuck off!
- Awkward Stories.
This took some thinking, because all of Bartlebee's friends are named Chad, but then I realized which one he meant. "Yes," says I.
"Well tonight," says he, "Chad was grabbing my ass and--" Bartlebee went on to describe a number of other much-too-forward actions by his apparently-gay friend and continued--"So should I pound his face in?"
And I said, "No. No you should not. What you should do is state, firmly and clearly, that you do not have any interest in him and that it is not okay to violate your personal space."
"Okay, but what if he continues? Then do I pound his face in?"
"No. Then -- Use the power of shame. Point out his actions to the rest of your Chads, mock him a little and ostracize him from the group."
Now, to me, that seemed like the best possible solution. If a person violates another's space, this is an aggressive act, and is not to be tolerated: And this has nothing to do with the sexual orientation of either the violator or the violated. Face-pounding, while everyone's right as a last resort, was completely uncalled for in this situation; among 19-year-old Boys, meanwhile, shame is a powerful tool.
Yet when I told (Let us call him) Rick, who is himself openly gay (one of I believe 3 such individuals allowed by law within the city limits of Roseburg at any given time), he condemned me for prescribing the use of shame. This despite the fact that I was not recommending shaming Chad for being gay, but for acting in a manner inconsistent with the values of politeness. (Granted, I am also afraid that the revelation that there are as many as 5 male homosexuals in Roseburg might send the town spiraling into a bloody cycle of witch hunts, purges and show trials, but that is a different matter).
I think I did the right thing.
***
Finally, speaking of purges and show trials: I have recently been reading and rereading this little work of horror. It is Nikolai Bukharin's final letter from prison to Stalin. (Ignore the commentary attached on the website, it is completely asinine). In it, Bukharin praises the "great and bold idea" of the general purge of which he has become a victim; professes his love for Stalin and the Party; and begs for forgiveness. I am simultaneously horrified and fascinated. What produces this sort of mind-set? How does it arise from the original socialist impulse? These questions are hardly new and really are as old as Stalinism but...This is the first time I've asked them. & I don't know either what the answer is.
1 comment:
I think you did the right thing. The use of shame against homosexuals simply for their homosexuality might make Rick a little sensitive about it, but if I found myself in a similar situation with a woman, I would not hesitate to shame her as a loose and wanton hussy, and no one would think I had transgressed any boundaries. On the contrary, we'd all agree she deserved the label after so aggressively advancing on me, even after telling her about my lovely wife and lack of interest in other romantic or physical liaisons. And really, if you can't treat an aggressively forward gay man the same as a drunken slut at the bar, then haven't you fallen guilty of discriminating against homosexuals yourself?
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