I'm incredibly agitated about a story I've just read in the New Yorker.

As you may remember, one of George Bush's lines, particularly when he was discussing education was the concept of "the soft bigotry of low expectations." To paraphrase: rather than assume that a (black, latino, female, minority) student can accomplish, I will assume, at the start, that you lack the right stuff to compete. I will assume that you can never achieve as much, to be so smart as to do well on this here standardized test.

Bush, of course, was referring to testing and suggesting that it was wrong to suggest that, say, someone who grew up poor and raised by his grandmother might perform differently on a standardized test than a kid born to affluence who never had to worry if there was enough milk in the fridge. It's wrong to change the standard because someone, due to his circumstances, might perhaps have difficulty meeting the standard.

I'm twisting this example, for my own purposes. Although Bush used the concept of the soft bigotry of low expectations as a trojan horse to do all sorts of nasty behavior, I am using it to talk about gay men.

David Feinberg wrote a couple of great comic novels before he died of AIDS and, in one of them, he suggested that the travesty wrought by HIV infections was so great that gay men would get the hint and never, ever let it happen again.

Well, as this New Yorker article indicates, this is completely not the case. As soon as the drug cocktails went on the market, gay men went right back to their 1970's ways, screwing as much as possible, taking drugs to enhance their libidos (the article references crystal meth and viagra) and the explanation for it all is that we ("we" means "gay men") have lots of unresolved sadness and it is understandable that we would try to address it by having lots of unsafe sex.

Ugh.

Gay men, of which I am one, embarrass me all the damn time. Some of the time this is because I am a little bit too highly strung. Some of the time, however, it is because political correctness can, in fact, go too far.

To wit:

The New Yorker articles references the idea that it has become a bad idea to emhpasize the fact that you should, you know, stay HIV negative. Because this emphasis might make those who are positive feel bad about themselves.

Huh?

You mean it's wrong to counsel teen-age girls not to get pregnant because it would make the teens who WERE teen moms feel bad? It's wrong to ask people not to smoke in a public place because it might make those who are addicted to nicotine feel bad?

It's a cute trick to suggest that the only reason all of us don't fuck as much and as often as we care to is that societal norms prohibit it. Or that women (obsessed with that whole womb-thing) stand in the way of men (eager to spread that seed.) Or that disease and preganacy, easily curtailed by antibiotics and contraceptives, are the only barriers to fucking as much as we want, whenever we want.

Fucking a lot of strangers seems to be a bad idea, biologically speaking. It's possible that cultural taboos have risen up against this practice, in the same way that a cultural taboo might develop against shellfish or pork in a culture with little hygeine and no refrigeration. But you really do need that hygeine and refrigeration. If it's that important to have sex with a lot of strangers, it's not possible to put on a condom?!? It's not just a prissy, sex-negative society that rules against sticking your un-shielded dick inside lots of folks.

I appreciate that people who have been told for so long that their desires are wrong would resent anyone suggesting that their desires may be problematic. However, gay men really need to get a grip. Straight men do not assume that they are entiteled to bed every woman who expresses interest. Gay men should not assume that they are somehow entitled to something more. Gay men get to struggle to find a mate, there ya go. Not to endlessly dick around with a bazillion partners, how ever willing those partners might be and however enticing that might sound.

And if these men are refusing to curb their behavior; to not even adopt the norms of safe sex but to abandon them entirely--if we give these men a pass, if we say that they are unable to curb their desires because of the failures of society...well isnt' that just the soft bigotry of low expectations?

If I don't stop looking at Chicagocrime.org then I'm going to be late for work.

It's a database of crimes in Chicago. You can sort it geographically, here's my neighborhood, you can sort it by crime, here's all the embezzlement, and also by date and police district.

And as if this wasn't enough for me to geek out regarding my kind of town, The Encyclopedia of Chicago is now online. The ordinary, published-book version came out last fall and I haven't bought it yet but the online version is awful nice.

For purposes of comparison, here's what the encyclopedia has to say about my neighborhood. Sadly, there is no embezzlement-specific entry but here's a nice little entry that addresses our reputation.

As one journalist put it in 1930, “In all the seven seas and the lands bordering thereon there is probably no name which more quickly calls up thoughts of crime, violence and wickedness than does that of Chicago.”

My heart swells with pride. Okay, gotta get going.

Turned in the fucking toupee story yesterday so I'm winding down this term.

Tonight I went with my friend Rosemary to see David Rakoff read from his upcoming book titled "Don't Get Too Comfortable." He was great, one of those writers like Sarah Vowell who I would rather listen to than read. Anyway during the Q&A someone asked him about writing this, his second book. His answer won't be as good on the page as it was on the stage since you won't have the benefit of timing.

"Writing is like pulling teeth. Out of your dick."

Yes, that seems about right.

It's the beginning of May, the time when Chicago residents wonder to themselves where they put their winter gloves. We are supposed to get some snow flurries today.

Ugh.

Feeling a little sad this morning over the death of Wanky the elephant. Wanky was living in Lincoln Park Zoo but her companions have passed away and, being social, it wasn't good for her to be alone. Animal rights protesters have argued that, being the kind of place that snows in May, Lincoln Park Zoo isn't good for ANY elephants (apart from the general, grim feeling of giant animals confined to very small albeit "natural looking" settings.")

Anyway, Wanky was loaded into a truck bound for a secret location (they didn't want protesters to show up THERE which could, I suppose, result in an elephant circling the nation's highways like a cargo load of toxic waste, unable to find a place to stop), the secret location turned out to be Salt Lake City (today's high 63 degrees so at least that's something).

On the way there Wanky lay down and began exhibiting difficulty breathing. Upon arrival the decision was made to euthanize her and that, it seems, is that.

I've gone so long without blogging that I wasn't able to talk about the giant mob round-up last week or my trip to Seattle or any of that; I have to return with a dead elephant. Ugh.

In happier ailing elephant news, the Washington Post is headlining Doubts About Mandate for Bush, GOP By John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei

As the president passed the 100-day mark of his second term over the weekend, the main question facing Bush and his party is whether they misread the November elections. With the president's poll numbers down, and the Republican majority ensnared in ethical controversy, things look much less like a once-a-generation realignment.

Instead, some political analysts say it is just as likely that Washington is witnessing a happens-all-the-time phenomenon -- the mistaken assumption by politicians that an election won on narrow grounds is a mandate for something broad.

Six months ago it seemed like we were all totally doomed. Now I'm feeling only partially doomed. Hey, every bit counts.

Headline from Today's Sun Times: Acting River Grove mayor defeats genital-piercing rival

Ending one of the more bizarre suburban mayoral races, acting Village President Marilynn May stomped challenger Paul Collurafici, a tattoo parlor owner who argued the suburb was being left behind but found his occupation a bigger campaign issue.

(Village Trustee Raymond) Bernero questioned why Collurafici made no mention of his tattoo studio on his campaign Web site and why he removed photos of pierced vaginas, nipples and other body parts from his company's Web site after launching his mayoral campaign.

"I'm a big fan of vaginas, but this is really gross stuff," Bernero told the Sun-Times. "This is close-ups of women's vaginas with stuff stuck through there."

Bernero later sent a letter to the Sun-Times, apologizing if he offended anyone but sticking by his "blunt honesty" in attacking Collurafici's honesty.

"Finally, please let your readers know that there is no 'fan club,' " Bernero wrote. "It was a joke. All requests for membership, along with submitted dues, will be returned promptly."

About a quarter of the two dozen supporters at Collurafici's election night party sported tattoos, ranging from Grim Reapers and skulls to naked women. One supporter who identified himself as "Tattoo Mike" had Frankenstein-style electrodes inked on his neck.

Collurafici says he has no tattoos or piercings, but inherited the business from his brother, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1996.

Bernero wasn't buying.

"He said he kept the shop as a memorial to his dead brother," Bernero said. "Most people light a candle. You don't pierce vaginas."

I would agree with Bernero that conventional wisdom is that folks don't express grief via genital piercings. But I'm hopeful that with the recent deaths of the Pope, Teri Schaivo, et al that I might be proven wrong.

It's a little bit of nerd heaven today.
In my office while rice boils and fish thaws for dinner.
What has brought on this nerdy bliss?
A few things.
For one, last night I took the first in a series of classes from 500 Clown. You know of The Blue Man Group, right? Well, if the Blue Man Group is U2 then 500 Clown is The Ramones, the scrappy, less exalted version of the same thing (in this case, European art clowning rather than guitar based anthemic music.)
There was a time in my life when I thought that I was going to write screenplays or do standup or otherwise be an entertainer. So when I took classes like this I thought that I was actually doing something worthy, I was developing my craft. Because when you try and describe a theater/improv/acting class to someone it's hard to not sound like an idiot.
For instance
Here's the first exercise we did last night. We divided the dozen people into two groups. Here were our instructions. "Everybody has to carry everyone else and everybody will get carried by everyone else. You can speak if you have an injury or other safety issue that needs attention but otherwise no talking. Okay go."

Well what the hell do you do with that? In the retelling, I mean, not in the doing. I remember the first class I took with Del Close, he divided us into two groups and said, "Invent a ritual. It might take an hour or so. Go."

It is, as you might imagine, difficult to re-tell these stories of how one spent one's evening without adding in, "one day, I will be developing sitcoms and we will be rich, rich, rich!" Pretty much everyone you've ever heard of who has come out of the Chicago comedy scene-John Belushi and Bill Murray through Tina Fey passed through Del.

These days I don't think I will be having much to do with sitcoms and so taking a class like the one 500 Clown offers, the one where I learned about being physically expressive on stage, are just for fun, a hobby.

It says quite a bit about me and sports that the thing that pushed me to enroll in the workshop was that I signed up to play on a volleyball team which was so, so not my thing, that when I thought "I can think of a MILLION things I would rather do than this!" that the thought of having to figure out non-verbal ways of carrying and being carried by a bunch of strangers sounded like a huge improvement.

Anyway, I totally loved it and if you don't get it, that's okay. It probably won't translate into something mainstream and lucrative for me down the line. It's just my idea of fun.

Today I learned that I don't have to leaven my story for Advanced Magazine writing with the elements I had thrown in there just to make it sound better. I can focus on what I want to focus on. Which is toupees. More another time...the timer on the rice just went "bing".

I bought the new ATLANTIC today, the one with the David Foster Wallace piece about Talk Radio. DFWallace makes me happy, except for the times when he gets on my nerves. If you've never read him try A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again where he writes about his week on a cruise ship.

The DFW style is to go deep, deep, deep into a topic, with a million footnotes which themselves have footnotes. He is the master of the tangent, the aside, the trifle that earns focus.

So two things; one is that he has a piece, a fucking humongo 35,000 word piece (for frame of reference, 500 words is about 2 double spaced pages) and the designers of the Atlantic have come up with an ingenious system for his footnotes making them more like hypertext. Really, even if you don't care to read 35K words on right wing talk radio, pick up a copy of the magazine (the link doesn't seem to lead you to the story) and see what they did.

Basically, everyplace where you might put a footnote, they've put the word in a color. Then the footnote appears in the side of the text, in that color. If you've ever used the feature in Microsoft Office that lets people write their notes in little bubbles that appear next to the text, that's what the effect is like. And it works wonderfully.

Nerdilicious.

Enough with the pope nerds already. Yes, yes he was a very spiritual man, we get it.
My favorite was when NPR dug up one of the pope's boyhood friends from Poland. So the poor man was 1)incredibly old and hard of hearing and 2)not a native speaker of english.

Fortunately the 80-something told us that the pope was a very spiritual man. So at least that's cleared up.

Daniel Gross, writing in SLATE, uses an economic metaphor to talk about the Republicans. Like an overheated stock, the party may have peaked and begun a decline.

Given their triumph in last November's elections (and their behavior since), the Republicans have nowhere to go but down. Indeed, polls and nimble online right-wing media types (Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan) are already starting to call a top in the Republicans' stock. The House and the Senate can't agree on the basics of a budget, the dwindling but vital core of northeast Republicans can't abide their southern and western compadres, and Tom DeLay is morphing into Jim Wright.

today's Washington Post discusses the effects of the Schiavo case on the party

Aggravating GOP frustrations are disturbing new polls, including a CBS survey that found that 82 percent of Americans -- including a whopping 68 percent of people who identify themselves as evangelical Christians -- think Congress's intervention was wrong.

Of course we haven't even gotten to Social Security (Bush's First Defeat per Jacob Weisberg) and, oh yeah, Iraq.

I am done hearing about feeding tubes, persistent vegetative states, all this fun stuff.
I'm big on death with dignity but not at all thrilled with the prospects of someone, vegetative or not, starving/dehydrating to death. Of course there is no medically assisted suicide since she can't commit suicide since she is a vegetable. Sigh. This is a mess.

I have a co-worker who is loud, rude, generally unpleasant. Oh and nerdy, not in the appealing "I'm super passionate about an esoteric subject" way but in the too much science fiction way. And not so good at using his indoor voice.

Apparently a conversation at his desk got a little heated because he just said "not 'Trekkies'! Trekkers! Trekkers!"

so now you know

On Wednesday night I went to hear Jeff Chang read from his book "Can't Stop Won't Stop" in an itty-bitty gallery space in the West Loop. I got there about 20 minutes before it started and took a folding chair a respectable distance from the handful of other people there. I was complimenting myself on having such great taste and being so cool as to be one of the few people there...this lasted about ten minutes and then 75 or so people came in, jammed into the doorway, sitting on the floor and otherwise making the gallery staff nervous with the way they would brush up against some of the art.

The book is subtitled "A History of the Hip Hop Generation" and it is a big, nerdy wet dream. Scholarly without being a Greil Marcus wankfest, Chang begins the narrative not with DJ Kool Herc DJ-ing in a Bronx rec room but with post-colonial politics and music in 1960's Jamaica.

One thing that I thought was especially interesting was what he had to say about the non-comprehensiveness of the book. Some might ask-what about all the activity in Atlanta/Philadelphia/Miami/Brooklyn/Insert Geographic Locale Here...how could you leave THAT out of this history??? The answer is that he set out to write a history from the street level that looks up, rather than a view from the top down. And to do that, you have to limit the geographic focus.

From the corrections section of The New York Times, via the website Regret The Error:

An Editorial Observer column in The Times yesterday incorrectly cited lyrics from a Michael Jackson song. The phrase "mamase mamasa mamakosa" ends the song "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," not "Working Day and Night."