BOOT! EDGE! EDGE!

I had an entire 70-screen PowerPoint presentation all prepared to impart on Pete (I call him Pete) how much I respect and admire and enthusiastically support him—and how we’d make awesome duet partners at the piano—but there was a bit of a time crunch so we were able to jam on only six piano concerti together. But still. I JUST MET PETE!

Gah! I look 1,000 years old here. I think Pete's photo-taking lady must have hit the wrong filter when she grabbed my camera to take our pictures.

#Pride101: What the hell do gay people have to be proud of?

We’re proud because despite relentless persecution everywhere we turn—when organized religion viciously attacks and censures and vilifies us in the name of selective morality, when our families disown us, when our elected officials bargain away our equality for hate votes they try to disguise as so-called “religious liberty,” when communities and cities and entire states codify our families into second-class citizenship, when small-importance bakers with the backing of the big-money hate industry take their unhinged loathing of us all the way to the Supreme Court, when our employers fire us, when our landlords evict us, when our police harass us, when our neighbors and colleagues and fellow citizens openly insult and condemn and mock and berate and even beat and kill us—we continue to survive.

We’re proud because pride is the opposite of shame—and despite what systemic bigotry and the ugliest sides of organized religion work so hard to make the world believe, there is nothing shameful about being gay. We’re proud because—thanks to the incredible bravery shown by gay people who lived their lives openly sometimes to the point of being defiantly in the decades before us—we can live our lives more and more openly at home, at work, with our families, on social media … and even on national television.

We're proud because we've worked tirelessly to achieve legal equality in marriage, adoption, parental rights and many other ways that make our families recognized as Families in our states and across our country. And though we have much more to accomplish—and though bigotry disguised as morality and religion and the supposed mandates of constituents work and sometimes succeed at eroding our newfound equalities—we have the momentum and intelligence and drive and humanity and ability to keep driving back the hate as we continue to drive forward with both our newfound and future equalities.

We’re proud because we currently have an openly gay married man as a viable candidate for the Democratic nomination for president--something most of us never even considered would EVER happen--and not only is he enjoying enthusiastic support from Democratic voters, but leading Republicans seem to have learned that while they can attack him for reasons they’d attack any other candidate, attacking him for being gay is completely unacceptable.

We’re proud because through our tireless work and the prevailing powers of common sense and compassion, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and Proposition Hate and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act long ago collapsed onto their illogical, immoral, meritless foundations—and new legislative attempts to dehumanize us gain little to no traction or visibility and soon die on the trash heap as well.

We’re proud because we are smart enough to overcome the self-loathing that our venomous, mindlessly theocratic society forces on us, and we have the power to stop its destructive cycle by fighting back and by making intelligent choices involving sex and drugs and money and relationships and the way we live our lives—and by using our lives as examples of success and humanity and love that other gay people can see and respect and emulate and achieve more and more easily.

We’re proud because after all we’ve been through, the world increasingly continues to notice and respect us and enthusiastically appropriate the often fabulous culture we’ve assembled from the common struggles and glorious diversity of our disparate lives.

We’re proud because more and more often and in more and more contexts our country and our culture see the fact that we’re gay as frankly boring.

We’re proud because especially this month and always all year we’re celebrating with parties and street fairs and parades overflowing with drag queens, leather queens, muscle queens, dad-bod queens, glitter queens, you’d-never-even-know-they-were-queens queens and even straight-but-honorary-queens-for-a-day queens, and together we can see beyond the pride in the parades of our lives and together celebrate the underlying Pride in the parades of our lives.

We’re proud because 50 years ago a small crowd in a bar in New York reached the tipping point in putting up with endless harassment and oppression and instigated a violent retaliation to a police raid that escalated to a week of riots and then to a march for equality that grew unstoppably to a national movement for equality and respect that continues proudly to this day.

Quite simply, we’re proud that we have so incredibly much to be proud of.

PETE RALLY! IN PETER RAPIDS!

BOOM!

To impeach or not

Read the article HERE.

I took advantage of my suddenly commitment-free evening to clear out some articles I’d saved to read for a wintry day. This one is epic in scope—block out A LOT of time to read and fully absorb what it says—but it’s a fascinating primer/refresher on the contextual and procedural mechanics of impeachment and how they’ve played out historically to act as potential case law today.

I didn’t realize the Constitution’s complete listing of impeachable offenses is just “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes & Misdemeanors”—which, as you might imagine, leaves itself open for a frustratingly vast ocean of interpretation. I’m also embarrassed to admit I didn’t realize that impeachment is just the indictment half (coming from the House) of the proceedings, which continue with a hearing in the Senate and culminate in removal from office if there’s a guilty verdict. (Also: Of the country’s three impeachment attempts to date—Andrew Johnson, Nixon and Clinton—none resulted in formal removal from office; Nixon resigned before the House vote and Johnson and Clinton weren’t found guilty by the Senate.)

According to this article, trump is beyond the point of needing to be removed from office but so far may not have done enough that can measurably be considered “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes & Misdemeanors”—at least not enough worth formally opening up the Pandora’s box of impeachment hearings. I don’t know anything about the author so I can’t account/discount for political bias, but I feel immensely more informed on the foundational elements of impeachment from reading it.

As an additional primer/refresher, the article’s contextual sidebars on the Andrew Johnson impeachment after the Civil War—along with a bit of Wikipedia reading on my own—gave me a more nuanced (and more chronological) understanding of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson, and the “separate but equal” doctrines that extended to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This is a fascinating—albeit long—read, and I encourage you to block out some time to really digest it if you’re at all curious/unclear about the prospect of facing our country’s fourth attempt at impeachment.

Lighthearted watching on a polar-grade winter’s night

Dear LORD this man is grotesque. And punchable.

This week’s New Yorker cover art is titled “Welcome to Congress"

I AM A PILLAR OF MY COMMUNITY

Also: I am a master at nimble, melodious wordplay because THAT’S A PILLAR RIGHT BEHIND ME.

Also: GET IT?

Also: Because IT’S A PILLAR. And IT’S IN OUR SHOW. And OUR SHOW IS A COMMUNITY. And I’M AT ONE WITH THE PILLAR.

Also: My Edwardian-English-lord-and-gentleman-who’s-also-sometimes-a-suspicious-roustabout-so-watch-your-wallets hair part is SEVERE and RIGHT ON POINT and CEMENTED AND LACQUERED IN PLACE BY THREE DIFFERENT HAIR PRODUCTS PLUS SOME PLUCKY DETERMINATION SO IT’S GONNA LOOK THIS WAY UNTIL THE MIDTERMS.

Also: WHICH WILL BE AS AWASH IN GORGEOUS BLUE AS THIS PILLAR. Because OUR COMMUNITY DEPENDS ON IT.

Also: I hadn’t planned on bringing this beyond-weird Facebook post full-circle, but here we are.

It's been a whole year now

How's that early-and-active-opiod-prioritizing bullshit going for you and your man-boy messiah, you opportunistic, lying sack of shit?

Why would you hold a hostage at a prison reform summit?

Happy Syttende Mai!

[break it down: sytten = seventeen, de = of, Mai = May]

As I'm sure the endless media coverage has made you thoroughly aware, today is Norwegian Constitution Day--celebrating the 1814 Constituent Assembly at Eidsvold where we signed our new Constitution and began our quest for independence after 400 years under the oppressive reign of the (not so great, it would seem) Danes. (We joined into an unholy union on this day with Sweden and didn't gain our full independence until 1905, but that's a whole different fjord to climb.)

So anyway, I thank all of you for wearing red and blue today to help me honor my heritage. There's leftover Christmas lutefisk in the freezer. Help yourself!

A year ago right now I was Hillary’s hand puppet on C-SPAN

#SundayShowTunes: Chess

It's very sad to see
The ancient and distinguished game that used to be
A model of decorum and tranquility
Become like any other sport,
A battleground for rival ideologies
To slug it out with glee.

Topically-Relevantish-Plus-Kinda-Useful-To-Know Political Vocabulary Du Jour

coup d'état [koo dey TA]: a sudden and decisive action in politics, especially one resulting in a change of government illegally or by force

putsch [poo ch]: a plotted revolt or attempt to overthrow a government, especially one that depends upon suddenness and speed; a failed coup d'état

du jour [dy zhoor]: fashionable, current

Happy birthday to my awesome brother-in-law

and father to my children. Well, technically, they're not MY children but I love them more because I used to buy them candy on the sly when they were much younger because THAT'S WHAT UNCLES DO. Oops ... where was I? Oh, yes: My brother-in-law has helped raise two decent, thoughtful, informed, involved kids (one of whom is co-authoring a play celebrating cultural and human diversities as we speak and the other of whom is in college as we speak studying political science so he can improve our country and world), obsessively power-washed his driveway on every day that ends in y, missed a few big sportsball games on occasion so the rest of us could watch musicals populated with frolicking men in ill-fitting tights as a family, and volunteered to climb the high, scary, pants-wetting ladder so I could stay safely close to the ground on the low, scary, pants-wetting ladder when we painted his house. Most importantly, he has always, without fail or even slightly crumbling resolve, shooed the entire family out of his kitchen so he could do all the dishes -- even after the 14-course state dinner we hosted for Angela Merkel just because we enjoy saying her name -- and thus saved me from having to do dishes, which I hate more than folding laundry or watching Donald Trump do that anus thing with his lips. So everybody call my brother-in-law at work today and sing Happy Birthday in long, fermata-ed whole notes so he can really savor the experience. And buy him gift cards from Michaels because that place gives him hives and I think if he could just buy some dried branches and styrofoam cones without using his own money, it could be like a gateway drug and he could conquer his fears and start making pipe-cleaner snowmen skating merrily on oddly shaped mirrored ponds to give as Christmas gifts or maybe Epiphany gifts for those of you at the end of the alphabet.

OMG

Today is the anniversary of the 1871 Chicago Fire

... which historians are not opposed to believing actually could have been started by a cow kicking over a lantern in Mrs. O'Leary's barn -- though, to be fair, there are many other credible, though less historically charming, theories as to how the fire started. During the 15 years I lived in Chicago, I saw it as my civic duty to read and learn as much as I could about my city and its history. I was excited to start reading this book when I found it, but it turned out to be more of a lengthy essay on the cultural and sociopolitical Zeitgeist that framed the fire than on the timeline and geography of the unfolding inferno and the human-level experience of surviving it, which I would have found far more meaningful.

In any case, upwards of 300 people died and thousands were left homeless and impoverished 146 years ago today and tomorrow. I mark this day on my calendar every year so I'm reminded to think about who they might have been and the horrors they most certainly endured. And I encourage you to a moment today in their memory to celebrate what you have while you still have it.

Here's my review from 2012:
I was hoping that Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 would be a breathless page-turner about the human dramas of conflagrant destruction, abject suffering and triumph over adversity peppered with tantalizing details about old Chicago buildings and neighborhoods that I recognize. Instead it’s a hyperwonkish examination of class inequality, political grandstanding, religious imperialism (particularly the emergence of “scientific” relief that favored distributing blankets and food and financial aid to the religious and the “worthy” newly homeless rich over assisting the chronically poor and the working class who were technically able to support themselves though there was little to no work available in the months after the fire) and the simmering intolerance toward (particularly German) immigrants in the fire’s aftermath. It does draw some timely parallels to America’s current obsession with “big” government in its discussions of Chicago’s post-fire laws against rebuilding with wood (which made rebuilding almost financially impossible for low- and middle-class fire victims) and its curiously detailed recounting of virulently sabbatical opposition to German-immigrant beer gardens serving alcohol on Sundays, which temporarily drove the mostly single-issue People’s Party into power over the status-quo Law and Order party of native-born religious privilege. The book does frequently refer to one concept that will amuse modern Chicago residents, though: the idea that fire victims “fled the city” northward to the neighboring community of Lake View.

#dotards

Republicans made Kim Davis a hero for voicing her beliefs at work, and because they agreed with those beliefs they pushed or dragged (or both) her into making them into a political statement. 

Now they're whining and cursing filling their diapers because other people are voicing their beliefs at work and making them into a political statement -- and THESE beliefs are ones that Republicans disagree with so hatefully that they're deliberately misinterpreting them into a narrative that other infantile Republicans can rally behind.

I hate Republicans.

Shhh ... sales tax

There are legitimate, across-the-aisle-respected economic theories and models and ideologies that shape the modern Republican party -- well, not the clown slaughterhouse of the party's current assault on rational logic and human decency but on the modern party in general -- that can easily be generalized enough to be explained to and understood by an 8-year-old ... not to mention the entirety of Twitter.

Then there are the staggeringly ignorant, lazily belligerent, contemptuously grotesque oversimplifications of Republican economic agendas that permanently disqualify you from every conversation on every topic ever even if you whisper them only to a dead elephant.

Grover Norquist -- a Harvard Business School MBA who founded something he calls Americans for Tax Reform -- is apparently that dumb.

The Iowa speech we're all going to miss:

"I don't understand farm subsidies but I'm going to pretend I do blah blah blah my inauguration crowds were bigger than the entire population of the United States blah blah blah no president in the history of the galaxy has been treated worse than I have blah blah blah beautiful babies and chocolate cake blah blah blah I just got back from Europe where I counted all the way to G7 blah blah blah next question, as long as it's about MEEEEEEEEE. Oh, and blah blah blah."