Barack Obama on Public Option: Insipid or Inspiration?

Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.
-Chris Hedges, TruthDig.com

Cornel West, a personal and great inspiration to me and many others has put Obama’s record directly to him. Is Barack going to be just another custodian of the American Empire in its decline or will he take a stand for the wretched of the earth, poor and working people, and the principles that inspired so many of us during his candidacy? Good question.

John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich and other congressional leaders are calling for a restoration of single payer/public option in health care reform. Since we will lose the Republicans, and some Dems over this, the President ought to take a stand. In a recent poll (Dec. 2009), 60% of Americans supported the single payer/public option. Is it any wonder that the 80% of Mass. voters who support it and the 53% who think the current Senate bill doesn’t go far enough voted for Scott Brown? Wake up, Rahm Emanuel!

Health care became diluted and impotent due to the lobbying efforts and arm-twisting of Big Pharma, Big Insurance and the health care lobby. We Americans spend upwards of $9,200.00 per person, per year on health care with very few office visits. Canada, with the single payer option, spends around $3,500 per year with approx. 45 office visits per person, per year! I have lived in Canada for going on four years and have only fantastic things to say about the treatment I’ve received. I do have complementary coverage as well as the provincial plan (in CAN provinces manage the health care system). And I had a potentially catastrophic health scare last year, am a middle-aged man; no “death panel” argued for my demise. Death panels are red herrings, and after all of this time of following the money, we ought to know better. The gov’t doesn’t have a stake in our illnesses, insurance companies do.

Without drawing a brave and inspiring line in the sand, and with the additional encouragement (as if they needed any!) of the Supreme Court’s devastating decision last week our economy, our health care and our democracy (arguably, already deceased) are sunk.

Voters across the spectrum support policies and politicians who take a courageous stand. We will have your back, President Obama – but you have to have ours.

Haiti and the Devil in Debt Relief

We hope that you use the weight of your governments to convince international financial institutions to cancel Haiti’s entire foreign debt.
-Eric Faustin, director of the Rocahd, the Coalition of Canadian-Haitian Development Organizations.

Haiti and its people are in a terrible pickle. They need emergency relief funds but they also need more substantive economic relief. There is a coalition of Canadian and Haitian Development Organizations and many others who are calling for substantial debt relief. Most agree that the current gov’t is the most stable in recent memory. This is very, very good. But.

Their awful position as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere can be attributed in part to their fight for freedom and against racism and colonialism. Make no mistake it has been an historical collusion between France, Britain, the U.S., the IMF and the World Bank. The IMF gave Haiti another loan of $165M, last week, thus keeping that country indebted even more! Plus, as usual, this loan – which they desperately need – comes with conditions: raising electricity prices, salary freezes, and so on. Talk about stepping on somebody’s neck when they’re down. This is where the racism and colonialism comes in.

When Haitian slaves threw off the French in 1804, France threatened an embargo enforced by the US, Brits, themselves and so on. To avoid this, Haiti agreed to pay off their former slave owners for their freedom. In nearly 2003 dollars this was $21B. It took Haiti until 1947 to pay off that initial debt. Can you imagine? Paying the slave master for the slave’s freedom? Americans can; we know that narrative well. When President Aristide began agitating for reparations in regards to that debt, he was promptly overthrown and hustled into exile under armed American guards. Of course, paying your Master for your freedom makes perfect sense to Americans. It’s the way things were done here for centuries.

Now the IMF, World Bank and other Western powers are screwing the yoke around Haiti’s neck even further. While giving on the one hand, they are taking with the other.

Without venturing into hyperbole, keeping Haiti economically paralyzed in these ways creates and perpetuates an environment where racist sterotypes, direct tropes still with us from slavery (lazy, shiftless, devil worshippers, etc.), can flood the minds and spirits of rich white Westerners. These tropes help us to justify the wealth we’ve gathered at the hand of slavery in particular but racism in general.

The nomenclature of first world and third world carries with it not only wealth rankings but also a racial hierarchy. How many brown peopled first world nations are there? Not many. This racism is no more demonstrated than Pat Robertson’s comment that the Haitian earthquake happened because Haitians made a pact with the devil in exchange for their freedom. Invoking the Western trope of a Faustian bargain, Robertson- no enemy of corporate America – delegitimizes the Haitian struggle for freedom.

Robertson represents hundreds of thousands of viewers, which is comforting.

The IMF and World Bank are the new Haitian masters. And the masters of a number of countries. We need to open our eyes and wallets in regards to Haiti and places like it. A person can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps with another’s boot on their neck.

“

The Bishop and Us

Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy,
for we had had more than enough of contempt…
– Psalms 121, 122, 123

Bishop Gene Robinson spoke here in Toronto yesterday morning at St. James Cathedral around the corner from our place. The excerpt above Robinson found particularly potent. I had a hunch it would be an eye-opening and inspiring morning and it was.

At the coffee, before the talk, I met a tall man, maybe 50s or early 60s, with solid mustache; he and I began debating about which muffin to take. Chocolate, carrot?

Making small talk, I asked if he was a member of St. James. No, he said. You probably know me, I’m the famous Jim Ferry. As regularly happens to me in Canada, I am ignorant of a great deal of official and unofficial histories. Jim Ferry is an ordained Anglican priest who was stripped of his license to preach and thus his livelihood by the Bishop of Toronto because he was living with his partner. In 1991! It’s incredible that that late in history, priest were still being de-licensed for being open about their sexuality and relationships. I was a little deflated; he shared his story.

Most attendees were older, gay men (Vajdon said he thought he was the youngest one there [37]; he was also the only brown person in the audience. There were a couple of non-whites helping in the service.) Clearly, we are of a generation who have had to fight hard for civil rights, here and in the U.S.,piece by piece as well as confront the apathy our U.S. communities embraced in the mid-90s. Only late last year we won Hate Crimes protection. It is so inspiring to be in the company of gay people, especially those who think critically of power structures and homophobia.

There is an amused sacredness and seriousness of purpose to Bishop Robinson. He has no pat answers, preferring to seek his answers in the ceiling and letting answers emerge from the atmosphere around him. He’s relaxed and genuine, juggling his hand gestures and a cup of Starbucks. He told us of his journey; born & bred in Kentucky to a fundamentalist family, realizing his difference at 12 or 13, being fed up with his church of origin and after college finding his way to seminary and then the ministry.

He married, letting his wife know beforehand that he had impulses that didn’t fit in with heterosexuality. They were married for 13 years until, together, decided to separate and divorce although as a team. Yesterday, Robinson said his divorce was, “the most healing thing that’d ever happened to him.”

In the Q & A, he took a variety of questions. One man disagreed with Robinson’s analogic comparison of LGBT people today, to that of the Jews in Exodus. This man, a Buddhist more than anything, said that he thought the life of Jesus was a more apt analogy. Robinson, finding his answer in the rafters, said that if his metaphor didn’t work for him, then he had to find one that did. We all have different understandings and isn’t that wonderful? I’m not doing his answer justice but it was anything but a pat, non-engaged response.

I raised my hand and, when Gene called on me, I skooted up to the microphone.

“I have a tactical question,” I said. “Toronto is, uniquely, although Canada is too, a safe haven for queers. We exiles have built a community, know each other’s faces, socialize together and offer each other support. We’ve marched a few times in front of the US embassy here, blog, write letters and so on. What else can we do, as exiles, in our unique position, to move things along (in the US and elsewhere). Do you have any wisdom or strategic advice?”

My voice was getting shakier with nerves as I went along. This is, for many of us, one of several questions able to shake us to the bone. Again, after consulting the ceiling, Robinson’s answer was a solution hidden in plain sight. Although, one couldn’t say I am not well-versed in the politics and consequences of Gender, his answer was obvious but had never occurred to me in regards to my condition as an exile.

“Dismantle Heterosexism” is the short answer. He had taken a circuitous route in his effort to do justice to the question (as he did with all of the inquiries), but that’s the nuts and bolts of it. Of course that’s the answer, I thought. Duh!

In his answer, he also noted that our worldview changes our experience. When faced with the cognitive disconnect imposed by their world view, the bigoted are faced with two choices: denial or a revision of their worldview. He broke down Heterosexism, racism, sexism other discriminatory “ism”s into this formula: Prejudice + Power = ism.

While I have not been a fan of the s/s marriage movement swallowing the whole rest of our struggle, Gene’s response allowed me to see that marriage may be neither here nor there but that, as an institution, it maintains itself, and the injustice we face, through heterosexism. By storming the barn, we are in effect landing a blow at the very foundation of heterosexism.

And I reminded myself that heterosexism is the thing that informs all of my creative work: Alice Michell, Frank & Mary and my current novel, The Drifts.

Robinson also noted that he found this excerpt from Collossians 1:24-2:7 potent:

As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.

While I am not religious, I found the three lines prior to this last excerpt even more apt:

I am saying this so that no one may deceive you with plausible arguments. For though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, and I rejoice to see your morale and the firmness of your faith…

It is the spirit of gratefulness and ‘thanksgiving’ that offers me the courage to seek wholeness, fun and connected-ness that I found running deep through the Bishop. Meeting Robinson and getting a hug, without his bullet-proof vest (!), was eye-opening and inspiring.

The Drifts, my novel coming soon!

Here’s the catalog description of the novel I’ve written which will be published in Spring 2010 by Coach House.

The Drifts
a novel by Thom Vernon

Night is falling, and so is the snow. As a blizzard buries the ground, it uncovers the resentments, hopes and aches of a small town in northeastern Arkansas, where, like in any Southern small town, there are unwanted pregnancies to agonize over, surgeries to be paid for and love to be made.

Julie’s two daughters have just run off to Hollywood to get famous when she finds herself, at forty-six, unexpectedly expectant. She’s not sure she can stand to be a mother again. And her husband, Charlie, won’t come home to talk it over with her.

Charlie wants another child more than anything, but he doesn’t know how to deal with Julie. His affair with Wilson, his best friend, is over, but he’s found a different and unusual kind of intimacy – with a calf.

Wilson works in the Singer factory that keeps the town alive. She’s not in love with Charlie, though; she loves Dol.

Dol is a transsexual, a divorced father of two children, who can’t afford the transition that would make his body make sense – although the doctor visiting from Atlanta might change that.

Their very different voices converge as the blizzard gathers force, their stories violently mapping in the snow the ways that memory, gender and history carve themselves upon our bodies. The Drifts is dexterously told, a cacophony of four affecting voices melding
into one exquisite chord.

Praise for Thom Vernon:

‘A real gasser. Very good, very good.’ – Hubert Selby, Jr.

Thom Vernon has worked in film, television and theatre since 1989, including appearances on Seinfeld, General Hospital and The Fugitive. He has been the Actors’ Gang Youth Education Program director, and has worked extensively with at-risk people, including as an arts educator at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People. His screenplays and fiction have placed in various competitions, including Paramount’s Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project and the Open Door Contest. He hails from Michigan, but he and his partner live in exile in Toronto. This is his first novel.

ISBN 1 55245 228 x
978 1 55245 228 8
$19.95 cdn | $17.95 us
5 x 8 pb, 250 pages
fiction
fic000000
world rights
april 2010

Well, another day of discriminatory legislation passed yesterday.
We did win a couple of small victories in Washington State and elsewhere. But all in all my sense is that we’re just going to continue batting our civil rights back and forth. The amount of energy, the tremendous resources and heart & souls of our people is not feeding our communities.

We’ve surrendered for too long to the incrementalism of HRC and other national queer “leaders”. Look how long it took to get a hate crimes law! But we got it, so I’m thankful. But now how about housing protection? How about partner immigration? On election day, my suggestion is that we show up and watch throughout the day but that we don’t vote. We just stop participating in this ballot/proposition charade. We stand there And instead, we admit that no civil rights have every been extended to any Americans at the poll. No, this has to ordered. This way, we stay invigorated and excited about battling these bigots. And show those on the Right and the Left that we’re watching and, for us, this is our lives. Not winning an election.

Outrun the Dog

I’ve been working on a post about death and appreciate that you’d let me put some ideas here.

We All End As Stories
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died.
-Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows

I am hesitant to write about Death – especially with capital letters. To make matters worse, we can never hear the story of our own death, but are endlessly tortured with that of others’. There are other problems with Death as well. One major problem is Memory – other people’s. Accepting Death eases the living into a new story. We are all constructs informed by the memory of others. It is the stories we become that are irreplaceable, not our bodies. In the end, we all become stories.

The Path of Life, outer wings of a triptych – Hieronymous Bosch.

* * *
In Hieronymous Bosch’s, The Path of Life, c. 1500-02 a desperate old man beats away a hungry dog with a stick as he makes his way along a narrow dirt road. On a distant ridge behind him, a gallows emerges. These two images, and the thieves beating other travelers, demonstrate Bosch’s optimism. Everyone has a story that informs their life: think Rosa Luxembourg, Janis Joplin, JFK, Marx. Few of us know the story we become in death.
The stories we tell become very treacherous for the dead. Paul Valery suggests that recollection is actually strategic: it gives us time to recover from what has happened. Walter Benjamin is even more direct: Memory’s function is to protect our sensory impressions but when we tell the story of these impressions, they lose their power. “Memory is essentially conservative; reminiscence destructive.” Every actor or artist knows this. We do not talk about that seed of emotional power or understanding which offer cohesiveness, force and intention to their work. To do so is to destroy its power to inform. In Some Motifs in Baudelaire, completed shortly before he controlled the story he would become with an overdose of morphine, Benjamin wrote:
Story does not aim to convey an event per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds the event in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening. It thus bears the trace of the storyteller, much the way an earthen vessel bears the trace of the potter’s hand (316).
We tell stories to transform what has happened into our experience.

Another nightmare story of US healthcare in Michigan

Copied from Americablog News! Ageekymom writes: We have insurance (with a 30% co-pay.) Our 19 year old son had open-heart valve replacement surgery last July. He passed away the day after the surgery. The bill was over $116,000 for 2 days in the hospital. The $30,000+ co-pay was (thank God!) picked up by a Michigan state fund for children/young adults with his type of birth defect. I can’t imagine what people do if they are not eligible.
Neither my husband or I is currently working. We pay almost $900/month for our crappy health insurance. It’s obscene!

I know Americans want healthcare. But they better wrest it from the AMA, Big Pharma and Big Insurance. They are going to kill and bankrupt every single one of you and they won’t stop until they make sure that every healthcare dollar goes to them.

Canadian Emergency Room

I’ve been so overwhelmed with stress and exhaustion that I haven’t written in awhile. I have very much avoided commenting on the so-called health care debate in the US.

On my view, there is no real debate. It is Big Pharma, Big Insurance and the AMA placing a strangle-hold on any chance the average American will get to have reasonable healthcare. I don’t know what the heck “the public option” is – who we are talking about here.

I live in Canada now and the other night I collapsed. I say that because I want you to know that within 5 minutes the paramedics were here, took me to the ER, got me conscious again and after a long IV drip – sent me on my way. Didn’t cost me a dime. Now I know there are pros and cons on both sides of the border, but as I was lying there feeling woozy staring at the ceiling, I thought “Wow, what are Americans thinking? Don’t they want healthcare? They’re paying for it in beyond reasonable amounts anyway.” As an American, I just hate to see people doing without healthcare because politicians, Media and other people seeking their 15 minutes.

And after my experience the other night, I just had to stand up against the horrible bashing that Canadian healthcare has had to weather. And the terrible cost it will continue to be for my brothers and sister south of the border.

Absolution & Pretending We Don’t Know

Last night I saw the documentary “Tyson” and this morning I have read an op-ed piece, “The Disease of Permanent War” by Chris Hedges. Both are disturbing for what they so plainly say about our values. I suppose that I am not unusual; my memory of the injustices of 2000-08 is fading.

As a viewer, an American viewer, a nagging connection kept rearing its head during the film and in the following hours. Mike Tyson is teaching us something. Surprisingly, the one-sided film – complete with glowing sunsets and an older, wiser Tyson strolling along the beach – may not do him any favors but it may do something for the country. Tyson, in spite of everything that has been hung around his neck, has the chance to move beyond the past. The United States, unfortunately, has not. Dick Cheney doesn’t have to do anything except growl at all of us and the media gives him air time to make his case for the legitimization of torture and other crimes. We, of course, pretend to have a legitmate debate about what counts as torture. As if we didn’t know. Ask a couple of Vietnam vets; ask Abu Gharab prisoners; ask the folks in our Super Max prisons. We certainly find it worthwhile to hold Tyson accountable but, as it usually goes for black men in the US, that may be because their lawyers fall asleep during trial – or, in Tyson’s case, were studying tax code revisions.
If we do not value injustice enough to account for it, it will be erased from our memories unnourished by empathy. And we will be unable to look forward.

Congratulations, Toronto!

Congratulations to Toronto queers and our allies for a successful Prop 8 protest! Between 75-100 of us shouted, “Spread the Love, Stop the Hate; People, Don’t Discriminate!” and other chants. It was so great to meet everyone and unify our reach across the border and to our brothers and sisters in California and around the world. Go Toronto!