Bonnie Tinker

I feel a sudden and painful loss, leaving a gaping hole in my fabric of Portland. I don’t know how to describe the absence. She wasn’t a friend. If I flatter myself, I could have once called her colleague and ally: rarer than a friend. I enjoyed working with her.

She made a fierce ally. I remember sitting with her privately at Friends’ in July ’04 and frankly discussing the stark chance of defeating Measure 36. I remember her the year before in that same room trying to add her integrity and realism to the amorphous coalition opposing the invasion of Iraq.

The following quote from her exemplifies the mind and character we have lost:

It is a stark reminder for me that life is easier for sexual minorities of all backgrounds and definitions because other minority groups have struggled for centuries against discrimination. It is often simpler to consider homophobia by itself, to want to work only on “gay issues.” It is simpler, but it is dishonest. Sometimes those of us who are white become so consumed with the injustice we experience that we forget the many ways that white privilege lightens our load.

She wasn’t always easy, but she was often right. I remember her seriousness: the thought and effort, the dedication she applied when something mattered to her. I remember her well informed sharp intelligence and the integrity of her character.

“Bonnie Tinker” by Altaira H 2009-07-04

“Remembering Bonnie Tinker” by Eileen Flanagan from her blog “Imperfect Serenity” 2009-07-03

“Bonnie Tinker – Love Makes A Family” Spirit In Action audio interview by Mark Judkins Helpsmeet 2006-08-06

“Queer politics: Local and sustainable?” by Bonnie Tinker in The Portland Alliance July 2006

“Language to open hearts and minds” by Bonnie Tinker in The Portland Alliance April 2006

We can’t force people to believe that discrimination is wrong, that the planet needs our protection, that marriage rights are human rights, that war is not the answer. But we can use words in a way that creates the possibility of change by unilaterally disarming our own speech.

“20/20: Young Men with Gay Moms” by Alice Irene Pifer from “20/20” ABC News 2004-09-30

Tinker v Des Moines

A video that shows Bonnie’s charm and substance:

Orwell’s truths

“Eternal vigilance” by Keith Gessen in the New Statesman 2009-05-28

… he thought a mature totalitarian system would so deform its citizenry that they would not be able to overthrow it.

Orwell may have gotten it right. Some citizens have overthrown totalitarian governments. But dictatorship does correlate with minds incapable of overthrowing it. Which came first?

University is where you sometimes get loaded up with fancy terms whose meaning you’re not quite sure of.

Orwell encapsulates Wilson’s argument with a remarkable concision: “Dickens had grown up near enough to poverty to be terrified of it, and in spite of his generosity of mind, he is not free from the special prejudices of the shabby-genteel.” This is stark, and fair, and that “terrified” is unforgettable.

Mortgaging the nation

“Obsessive Housing Disorder” by Steven Malanga in City Journal Spring 2009

The program could not work because it tried to solve a problem of wealth creation through debt creation.

Goodbye

Net right

“Reinventing conservatism, one tweet at a time” by Julian Sanchez in Law & Disorder at Ars Technica 2008-01-02

The movement was always a somewhat uneasy coalition of market enthusiasts and social traditionalists, defined at least as much by what (and who) they opposed as by any core common principles. The Palin strategy—recapturing that oppositional unity by rebranding the GOP as the party of cultural ressentiment—is just a recipe for a death spiral. Conservatives don’t need to figure out how to promote conservatism on Facebook; they need to figure out what it is they’re promoting. [emphasis in original]

What gets lost in the “bottom-up versus top-down” frame is that the left has managed a more useful symbiosis between their grassroots and their intellectuals. [emphasis original]

It has?

Neocon next

Will Hillary Clinton serve as the neocon wing of the Obama administration?

“Where Have All the Neocons Gone?” by Jacob Heilbrunn in The American Conservative 2008-01-12

The neocons, who had started out as Trotskyists, espoused a social-democratic program in domestic policy.

…US Institute for Peace and Holocaust Museum task force on genocide … new report … could prove almost as influential for the Obama administration as the neocon-inspired “Defense Planning Guidance” of 1992, which called for American unilateral domination of the world, was for George W Bush’s presidency. … The report’s aims are noble, but it is essentially a stalking horse for liberal intervention. It would create a permanent bureaucracy with a vested interest in insisting upon armed interventionism whenever and wherever the US pleases… [emphasis added]

[from A&LD]

Politics, YouTube, and Foucault

“Michel Foucault and our macaca future” by Julian Sanchez in Ars Technica 2008-12-19

Sanchez raises an interesting question: How will YouTube and such discipline politicians?

a growing bottom-up panopticon will have important—and not exclusively salutary—effects on our political life

Foucault’s idea that the act of observation—and indeed, the mere awareness that one might be observed at any given time—exerted a powerful psychological effect on the observed.

how we might characterize the implicit “aims and objectives” of a distributed Little Brother panopticon

from the comments:

Wasn’t there a similar worry that with the advent of 24/7 news networks like CNN that politicians would simply sanitize their every thought? As if politicians were somehow human and genuine to begin with. That quickly passed, and I think the same will happen here.

Since there is no oversight or accountability in user generated content the door is left open to distort and skew the facts for political gain.

For all the talk of how the internet is going to revolutionize politics for the better, it sometimes seems like it has only reinforced our short attention spans and cultivated our love for brief sound bytes.

Keith Douglas and poetry misread

from “How to Kill” (1943) by Keith Douglas (1920–1944)

Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.

Douglas had a voice appropriate to his war and technique to use it.

Jon Glover brackets a review mostly about Keith Douglas with genuflections to ideology. He quotes Douglas’s peer Sidney Keyes:

“Person and Politics: Commitment in the Forties” by Jon Glover in Poetry Nation 1974

In an insecure, unplanned society such as ours, no one has a right to complain that art is obscure or out of touch with the people; this state of affairs is inevitable, and will remain so, as long as the structure of society itself stands between him and his potential audience. While the mass of the people are excluded from full participation in the necessary activities of society, among which artistic appreciation is one of the most important, all Art for the People will be bad art, and nearly all good art will be obscure and exclusive. (Keyes, “The Artist in Society”, Minos of Crete, p 149)

Keyes accurately describes the result: bad art for the people, and the obscure. He mistakes the obscure for good. And he ignores that most good art existed before him, from times even less secure.

And Glover persistently slips on ideology and misreads Douglas.

Glover’s invocations of ideology seem silly from the distance of more than thirty years. But they do matter. We inherit the legacy of this criticism.

Did Marxist literary criticism license inaccessible art?

“Simplify Me When I’m Dead” wrote Douglas.

Read the poems.

Bill, grow the beard again

Privacy law

“FISA op-eds from a parallel universe” by Julian Sanchez from “Law & Disorder” in Ars Technica 2008-12-09

The idea of privacy can help constrain governments. But never mistake the idea for a reality.

With increasingly easy surveillance, governments will conduct more surveillance. Violations of privacy have more tolerance than violations of security.

Effective janissaries for NATO

“Letter from Pashmul: Policing Afghanistan” by Graeme Wood in The New Yorker 2008-12-08

It is also a classic counter-insurgency gambit.

“It’s a common tactic in irregular warfare situations to pit the rivalries of an ethnically diverse populace against each other.” The difficulty is finding a way to avoid unleashing a dispossessed minority on a rampage of revenge against the group it is asked to control.

cf Rawanda

Pakistan’s next

“Next Steps in the Indo-Pakistani Crisis by George Friedman in Stratfor 2008-12-08

The first view holds that Pakistani officials aid and abet terrorism

In this view, Pakistan’s civilian government has only as much power in these matters as the army is willing to allow.

The Indian government chose to make this demand [the 20] precisely because complying with it is enormously difficult for Pakistan.

Contrary to Freidman, I don’t expect much; perhaps some airstrikes.