Laughing and Crying: Congratulations in the Form of Liberal Guilt

"In order to justify their behavior, they turn their theories into dogmas, their bylaws into First Principles, their political bosses into Gods and all those who disagree with them into incarnate devils. This idolatrous transformation of the relative into the Absolute and the all too human into the Divine, makes it possible for them to indulge their ugliest passions with a clear conscience and in the certainty that they are working for the Highest Good. And when the current beliefs come, in their turn, to look silly, a new set will be invented, so that the immemorial madness may continue to wear its customary mask of legality, idealism, and true religion." 

-- Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun, 1952, Harper and Brothers, NY, NY.)

I laughed and cried at the same time on viewing photos of the first same-sex couples to be married under the new law in New York.  The laughter came from happiness for them and -- I confess it:  satisfaction at the thought of how these pictures must stick in the craw of people clinging to the fringe on the far right of our sociopolitical fabric.  The tears came a little bit from happiness for the newlyweds, as well, but mostly it was sadness and shame (Yes, I am One of Those Types of Liberals).

Uh-oh. I feel a tangent coming on.

I googled "liberal guilt," and was appropriately distressed to find that the vast majority of articles turned up by the search discussed "white guilt." 

Allow me to invent a statistic:  99.2% of the articles morphed liberal into white within their first paragraph among those that were so formatted;  An impressive 99.5% of that .08% paragraphed remainder did not even bother with a transitional phrase or sentence, rendering white as synonymous with liberal.  The tautological shortcomings of this kind of wacky thesaurus work are obvious, but apparently not remarkably so.  As for the unparagraphed among the culled, they were predominantly contained in readers' commentary and tended to bring to mind certain unappealing aspects of a severe gastrointestinal flu.  It's all in my footnotes.

Preconditioned to wonder what was wrong with me, that I had not remembered (or had I forgotten?) that I was white while weeping tears of happiness over the newly married lesbian and gay couples in New York, I took a few minutes out to don a modified hair shirt (it's hot!) and to read up on Self-Loathing (it's de rigueur!). 

Then, as usual, I got angry -- and please don't throw some pithy analysis of what you think my anger means back at me, because you are bound to turn a fairly flat anger into some convex divergence of wavy rage.

Entry after entry assumed me a white male (they often forget "privileged," so I am adding it for them).  One of the odd things worth noting? Susan Sontag is often mentioned in the middle of all that chalky-white phallic superiority...

{Scratching:head:at:yet:another:confusion:of:an:intelligent:and:assertive:woman:with:an:obvious:genetic:gender:defect} 

... though, granted, she can be irritating:  Remember when she "equated" Communism with Fascism? 

She said The Left had romanticized Communism in order to better demonize Fascism.  She further posited Fascism as not only possible within a Communist context but probable, famously calling this symbiosis "Fascism with a human face."

She was a let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may kind of girl.

Oh, puh-leeze.  I know that extant power structures are, in fact, white male structures that perpetuate the marginalization of The Scary Other.  Did you not pay attention when you read the first 899 posts that make up this blog?  Jeez.  You probably don't remember my favorite color, either.  All I am trying to say, in a desperate attempt to return to the topic at hand, is that words matter, and that the degree of precision we bring to those words matters as much as their primary definitions.

Anyway, my impromptu internet search results insist that were I all those things that go into making a liberal, my guilt would have as origin my hatred of my own race.  That not being so, all of it together begs the question of whether non-white and/or female people can be liberal.  Actually, it's petitio principii all over the darned place (Watch you don't get mud on your panty hose!) because I'm beginning to think that Women are categorically exempt from guilt, and Women of Color, doubly so!

Okay, okay, I confess. My female, socialist, and undoubtedly racist self has never before noticed the obvious, in-your-face, bait-and-switch feint that blithely makes white and male out of liberal.  My brain may well explode if forced to consider the implications of more adjectival qualifications -- feminist, hopelessly self-deprecating, intellectual, pleasingly plump, vegetarian, etc.

My moral senses are feeling kinda dulled.  And has anyone seen my legs? (That's an Inside Joke for the Faithful Few.)

We believe things that fly in the face of reasoned proof all the time.  Remember that 24 percent of Republicans say that President Obama “may be the Antichrist.” Even larger numbers continue to insist that he is Muslim, socialist [Don't I wish?], and foreign born. 

47% of Democrats have heard that Republicans may have a sense of humor.

At the end of my tangential voyage, I've decided that it is perfectly fine to use the term "liberal guilt" without addressing or incorporating the notion of "white guilt," as long as the speaker's capacity for racism is a given. 

I'm sending off for the rulebook.

Yes, I laughed and cried gazing at the photos of Phyllis Siegel and her happy wife Connie Kopelov, married at 9:02 Sunday morning.  They found each other late in life and have been together for 23 years.  Phyllis is 77 and Connie is 85 and usually in a wheelchair.  They were the first same-sex couple to wed in New York City.  Two grandmothers won the honors for the entire state, marrying just after midnight in Niagara Falls.  Kitty Lambert, 54, and Cheryle Rudd, 53, from Buffalo, have five children from previous marriages.

It's great to see how well revisionist explanations of homosexuality as a youthful hormonal confusion play out in real life!

One of the first endearing things I learned about my darling Fred, some odd 20 years ago, was that if asked whether or not he was gay, he always said "Yes, I am!"  [With an ear-to-ear smile.]  He figured that the person asking needed to learn and believe that gay and lesbian people are everywhere [And happy!] and that by saying he was gay, he was just helping progress along.  I decided to do the same thing... but no one has ever asked me whether I am a lesbian and it is against The Rules to volunteer misinformation.  No, you have to wait until the person demonstrates a fairly affable need to be mislead. 

Anyway.  In the wake of my happy tears [tinged with liberal guilt], I considered the following:

*DADT is on its final legs, all wobbly, it's demise scheduled for 20 September 2011. 

*In SIX states, then, gay men and women will be able to live as openly as they may die in service to their country: Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont.

*DOMA is about to fall, that fell creature born of the equally fell Bob Barr -- he has moved on, now employing his considerable time and talents toward helping Jean-Claude Baby Doc Duvalier.  Of course, in 2009, Barr publicly stepped away from the document he authored, anchoring his reversal in what he considers the act's ultimate failure -- that it is incompatible with the belief in "federalism and the primacy of state government over the federal."  That guy wears his heart on his sleeve.

Not quite enough to allow us all to sit back and murmur, "Good times," but it feels like the right direction in which to travel.  We can get there from here, it turns out, and, amazingly, I estimate that there is precisely where I want my burden of liberal guilt to fall from my shoulders.

I imagine the sound to be one big old KerPlunk, which, as aficionados of the game will recall, is also the sound of lost marbles.

Congratulations, Phyllis and Connie, and may you have continued long life and happiness together.