Majel Barrett is dead. O, Discordia

1932-2008

Old Assholes Never Die, They Just Move to California

I'm not surprised to find California's Attorney General coming out against Proposition 8, officially washing his hands of the damned thing in a publish-before-the-weekend-and-hope-no-one-will-notice filing with the California Supreme Court.

Like John Kerry before him, AG Brown was all for Jim Crowing gays and lesbians out of marriage before he turned against it.

Asked about his change of position, Brown said Friday evening that since his initial comments the day after the election, he and senior lawyers in his office had looked closely at the court's precedents and at the recent marriage ruling and concluded they couldn't defend Prop. 8.

"We have a conflict between the amendment power (through voter initiatives) and the duty of the Supreme Court to protect minorities and safeguard liberty," Brown said.

Fundamental rights in the state Constitution, including the right to marry that the state's high court has recognized, "become a dead letter if they can just be amended" by popular vote, Brown said.

To which I can only ask Brown, "Why in the hell couldn't you have 'looked closely' at these court precedents before the election? That might've done something to, oh I don't know, influence debate, perhaps defeat this evil bit bit of ballot measure bullshit. Prop 8 passed with all of 52%, you fool. And don't give me any of that, 'State's Attorneys General should be above the fray,' bullshit. If you believed that for a moment you be right there in court, defending Prop 8 as the law of your land, whether you like it or not (since that's pretty much the Attorney General's job). Now, you feckless hack, now matter whether you fight in the court or not, the Court of Public Opinion will find you guilty of being a hypocritical jackass with a moral compass as skewed as Berkley undergrad's sexuality...but nowhere near as fun."

Instead, Jerry Brown chose look "closely" at the resounded "No," that greeted his May appearance before the Court, in defense of California's previous gay marriage ban. No trouble defending that one, though it was clear (even to a neophyte like me) that "traditional marriage" (whatever that might mean) is dead, at least in California's public sphere.

Does Jerry Brown hate gay people? Difficult to say. As a former governor of that great republic to my south (inheriting his father, Edmund G "Pat" Brown's office in the manner of an Adams or a Bush) and a current practicing Catholic, Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown hails from The City itself: San Francisco, Seat of the Gay Conspiracy. You'd think that would have some effect on the man...until you learn that this was the San Francisco of the 1940s and 50s--an international mafia battlefield if ever there was one, when you couldn't spit without hitting a pinball joint or a piece of flesh from around the world. Then you think, "Maybe the effect wasn't all for the best." Jerry Brown's San Fran is light years removed from what I selfishly consider my San Francisco. The City where (as I knew they would) my gay brothers and lesbian sisters rolled right out of their sin-drenched beds on the day after Election Day and filed suit against Prop 8.

I've held off commenting on this issue out of fear, honestly. I just sold a short story to a Latter Day Saint who's hosted my website free of charge for the last nine frickin' years. Any serious discussion of Proposition 8 must involve a discussion of the Mormon Church's role in passing it, something I damn site don't want to get into.


But fuck it, I'll get into it. After all, its a hard white elephant to ignore when the New York Times can run headlines like, Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage.

“We’ve spoken out on other issues, we’ve spoken out on abortion, we’ve spoken out on those other kinds of things,” said Michael R. Otterson, the managing director of public affairs for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormons are formally called [check out that little condescending aside from the Newspaper of Record--D], in Salt Lake City. “But we don’t get involved to the degree we did on this.”

The California measure, Proposition 8, was to many Mormons a kind of firewall to be held at all costs.

“California is a huge state, often seen as a bellwether — this was seen as a very, very important test,” Mr. Otterson said.

[:::]

Shortly after receiving the invitation from the San Francisco Archdiocese [and bully to you Catholics for reaching across the Gentile-Saint divide; look for a Catholic-Sunni jihad to follow in 2009--D], the Mormon leadership in Salt Lake City issued a four-paragraph decree to be read to congregations, saying “the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan,” and urging members to become involved with the cause.

“And they sure did,” Mr. Schubert said.

Jeff Flint, another strategist with Protect Marriage, estimated that Mormons made up 80 percent to 90 percent of the early volunteers who walked door-to-door in election precincts.

And I am not surprised. “What we're about is the work of the Lord," M. Russell Ballard, one of the Twelve Apostles that make up the Saints' Quorum, told his flock, "and He will bless you for your involvement.” Of course he will. It's an opinion shared by every god-fearing American threatened by the idea of two fags getting hitched, whatever their denomination.

That's why I cannot join with my brother's and sisters who marched on the Temple in Salt Lake City, for two reasons: (1) I'm against protest marches. Riots are simpler and much more effective in the long run. (Don't knock them--riots won us every one of those supposedly-inalienable "rights" we supposedly possess.) And (2): this was not the Church's fault.

Not alone, at any rate. In the end its the direct fault of every individual who worked to pass Prop 8, including all who funded it, volunteered for it, and all those ignorant-ass, Uncle Tom niggas who voted for it. Any organization that marches on the Salt Lake must also stage a march on the Southern Baptist Convention, the California Archdioceses, and wherever the hell Methodists consider sacred, too.

Organized religion will be the ruination of this species. Whatever utility it might've once possessed has long been outweighed by its reliance on exclusion and Other-ing. These are religion's organization principals. No matter how universal (that is, "Catholic") a faith may claim to be, fundamentally it rests on a cleaving of the world into "Us" and "Them"; worshipers of the true god(s) and worshipers of the "false". Right now, I'm worshiping a false god so polymorphus and complicated organized religion doesn't even know what to call it and so calls it "secular humanism" with a dismissive wave.

I'm deluded, you see. I just don't understand how they'll be anarchy in the streets if we allow gays to check "married" on their income taxes. I've failed to realize that my hot red-headed roommate's romance with an even hotter red-headed latteslinger would sound the death-knell of Western Civilization if it ever received state or (God literally forbid) church recognition.


More than anything, I'm surprised to find an old foe leading the attack to make sure we all go back to ignoring gay people, or treating them as diseased.

The Yes on 8 forces' brief was filed by Kenneth Starr[!--D], the former Whitewater special prosecutor and now dean of Pepperdine University law school. He argued that the court should preserve the people's lawmaking powers by upholding the initiative and invalidating 18,000 same-sex weddings performed before the election.

Kenneth-Fucking--STARR! Oh, Jesus himself would start a' rollin in the grave if he saw his saints (Latter-Day or otherwise) allied with the Beast!

232

Because I can’t think of anything else to say, I’ll let Fredrick Douglass play us in.

Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, "may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth"! To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery-the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just....

[…]

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour. (The Meaning of July The Fourth for the Negro, Rochester, New York, 1852)

Read the whole damn thing, why don’t you. And remember, s was true in his time, so it is in ours: you don’t have to be black man to be treated like a slave. His was the slavery of whips and chains. Ours is the slavery of economic pressures, interest rates, propaganda, eternal drudgery. The very form of slavery that the slaveholders of Douglas’s time decried. From their lofty perspective, toiling in a shoe factory for sixteen hours a day, performing the same task over and over and over, was beneath the dignity of any white man, save perhaps the Irish (who weren’t really white in any case, being largely Catholic and thus tools of Satan). At least, the slaveholders argued, their brand of forced labor uplifted an otherwise idle and obviously inferior race, giving them the twin gifts of Christianity and Civilization (which, to most Americans, then as now, is the same gift given twice).

One of the most famous articulations of this perspective, Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters by George Fitzhugh (of Port Royal, Caroline, VA, as the title page adds—so readers will literally know where Mr. Fitzhugh is coming from) went so far as to claim that, “Christian morality is the natural morality in slave society, and slave society is the only natural society. Southern Slavery “has become a benign and protective institution, and our negroes are confessedly better off than any free laboring population in the world.” After all, “The whole moralé of free society is, ‘Every man, woman and child for himself and herself.’ Slavery in every form must be abolished. Wives must have distinct, separate, and therefore antagonistic and conflicting interests from their husbands, and children must as soon as possible be remitted to the rights of manhood. Is it not passing strange, wonderful, that such men as Channing and Wayland did not see that their world of universal liberty was a world of universal selfishness, discord, competition, rivalry, and war of the wits. "

All bullshit, of course, save the part about “universal selfishness” and “discord.”

I walk the all-but empty streets of my adopted city and in the distance I hear the mortar-crack of fireworks. I can’t help but be un-American on this, our most sacred of secular holidays. I can’t help but think, “What the fuck are you people celebrating?” The fact that, for the first summer in God-knows-how-many-millions of years, the Arctic is melting? The price of gas, set to reach $7.00 by year’s end? This and every other nation’s increasing wage disparity? America’s new national past-time of conspicuous consumption? Or the ubiquity of wage slavery?

It’s a term I’ve longed to reintroduce to the American idiom, as it so perfectly sums up our position in this mournful first decade of the twenty-first century, when the rich get richer and the poor eat themselves away to nothing, all with a smile on their face.

Most generally, you could define “wage slavery” as “a social condition, whereby a person is rendered totally dependent on the cash economy for their survival and the survival of their immediate dependents (parents, children, guppies, whathaveyou).” But, wait, you might say, Isn’t that all of us?

Precisely.

As with some much else, the concept of predates American by centuries. One thousand, seven hundred and thirty-two years before the Declaration of Independence the Roman lawyer/statesman/philosopher Cicero, in what may or may not have been a letter to his son, noticed that, “vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labor, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery.” (De Officiis, 44 B.c.) And we can’t even think about a topic like this without bringing in the obligatory quote from Karl Marx:

“The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole. The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.” (The Principles of Communism)

Currently, I sell myself for $11.25 an hour. The CEO of Goldman-Sachs (the firm predicting that $7 gas, mentioned above) is pulling down $6 million a year. He won’t be worried about a two hundred dollar dentist bill breaking his household budget. His name is Henry M Paulson Jr, and I don’t know what his wife does for a living. My partner daily wastes her life riding the highways of our adopted city, prostrating herself before any employer with the merest hint of an offering. She’s falling all over herself for the chance to be exploited; to become just as burnt out, depressed, bored and unmoored as I’ve become.

For the past two years I’ve been a tick on the hide of my region’s largest utility companies. Portland General Electric, Comcast Cable, the Seattle Steam Corporation, the Spokane River Water District…these are the faceless, corporate entities that pay my rent, buy my shoes, and put food on my family (as Our Glorious Leader might say). They are, in effect, bribing me to not care, to keep my head down, do my job, and not worry about the fact that their actions have destroyed the salmon population, despoiled the local river systems, turned lakes into toxic soups, flattened mountains for their coal and gas, and poisoned thousands of miles of ground with their ever-expanding network of leaky, bargain-basement pipelines.

I should ignore the fact that, to the U.S. Forest Service, everything is an excuse to cut down trees. Weevil infestation? Grab your saws and hardhats, boys; we’ve got to kill those trees to save ‘em. Fire season? Can’t have fire without wood to burn, and why burn it when you can turn it into x numbers of board-feet, which equals y dollars, which equals a z increase in Weyerhaeuser’s stock price. That way the CEO’s can feel good about themselves when they award themselves another pay raise.

Should we celebrate the fact, on this July 4th, that CEO Robert J Stevens of Lockheed Martin makes over thirty-six million dollars a year? What about Mr. David J O'Reilly of Chevron, with his “mere” $34.61 million? Is that what you get when you sink a pipeline deal with Burma’s military rulers? Not bad, all things considered. Closer to home, there’s Brian L Roberts of my good friends at Comcast, pulling down $38.98 million.

Do you think you’ll catch any of these men scratching their heads in the grocery store dairy isle, wondering if they can afford a block of cheese? No. Extra sharp cheddar doesn’t even count as an “expense” to someone with a summer home in Big Sur, a penthouse in Manhattan, and the ability to actually pay for a $200 hamburger.
Yes, we can actually shit gold. What a dream this is, this American Dream. Would that we could all wake up one day and realize that things don’t have to be this way.

Noam Chomsky observes that

“Anarchists of this tradition [the libertarian, Anarcho-syndicalist one that Chomsky favors] have always held that democratic control of one's productive life is at the core of any serious human liberation, or, for that matter, of any significant democratic practice. That is, as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful…”

But who wants to hear something like this? On this of all days, how can I, a free, American male (who, thanks to my ten-hour days inside an office, can even pass for white) talk about “income inequality” and wage slavery? Today “my” country turns 232, and in spite of the perfect socio-economic storm I can feel, even now, gathering on the horizon American shows no signs of slowing down. No force on earth seems capable of opposing the onward march toward the Apocalypse. As a concerned citizen of country owned outright by rich assholes who, as George Carlin so rightly articulated, “don’t give a fuck about you,” what have I to celebrate today, save one more day of life on Earth?

I’m under no delusions here: no one will read this post. Any who do will probably accuse me of being a pinko-commie-faggot-Marxist who’s obviously rooting for Al-Kay-Duh. But as Eminem says, “I write songs for me. Fuck what you like.” Replace “songs” with “essays,” “blog posts,” or “masturbatory rants” and you’ll find yourself face-to-face with my exact frame of mind. In that spirit, I’ll let another contrarian writer from Missouri, Samuel Langhorn Clemens, play us out.

“My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office- holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is a thing to watch over and care for and be loyal to. Its institutions are extraneous. They are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease and death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags, that is the loyalty of unreason.”

George Carlin is dead. O, Discordia

I [Heart] My Neighborhood

I spend my Monday at thinking about all the things I should be doing—those that working keeps me from and those that keep me working. Should I quit my job before or after Regina’s Liberty Tax job disappears? Should I quit my job before or after I finish my godforsaken book? Is the book forsaken, or am I? Can God forsake you if you deny His existence? How can any fictional character forsake the living? We don’t refer to “Hamletforsaken weather” when our eternal Portland winters drag on into spring. We don’t speak of “Pipforsaken Hell Holes” in Iraq, Brazil, South Africa, America. Jesus didn’t ask, “Frodo Baggins, why hast thou forsaken me?”

If there is a god, has it forsaken me? At one time I deluded myself into believing I could sense the Force—the eternal, uniting principal of all life on this planet—nay, all the living systems of the universe. I imagined I could make myself aware of this principal and literally feel the live around me, a physical presence in my airspace. I can’t imagine that any more. I’ve lost the knack. Skills need practice. Without practice, there is no progression. Without progression, no evolution. No evolution, no survival. I’m up to Voyager’s Fourth Season, the Seven of Nine season, so I occasionally think in Borg. I will adapt. I must survive. The big question is always how?

Do I get the job before I go back to school? Landing a job at the college would generate the greatest amount of reward in this department. Or do I go back to college, securing a job once I know what my class schedule is like? Why am I rattling my brains so much, wasting time on this absurd plan? Enroll in to college to get a job that will secure me cheap prices on college? Does that sound like a good reason to re-enter the American educational system? Is it anything other than a half-baked, bullshit excuse for plan? The last flailing of a desperate man? A wage slave lashing his own back?

I walk down the street thinking about all this. It’s Monday afternoon. Dark clouds hug the tree line like spectators in Persian art, peering over the far horizon with their hooded, rainy eyes. But I’m on 82nd Avenue, walking to the bank, and for the moment I walk in the sun. I pass the crosswalk I cross each day on my morning way to work. I pass the carwash, the Bar and Grill, the newspaper box that I set my coffee on as I pause in the morning.

A man walks up to me as I approach the bus stop where, nine hours ago, I waited for the bus to work. “Hey, man.” He’s a late-twenties, unremarkable man. Taller than I, like most, with dull blue eyes and hair like wet sand. “Do you know where I can score some crystal meth?”

Immediately my brain performed an operation in what I call Narc Calculus, a complex system of logical postulates designed to recognize the Narc from the simply ignorant. Narc Calculus indicated this man was out of his flippin’ mind.

“Nope, ‘fraid not,” I said, not bothering to slow down. I didn’t apologize, as I might have had the man asked me where to buy weed. However, I did have a revelation after I’d walked a block or so.

“Now there,” I said to myself, to God, to the invisible audience that’s followed me around since I became aware of the mechanics of television at age three or four, “there goes a man who’s got his fucking priorities straight. No moral grays in his universe. Nothing but black and white. And I hear Irvine Welsh, author of “Trainspotting” in my head. “When you’re on junk, you’ve got only one worry: scorin.
But when you’re off it, you’re suddenly obliged to worry about all sorts of other shite.” (Translated from the original Scottish.)

For a moment I envy that anonymous methhead his simple, moral clarity. Then I go back to despising him. Fucking methheads.

I love my neighborhood, but goddamnit I hate cities. Human civilization disgusts me. I could never be a sociologist. When it comes to study of human society on a marco level I can’t help but agree with Agent Smith of the Matrix and see parallels between human begins and diseases. Particularly sexually transmitted ones.

And now that I’ve had a horrid, eternal Tuesday, I can’t help but be cynical. Maybe humankind is really planet Earth’s syphilis. We’re certainly know how to crazy up the place. National Weather Services across the globe agree that 2008 will be colder, wetter and stormier than 2007 ever dreamed of being. Thanks La Ninia. Thanks, other humans. When we’re dead and gone, alien historians will probably chisel something like, “They got what they disserved” onto our figurative headstones.

I don't know if you can tell, but I had a horrible day on Tuesday.

Dehumanization, Issue One: Strip Clubs

No matter how many strip clubs I visit (and My [adopted] Fair City does like to style itself the Strip Club Capital of the civilized world) I always feel dirty. So last night, hunched over the stage-right table we’d collectively seized in a strip club on the outskirts of Portland proper, my partner, impertinent questioner that she is, asked why?

I, sloppy thinker that I am, found myself without an answer for her. Like so much else, it took a night of drinking, a long bus ride home and a follow-up session of hedonistic debauchery before I achieved the mental state necessary to formulate an answer. By then, my partner was fast asleep. So these things go. My mind is a slow, soft machine, and it takes a lot to prime that pump.

But I have to share this with someone, so into the wastelands it goes.

The decision to visit this particular strip club was a completely spur-of-the-moment. My Co-President informed us that one of our mutual friends had (A) secured a job there (B) working the 8-2:30 p.m. shift, assuring she’d be on stage at least occasionally until the State Liquor Control Commission-mandated closing time.

Thus, with altruism in our hearts, we trudged out into the perpetual wet and cold that is an Oregon winter, caught our buses, and arrived half an hour later. The club itself: a windowless wooden cube that squatted beside the road, its postage stamp of a parking lot sprinkled with a working class assortment of older American cars: Fords, Chevies, Pontiacs. We entered through the rear (no pun intended) and there she was: our fiend, on stage, naked but for her striped, thigh-high stockings. She recognized us on sight and smiled without breaking stride. Personally, I felt seized by the twin poles of embarrassment and lechery, both as naked as our friend on stage.

So I avoided eye contact and shadowed my partner and Co-President Action as we circled the bar. Inside, the club was hardly worthy of the word, and the more I visit them the more I realized how much our modern conception of the strip club owes to the modern rap music video, with its visions of New York and LA’s finest. The vast majority of “clubs,” share no resemblance to those storied establishments. Were it not for the stage, bar, tables, and video poker machines, they could easily function as portable storage buildings. (When the Revolution comes and all prisoners are released, that’s exactly what they’ll be…you can buy that for a dollar, though that’ll be $3.50 with inflation.)

A fat tub of humanity tapped me on the shoulder. “Hey, did you bump my friend over there.” He’s at least six feet and tipping three hundred pounds, his chin studded with a pitiful-looking wiry tangle of soul patch hair. I have a vision of myself as Robin (Tim Drake, not Dick Grayson—if I’m to be Robin, I’ll be a Robin who wears pants, thank you very much) and calculated the likelihood of my striking a pressure point through all that fat before one of his canned-ham fists sent me off to the Blessed Isles.

—Not intentionally, I told him.

“Well, look over there at him.” I followed the fat man’s sausage-finger to a thinner, taller, mullet-wearing individual behind the bar. He looked like Jeff Foxworthy’s cousin, still plying the family trade and no doubt resentful of his uppity, rich relative. “Wave at him,” the fat man said. I did. Mullet Man raised two-fingers in response, a flying V—for peace, which means Victory and not, thank god, Vendetta. Everything, in the language of lower class bar etiquette, was cool.

“That’s what I thought,” the fat man said. I turned away from him as fast as I could, the better to hide the contemptuous look on my face. I think of all the random invasions of personal space that I suffer everyday, in the mere act of stepping onto a bus—bumped shoulders, knocked heads, stepped-on toes ect. Would that I could send a Personal Linebacker out to intimidate the causes of such slights. So that’s why I don’t go out in public, I realized. There are just too many people in this world ready, willing and eager to pull you into a Dick Waving Contest.

Admittedly, we were in ripe territory for such people: their natural stalking ground. The strip club, whatever its drink price, décor, or hook, is a stationary testosterone battery. Its walls hum with pent up sexual aggression, all the more pervasive for it being almost exclusively male.

Thank god we grabbed our table to stage right, a respectable distance from both bar and walls, within sight of the emergency exit.

Our friend, who’s taken the stage name “Starlet,” joined us soon, fully clothed in skirt a black pull-over blouse and matching mid-thigh skirt, the stripper’s version of dress-casual work clothes. Starlet is a compact (4’11’’) Jewish girl, only slightly elevated by her high heels. The short cut of her black hair gives her face a pixie cast, accented rather than spoiled by her cat’s-eye glasses. By executive fiat I’ve commissioned her as a Commodore in Monster Island’s Navy (which, much like the pre-Revolutionary American Navy, is practically non-existent) She deserves no less for the extraordinary services rendered to our splinter-nation, services that have nothing at all to do with stripping.

Still, I won’t pretend I dragged my ass all the way out there for purely altruistic reasons. As a twenty-first century woman, secure in her body and herself, Commodore Starlet doesn’t need my moral support. I’m sure it was welcome, but I’d be lying if I denied that the opportunity to see her unclothed was my primary motivation for leaving the house. How could I and remain true to myself as a heterosexual male? Who among you hasn’t taken a moment to mentally undress your Platonic friends? And regardless of other issues, the strip club does have its utilitarian uses. Only there, within the confines of its context, am I allowed to financially support the Commodore for showing me her goodies without feeling like a complete scrub. Anything to help a friend in need…right?

So it was with mixed motivations that we (my partner, Co-President and I) bellied up to the stage for Commodore Starlet’s performance. She did three “sets” in the parlance of her profession. That is, in the parlance of the uninitiated, she stayed on stage for three songs, shedding clothing to the overly-loud rhythm of so-called “classic” rock. I recognize the Door’s “LA Woman,” before the intro is over and my mouth forms words in time with Jim Morrison as the Commodore removes her top. She finishes the song in skirt and bra, her legs sculpted by those extraordinary stockings. I don’t recognize the songs that drive her second and third sets. By then my mind is elsewhere. Commodore Starlet has my full attention.

She begins her second set by letting the girls out, tossing her bra into a corner of the stage. I marvel at her ability unhook the damned thing without breaking rhythm as she pinches her nipples. They become buds of a springtime sapling as she leans over the edge of the stage, getting uncomfortably close to the fat gentlemen seated on my right. She dances away from him (sweeping his dollar tip off the edge of the stage) shaking her booty in our general direction, eventually earning my amazement as she shucks her panties (which, unlike the bra, glow a imperial purple in the obligatory blacklight) with a single, deft motion, kicking them out of her path. Throughout all this she smiles down at us, and in the diffuse lighting of this awful place her lipstick is the same color as her labia.

Somewhere in middle of all this I experienced a revelation. In other performance based media, audiences derive their enjoyment from interaction with individual performer. Musical performances, stand-up comedy routines, dramatic readings, plays…hell, even political speeches…all of them are dependent upon the individual performer putting him or herself into the proceedings, the public forum allowing their personalities to grow large enough to fill the room and capture the viewer/listener’s attention.

Sex shows—be they stripping, lap dancing, live, or filmed porn—are the exact opposite of this, and as such they are one of the most dehumanizing (legally recognized) professions on the planet. There the performer is reduced from an individualized human being into a collection of mobile body parts and it is these which command her (and, to be fair, his) audience’s notice. The fat man to my right and the skinnier man to my Co-President’s left don’t go to these places to see stripper x perform. They’re there for the purely visceral experience of having an anonymous person shake titties in their face. That is the extent of their involvement in all this...and every time I see their like I can’t help but wonder, Have you people heard of this thing called the internet? It’s great: it’s like Pornotopia, with more T&A than most people a generation ago saw in their entire lives. And you can enjoy it all in the comfort of your own home, without braving the rain or worrying about some pig’s opinion of your blood alcohol content. More to the point, in the privacy of your own home you’re free to say and do whatever you want to your chosen sex object, up to and including jerking off.

Most strippers (save the few “lucky” enough to break into the world of hardcore porno) aren’t provided with a marquee. They never see their name in lights. They do not receive wages, neither salary nor hourly, working exclusively for tips save at a few, enlightened establishments. Theirs is the absolute bottom rung of the service industry latter, and I can’t enter a strip club in the United States without being uncomfortably aware of these, and other equally unfortunate, facts.

So I tipped generously and waited for the Commodore to redress herself. Hugs were exchanged, promises were made, and the combined Executive branch of Monster Island departed. But not before we extended our promise to Commodore: once we’ve got our burlesque house up and running, there were will always be a place for her in its arms.