Post Scrip

Creativejuice, the feller in the previous post, felt compelled to respond to me. "And thank you for taking it upon yourself to judge me," he wrote, after I commended him for behaving like an adult.

What the fook is it with fags and judgment? He clearly prevaricates in his correspondence with me, yet when I point this out, it's judgment. Hmm.

Okay, there's this odd little philosophical brick laid in the foundation of Homoland (for those who just joined our story, Homoland is my name for the Castro district in San Francisco; it is a far better nomenclature than 'gay community' as far as I'm concerned). And this little brick sez, "We are not straight; we are gay. Therefore, gay is what straight is not." Next to it is a little brick that sez, "There are no standards. Our strength is in our diversity, and we are all different; judgment was used to belittle us and divide us, therefore judgment is bad."

There's just a teensy problem with such an understanding: without standards, you have mob rule. Community, by its nature, cannot exist without standards. C'mon, lambchop, think to the French revolution (and before you get snooty by asking 'which one?'), when they did away with months and years, and call their time Year One of the Revolution and so on, dissolved marriage as an institution, banned the church and jailed clergymen, squatting rights came to bear (didn't matter if you owned the land, merely that you lived on it). On and on. Tell me, who came to power? And what did ol' Robespierre do? And who destroyed him? And were they themselves destroyed? (Here's a lovely quote: "If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible...It has been said that terror is the principle of despotic government. Does your government therefore resemble despotism? Yes, as the sword that gleams in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of tyranny are armed.") Let us remember these folks were lefties. (Go on with yer shit about Shrub; I ain't impressed. Do you actually believe you're saying something new about W. and his cronies?)

What about them Bolsheviks? Who succeeded them? And what sort of dictator was he? And what did he do?

My point is not "Oh, those wacky lefties." My point is what happens when you eschew standards egocentrically, thoughtlessly. When you say, "Let's make 'em up as we go along and reinvent ourselves and make our own society cuz those old ethics were just so tired and, well, they didn't speak to me; that's all about straight white men."

No, I didn't misspell the title to this entry. It's a little scrip for the odd syndrome at the heart of Homoland. Why is the act of pointing out a man's lies called judgmental? All you do is notice him lying.