Reflections on gayness and cultural warfare

What I notice about Americans is that their culture is very aggressive. Decades from now the history will be written of a time like the 1970s when gayness suddenly became a big popular thing and issue. This was perhaps the decisive social event of the seventies, along with the massive if initially tentative and anxious success of women entering professional occupations other than teaching, nursing, and secretarial work. That led to some excesses culturally and ideologically, which have become easier to notice now.

I write as someone who tries to think in my amateur way about the society I have lived in without worrying so much about what kind of person I am. I think people demand that because we also have a highly performative culture. Saying anything in public or social contexts is fraught here because what you are saying is often less important than the event of your saying it and whatever that is thought to mean about you. It's as if everyone is posturing and trying to look good, like actors who don't know they are. And when we look at films and performances in them, we are not supposed to think about what this bit of art is saying, but only enjoy it, and comment about how good it is or isn't. We are society of workers and consumers. The interesting then becomes a subcategory of the pleasing. But a world in which your most salient potentialities are to do something and to get what you want is a world committed in fact to nothing more than managing its own manner of dying.

Gays were often hated, and in return they could seem rather militant in their attitudes, which is not so bad, and I also remember that feminists, which then was so many young women, were typically angry, and there was something about them that I remember that I would call for a lack of a better word very aggressive.

My hypothesis is that the United States since WW2 has been a permanent war economy, and the Cold War sustained this ideologically along with other things. And that because of this American society and life are more brutal and violent than elsewhere, our institutions more authoritarian, and our intellectual culture not only weaker but remarkably less inclined towards self-criticism than European societies were in my generation, and then much of the world is. Whenever I have gone to an American hospital, I get the feeling I am being treated like a possible criminal suspect to be made prisoner. I don't know why since I don't believe it is anything about my manner other than possibly that I am assertive, albeit politely, and might ask, for example, to see a copy of a document I am expected to sign. My father, who was a retired professor and former Congressional aid living comfortably in retirement in one of America's wealthier neighborhoods, was treated similarly, maybe because he was old, or did not appear at the moment to be laden with a promise of conferring magnificence upon the persons with whom he was interacting or their superior officers. America is a nation at permanent war, that's the country I grew up and still live in, and the consequence is that people are often treated like either soldiers or potential prisoners of war. My feeling about that is: shit.

By the seventies there was little protest anymore, but some people had liberated fucking. I admit there were good things about that. A war being fought against, or with and for, many of our own citizens on the grounds of their personal identity and desires (must they be fought for? Should they be forbidden?), also really sucks. In the early 90s I worked for the American Red Cross in Washington. It was headed by a conservative Republican former Senator who was proud of her stance standing up for people. She liked to compare herself in speeches to the Biblical Esther. (She was not Jewish). She championed women becoming executives and complained about the "glass ceiling." Everyone who worked for her was a conservative. They wanted the government to be run on the Bible, were against abortion, and never said anything about the AIDS epidemic. I guess that was no concern of the American Red Cross. People were dying partly because our government didn't want to help them. A few years earlier, an uncle of mine who was gay had a stroke while living with a man whom he loved, or thought he did, and who I suspect spiked his drink. As soon as my uncle was hospitalized, the man disappeared, emptying my uncle's bank account and living him an impoverished cripple with a damaged brain. My family never made any inquiries, I am guessing because they were ashamed that their son, who until then had been a successful doctor, was gay. I miss my uncle. He was a smart and kind man.

Maybe he loved badly, he fell in with someone who apparently didn't love anyone, and probably didn't know how to. By the time he died, it was popular in some circles for people to choose freely what kind of love or sex they wanted, while other people continued to moralize. You must do the right thing with sex, just like you must do the right thing generally. Only this right thing isn't about being kind to people, and it allows a lot of cruelty. I think it's about doing the right thing because it is the right thing, and that is defined as what is demanded. Demanded by whom? By some, or the, boss of it all. Americans call that God. They don't know what the fuck they are talking about.

But if someone came along and did, would that make much difference? Probably not. Followers of Saint Francis do unkind things too. Americans are bad with religion, because what it means to them is obey. And because it empowers professionals who exercise a moral power over others that is easily abused, maybe because they too need or want someone to love them, or feel ambivalent about their social position, or because people should be more autonomous and less dependent on authority.

I think much of our problem is that America is a nation permanently at war. Ostensibly against half the world, to police it to make it safe for our "liberal" form of capitalism. We could even pretend to be defending kibbitzum in Israel that are queer-friendly on the grounds of that liberalism. And who is to be calmly murdered then, and who runs off to the bank? This is what I care about. "What is hateful to you, do not do to others," it is said. What is hateful to you, do not trust the government of the United States to defend.

Their reasons for threatening me were not about sex. Why did they target me? A nation at war will target many of its own people. The war will come home. Just as colonialism did. Colonialism could be brought home as fascism. It didn't always benefit the people living in the colonial "metropole" or home country. In the 80s and 90s our government was in the business of deciding which of its citizens may as well die, and those whose forms of love or sex were considered improper were supposed to die, and many did. More recently, there is some natural disaster and the government could help the citizens but it worries mostly about auto manufacturers and banks. The country I grew up in and still live in is a disaster. It's about to get worse. If liberalism ignores the disease, fascism worsens it while attacking it.

Americans when contrasted to, say, the French, among whom I have spent a bit of time, are quite noticeably much more aggressive. This is a country where lyric poetry would only be learned by men if they were sissies (at least the America I grew up in) and everyone was into sports. It was such a big thing. Now you can interpret this and other things through a critique of heterosexism, patriarchy, etc., and there's truth in it, as there is in looking at this is key to, say, Francoism in Spain, where one might add that a very conservative Catholic culture was in play that had roots centuries earlier, had "erotic" forms as well as aristocratic ones, and ties to institutional anti-semitism, scholastic philosophy, the American colonial enterprise and the West African slave trade. Which may be another way of saying that history is complex. So is that of the United States. I think an historian might well take as a starting point that whatever we assume to be the things that explain why we are the way we are or how we got that way are very likely neither the whole story nor even the best explanation.

Americans are thuggish and ignorant. In business or any kind of affairs, they are usually not honest and don't really know how to be because their thinking is rhetorical.

Sometimes I divide the world into two camps: the religious and the philosophical. What is love? What is friendship? What is the good life? For philosophy, these are questions. For the religious, such questions must have answers (consult the text), or if you have to ask them, something must be wrong with you (why read anything?). The religious then are usually anti-intellectual, and this is why. The objects of my greatest loves have not been persons. I also claim that the question what is the good life is one that few people answer well, and most people never ask, and they should. America is not a very intellectual country. Neither were its gay libbers, mostly. My uncle was, his boyfriend wasn't. I don't mean to suggest better reading might have saved him. I don't know. Maybe he didn't need saving. There have been crusades on offer, and I'd prefer not to go there either.