Facebook | Broderick Fox's Photos - SIlverlake Rally

Facebook | Broderick Fox's Photos - SIlverlake Rally

Signs and Symbols of proposition 8 on gay marriage

note: click the above link broderick fox photos to view the poster i refer to in the below essay



This is a powerful and moving poster indeed! But,does it move the message in a concilliatory direction or further polarize entrenched positions in the gay rights movement ? I think it polarizes. Full of anger, defiance, resolve, and solidarity, the poster is very "early 20'th century" iconography, and reminds of the ones where oppressed workers of the world unite in the face of overbearing oppression. Its message leaves little ambiguity indeed... But,what are we trying to acheive here if not some compassionate break witht the past. While the signs , symbols, and images for the gay liberation movement must suggest this anger as the driving initial impetus,it must also contain the symbol of an all encompassing understanding that the news anchor Keith Olbermann spoke of in his moving 11/10/08 comment on CNBC.

Perhaps a compassionate appreciation of the history of the institution of marriage, and the the fear that compels these long held religious definitions concerning what constitutes the legal and social bonds of love between couples, is what's needed here. FEAR of change and fear of moral breakdown is the driving element that tempers and fixes these values. Using another line from the book of Jesus: "Forgive them for they know not what they do."

Seems me that the highest form of love is a disinterested compassion that strives to understand the deeper origins of human failing in self and in "other" and thus can be loving towards those who are stuck in history... stuck still in all of our failings to accept the multitude of minority posiitions whether racial, sexual, gender preference, tribe, whatever. These people are not anything if they are not stuck in history. Dug in back along an ascending arc of human understanding.

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We all come from this failing, we have passed this spot; and some of us have begun to move beyond it. If love remains throughout, the rest will come in time.It's just gonna happen. It's just a question of time, intensity, and endurance... and how many people peacefully join the movement. NO DOUBT THIS WILL BE OVERCOME

Sarah Palin's Misogyny
..... how misogyny stole the Christian message


this essay is all over the place.... if you are prepared to feel g forces of theme flux, then read on...

The essential irony of Palin's candidacy is that the feminist movement is firmly rooted in progressive left thinking, yet Palin hails from the whacky soccer mom far out right. Granted. Palin's beliefs are not progressive at all,but actually part of the continuing studies in the ancient mold of the early mysogynists who set up the current macho thinking we have inherited over a couple millennia or so. In sex alone does she buck the system. In every other utterance she is anything but rooted in progressive thought. Indeed, Palin's world view in its pure form represents one of the most antiquated and unimaginative still surviving views of "man's" narrative on the planet. One that was founded upon state and religious based misogyny thousands of years ago. Though the early "church fathers,"after the death of Christ, would never have referred to themselves as misogynists, establishing moral codes and state laws that made women the property of men, that's what they were. That's what we all come from and still are to a large extent. It is a bible based view, with an historical record and it still represents the foundation of much of our cutural value system today. In the West this view became fixed with the acceptance of Christianity as the state religion by the declining Roman Empire desperately trying to keep it all together. This world view early on linked religious structures w/ male dominated power based hierarchies......

These beliefs today, if adhered to in their literal forms, are counter Enlightenment, and are outright dangerous when incorporated into the philosophical framework of those who would "lead us" from the highest offices in the world..... whether Christian, Muslim .... whatever.... For example, if the Rapture is near at hand, why work toward any global warming policy to save the planet, or reach out to sit down unconditionally with the swarthy "Muslim Moor" billions of people strong planet wide.

........Truly the ultimate tragedy of this age old misogyny proves consequent in the 3'rd world where people are still bought and sold, mostly women and children, and daily continue to die of starvation, lack of water and disease.........




.......So, therefore, the conservative position by strictphilosophical definition, is against feminism, because frminism suggests radical and fundamental change It is amazing and encouraging that less than 100 years after women's suffrage here in America, the feminist movement has effected the collective psyche enough to the
point where a critical mass has tipped the balance enough for a women to be a viable candidatefor the highest office here in the U.S.. Finally, though, here in the American empire, and Europe as well, the dominant and most
we are still firmly based on male dominated
hierarchical structures......... We are still closer to our ancient roots, closer to Rome, than we are to our potential becoming.


a brief digression into Obama... then back to the Palin phenomena
.

Barack Obama perhaps is unaware of this dimension of his presidency, and does not seem to act consciously toward cultivating the cult of his own personality,thank god, but just the symbol of the man OUT OF AFRICA ,and Indonesia, Hawaii and Harvard law school.....the man w/ 3 vowells in his name open O in the beginning; open A in the middle.... opening out again with an A ...... compare all the other Presidents names and nothing comes close to this open vowelled name. They are all white male anglo saxon names. Reminds me of the French sybolist poet Rimbaud- this fix on the vowellic sounds of the man's name ... the music and rythm of it all..... this is a far more profound yet sweetly passive a revolution than we Americans yet realise. The stage upon which this Obama revolution will pay out effecting subliminal modes of thought here in America and in more overt ways as he strides out into the world w/ new notions of the rules of engagement on a global level,remains to be seen. All signs though seem to suggest, and this is premature wishfull thinking, that this is the true genius of his intelligence.


In essence the hope is that the change we all seek, whether unwittingly, symbolically, consciously or not, in OUR CHOICE FOR LEADERSHIP moves the entire species in ever so small social tectonic shifts. But these shifts in the direction of this new mode traject out to a place that history itself calls for if we are to survive the nuclear era. How on earth are we to survive this era when the likes of Bush and Cheney, and their heir apparents in McCain/Palin, pronounce the very word nuclear as "nucular", as Bush does for criss sakes!!! In so many ways, in signs and symbols; in how we entertain ourselves, in the cults of hollywood, further entrenching our collective ignorance WE ARE STLL THE ANCIENTS... just look at the pediments and freizes the Doric columns supporting the lintels of the grand edifices in all the capitols of the West.We are still stuck in the ethos of Rome and Greece. Lovely heritage both, but we must now move on and Obama represents our best bet, here anyway, of making the first leap to the next level of becoming aware of eachother in the global sense.In essence the shackles born over hundreds of generations steeping us in insular nationalisms and tribalisms and all things suggesting belonging to local biases are at least beginning to be noticed at last. Palin, bless her beautiful feminine countenance, harkens backward in her thinking if not in her sex. It will likely be a few generations passing before we actually manifest the changes coming out of this awareness, but Obama, the symbol of the man, more than the man himself, is our best bet now moving in this direction...

back to Palin

...................Sad for us and for Palin that in every other way, via her creationism, witch exorcisms, attempted book censoring stuff, .......on and on- her conservative views represent some of the worst of the old male dominated model that
we need so much to dismantle if true progress is to be made in
terms of not only how the sexes in this country relate but how the
countries of mother earth or Gaia relate. The term "feminism" needs
to be broadened so that it incorporates the concept of the feminist
chi, or the "mother energy" in all of us... men and women....
......This "mother energy" was long ago expunged from both sexes,
(mostly men),when the conquering barbarian cultures and the
ancient Homeric and Hebrew, ( I am not talking about the Jews here
and this is not an anti semitic stance here), began to dominate
not only the world, but to imprison the mind into how it relates to
self and to Mother Earth. This is why Palin wants to drill,drill, drill, as in rape, rape, rape, thrust, thrust, thrust, dominate, dominate, dominate. This
world was given to "Man" , bequeathed to man by god as "his agent
to do his will and to use the fruits of the land etc.,

Sarah, unbeknownst to her is an inheritor of this philosophy. She believes
that "fucking the earth" is our divine right because it was given
to us, (To Adam and his male seed actually) by a male god 6 thousand years
ago and is solely for the paragon of beings to exert power and dominion over. It
was indeed mostly men that proceeded from the so called "garden"
and began this campaign of dominion over all the earth. We are
still living in this age. In this sense we are still the ANCIENTS

.......As far as Palin goes, what an irony to have such male oriented
misogyny packaged in such a petite and alluring feminine form!....
This is hard to digest for men who, from their cerebral highground, wrestle with their limbic systems






….I'm working on an essay titled "The Dream of Sarah" It is a male wet
dream desiring the best for Palin's erotic as well as cerebral enlightenment moving through time........ Sarah time travels through the ages cast out from the "garden" , and as a "fallen temptress" she takes a number of lovers and husbands, (all in the male dominant model), and finally arrives at the
the windswept- curtains billowed in window sill of Voltaire @ his writing desk at the highpoint of the French Enlightenment.
Voltaire then morphs into the libertine Casanova who looks like Fabio.They spend rapacious nights reading Sapphos poetry by candlelight, Rousseau's and
Dennis Diederots writings, Candide and all the rest. She is beginning to break as she combines the sensual beauty of Sappho's poetry with Rousseau's championing of the noble savage finally revealing herself in a sensuous striptease under Voltaire's brightly lit candlelabra. Revealing herself to voltaire and to the "Enlightenment" finally becoming truly modern by casting off these age old shackles that have been with her since the days she left paradise..

as dust gathers on her Old Testament bible

Thomas Paine, Jonathan Swift, and Sean Hanity mixin it up


This is an ongoing correspondence between 2 of the brothers Warren- Dave and Pete.
This response was answering a poem he has written based on McCain's statement referring to Obama as "that one" in the recent debate in Nashville. In reading my response back though I decided to not include Pete's poem in this essay as it took on a life of its own and pretty well makes a case for the corruption and reformation of the term "liberal" and "liberalism" as it is bandied about today on infotainment networks like FOX News.

Pete,
....Now to your thoughts and quotes from Swift and Thomas Paine, apropos of their satirical brilliance and your poem entitled"That One." Further along an imagined course, I'd bring both Swift and Paine forward to sit on a typical set w/ the renowned Sean Hannity of FOX news during one of his anti liberal
mini screeds. It would be interesting to see how Swift ,or Paine,
or Patrick Henry for that matter, would withstand Hannity's anti
liberal vitriolic screedograms... It would be evident to Paine @
the outset however,that Hannity simply has not done his
homework-that he would be taken by Paine as a talking head Torre lightweight and Paine would immediately leave the set.

Swift, however, saved by his keen sense of humor, farce, and irony, would hang in
there awhile just to see what form anti liberalism had taken these
250 years or so later. He would quickly conclude though that Hannity has
not read Thomas Hobbes,David Hume or Bishop Berkley or much of
European history at all from the Age of Reason forward. Or maybe he
might think that if Hannity had read any of these people, and
compared them to thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment like John
Locke or Adam Smith, or JS Mill, that he just did not get it. He simply
did not understand that the former thinkers were brilliant apologist with
reasoned arguments supporting the case for conservative philosophy.
And there surely were reasonable arguments defending conservative thought given the contexts of the times, with the civil and religious wars in England, and, especially, the debaucheries of the French Revolution, as cases examplar of liberalism run amok.

If he read the Scots at all,he simply did not understand how profound was the liberal idea that reimagined self determination in the hands of an enfranchised
democracy, and that this liberal and radical form became us here in the U.S.! I say reimagined because this idea had its precedence
but died in the 4'th century AD with the demise of Rome.
He simply does not get the self evident truth that we are all
children of a profoundly liberal approach to how people govern themselves.

Conservative philosophers like Hobbes for example, proclaimed more
or less that sovereignty was best placed in the safe hands of a
single monarch, or sovereign, and in exchange for relinquishing
individual freedoms, subjects would be guaranteed protection and
security by such a sovereign. Pretty sound reasoning here seems me. That was the deal . Give me the bulk of your rights to self determination and I'll protect you from your fellow subjects within under the rule of law ,and from without,
from foreign enemies of the state. All the liberal intellectual and
philosophical movements of the late 17'th century and early 18'th
flew directly in the face of this "conservative" thinking. This
movement led by John Locke and others of the Scottish
Enlightenment became the political realities and applied
structures of the later 18'th century and continues today.

Does Hannity know, (I think McCain does, but Palin surely does
not), that we are indeed the living demonstration of extremely
liberal and radical ideas. We in the surviving modern democracies
are all the children and benefactors of radically liberal thought.
What would Hannity say to this? If he'd been alive during the
revolution he'd have surely been a loyalist or a Torre. The whole
of the 18'th century, as far as the political structures it
produced, is all about overturning conservative thinking as in
monarchical rule, and risking the enfranchisement and power
granting to the "mob", to the masses, and finally framed so
beautifully, so simply, so enduringly, in the first lines of the
Constitution "WE THE PEOPLE" Up until then, all " parliamentary
constitutions" would have started thus: THE KING DECREES BY DIVINE
RIGHT THAT........ blah, blah, blah

Hannity would have likely branded Jefferson, Adams, and Paine all
dangerous liberal insurrectionists and demanded their heads on a
plate delivered up to the king.

What's so dangerous today is this idea that liberalism
conjugates out to "anti patriotism. Go back to school Sean!!!!!
It was liberalism and the guts to risk all its diverse promise that
gave us what we have today and why liberalism excercising it's measures of conservative reinstatemnet of the amendments to the constitution and the constitution itself which has been under serious assault these last 8 years
thatwill save us from this drift toward what Hobbes and Berkley, with
all their noble thinking, championed in their thoughts granting
absolute rule in the hands of a single sovereign. This drift is
happening right now with more and more power granted to the executive branch of government long before Bush.

Give me Hobbes any day over Hannity, for given the context of his birth, (he was born 3 mos. premature on the evening of the destruction of the Spanish Armada
in 1588). He was born literally in a womb of fear as his mother looked out to sea from the English coastline at the specter of the looming Armada. So, how and when he came into the world directly effected the way he thought for the rest of his life. He thought a single empowered sovereign was the only way to ensure the safest and most stable form of government. He may have been right for his context but clearly wrong in terms of the eventual best of all possible worlds ensuring security.But he would not have had the prescience then to see what has happened in the new world 300 years hence after that fateful night when tumultuous seas and wind made
quick and easy dispatch of the formidable Armada in 1588.

But Sean, Hobbes went to school in a way that we have
forgotten to go to school even if we get ourselves into the Ivy Leagues. He did his homework with thousands of hours of study and
analysis producing his brilliant work in The Leviathan, not
instant stardom and a buly pulpitauction block to hock your books and
T-shirts!!!! Because you're on fucking TV!!!! .
Poor Sean though, he is but an emblematic talking head of these sorely dumb
downed times in that he is a very narrowly educated ideologue who
is granted license to spread propaganda and calling it fair and
balanced news. It's as bad as trying to put Intelligent Design scientifically
into a biology text. Eric Severied and my Dad would puke all over H Hannity's notes each night he gets going, but each would feel so much more loss for what
has happened to the electorate and the American Mind.