Some Thoughts on Pride Weekend

A few thoughts here on Pride weekend. My neighborhood is the historic center of the gay and lesbian community in the Emerald City. The parade used to go down Broadway but has been moved downtown in the last five years. We still host a block party the Saturday before the Sunday parade; that means thumping dance music all-day long.

The current wave of celebration for gay marriage is what the Democratic Party is choosing to hang its hat on: Not the economy, not the recent $15-hour minimum-wage victories in SeaTac and Seattle, but the dramatic, sweeping acceptance of gay rights. For example, here are the first lines of a fundraising appeal I received the other day from the state party:

“GOP Front-Runner Compares Gay Marriage to Polygamy.” It’s sad but it’s true. 

Pedro Celis, the GOP candidate running against Suzan DelBene for Congress in the 1st district, is rushing to the right to appeal to the Tea Party. And he’s not alone.

Democrats are hiding behind the skirt of gay marriage because they are adrift. Gay marriage is all well and good. As Nietzsche said, "The more tolerant a society, the greater it is." Or something like that. But for a party to trumpet its tepid leadership on gay rights in a fundraising letter is a mark of desperation. (Unless I'm wrong, the great breakthroughs on same-sex marriage came in the courts and from ballot initiatives in 2012.)

People want jobs and public spending on transportation, housing and health. And the Democrats have delivered little. But the Nobel Peace Prize president is promising to deliver spending on war.

Ben Hubbard has a small piece today, "Syria: Dispute Unsettles Rebel Coalition," about the putative recipients, the Free Syrian Army, of Obama's latest folly, his $500 million lethal-aid request to arm and train a "moderate" Syrian force to compete with the Saudi-sponsored Salafis in the ouster of the Baathist government in Syria:

As President Obama asks Congress for $500 million to help Syria’s rebels, the dysfunction and infighting that have long undermined their fight against the Syrian government spilled into the open again on Friday. The leader of the interim government established by the exile opposition, the Syrian National Coalition, said in a statement that he was firing the head of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army and referring its members to a commission to investigate accusations of corruption. The military council responded that the interim government had made a “grave legal error” and did not have any power over it — a position that was supported by the leader of the Syrian National Coalition, Ahmad Assi al-Jarba. Despite being endorsed by the West as the leaders of the struggle against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, none of the bodies involved in the dispute are currently playing a significant role in the civil war. The coalition is widely seen as ineffective, its interim government is little more than a list of names, and the military council has been overshadowed on the ground by rebel formations and extremist groups that have been more active.

The lightweight Saudi stooge Ahmad Assi al-Jarba had a photo op yesterday at the airport in Jidda with the Hogarthian John Kerry. Al-Jarba is being presented as an answer to ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Yes, I know. It is hard to believe.

A legitimate question to ask is, "Which body is more corrupt, the Syrian National Coalition or the U.S. Congress?" The answer will be the latter if Obama is granted his half a billion.

David Brooks had an interesting column yesterday, "The Spiritual Recession: Is America Losing Faith in Universal Democracy?"

Brooks riffs on a recent article by Mark Lilla, "The Truth About Our Libertarian Age: Why the dogma of democracy doesn't always make the world better," in the New Republic and asks why people no longer aspire to large social projects like global democracy or socialism.

. . . Lilla argues that we have slid into a debauched libertarianism. Nobody envisions the large sweep of events; we just go our own separate ways making individual choices.

He’s a bit right about that. When the U.S. was a weak nation, Americans dedicated themselves to proving to the world that democracy could last. When the U.S. became a superpower, Americans felt responsible for creating a global order that would nurture the spread of democracy. But now the nation is tired, distrustful, divided and withdrawing. Democratic vistas give way to laissez-faire fatalism: History has no shape. The dream of universal democracy seems naïve. National interest matters most. 

Lilla’s piece both describes and unfortunately exemplifies the current mood. He argues that the notion of history as a march toward universal democracy is a pipe dream. Arab nations are not going to be democratic anytime soon. The world is an aviary of different systems — autocracy, mercantile despotism — and always will be. Instead of worrying about spreading democracy, we’d be better off trying to make theocracies less beastly.

Such is life in a spiritual recession. Americans have lost faith in their own gospel. This loss of faith is ruinous from any practical standpoint. The faith bound diverse Americans, reducing polarization. The faith gave elites a sense of historic responsibility and helped them resist the money and corruption that always licked at the political system. 

Without the vibrant faith, there is no spiritual counterweight to rampant materialism. Without the faith, the left has grown strangely callous and withdrawing in the face of genocide around the world. The right adopts a zero-sum mentality about immigration and a pinched attitude about foreign affairs.

Brooks is a genius of keeping the obvious unstated. The unchallenged domination of predatory capitalism is the taproot of "rampant materialism." A Muslim says “There is no god but God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” What do we say here in the belly of the beast on Pride weekend? I'll tell you what we say: It is The Teaches of Peaches (2000).

"Fuck the Pain Away" is all we have to say. That is the rainbow-colored standard that we fly so high.