The Real Impeachment Question

Is simple. The President of the United States openly and admittedly leveraged his powers of office for personal political gain, jeopardizing the United States’ national security and undermining the free and fair elections that are the foundation of our constitutional republic. The facts are indisputable, and, in fact, no one, not even the President’s most vocal defenders, disputes them.

So the question is simply this: Are we a society in which powerful white men can do whatever the fuck they want with impunity, or are we a society in which the same laws apply to everyone?

It really is that simple.

The Heart of the Matter

Before we get started, here’s what I want to know about your philosophy:

Given the resources and capabilities of human beings as a species, why shouldn’t everyone matter enough to be important? Why shouldn’t everyone have what they need to prosper and thrive and be happy? There’s more than enough to go around. Why shouldn’t everyone have enough?

That Jamais Vu Thang, Man, Ain’t Nothin’ to Fuck With

I still remember, twenty-five years later, when the first Wu Tang Clan album dropped. I was twenty-one years old, in college, an avid fan of hip hop, which was entering a golden age after a shaky start in the 1980s. The record took our little campus by storm; I swear you couldn’t walk through the dorms or go to a party that whole year without hearing at least one track. Even now, decades and more later, I’d be hard-pressed to pick a favorite song on the album.

But of course I lived in Florida, the black hole of live music tours, so I never got to see them live. So you can imagine how happy I was to score tickets to the Wu Tang show this past weekend in Seattle. I didn’t even know when I bought them that the tour was specifically to celebrate Enter the Wu Tang (36 Chambers), which I still have a CD copy of that I bought in college, and that I still listen to.

So you can imagine how thrilled beyond thrilled I was when I found out that not only was I going to see a band I’d loved more than half my life, but that they were specifically going to perform the album of theirs that I knew and loved best. I hardly even minded having to walk into a giant venue with tens of thousands of other people in it, a thing this cranky introvert is not typically to be found doing, because if there’s one thing I hate worse than people it’s crowds of them.

We got there early, had a couple drinks, and watched the opening band (The Soul Rebels, I think they were called, a New Orleans brass band that does hip hop covers: they were good). Then, with much hullaballoo, the main event began. Continue reading “That Jamais Vu Thang, Man, Ain’t Nothin’ to Fuck With” →

Make America What Again?

What with the shit-show we’ve got going on right now as a nation — concentration camps on the border, a wag-the-dog escalation to a war of choice with Iran, a serious bump in hate crimes and people identifying as Nazis and white supremacists, a climate crisis that will destroy life as we know it starting to kick in for real, a nationwide election coming up that will undoubtedly be fucked with by hostile foreign actors while the beneficiaries insist nothing’s wrong, and a legislature unable, thanks to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to do anything but confirm hardcore conservative federal judges to lifetime sinecures, just to skim the surface — it’s easy to understand the widespread longing to go back to the way things were under the Obama Administration. To get things back to normal so we can all go back to living our lives without having to worry that the demented narcissist with the nuclear football will bring about Armageddon in a fit of pique or even just to avoid jail time.

I get it. I really do. I also would like not to live my life in a fog of existential dread, in which every action is pointless because, Rapture or not, the end is probably nigh for the American experiment and possibly human civilization and what can possibly matter anymore?

But even were it possible to return to whatever passed for normal before — and it isn’t — such a return is not even desirable, both on its own merits and especially in light of the challenges we face as Americans and human beings who live on the rapidly-warming, ecologically-imbalanced, and soon-to-be-downwardly-spiraling Earth.

I’ll explain.

Continue reading “Make America What Again?” →

A Modest Proposal Regarding Abortion

Encouraged by the elevation of conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, pro-birth zealots in Ohio and Georgia have introduced anti-choice legislation so draconian that it attempts to criminalize feminine contraception and even assert jurisdiction outside the boundaries of the states in question. Indeed the laws go so far as to mandate a medical procedure (reimplantation of ectopic pregnancies) that does not currently exist, and to criminalize the heartbreaking but naturally-occurring phenonmenon of miscarriage, on the off-chance the mother had some hand in it and it wasn’t just God’s will.

It’s a long way to go to prevent abortions, but I think we have to ask ourselves something.

Does it go far enough?

After all, as severe as these laws are, they ignore a full half of the problem: whether the act of conception was consensual or not, it takes a man to get a woman pregnant. Moreover, thanks to advances in medical technology, it’s both easier and more practicable to concentrate on the male half of the conceptive equation. Vasectomies are simple, painless, and reversible. There is even a non-invasive procedure which coats the inside of the tubes between testes and penis with a magnetized layer such that sperm are pulled apart and rendered unviable as they pass through, without any further effect on the patient. It’s cheap, easy, and can be reversed in a matter of minutes.

Just think how many unintended pregnancies could be prevented. Maybe not all of them, but a significant majority, I’d bet.

Is it draconian to mandate the procedure? Possibly, but no more so than the legislation already on the table. And in preventing the possibility of conception rather than using the demand said conception be carried to term no matter the circumstance or mother’s preference, it will be vastly more effective at our stated goal of preventing abortions.

In fact, I’ll go further, and suggest that not only should some such procedure be mandatory, it should only be reversible by approval, either by a body of women designated to appraise a man’s fitness for reproduction, or by a woman signing off that she actively wants to have that man’s baby.

Will this prevent all unintended pregnancies? No. But it will reduce them significantly. And, as a follow-on result, it will reduce abortions even more significantly, since the only intended pregnancies that end in abortion come about because of some heartbreaking medical necessity, an issue best left to the woman whose body it is and the doctor whose advice she chooses to take.

It is an imperfect solution to the problem of unintended pregnancy, and the choice to abort that sometimes results. And while I am steadfast in my support for a woman’s right to exercise bodily autonomy, and will ever be thus, I do join my anti-choice fellow citizens in hoping to reduce the number of abortions. I know from experience that it’s never an easy decision, nor one ever taken lightly. It seems best to me to see if we can’t prevent it from coming up in the first place.