Unbirdened

So, a Spiritualist, a serialist and a literalist walk into a bar.

Except, they didn’t. And two of those three descriptions are inexact at best—fashioned in service to the opening line of what promises to be a joke but actually was our Thanksgiving.

The trio in question didn’t walk into a bar, but, rather, into our house. (Although wine was served, I should note.) The Spiritualist is Kathy, who in addition to being our longtime friend, computer fixer and cat-sitter is a member of the Center for Spiritual Enlightenment in Falls Church, Virginia, which is affiliated with the National Spiritualist Association of Churches. The serialist is Joanne, a veterinary technician and Florence Nightingale to animals who, though slightly north of 40, is in pop-cultural terms one of the older teenagers around—a self-described geek about the Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games and Lord of the Rings franchises who proclaims, to her husband’s helpless acceptance, that she would so “do” Joss Whedon, creator of the long-running television series Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, should events ever conspire to facilitate such intimacy. The literalist is Trudy, an accountant by day who’s all about numbers on the job but off the clock is all about friendship and compassion and a matchless brand of charm that is awkwardly and uniquely her own.

Kathy, Joanne and Trudy were our guests Thursday for a turkey-less Thanksgiving dinner (Trudy, Lynn and Joanne being vegans, and Kathy and I vegetarians). It was pretty untraditional in menu, guest list and conversation, but it met the holiday’s highest ideals in terms of gratitude, warmth and community.

The afternoon kicked off with Kathy and I conversing in the sunroom while the others convened in the kitchen. Kathy’s quest for meaning and belonging in the world brought her home a few years ago to a local church community led by an internationally known and recognized Spiritualist medium. Communication with the corporeal dead is commonplace within Kathy’s congregation, and the amazing, spot-on details of those interactions cannot easily be explained away. On Thanksgiving, Kathy shared with me Spirtualists’ belief not only in our eternal existence, but in constant learning and growth beyond this life. She said Spiritualists believe that each of us retains his or her individual identity after passing over, and that such earthly pleasures as self-improvement, eating and sex continue in some form. (This leads me to question whether our deeming a sinfully delicious dessert or particularly memorable orgasm “other-worldly” isn’t, in fact, somewhat premature.)

During dinner, but fortunately after most of the eating was done, a spirited roundtable conversation centered on the subject of anal licking and cleaning among cats and dogs. Trudy started it off by noting (appropriate of what, I can’t recall; Trudy tends not always to require segues) that she lately has been wiping the ass that her hefty foster cat is prevented by girth from reaching. Joanne—whose small Loudon County home makes Noah’s Ark look like a near-empty rowboat by dint of its accumulation of permanent and foster dogs, cats, chinchillas, rabbits, lizards, etc—chipped in by noting that her own substantial kitty, Oreo, has a personal dispenser of Redi Wipes in the form of Annie the Chihuahua’s tongue. (Which you therefore, Joanne further noted, don’t really want licking your face despite the diminutive dog’s abundant adorableness.) Kathy closed that particular discussion by toasting a collective comfort level with the gross that made our focus on the feline anus not only acceptable but enjoyable. (Damn, though, if Lynn and I didn’t fail to mention our constant need, years ago, to yank hardened crumbs of shit off the ass of our dim but heartrendingly sweet Manx, Franki. Next Thanksgiving, maybe.)

Then, after dinner, it was Kathy’s turn to marvel, on our PC, at the aforementioned Joss Whedon’s astoundingly articulate and well-reasoned, not to mention hilarious, YouTube video, posted days before the presidential election and delivered deadpan, in favor of a Mitt Romney presidency. His argument? That the resulting poverty, chaos and class warfare would hasten the purifying zombie apocalypse that each of us in his or her macabre heart of hearts (if not in our soon-to-be-eaten brains) really would like to see. Weeks ago, Joanne had shared this video with me, and I in turn had shared it with Lynn and several other ideological fellow travelers. Kathy, who given further Spiritualist training may one day be able to foresee and announce to the rest of us the approach of an actual zombie apocalypse, nevertheless enjoyed Whedon’s frighteningly plausible outline for the recent unrealized one.

During our multi-hour gathering, there were no combustible family dynamics for us to gingerly negotiate, no roiling political discussions to upset our digestive tracts, no rancorous social-policy debates, no after-dinner self-segregation into football and non-football camps. (Although I’ll concede that I did surreptitiously check the scores a couple of times.) Granted, there was one friendly debate about whether or not it’s stupid to spend $225 a ticket to see the ancient band The Who perform the 1973 rock opera Quadrophenia at the Verizon Center, with Lynn being squarely in the “yes” camp and Joanne and I, who recently had attended that totally awesome show, begging vociferously to differ. But given that any Thanksgiving table potentially harbors a cornucopia of acrimony, that lone jibe scarcely amounted to a gourd in the centerpiece. 

Not that there’s anything wrong with spending the Thanksgiving holiday with one’s for-real blood/legal relatives. And not that each of us at the table on Thursday doesn’t love his or her own mother and father and other relations, living and dead. They certainly were in our thoughts. (And at times in our fond conversation, as when Lynn and I told Trudy and Kathy how Joanne’s father once spent a good 15 or 20 minutes relating to us “cute”— read “horribly embarrassing”—stories of Joanne’s youth when she wasn’t there to shush him. Joanne’s face was roughly the hue of the table’s cranberry sauce as we recounted that conversation.) At any rate, we soon will again be in our respective families’ company, with the approach of Christmas.

But what it comes down to is that there are many different types of families. Lynn and I derived great joy from hosting three key members of our family of cherished friends this Thanksgiving. We were sorry only that Joanne’s husband Eric, a teacher, artist and author, couldn’t be with us because he literally was taking care of business at a workshop in Canada—a nation that peevishly refuses to align its own Thanksgiving Day with our own. Still, we felt deeply enriched by a communal experience that was devoid of discomfort, abundant with laughter, and unblemished by the dismembered presence of a bird slain for our supper.

And that, readers, is no joke.

Good Night for POTUS, Pot, Santa

For the past few days I’ve been pondering what to write about Election Day 2012. Not that the blogosphere exactly has been clamoring for my take. (Or, frankly, knows I exist.) But presidential elections are big deals, and there were many other interesting races and issues on local and state ballots this past Tuesday, as well, about which I have thoughts.

Initially, I had pegged my approach to this post to today's debut in selected theaters of Steven Spielberg’s film Lincoln. I envisioned brilliantly and insightfully writing about all that I’d found good and bad, hopeful and troubling, new and old in Tuesday’s results, and then comparing and contrasting all that with What Abe Would’ve Done—Could’ve Done, Might Do—were we to have a leader of his vision, savvy and integrity on our national stage today.

That approach seemed workable until I woke up his morning and realized it was trite, lame and obvious. (Lame and obvious may be redundant.) Then, too, my idea of ending this post by informing you, the reader, that I was temporarily tabling my cynicism and responding to the better angels of my nature by going out to catch Abe at the local bijou was thwarted by the logistic fact that the film currently is playing at only a single local theater that’s a bitch for parking. (“Fourscore and seven minutes ago I began circling the lot in forlorn hope of a finding a spot.” Ha ha ha.)

So, I’ll spare you the overarching theme, or any strained attempt to weave a sociopolitical, historical tapestry, and simply run through my list.

The White House. Obviously I’m happy the president was reelected, and that he won both the Electoral College and the popular vote, with the claim to legitimacy that this "bifecta" entails. I frankly thought that was the way it would go, but one never knows. Much has been said and written in the past few days about America’s changing demographics, and how the Republicans no longer can win elections by nailing the Grandpa Simpson and Jerry Falwell votes, given the facts that tomorrow’s seniors are today’s moderate baby boomers, that Jerry Falwell is dead and America’s religiosity is turning fuzzier, and that those damn minorities not only aren’t going away, but are growing in number—and voting, to boot.

While I do find those trends encouraging from a presidential-election standpoint, I also have no doubt that the GOP eventually will come up with some brilliant strategy, resplendent in spin and obfuscation, to win voters back without radically changing the substance of their policies. Maybe they’ll nominate Florida Senator Marco Rubio in 2016 and he’ll somehow make more-nuanced immigrant-bashing cool, since he’s Latino himself. Or, this whole changing-demographics thing will take a breather for one election cycle, as voters drool over themselves and their Big Macs in rapture over the fact that Republican nominee Chris Christie, in his button-popping glory, literally Looks Like America.

(One quick aside, because I love this joke and shamelessly urge you to applaud me for it. It had been my contention, in the calamitous aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, that the floodwaters that devastated vast swaths of New York City, New Jersey and Long Island might have been stopped, had only the Garden State’s massive governor been positioned in precisely the right places at the right times. This may be one case in which my steadfast refusal to engage Twitter denied me satisfaction. As it was, I was reduced to sharing my observation in a few e-mails and then being disappointed that the recipients did not respond by nominating me for the Mark Twain Prize and Kennedy Center honors.)

Anyway. What I took from the presidential election was that yes, the result was a reflection of changing demographics—with minority populations rising and younger voters looking at things differently than do their elders—but also that, while the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has badly tilted the playing field, it hasn’t quite succeeded in turning it upside-down. I’m always glad when Republicans don’t win presidential elections, as much because they can't install foxes in all the regulatory henhouses as because of the higher-profile damage they can do. But that’s not to say that I’m a huge Obama fan. I’m hoping, now that he’s a four-year lame duck, that he’ll turn bolder, less conciliatory and more candid as he seeks both to address the huge issues now being discussed—the “fiscal cliff” being tops among them—and the many dormant issues that demand action, such as global warming and gun control.

Congress. I’m thrilled that the Democrats retained the Senate, and I’m particularly grateful, as are all Democrats, to Tea Party voters for nominating as Republican nominees such knuckle-draggers as Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana. Still, it’s sobering to note that both of those throwbacks to the Paleolithic Age weren’t thrown back at the polls by so thumpingly much, still having secured 39 and 44% of the vote, respectively.

It’s cool, too, that the chamber now has its first openly lesbian senator-elect in Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin. (It’s not too early, however, to anticipate conservative bloggers’ snickering speculation as to whether this will embolden Hillary Clinton to finally come out, or whether she’ll maintain her business-arrangement marriage to Bill as she prepares to step down from the State Department and weigh a presidential bid in 2016.)

The House remained solidly in Republican hands, maintaining divided government and ensuring continued gridlock on most issues. Gridlock that, by the way, could be greatly lessened if states would put an end to politically drawn redistricting that results in tortuously gerrymandered safe havens for extremists on both sides of the aisle. But alas, the prospects for that are dim. And even removing the issue from the politicians’ purview isn’t necessarily the pathway to reform. Which brings me to …

Maryland. In my state, the lone disappointing election result Tuesday was the decisive defeat of a ballot question that would have forced state leaders to redraw a convoluted 6th congressional district map—described by one district court judge as a “Rorschach-like eyesore”—that had been crafted by the ruling state Democratic Party specifically to defeat longtime Republican Congressman Roscoe Bartlett (and which on Election Day succeeded in doing so). While I believe that most voters, regardless of political party, favor fairness and nonpartisanship in the drawing of district lines, the matter was dwarfed on the Maryland ballot by such glitzy, ad-fueled issues as gay marriage, casino gambling and the Dream Act. Also, Marylanders were of a collective mindset Tuesday to vote “for”—for legalization of same-sex marriage, for expanded casino gambling, for facilitating in-state college tuition to children of noncitizens. In the case of that abhorrent 6th District map, a vote “for” affirmed the status quo—the contorted geographic contours already in place.

The same-sex marriage vote, however, was historic. Maryland, Maine and Washington on Tuesday became the first states to affirm gay marriage by statewide referendum, ending a string of some 30 defeats nationwide. This surely was due in part to changing societal attitudes that will ensure future statewide victories, but Maryland long has been a progressive state. I’m particularly proud of the fact that populous Montgomery County, where Lynn and I live, powered the narrow statewide victory on this issue, with 65% of its voters casting ballots in favor.

The vote on the Dream Act was similarly groundbreaking and affirming, if more widely anticipated. Expanding casino gambling in the state, meanwhile, was hardly a moral victory, but it does promise to bring jobs to Prince George’s County and to pump money into state coffers that otherwise simply would be spent in neighboring states.

The nation. Last Sunday, the Washington Post published a special section that took a state-by-state look at the presidential race, Senate and House elections, and ballot issues. Two of the more offbeat items that caught my attention at that time were the fact that Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell was favored for reelection in Washington state over Michael Baumgartner, who’d earned the nickname “F-Baum” for encouraging a taunting blogger to go fuck himself, and that Republican Kerry Bentivolio, a reindeer farmer and Santa Claus impersonator, was seeking an open House seat in Michigan’s 11th District. My immediate thoughts on those races were that F-Baum might yet win by emphasizing (ideally without obscenity) the “can’t” in “Cantwell,” but that Michigan voters might be wary of a candidate who’d built his career playing God with “naughty” and “nice” declarations and threats of coal-filled stockings on Christmas morning.

In fact, however, Cantwell cruised to reelection, and it was Bentivolio rather than his Democratic challenger who was issuing hearty ho-ho-hos on Tuesday night. This despite the fact that the erstwhile Jolly Old Elf, a Tea Party favorite, had been condemned by his own brother as “mentally unbalanced” just five days before the vote, as I belatedly discovered upon Googling his name earlier today. Phillip Bentivolio had called his brother “conniving” and “dishonest,” and said that he’d undergone electroshock therapy as a child and was a glue-sniffer as a teenager. Also, there was this today, from Huffpost Detroit: “According to Politico, in old court documents Bentivolio was quoted as saying he had “a problem figuring out which one I really am, Santa Claus or Kerry Bentivolio.” (Of course, as the film Miracle on 34th Street documents, it’s not so easy to prove that a claimant isn’t, in fact, Kris Kringle.)

On a serious note, I was saddened but not surprised by the defeat of Proposition 34 in California, which would have repealed that state’s death penalty. I’m simply not in favor of governments executing their citizenry. I see it as being morally wrong, too subject to error, without deterrent value, and on balance, even more economically costly (totaling the legal costs) than imprisonment without parole. The 53-47 vote was, however, a vast change from the 70% favorable margin in 1978 that had placed the law on the California books in the first place.

Finally, there were the successful ballot initiatives Tuesday in Washington state and Colorado to legalize marijuana for recreational use. As victory had been forecast in both states, I wasn’t surprised. But, as I outlined in my August 6 post headlined “Rolling Stone Blows Smoke,” I’m neither enthusiastic about the prospect of state-sanctioned stoners, whatever the potential tax benefits, nor convinced that these votes ultimately will mean anything, given the federal ban on recreational marijuana use. It remains to be seen what the federal response will be. Sure, Barry Obama liked to toke during his Hawaiian youth, but he’s the Man now, and he’s gone from laidback hoopster to unapologetic launcher of unmanned death drones. “Don’t make me sic my jackbooted thugs on your dopily giggling asses!,” I can hear POTUS exclaiming, as law-and-order Republicans nod in grudging respect and, somewhere, Willie Nelson reassesses his relocation plans.