Well, you might have to bear with me even more than usual on this one, kids. See, I've been reading an article in The New Yorker about this radioevangelist in Tupelo, Miss. by way of Wyoming by way of Stanford(!) by way of Oklahoma City, named Bryan Fischer. As you'd probably expect, he's to the right of Attila politically, and his primary crusade is against homosexuals. He has said, among a deluge of crazy things, that homosexuality was at the heart of Nazism. To wit(less): "Hitler recruited around him homosexuals to make up his Storm Troopers...(he) discovered that he could not get straight soldiers to be savage and brutal and vicious enough" and that "homosexuality gave us Adolf Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine, and six million dead Jews." I tried Google to find a list of well-known evangelical homophobes who are later outed themselves, a la Ted Haggard, but what's out there for vicious, violent, sick, twisted videos and rhetoric from these men and their acolytes is too disturbing for me to explore, much less recount. It is truly shocking and sickening.
Sorry--I really am shaken by what I just saw and read. But anyway, I intended to talk about how much Saint Ronald of Reagan's "Big Tent" in the Republican Party has shrunk, if in fact it ever really was larger than it is now. That tent is all-inclusive so long as you're not gay, non-white, a member of a labor union, a proponent of contraception (in 2012, for chrissakes) or a woman's right to have some say in her reproductive (at the very least) destiny, a believer in climate change, a Judicial activist (Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, Kennedy excepted, of course), a believer in evolution, one who believes we need to raise revenue as well as cut spending, low-income, etc., etc. ad nauseum. A very large segment of the Republican Party is attempting to turn the calendar back to 1958, to a world which didn't even really exist then.
Maybe they have "Big Tent" confused with "Red Tent," the place which, in many cultures back in the day when women were fully-recognized, actual people, was used to segregate women when they were thought to be at their most powerful, during menstruation or childbirth. "Because of the power a woman has during this time, it is best that, out of respect for her men and their medicinal trinkets and beliefs, she stay away from them." Now, again and still, it's because of her lack of power that she needs to stay away. At any rate, tents are places, it seems, of apartness, not inclusion. Is that really how we want to live? Perhaps the upcoming election will give us an answer, for better or for worse.
As usual, this is the long way 'round to the theme for this week's show (hey, it's not easy, connecting the disparate parts for those who only read and those who only listen; you're probably best off in the majority, those who do neither). Turns out I have zero songs about "tents," but lots, in this season, about circuses, which seems apropos to our current governance, and carnivals. So that's what'll happen tomorrow, noon till two on 100.1 FM, www.wool.fm on the webs. Hope you can join me (and join the station, for a nominal tax-deductible charge, if you like this stuff).
"They're selling postcards of the hanging/
They're painting the passports brown/
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors/
The circus is in town...."
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