More on Oakland/Prop 8

I was looking for videos on youtube to supplement the very serious, thoughtful blog I posted earlier today.   Nothing up yet, but I did find a video posted by a guy a couple weeks ago who went down to MacArthur and Lakeshore to ask questions of protestors from both sides.  I had a lot of faith that Prop 8 would fail, and though it was disappointing when it passed, I took comfort in the hope that I will live to someday see an end to this ridiculous bigotry.  This is a major setback, but I'm confident that 8 will be defeated in years to come.  

However, after talking with a few friends who share my beliefs on the issue, and then reading smug, hyer-moralistic commentaries which indicate that it wasn't intolerance and discrimination that was responsible for 8's passing, but God's will, I'm finding myself pretty angry.  More serious and thoughtful commentary that isn't the least bit snarky below the video:

- First thing's first, and this has to be said: Jesus Christ!  I didn't know Jabba the Hut's sister lived in Oakland (see 1:40-2:20).  The guy asks her what her "position" on 8 is, and the answer is definitely "sitting down,"  preferably with a small trash can filled with buffalo wings, two buckets of Halloween candy, eight orders of bread sticks and a jar of mayonnaise.  What car does she ride in?  On a side note, I hope she's not in a wheelchair.  If she is, I'm pretty sure I'm going to hell.

- It's hard to tell, but a couple of the pro-8 people in this video appear to be Mexican-American.  I may be wrong, but riding on that, hispanics as a group have a history of mostly voting Republican and being pretty conservative when it comes to politics that conflict with  the views of the Roman Catholic Church (results show that 53% of the Hispanic vote was for 8).  At the risk of making an already volatile situation worse, if I were the guy holding the camera, I might ask these people how they stand on proposed legislation against amnesty for illegal immigrants already here, the vast majority of which are from Mexico (everyone remember Prop 187?).  

I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to belittle the struggles of people who come here illegally because they have no alternative.  I'm aware that the right to health care carries a lot more weight than the right to marry.  I want to be clear on that, but I think it's a relevant question simply because it has to do with two wedge issues concerning two separate groups that are historically discriminated against in this country.  No, opposition to granting illegals an easy path to citizenship doesn't have anything to do with core values.  The arguments from both sides have to do with economics in the best cases and race in some of the other ones.  But I wonder where these core values that dictate who can and can't get married come from.

The answer should be obvious, but let's see what these pro-8 people have to say:

"It's all about family with us."

"The state of California has always been a man and woman state"

"(It doesn't) just (affect us) directly, but for the future of the kids.  It's important."

"A man and a man and a woman and a woman is not okay.  It's not good."

"God ordained marriage between a man and a woman."

"If gay men are approved, no more children in California."

Just a geyser of eloquence, huh?  I really feel bad for the one anti-8 guy who's making an attempt at dialogue with these people (5:12-6:58), but I think their "arguments" make it a lost cause.  It's a sad state of affairs when we have to try and elicit real answers from tired old slogans or just sheer nonsense ("...no more children in California").  I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the "values" that these people espouse can be traced to a belief in God.  

I'm a man, so I'm naturally a polytheist (my spiritual realm consists of Me and My Penis), but as a general rule, God has a talent for really fucking up the machine that is U.S. politics, and we should try and avoid any talk of God when there's no place for it, specifically those things we like to call our individual rights as Americans.  This is coming from a straight man who will be a bachelor 'til the day I die, but I've always maintained that anyone who wants to make the mistake of getting married should be able to.  My father was a divorce attorney and peoples' lives (straight mens' particularly; sorry, but I have to say it because it's true) get fucking WRECKED by failed marriages.  That's my soapbox moment.

- To the woman who went out to protest in defiance of the epithets she heard when getting home from work (4:29), I salute you.  There's a word for what you have and it's called integrity.  I wish more people had it.

Anti-Prop 8 Protesters Target Oakland Mormon Temple

According to an SF Gate post a little more than a half hour ago, a few hundred folks have come out to the Oakland hills en masse to protest the church's role in providing the Yes on Prop 8 campaign with millions of dollars.  I have to confess that my applause for the protestors is silenced and overridden by a sense of wonder at the fact that the Oakland Mormon Temple is finally the site of something relevant.

See, I've always been curious about it.  When I was a wee child, I thought it was Disneyland, and my Mom was always quick to correct me.  The temple can be seen from just about any part of Oakland, and it's not a little curious that in a city that is predominantly black and non-Mormon, one of the most prominent, spurious presences day or night should be a massive, white, phallic Mormon church.  It's kind of like walking into a Synagogue and telling everyone your name is Adolph.  That might not be the best simile, but apparently good similes are taking Sundays off for awhile. I've come across two bad ones this morning and I'm not having much luck either.

But perhaps more ironic is the fact that the Mormon Church, which is widely known to have a few unconventional marriage practices of their own--polygamy and child marriages and the wearing of weird underwear--has spent millions of dollars on a campaign to keep the traditional definition of marriage in place.

In any case, I'm glad to see that the OMT is making headlines, perhaps nationally.  We have this beautiful, majestic piece of architecture that overlooks the city, but its occupants are really out of place.  The world needs to know that it's going to waste.  People might finally wake up and say, "What the fuck?  Remind me again why that's NOT a roller rink!"

"A roller rink, you say?  Why a roller rink?"  Need I remind you that roller rinks today are just as awesome as they were in 1978, but a lot more rare?  Where's your head at?

For those of you who don't know, Oakland has been a hot spot for the revival of what is probably the greatest sport of all time: roller derby.  

Why roller derby has never been made an olympic sport, I'll never know.  It's traditionally consisted of young women on rollerskates wearing short shorts trying to physically best one another by knocking their opponents over.  Plus, they have really kick ass names--Lemmy Chokeya, Jennacologist and Jane Hammer to take a few from the Oakland Outlaws roster.  I've searched and searched, and I'm convinced that life offers few things that are better than roller derby.  And before the sexist card is pulled, allow me to point a couple of things out: First, most of the leagues today are run by women and are not-for-profit.  The roller girls do it out of love.  

Secondly, a handful of leagues are co-ed .  That means men knock down women and women get to knock down men.  Put that in your hyper-sensitive feminist agenda pipe and smoke it.  Your gender politics are null and void, because that's equality in action!

It's my understanding that a major hurtle for the Bay Area Derby Girls organization has been finding a fixed place to compete.  I seem to remember reading some time back that they were competing at Dry Ice, but the maximum capacity wasn't big enough for the massive crowds coming out, and it was deemed a fire hazard by the Oakland FD.  

How awesome would it be if the inside of what is presently known as the Oakland Mormon Temple looked like this:

                       

I admit that the gay marriage issue is the more pressing one, but I think running the mormons and their institution of bigotry out of Oakland for a higher, more awesome purpose (complete with daytime matinees and beer on tap) should be next on the agenda.

A belated congratulations to the Oakland Outlaws, who pwned their way through the 2008 season and are this year's champions.

Mark Twain in Oakland

I've been spending some time in history rooms and museum archives trying to compile materials for a blog I want to start on the history of Country music in the Bay Area.  The academic in me has once again been awoken but this time I have to worry about copyright laws and all that burdensome kind of stuff.  

Anyway, while going through indexes in the Oakland History Room, I found this:

Turns out there was a guy in 19th Century Oakland who walked around with an arrow pointing at his head.

Well, his name was Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, or at least that's what the index claims.  I guess it looks like his profile, but how can we really know?  This kind of reminds me of that really dubious photo of Bigfoot that probably won a Pulitzer Prize or something.  I can't really offer any tenable counter to the claim that this is Mark Twain, so I have to kind of accept it.

I've always maintained that Huckleberry Finn is for boys what Jane Eyre is for girls: there are a lot of instances of fucked up human behavior that is beyond the abilities of cognition and self-reflection of young readers, but that's all overridden by the fascination with what we might get away with.  What 10 year old boy wouldn't want to spend his days fishing and, er, smoking and botching the rules proper grammar our that superiors hoisted upon us at every turn?

So that's Mark Twain at the Piedmont sulphur springs, hanging out with snooty white people.  Incidentally, snooty white people still live in the area.  It looks a lot different, and the sulphur springs have been replaced with spas that snooty white people flock to and patronize along with their ridiculous friends.  You too can be massaged and tanned and exfoliated and waxed and otherwise be completely stripped of any real, human sexual appeal that might have worked really well before you decided to make me want to kidnap you and sell you to a wax museum.

Anyway, Mark Twain famously said that the coldest winter he'd ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.  Along with Hell's Angels, Jack London, the Panthers and boozing sailors on shore leave Oakland is famous for a kick ass microclimate.  In other words, it's a fine town to get naked in.

"Clothes make the man.  Naked people have little or no influence upon society."  -Mark Twain