Dustin M. Wax

Acting Schmuck-for Life Bill O’Reilly is upset about the Buster Bunny/lesbian family incident. It’s just common sense, as everything he says is — if he can’t imagine something, it must be absolutely and irrevocably wrong. So, Buster Bunny — who is a hip, modern dude — heads up to Syrup Country and hangs with a family headed by *gasp* lesbians! This bothers our Secretary of Education and Bill O’Reilly, who feel that they should shield our young from the realities of sexuality.

Many Americans believe that little kids should have a childhood and not be subjected to any kind of sexuality. I don’t want to be offensive here, but who in their right mind wants to explain Norma and Barbara’s lifestyle to their 4-year-old? Give the kids a break, OK?

But, of course, they still don’t really get the difference between “sexuality”, which is, like, part of your identity, the way you approach the world, and sex, which is two people (or more, or even less) doin’ it. I agree that it’s probably not in the best interests of our society, the way things stand right now, to be showing sex on PBS. Unless it’s, like, hot wildebeest-on-wildebeest action, but then, only after 10 pm, please.

So here’s the thing, Billy: kids are “exposed to… sexuality” — even your twisted, weird, phone-based, falafelesque sexuality — all the fucking time. When they meet you, god forbid, they are “exposed” to your sexuality. It’s part of who you are. When they meet anyone, they are exposed to that person’s sexuality — it’s part of who they are. Believe it or not, they even got their own sexualities — maybe not full-grown, pass-the-tahini-please sexualities, but still. It’s part of who they are.

Here’s another thing, Willie — there’s lesbians all around! No, they’re not coming to get you — you don’t have to hide. Nor order another vibe (but if you do, remember: color code them so you know whose is whose!). But there’s lesbians, and people in same-sex relationships, all over the place (especially in your Republican families, for some reason…) and children, no matter what you might do, are meeting these lesbians and gay men and queers and bisexuals and polyamours and intersexed folks and all manner of sexualities that are neither a) strictly heterosexual, nor b) yours (whatever you want to call it). They meet them among the parents and older siblings of their peers, among the doctors and firefighters and police officers that come to their schools for demonstrations, among their teachers and school staff, among the shopkeepers and employees they come into contact with, and so on.

What you’re asking is for a world in which what kids see on TV is vastly different from what they see in the world around them, every day. You’re right — there was probably no specific reason why the maple farmers in the Buster Bunny episode had to be lesbians. Except, just this: some people are. Sometimes you go over to your friends’ house and their moms are lesbians. Or their dads are queer. Or one of their dads is bi, another is gay, one mom is strictly gay, and the other two are bi. And you know what? Unless the people are the kinds of freaks who would call their employees up late at night and make odd insinnuendoes about naming vibrators, they probably aren’t exposing their kids and their kids’ friends to any sex. There’s nothing dirty for a Moral Paragon like yourself to have to explain.

What you, and the rest of us, do have to explain is why the family structure is unlike our own kids’. And then we have to explain why there’s hardly any families like Johhny’s or Mary’s on TV. We have to explain how some people are afraid of people who love wrong — try getting that across to your “innocent” 4 year old imaginary friend. That some people absolutely hate families like Johnny’s and Mary’s — that they’ll go out of their ways to make families like that suffer — because a man loves another man the way Mommy loves Daddy.

Nobody “in their right mind wants to explain” that, but you and the other Immoralists with your message of shame and outrage make it necessary, every freakin’ day.

CODA: This post was inspired by the cease-and-desist letter sent to Newshounds for linking to O’Reilly’s article. The people at Stay Free! Daily thought it would be a good idea if everyone linked to the article. Since I like doing things that upset B.O’REilly, I thought that sounded like a grand idea. This before I even read the article — but on reading it, I decided that, hey, it really is a piece of shit, and deserves more than a meaningful but ultimately futile symbolic jab. What the O-man needs is a solid mocking, which I hope I have administered thoroughly.

If any government agency heads are reading, I will pimp your policies here for a secret one-time payment of $21,500. I’d prefer if, to minimize the work I’d have to do, you choose something from my archives that I can rehash quickly. Don’t worry, nobody will find out.

Personal References

Maggie Gallagher

(Originally Published 28 Jan, ’05)

The million-and-oneth monkey over at a million monkeys typing wrote the other day about some misgivings he was having about David Allen’s Getting Things Done method, particularly in relation to major life issues like career development. Nothing serious, just some musings about whether what worked for the short term is the best way to go about looking at your life as a whole.

The GTD’ers were not amused. Among the responses he received were the following:

• If GTD does n’t meet your needs, then you are doing it wrong.
• GTD does everything an dmore. my life changed wehn i started using it, and you dont have any rite to convince people otherwise
• Your [sic] a [expletive] [expletive] if you think that your [sic] [expletive] getting things done right.
• you give people the wrong impression. gtd works.
• y dont you try christanity, you [expletive]

In a way, the response is a validation of his weblog’s title: the web really is a million (or more) monkeys (well, apes, really) typing, and you’re bound to see it all if you hang around long enough.

But it also points at a rather unflattering aspect of our culture right now, a tendency towards fundamentalism that is hardly confined to the strictly religious. Johnston (the aforementioned million-and-oneth monkey) didn’t challenge the system, he didn’t say it doesn’t work — in fact, he’s one of the more popular GTD bloggers out there — he merely mentioned that GTD might not answer all the questions in his life. ANd just look at how scared he made some people!

There’s an idea I’ve been playing around with the last 6 months or so, that people are essentially universalizing creatures. (I’ve used a couple no-go words there: “essential”, because I reject essentialism, and “creature” which ,the evolution acticists assure me, has been co-opted by the creationists. But like I said, I’m lazy.) We live in a world in which Bad Things happen, and this is where religion comes in. Religion allows us to believe that a) we can exercise some degree of control over the universe, thus forestalling or minimizing the incidence of Bad Things, and b) that when “a” fails and Bad Things Happen Anyway, there is some meaning, some reason behind them — and as a sub-corrollary, that we might learn to understand that meaning. What scares us more than anything is the thought that we might live in a random, meaningless universe — so we make meaning and we invent order.

But this isn’t restricted to the religious domain (hell, the religious domain isn’t restricted to the religious domain) — the need for predictability and uinderstanding pervades all aspects of our life. A lot of your “-isms” — racism, sexism, homophobism, fundamentalism, communism, libertarianism, liberalism, capitalism — consist, at least in part, in the attempt to impose a system of order and meaning onto an otherwise unpatterned reality. One of the big wrenches (a monkey-wrench, perhaps) in the machine are cases of ambiguity — the cross-dresser, the cosmopolitan, the female executive, the hippy, the secular Jew, the half-breed. By failing to fall into the “proper” categories, these people are unpredictable, and this unpredicability makes others uncomfortable. “If I do x, I don’t know how this person wiill react!”

The best assurance of predictability and understanding would be a world in which every person would act in every situation the way we ourselves would act in the same situation. While this offends the sense that some of us have that diversity is not only good but beautiful, I think that it is an omnipresent part of being human. It is this that sits at the core of virtually every social theory of importance. Foucault’s panopticon, Austen’s performativity, Derrida’s deconstruction, Scott’s state, Balibar on racism, Althusser’s hailing, Bourdieu’s distinction, Spivak’s subaltern, Said’s orientalism — all deal with the use of power to impose order and predictability on human subjects.

Thus racism, nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, and so on all emerge as ways of trying to force people unlike “us” (whoever the “us” is in a particular situation — I suppose I should include all the anti-isms as well) to be more like us. Whether the means used are rhetorical, financial, political, or military, the bottom line is getting people to accept as “natural” our way of doing things, and to reject ways that differ from ours. Granted, this is often coupled with an equally strong resistive force — the desire to assure that people significantly unlike us remain unlike us, and thus subjugable. This is the unmentioned side-effect of universalism — the more you make a people like you, the less barrier there is to their replacing you. I’d say this is a tension that exists on every scale, from parenting to global politics.

Setting aside global politics, then, let’s return to the GTD fundamentalism of the million monkeys. More and more in the modern world, and I think particularly in the US, the traditional sources of order and meaning are being eroded. The growth of particularly hard-line religion (folks more puritan than the Puritans!) and the latest anti-science backlash (which encompasses not only evolution but global warming, stem-cell research, pharmacology, genetic engineering, and so on) are one aspect of this. But there’s a personal response as well, best represented by the rise of the “opinion” as the Golden Standard of individual rights. Having a right to one’s opinion used to mean they could not like eggplant; nowadays it increasingly means not having a right to challenge racism, corporatism, political fraud, patriotism, etc. Let me give just one example: how many anti-war activists feel entitled to challenge the morality of the choice to be a soldier? I realize this is a complicated issue, although one that is rarely so complicated when we consider, say, the soldiers of the Nazi regime.

Into this rich stew of fear of disorder comes David Allen, whose relatively simple system offers hope for people buried under what he calls “knowledge work”, that nebulous and poorly defined field that more and more of us find ourselves employed in. We don’t stand on an assemblyline and push a set of buttons all day anymore; most of us have jobs that consist largely of making decisions, setting priorities, and moving information. And working late — we work longer hours, on average, than at any time since the 1920s. The system is simple: collect everything, assign each “thing” an action, and do that action. Lather, rinse, repeat. For the rest of your life.

And that’s the key to the response Johnston got from the typing monkeys: for the rest of your life. Allen’s system is not just a method for doing things, it’s a life discipline. It’s not intended to impose order at work, but to impose order on our lives. The same tools that work at the office are meant to work in our personal lives as well (especially as the line between the two is increasingly blurred). In essence, it promises the same thing religious discipline offers: order and meaning. Johnston’s heterodoxy, which took the form of suggesting that maybe the short-term benefits of GTD could be supplemented with Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits”, in this formulation, is like an Evangelical Christian suggesting that maybe they should adopt the principle of papal infallibility, or Muslim halal rules. More than that. though,. it implies that the system that a lot of people are investing their lives into isn’t complete — and that therefore they might have to change. Frightening stuff, apparently, for a number of people, whose response is typical — the way I do things is right, and your failures are a result of not doing things the way I do. It’s exactly what the French and British told their colonial subjects in Africa and the Middle East, what they, and later the US, told (and tell) American Indians, what the Spanish told the South and Central Americans they conquered.

It would be funnier if it weren’t so scary.