Post 665 - October 20, 2024
The weight of the existential dread that seems to be hanging over us as this election is approaching is almost unbearable.
Michael and I met with a group of people on Saturday to write letters to voters in Pennsylvania. None of the letters specifically endorsed a candidate, instead they were about health insurance.
The idea behind the letters is to inspire people to vote for the issues that truly matter to them and not for what is being shoved down our throats from every news outlet and talking head. All we were directed to talk about was the Affordable Care Act.
About ten of us met in a friend’s brother’s apartment down in SoHo, wrote the letters together and ate some delicious homemade food.
The picture that flashed into my mind while we were there was a photograph from the 1960s. In the shot, there is a crowd of uniformed men standing holding guns. A handsome young surfer-dude-looking guy with wavy blond hair and an oversized turtleneck sweater is putting the stem of a flower into the barrel of one of the rifles pointing at him.
Flower power. Make love not war. Give peace a chance. It seems like a snapshot from such an innocent time.
The young man in the picture was born George Edgerly Harris III. He was an actor. He appeared in several off-Broadway plays – one with his father and another with Al Pacino and James Earl Jones. He also did some television.
George moved to San Francisco in the 1960s and changed his name to Hibiscus. He was part of a group of people who called themselves the Cockettes. They dressed in drag, sporting beards and glittery makeup, and performed outrageous musicals at midnight in North Beach. The disco star Sylvester was part of the group as was Divine, the legendary star of many a John Waters movie.
I was just a kid when all this was happening. I lived in a conservative suburban neighborhood in New Jersey. Vietnam was all over the news every day and the prospect of being drafted terrified me. It terrified everyone.
When my father was drafted into World War II, he was eager to serve. Scared out of his wits, I am sure, but he wanted to do his part for his country. The enemy was obvious. Hitler and his followers were marching through Europe. He posed a threat to the entire free world.
The war in Vietnam was different. At the time, we the people were told that we were there to stop the spread of Communism. Subsequently, much has been written about the truth of why we were there, and it all seems to boil down to greed and money. Our military machine
is a massive money-making venture, and it needs wars to fight to make people rich.
Making money off war is nothing new. Brecht wrote about it in Mother Courage and Her Children. George Bernard Shaw used the idea of war profiteering in his plays as well. There’s a widely shared quote from President Lyndon Johnson saying he couldn’t stop the war in Vietnam because “all his friends were getting rich off it.” Whether he said it or not can’t be verified. The sentiment behind it, however, is undoubtedly true.
The United States is the world’s largest exporter of weapons. Last year, arms accounted for over $80 billion in sales that were added to our national coffers. The top ten buyers of our munitions are Ukraine, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Poland, The United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Italy, Israel, and the Netherlands.
We are allied with these places and many others because they are valuable markets for what we are selling. It’s not that we just like them. Last year, we sold Israel $453 million worth of weaponry. No matter who ends up in office next year, that is not going to change. Politics is one thing; the almighty dollar is another.
Throughout our history, young people have protested the world they were born into. The Lowell Mill girls organized to fight against reduced wages at Massachusetts cotton mills in 1834 and 1836. Teenagers fought in both the American Revolution and in the Civil War. Plenty of young people gave their lives in the fight for Civil Rights at the same time we were at war in Vietnam. The Hippie movement was fueled by our disillusioned young.
What’s at stake during this election in 2024 is far from easy to explain to people who have grown up in an environment where everyone, ostensibly, has the same rights. The look of incomprehension on a twenty-year-old’s face when you tell them that women, in our lifetimes, used to need their husbands to countersign a credit application before they could get their own cards, tells you everything you need to know about how little what’s being fought for today is being understood.
I’ve lived in a world where women, homosexuals, and people of color were officially second-class citizens. We all still experience enormous inequities in our society, but nowhere near what we lived with even fifty years ago. The thought of going back to that time under the Republicans’ Project 2025 scenario terrifies me. It also saddens me more than I can say, because it should be unthinkable and yet here we are, facing its possibility.
Hibiscus died of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a complication of AIDS, on March 6, 1982. It was right at the beginning of the pandemic. Nobody knew what it was yet. The disease was still being called GRID or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. There’s so much power in words. There are still people who have never gotten over the idea that it’s only a gay disease because that’s what the doctors originally called it.
In the New York Times this morning, their lead article is about the Republican candidate and their second article is about Vice President Harris. The Washington Post also gives top billing to the ex-President in three of its top four stories – the last being “T&*%p in McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, Harris visits churches in Georgia.” The top story on CNN belongs to the Republican candidate. MSNBC leads off today with the ex-President. Even the BBC tops today with the idiotic nonsense of the ex-President pushing buttons on the fryer at a McDonalds. Their second story is about Elon Musk giving money to voters in Pennsylvania.
Billing matters. It doesn’t make a difference that the ex-President is talking about the size of the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s schlong, if he’s the first story, what people get is that he’s more important. Seriously, I didn’t make that up. He was talking about the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis at one of his rallies.
Very early on in my career as a stage manager, I began negotiating for title page billing in the program. Did I think that the audience cared who was stage managing the show they were about to see? No. The people I was working with, however, cared very much where everybody was in the pecking order. If you weren’t on the title page, you weren’t important and could be ignored. On the title page, you had a say.
Billing matters. The Republicans know that the more nonsensical the idiocy coming out of their candidate’s mouth, the more likely he will be to dominate the news cycle. There truly is no such thing as bad publicity. If there were, the Republican candidate for President of the United States would have sunk back into the primordial ooze eons ago.
The 2024 election falls neatly between Halloween and Thanksgiving. There are Halloween decorations up all over the city these days. In our neighborhood, several brownstones have gone all out and covered themselves in ghosts and ghouls.
There are even Christmas decorations beginning to appear. A year-round Christmas store down in Little Italy has covered its red and green yuletide pediment with skeletons. It makes it look like the undead have overwhelmed the North Pole.
I don’t have a solution for avoiding the anxiety surrounding November 5. I wish I did. Feeling like this just makes me want to withdraw into a warm cocoon. And eat. It has to stop. I have to make it stop.
The mess I have made in the living room as I try and get rid of stuff from our storage unit defies description. Poor Michael. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, though. In a few days, we should be able to get in and out of our storage locker with relative ease. Who knows how long that will last, but it’s a good goal to work towards.
After that, there will be a walk, a meal, and maybe even some television with the cat on my lap. If that isn’t an antidote to anxiety, I don’t know what is.
It’s time to get rid of some junk.
(Flower Power by Bernie Boston)