21 November 2003

Two Hotels and the Oil Ministry

My head hurts, not hung over, just a dull ache from where the trunk lid hit me Wednesday night, lunging for my jacket in the cold dark rain, late for a meeting for which the other guy didn't show. There is a painful knot there and a cut that is still tender. I am not lazy. I have been up since the alarm went off and I dutifully listened to the BBC. I am fully up to speed on the conclusion of the President's State Visit to Great Britain. I am aware of the impending arrival of a high-pressure system that should yield a splendid weekend. My fingers work properly, are still well connected to my wrists. The laptop started and Windows loaded, a problematic process which does not always occur.

But I am listening to the radio with half my brain, doing dishes, drinking coffee, making airline reservations for my son. I am not writing. I am militantly not thinking about bombs and terror. There is something about the history of marriage on the radio. The BBC is long gone, Dan Damon has debriefed the show with his producers, and is probably at lunch.

So all is in readiness, waiting for the Muse to come and the miracle of the creative process to occur. Two hotels in Baghdad were rocketed, and the Oil Ministry, and no one was hurt. The delivery vehicle was apparently a donkey cart, a clever improvisation on the power generator concealment used in the attack on the al Rashid Hotel a couple weeks ago. Two kids from the 82nd Airborne were murdered with one of those roadside bombs and in our domestic version of terror, a $400 billion dollar bill that no one has looked at is wending its was through final approval. It contains, by report, a prescription drug entitlement and several essential demonstration projects for West Virginia. Congress must pass it in haste, without examination, so the Members can go home for Thanksgiving and not return.

Ah, were they just to make their absence permanent!

But Congress and its venality have a regular rhythm, in tune with the seasons. Not so with our Judges. National Public Radio is about to loop its first hour, replaying All Things Considered. But as the words die in the stillness of the apartment, I listen in astonishment at how the courts have pried the cold fingers of the States off the most personal of institutions.

It started with the battle over contraception back in the 1920's, the question being whether a married couple could use condoms, or some other means to not reproduce unintentionally. It was an interesting ride through the court decisions over the decades, collapsing the years of debate into a cogent march that showed how this great democracy changes, morphing so slowly that the drama of the change eludes us. We are time travelers, after all, just doing it slowly.

It is hard to pick out the most important decision, since each of them comprises an essential building-block in the road to fundamental social change. When you look at it properly, the idea that the State is involved in what we do with our bodies is the most extraordinary. In the 1920s, the Supreme Court determined that couples could use condoms, or practice coitus interruptus, air bursts or do whatever they wanted so long as it was not sodomy. The high court didn't get into that. They allowed the States to deal with that issue. After all, who except a legislator would dream of bringing that up in polite society?

This month superior courts in New Jersey and Massachusetts made startling decisions on same-sex marriage, arriving at diametrically opposite opinions on essentially the same facts. In New Jersey, it is still not legal to marry your lover if they carry the same critical chromosomes. It appears in Massachusetts it is. I red somewhere that we share 98% of the same chromosomes with the chimpanzee, but they can’t get married anywhere.

And we only got to this because the Supreme Court ruled that sodomy was no business of the State at all. I suppose the real curious part of this is how the Sheriff got into bed with us in the first place. Can you imagine? It must have been crowded in those colonial beds, what with the Minister and the Judge and the Sheriff and all. I imagine the states involvement with our American reproductive systems has its roots in Puritan times, Hester Prynne and the Scarlet Letter and all that. Naturally the Church has been mucking around with us since it was founded. There was a prohibition against Priests sleeping with their wives the night before conducting a service- that was a new idea in 386 AD. It was shortly followed by the prohibition on the clergy having wives at all and you can see where that led.

I saw a show on TV last week. We have about run out of variations on Cop-shows, and this one was about "cold cases." The most interesting thing was the special effect that morphed a young version of the cast from the old crime into the old members of the cast in the present day. With homosexuality being so fashionable these days, the episode was about a hate crime a couple decades ago, and young gay man bludgeoned to death with a ball-bat. The curious thing was the depiction of the gay bar. Men were dancing with men and women with women, but if a cop appeared at the door there was a shouted signal and the lesbians and gays immediately began to dance with each other so they wouldn’t be arrested for same-sex dancing. Life in terror.

Maybe that is just a mark of how far we have traveled in time, that we are OK not only with same sex dancing but have thrown the Sheriff out of bed and are not likely to let him back in. Unless he is cute, that is, and that would be purely our business, right?

But I see look at the clock and see I have waited for the Muse to arrive in vain. It is almost time to be gone, and don’t really feel that I am really begun. This time travel business is a funny thing and sometimes I feel like I am going backwards and forwards at the same time. So while conscious of a rushing social motion towards a new paradigm, I'll be on the lookout for donkey carts on the way to work. And whether the Sheriff is there or not, I am staying away from hotels for the time being.

The Oil Ministry can shift for itself.