{"id":40150,"date":"2011-06-11T03:16:04","date_gmt":"2011-06-11T07:16:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=40150"},"modified":"2011-09-24T15:59:33","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T19:59:33","slug":"of-guns-and-penises","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-judith-gayle-2\/of-guns-and-penises\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Guns and Penises"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Weary of penis puns? Me too. One more wiener joke will put me over the edge. I’d willingly travel back in time to those rowdy years as a Cub Scout den mother, facing down the emerging testosterone of over a dozen 9- and 10-year-old boys, each and every one trying my patience with potty humor. I’d happily volunteer to scold those who make big bucks delivering my corporate-sponsored and televised news, who can’t control their nervous laughter or their need to repeat the name Weiner over and over as if we might miss the joke. Get a clue, you guys — you’re embarrassing yourselves. (I wonder what we’d have to pay someone with actual intellect to anchor network news, and I wonder who would watch.)<\/p>\n

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Just last year, Anthony Weiner married Hillary Clinton’s long-time top aide, exotic beauty Huma Abedin, and the couple is expecting their first child. Weiner’s behavior seems particularly dismaying for a newlywed. His sexting habit appears to be long-standing, and if he was serious about quitting he probably should have sought treatment for this compulsion rather than endanger his marriage and career. Clearly, the psychology<\/a> of this personal problem isn’t news to any adult, but the variables are very much a reflection of 21st century multimedia influence. There IS no real anonymity these days, but Mr. Weiner may have factored that in, adding an additional layer of thrill to his eventual self-destruction.<\/p>\n

Certainly\u00a0Weiner got emotionally stuck somewhere in adolescence. I don’t say that because he got caught playing cyber-footsy; I say it because he’s got a habit he reportedly confessed to his fianc\u00e9e, telling her he had quit when he hadn’t, which in turn produced all the gory details we’ve endured over the last week. There are programs available for that kind of thing.<\/p>\n

This would be a good place to interject that I don’t care what consenting adults do sexually, that’s strictly between them and their partners. I do care, however, when elected officials put their public authority in jeopardy by risking it for a personal thrill. That seems to me a self-defeating exercise, and — until we collectively grow past our long list of sexual prohibitions — one that ultimately harms everyone involved. Look at all the time and energy wasted in this train wreck, mitigated only if intense Chiron energy begins to expose and bind these kinds of collective wounds.<\/p>\n

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Sadly, Weiner is one of the good ones. The kind of candid grandstander and egoist New Yorkers prefer, he’s been a trusted voice on the left for a while now, ever since we lost top-tier progressives like Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold, or even outspoken Florida Representative, Alan Grayson. We can no longer count on Democrats to enthusiastically defend progressive values, and Weiner is not shy about getting to the truth of Republicans’ convoluted talking points. If that kind of candor sounds oddly disconnected from the current scandal, it should be noted that the Congressman never did say the suspect bulge wasn’t his. If anything, that was the give-away.<\/p>\n

That’s one of liberals’ virtues I find refreshing, even redeeming: they’re terrible liars. Recall, if you will, “I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinski!” I know, you wanted to believe. But — gosh! — counting Big Bill’s body language and facial expression, not to mention personal history, it was a stretch, even for the faithful. Yet who could blame him for a quick disclaimer. With the Moral Majority poised to wave a semen-stained dress like a battle flag, impeachment loomed.<\/p>\n

Mr. Weiner’s second mistake, the cover-up, was doomed from the start. The third misstep was in suggesting his Twitter account had been hacked, a serious allegation that required further exploration. One might count as a fourth error a somewhat narcissistic cultivation of attributes that even Barbara Walters<\/a> couldn’t help admiring, but clearly, the congressman’s first mistake was in displaying them to cyber-strangers. Ultimately, Anthony Weiner just couldn’t bring himself to lie about whose penis was in question. To paraphrase his unhappy friend and ex-roommate, Jon Stewart, these things do not go unrecognized by their owner.<\/p>\n

After a tearful admission and blanket apology to all concerned, the representative seems hunkered down to weather this storm. Barraged by calls from both parties to step down, that is entirely the congressman’s prerogative. Weiner bent the boundaries of good taste and told some untruths, but not a single law appears to have been broken. Lefties are inclined not to count this kind of thing as a deal-breaker, and righties only make much ado about it if the offender is in the opposing camp. For progressives, the worst of this situation has been in giving muckraker Andrew Breitbart a legitimate scoop. A broken clock, so they say, is right twice a day, and Breitbart, whose ambition is to get the respect a real journo might earn, got this one right.<\/p>\n

While the episode has been painful to watch, we don’t know how it will eventually shake out. The congressman’s wife has chosen to stay with him and is urging him not to resign from government. The entire event has that self-destructive Chiron feel to it: repeatedly shooting down at your own toes will eventually cause you to shoot yourself in the foot, forcing you to deal with consequences, including what is optionally devastating and\/or healing. In this case, the episode occurred with the whole world looking on.<\/p>\n

Bread and circuses? Yes, indeed, except that in the good old U S of A, our diversions are more aptly described as guns and penises. We are young souls here in the United States. Many of our citizens inhabit an adolescent persona that refuses to reason past the secretions of their glands, nor can they control their emotions farther than their individual and tribal vendettas. We once had enough national humility to leverage that youthful hubris; now we’re poised to synthesize experiences that will shift us into adulthood, and I do hope we don’t have to depend on Chiron’s alchemy for that process.<\/p>\n

No matter how much anxiety Weiner experiences this week, he’s head and shoulders above Sarah Palin, opportunistically cruising the East Coast on a bus tour. Supposedly taking a family vacation, Ms. Palin is sucking up oxygen and making people like poor upstaged Mitt Romney want to spit in their milk. Visiting Old North Church in Boston, the little missy was asked what she would remember from her travels. The question launched what we now refer to as a Palin “word salad,” a jumble of barely-recognizable misinformation. In this case, her reference made more sense to the far right and Christocrats, as she insisted that Paul Revere was ‘ringing bells’ to warn the Red Coats that we wouldn’t let them take our guns. Say what? Yes, she did, and you can watch Stephen Colbert send that up brilliantly, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Catching hell from a startled press, Sister Sarah explained herself<\/a> to FOX News a few days later. She was being maligned by the left — the lamestream press, as she puts it — for her comments, but she insisted that her account was accurate. Revere had been captured and detained by the British, to whom he inflated the numbers of armed rebels they would meet if they persisted in moving on Boston. She was not wrong, no, not straight-shootin’ Sarah. She takes her history from conservative historians and they know best how to define the founders and their intentions. Their revisionist history filters almost everything through the protections of the 2nd Amendment, because we love our guns, here in ‘Murika. In fact, we seem to love our guns more than we love our Constitution.<\/p>\n

I know this will come as a shock, but so many of us have been wrong all these years, not understanding the true Bible-totin’, anti-slavery message of our forefathers; or so it would appear if we listen to the choice of history practiced by the right-wing. Over at Hullabaloo, digby has a couple of YouTubes that will give you a good idea of what evangelical historian David Barton wants to teach<\/a> this misguided nation. You should probably watch them, because there is a whole alternate universe establishing itself in the minds of the Tea Bag contingent. You will be hearing more of this, and being aware of it is the only way to make any sense of it at all.<\/p>\n

Jon Stewart recently interviewed Barton, the expert in American history that Mike Huckabee wants to force the public to watch. He’s as slick as they come, oozing snake oil and pious intentions. Perhaps these aren’t lies so much as delusions, I’m not sure. Perhaps Sister Sarah truly believes this nonsense, I don’t know. Perhaps this is revisionism with impunity: no consequences for those who would change the entire context of the national landscape.<\/p>\n

So much has already passed downstream, who are we to blame for having surrendered reality and embraced self-serving fantasy? Who would take responsibility? As accountability is not in the Republican lexicon, it will probably fall to those sad-sack Democrats to dig reality out of the muck of conservative propaganda. Meanwhile, some portion of the nation believes that Paul Revere rang bells to warn the Brits that we are a gun-totin’, ammo-hoarding, militia-lovin’ citizenry. And those of you reading this? Don’t even THINK about bringing the hard truth into 21st century focus anytime soon.<\/p>\n

C’est la vie<\/em>. Such is life, here in Crazyville. Emotional maturity awaits us, but in order to leave the old behind, we have to expose our dysfunctions and admit our pretensions. All eyes will have to shift in witness to what no longer works, and perhaps never did. Perhaps we’ll have to count the rungs of our mistakes in order to climb the ladder to a new level of common good and mutual respect. Maybe, like Anthony Weiner, we’ll have to apologize, even allow an ass like Andrew Breitbart an opportunity to capitalize on our embarrassment.<\/p>\n

Me, I consider this current window of time a heads-up moment for each of us. If any part of this process describes you or your life — self-delusion to cover wounding — I urge you not to put off dealing with it squarely. Progress only comes on the other side of moving stuck energy, removing the blocks that keep us in old behaviors. What remains in the way of progress is the old baggage we drag behind, the secrets we can’t face, the lies we cling to. Perhaps getting right with OURSELVES is the real business of ‘change we can believe in.’ And as we begin to do that work — one by one — everything around us shifts to let in the Light.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves Weary of penis puns? Me too. One more wiener joke will put me over the edge. I’d willingly travel back in time to those rowdy years as a Cub Scout den mother, facing down the emerging testosterone of over a dozen 9- and 10-year-old boys, each and every one … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1744],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40150"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}