Who's Gay? Who's Not? Who Cares?

Last week’s revelation that CNN’s Anderson Cooper is gay delivered the usual chorus of applause and catcalls. Some people praised his forthrightness, and his willingness to come forward as a public figure. Others condemned him as the latest embodiment of America’s moral decline. The response was as predictable as online Twilight fan fiction. And it all overlooked one important question: does it matter?

Cooper has spent over two decades cultivating the respect of broadcasting executives and viewing audiences for his solid, authoritative reporting. He gained attention by sneaking into Burma with a forged press pass and providing some of the only quality coverage during the military regime’s repressive crackdowns. This presaged his high-intensity career. He has parlayed early accomplishments into a reputation on par with Edward R. Murrow.

And he has done that without recourse to whom he has sex with.

When Cooper’s announcement hit the news last week, I couldn’t help flashing back to 1997, when actress Ellen DeGeneres outed herself on the cover of Time magazine. I remember feeling quite offended by this news—not that the star of a top sitcom was openly gay, but because a respected news source considered this front page material. Was there really nothing more newsworthy in the world that week?

As a society, we have become grotesquely fascinated with celebrities’ sexual proclivities. Recent disclosures that sitcom star Jim Parsons has been in a relationship with the same man for ten years, or that Gillian Anderson has had relationships with both women and men, have had entertainment rags practically salivating. Whether stars want it or not, their sex lives make profitable fodder for the ancillary media that accrues to them.

Yet I wonder who cares. Jim Parsons’ sexuality will not affect my enjoyment of The Big Bang Theory. I won’t burn my X-Files DVDs because Scully is eyeing the same women I am. I see a certain relevance when Ricky Martin or Melissa Etheridge, who sing love songs, let us know which category of people they have in mind as they sing, but even that runs kind of peripheral, because they’re good songs, regardless.

Yet our obsession with celebrity sex has distorted our approach to popular culture. One side so eagerly wants to make heroes that they rush people into the public eye before they’re ready, like Richard Chamberlain, or after they’re dead, like Malcolm Forbes. The other side is so offended by homosexuality that they invent lurid tales of decadence and moral collapse. Celebrity sex turns liberals into exhibitionists, and conservatives into pornographers.

Admittedly, some people do have legitimate reasons to publicize their sexuality. Barney Frank, the first openly gay member of Congress, wanted to let constituents know where his loyalties lay, and thus how he would likely vote. Apparently, Massachusetts voters didn’t disapprove. George Takei has a thriving career as an activist, and certainly he has a right to let fellow travelers know he has “skin in the game,” pardon the expression.

But when celebrity sex become public domain, the result is consistently dangerous. Consider the Kardashians, whose romances, marriages, and pregnancies resemble a flea circus on meth. Many people wonder why Kim Kardashian ended her highly profitable marriage so quickly, by airing dirty laundry in public. The answer is simple: because she lacks any marketable skill besides her sex. Without public attention to her genitals, she has no way to make a living.

I don’t want to be seen saying that all celebrity sex is tawdry, or that all gay celebs should keep silent. When Sean Maher came out recently, for instance, he did so with the noble goal of giving gay youth a positive role model. With his stable relationship and growing family, Maher provides a sterling example of how open homosexuals are legitimate members of their communities. His openness helps raise the bar of the discussion of sex in society.

And if Anderson Cooper wants the world to know he’s gay, God bless him. He should no more have to conceal his fondness for men than I should conceal my fondness for women. But that, in itself, doesn’t make him admirable or heroic. Recent coverage threatens to obscure his contributions as a journalist, reducing him to a bland icon like Judy Garland, who reputedly ended life shuffling through motions that no longer interested her.

As a nation, we owe it to our celebrities to stop looking up their trouser legs. Let’s lionize them for what they do, not who they sleep with then the cameras shut down.

Finding the Facts in a Very Cluttered Case

DiAnn Mills, The Chase: A Novel

Diann Mills presents a Christian thriller novel, which apparently means no cussing and chaste romance, but remarkably blunt scenes of brutal violence. I like a lot about this book, from its interesting characters and nuanced interactions, to its well-paced, almost cinematic portrayal of a story based on a real-world case. Mills’ adaptation of real characters and situations gives her story verisimilitude. Yet she keeps finding ways to take me out of the story.

Kariss Walker, former Houston media starlet, left journalism to make a living writing chick-lit. But the last case she reported for the evening news, about a young girl found starved to death outside an apartment complex on the bad side of town, won’t let her go. So she decides to restart her career as a suspense novelist, and in pursuit of the best possible story, she teams with the local field office of the FBI for some field research.

Too bad her weatherbeaten training officer, Agent Tigo Harris, cares more for a gunrunning sting he hopes will stop American rifles funneling to Mexican drug cartels. Pursuing this Holy Grail, Tigo stonewalls Kariss, takes crazy dangerous risks, and skirts the edge of legality. But when people he cares about start dying, Tigo realizes an outside eye, like Kariss offers, might clinch the deal and stop the Arroyos, who are less a gang and more domestic terrorists.

Ignore that Mills pilfers the premise behind the TV series Castle. Even Mills obliquely acknowledges this fact. These are pretty interesting stories. The starved baby comes from the Beloved Doe case that baffled Houston for five years, and the gunrunners touch on the power of the headlines. When the two stories converge, as we know they will, they present a conspiracy so intricate, yet so plausible, they make The X-Files look like a bedtime story.

Yet Mills keeps finding ways to get between me and the narrative, reminding me that I’m reading a book. Start with the fact that our main heroine is a novelist, researching how to write... well, how to write the book in my hands. She keeps talking about the author business, phoning agents and publishers, and inserting thoughts about how, wow, this experience I’m having would be great in my novel! I can only describe that as visible authorial fingerprints.

She also alternates between gritty frankness and nigh-Victorian modesty. In the very first chapter, her FBI agent manages to shoot two gang bangers in the chest from a moving car (don’t overthink it). At various times, Mills describes people getting their heads blown off, bodies showing signs of elaborate torture, and several situations where Kariss lives in fear of getting raped. And she describes these scenes with unflinching detail.

Yet her Feds and gangsters won’t drop an f-bomb to save their lives. Really? I kept waiting for somebody to let fly with a good old-fashioned blue streak. I don’t think Jesus would mind if we depicted people talking how people talk. And sex... well, it just doesn’t happen. Our leads have the romantic tension that is mandatory in genre fiction today, yet neither will speak first, so their courtship consists of playing web app games on their smart phones.

Then Mills feels the need to clutter her good, muscular core narrative with more ornaments than a Christmas tree. Tigo’s dying mother; Kariss’ sister pregnant out of wedlock; her ex-brother-in-law, whose banal uptown greasiness hides darker secrets; the deportee father, who discovers his daughter’s grim fate, and searches for his missing wife. It gets hard to keep all the subplots straight.

All these cow paths impinge upon the attention Mills gives her central narrative. The story she promised us gets compressed, and she wanders away for whole chapters. This book could benefit from some judicious trimming, because if Mills had a more austere storyline to hold our attention, she could spend more time fleshing out the story that we readers have hung our hopes on. In other words, Mills should tell less story, but tell it better. This text says she could.

Don’t get me wrong. I read this entire book in two energetic sittings, and don’t regret the time spent. Yet I feel I could have gotten even more out of the experience if it was more tightly focused, and the author invested her energy into telling only one or two plotlines with all the strength she could muster. The thriller market is crowded, and she should reward readers’ investment with the strongest possible story she could tell.

Contemporary Verse and the New Classic Tradition

Aaron Poochigian, The Cosmic Purr: Poems

Too much current poetry falls into two camps: singsong lyrics to soothe risk-averse masses, or image-rich free association evidently designed to alienate the audience. What happened to versifiers like William Blake and Walt Whitman, who saw their ability to reach and challenge readers as a duty and a privilege? Or holy poets like Sophocles and Shakespeare who crafted celebrations of the motivating spirit that makes us both human and divine?

Like his fellow classicist AE Stallings, Aaron Poochigian forms a bridge between the dead luminaries he translates, and today’s introspective verse. He makes use of the ancient, somber forms so many readers love, but he applies them to a muscular contemporary poetic ethos. And though his verse is very new, addressing current concerns for a living audience, it has a lyric texture of something much older, with a robust Greco-Roman spine.

When I say that Poochigian’s verse has an older tenor to it, I don’t mean he presents it like a museum piece. Poetry, for Poochigian, is no mere dead specimen for critics to parse and teachers to enforce on defenseless pupils. Consider these lines from his sonnet “Off the Clock”:

Co-conspirators for an afternoon,
we gathered, hush-hush, at the slow café.
Last week was debts and earthquakes but today
nothing is pressing. If a coffee spoon
is stirring, if the shadows lengthen there
beyond the awning, or the daily news,
catching the breeze, rustles around our shoes,
our minds are absent, and we just don’t care.

Notice that Poochigian uses the octet, the opening eight-line passage from the original Italian sonnets invented by Giacomo di Lentini. This form is much rarer than the Shakespearean quatrain, largely because it’s much harder to sustain. But Poochigian also contemporizes the line structure, with enjambed line endings, and very short clauses within longer lines. It has a disconcerting effect because it’s both ancient and, in some way, subtly new.

Traditional forms work well for Poochigian, as for the better known Stallings, because they see forms as tools they can use and adapt as needed. Many New Formalist poets treat forms as hidebound and inviolable, and would not create the tension between enjambed lines and mid-line commas. That would be just too troubling. Poochigian uses forms like a carpenter uses power tools, customizing them with ad hoc splices to make them suit his needs.

This same malleability applies to his subject matter. As a classicist, known until now primarily for his translations of Sappho, he has spent his professional life immersed in the Greco-Roman world. But he lives in Judeo-Christian America, and in some of his verses, he views Jerusalem (to pinch a metaphor from St. Anselm) through the lens of Athens. Consider the opening stanzas of “The Bad Tree”:

Why was the bad tree so appealing?
Why did the fruit perspire so much?
Its musk reached out, a red-light touch
tugging them toward a funny feeling.

Their friend the snake spoke like his glide.
Who could refute such breathiness?
God never talked to them like this.
They gobbled, giggled, ran to hide.

Poochigian continues in this manner, daring to ask: why is knowledge forbidden? If the truth will make us free, why does knowing comprise our Original Sin? Like Socrates twisting Euthyphro’s ear, Poochigian resists the desire for pat answers. To him, the question, not the answer, reigns supreme.

This give-and-take pervades Poochigian’s verse. The contemporary illuminates the ancient; the pagan illuminates the Christian; the life of action illuminates the life of the mind. Poochigian is not content to sit still, and his voracious mind roves over many topics, challenging us as readers to reevaluate what we think we take for granted.

Some of Poochigian’s topics will take nobody by surprise, yet his viewpoints certainly will. For instance, this book’s concluding twelve-poem cycle turns a modern eye to ancient and medieval topics. In poems like “Medusa” and “Helen’s Iliad,” he presents myths often told through pugilistic male eyes. But he forces us to see them through the vantage of the women who are so often passive, yet so instrumental, in these archetypal stories.

Aaron Poochigian comes from a firm foundation, which he builds onto with confidence and panache. For a generation that has come to associate poetry with open mic gloominess or lit class antiquity, he serves as a breath of fresh air. He writes for ordinary readers, and I believe ordinary readers, if given the chance, will embrace him as few of today’s poetic generation has been embraced by plain-spoken, literate masses.

A Bad Idea Disguised as a Strange Novel

Ben Coes, The Last Refuge: A Dewey Andreas Novel

Just in time for Independence Day, former political insider Ben Coes presents the most ill-considered praise of militant nationalism in many moons. The author, who has connections to George HW Bush and Mitt Romney, punches every hot-button issue on this year’s electoral slate, and apparently seeks to enflame feelings. I fear, if read by uncritical audiences, this novel will cause irreparable harm to US foreign policy.

Dewey Andreas, ex-Delta, covert assassin, and semi-illicit security consultant, is ready to settle into a life of relative normalcy. Unfortunately, a Mossad officer—the same one who rescued Andreas from Hezbollah insurgents mere months earlier—is captured and spirited to Iran’s most notorious prison. With American agents sitting on their hands, and Israel on the verge of prompting World War III, Andreas goes guerilla to pay his debts at the point of a gun.

But Andreas discovers bigger forces at play. In Israel, the father of the officer he means to rescue has Polaroids, originally meant for Andreas himself, of a nuclear weapon. Painted on the nose-cone, in Farsi: “Goodbye Tel Aviv.” Suddenly, besides rescuing a friend, Andreas must also prevent the most deadly act of terrorism in world history. That isn’t even the final revelation in a book that never stops accelerating.

It’s impossible to separate this book’s story from its politics, and impossible to ignore that I consider its politics flat damn wrong. Coes uses moralistic words like “evil” and “detestable” to describe Iran, while pinching his description of Dewey Andreas from other well-known heroes like James Bond and Jack Ryan. This includes violence so comically choreographed that it would only make sense inside the Matrix.

The narrative implies that Andreas is justified in anything he does, no matter how heinous or brutal, by the exigencies of a hard world. This includes murder, kidnapping, torture, and what I can only describe as acts of war on American and international soil. Though he does this all officially off the grid, he has the tacit blessing and under-the-table financial support of America’s military intelligence apparatus.

Ben Coes

If this guy were real, we’d call him a war criminal. In a prior book, he orchestrated a military coup in Pakistan, and continues to trade on that accomplishment in this book. He admits that, back in the Reagan years, he assassinated foreign nationals on foreign soil. In this book, he uses human shields, hires contract enforcers, and smuggles weapons across international borders. Serbia extradited Slobodan Milosevic to the Hague for less.

Moreover, Coes’ Iran is at best paradoxical. On the one hand, Iranian agents capture an Israeli national on US soil and spirit him to Tehran undetected. On the other hand, Iran’s rulers behave so maniacally that they beg to be played on film by Gary Oldman. They’re prone to petty grudges, incoherent rants, and Fascist shenanigans, including a kangaroo court so transparent that Judge Judy would fling her gavel. And with good reason: this Iran is a circus.

Ask yourself: if your arsenal had only one nuclear weapon, would you announce where you intended to set it off? Would you set it off at all? I venture that you would not. A single nuclear weapon serves best as a threat, when it could appear anywhere without warning. Once you use it, you’ve squandered your strategic advantage. But Coes’ Iranians don’t think that far ahead, because they’re mere hand puppets for Coes’ diatribe.

And some of the violence is so awkward it’s almost funny. At one point, Andreas jumps off a hotel balcony, twists in mid-air, and shoots well enough to hit a target on the balcony he just fled, at night, before splashing down in the hotel pool. Yeah, right. Elsewhere, his two contract enforcers open fire in an elevator, killing five Iranian bodyguards without hitting the diplomat they mean to capture, and even more remarkably, without hitting themselves with a ricochet.

This works, perhaps, because Coes thinks like a filmmaker, not a novelist. If he had a Hong Kong fight choreographer, flight rig, and soundtrack orchestra, his storyline might make sense. But in prose, his audience has time to wonder if everything he describes could work in a Newtonian universe. The sad answer is, it can’t. Then we wonder if his politics are as comically misguided.

Coes’ press biography stresses his connection to Mitt Romney. If Michigan Mittens wants to win this November, he might want to cork Ben Coes’ yap, because a post-Bush electorate will resist such weenie-swinging nationalism. At least I hope they will.

On a related topic:
Operation Ajax—America's First Battle With Iran

Separating Crisis Message From Crisis Mush

James Howard Kunstler, Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation

I always find it awkward when I agree with a book, but have to recommend against it anyway. A book may be factually accurate, and accord with real-world concerns, yet still fail in the goals it sets itself. That’s the problem with James Howard Kunstler’s latest jeremiad. Though he (mostly) hits the target squarely, he touches so many topics in such a slim book that he loses coherence, does none of his concerns justice, and sounds like a curmudgeon.

Kunstler inveighs mainly against “techno-grandiosity,” his term for the hubris of assuming that technological innovation can solve the problems technological innovation creates. Cheap energy, material innovation, and boundless optimism have created a world of unprecedented plenty. But Kunstler believes this will be seen by historians as an anomaly. We face imminent fuel shortages, agricultural failure, and a world too crowded for its diminishing resources.

Unfortunately, our best and brightest assume, because society has seen an upward trajectory to this point, nothing can stop us now. If we run out of hydrocarbons, so what? We have technology to circumvent those shortcomings. We can build our way out of this cul-de-sac. The mere fact that current technology relies on the cheap, abundant energy that only hydrocarbons provide doesn’t penetrate the heads of these relentless cheerleaders.

So far, so sound. Kunstler’s claims make sense, they accord with the evidence we outside the halls of power see around us daily, and they sound persuasive. But instead of expounding on this core shortcoming, which bolsters every other claim Kunstler makes, he caroms through every ramification he can imagine, sometimes too briefly for us to comprehend them. Only somebody already in agreement with Kunstler will even want to follow his frenetic thought labyrinthe.

It’s hard to dispute Kunstler’s warnings about peak oil, unsustainable urban design, the false promise of post-humanism, and more—if you follow his hyperactive reasoning. Because he voices concerns I share, though more eloquently than I could, I agree with Kunstler. But he doesn’t stay on one topic long enough to do any of them justice. I’m persuaded because I’m already persuaded. If I came to this book cold, I doubt he would change my mind.

James Howard Kunstler

Kunstler also follows some weird cow paths. For instance, though he mostly addresses abusive reliance on technology, his longest chapter barely mentions that topic, focusing instead on the circumstances around the 2008 Wall Street implosion. Kunstler’s explication is less thorough than Robert Kuttner’s A Presidency in Peril—though Kunstler is funnier and more pugnacious. Still, telling a story well doesn’t matter if the story feels like an appendix.

Worse, both Kunstler and Kuttner miss the most important lesson of the meltdown: while media and government in the runup lionized pirate financiers, they also demeaned routine work. Laborers, teachers, and local service providers heard themselves openly described as “slackers,” “parasites,” and worse. No wonder they marched on Zucotti Park when not one bankster was indicted for the 2008 shipwreck.

Maybe that highlights the problem I have: Kunstler highlights the top-level malfeasance which created the current impasse, without really parsing what it means for the ordinary Joe who wants to earn a living. Peak oil, with its charts and histograms and sweep of technology, alarms those of us who care about umbrella issues. It means something different on the ground, where stats show that, the poorer you are, the further you probably live from your job.

Car-reliant suburban sprawl, one of Kunstler’s biggest bugbears, will certainly become a major menace when oil becomes so scarce that the poor can’t drive to work. But such sprawl was willed into existence, not out of malice, but because people need homes they can afford. And as the rich, who initially fled urban life, have now crowded the working poor out of city centers, people with hourly wages have moved where they can afford.

Kunstler, unfortunately, misses this. Though I can’t claim he’s unaware of the contemporary two-tiered social structure, he addresses it only fleetingly. Thus, while I cannot disagree with anything Kunstler says, I fear that when he addresses the audience who most needs to hear his message, his words will fall on deaf ears. Indifference, in politics, is so much worse than opposition.

I support nearly everything Kunstler says about what he justly calls “America’s war against its own future.” But if he doesn’t learn to pitch his message in terms that will penetrate his audience’s barriers, he might as well shout down a hole. I fear that’s what he’s doing already.