UPDATE AND A WORD ABOUT MY FUTURE PROJECTS

You've probably noticed that I haven't posted anything in a few days. Once again, I've been extremely busy handling my partner's health problems. I spent the better part of the last two days in the hospital. I didn't sleep much during that time and when I got up this morning I was too exhausted to think, let alone generate a decent post. Aside from that, I was out of town this weekend and have been occupied with lots of new things; and don't worry: They are good for me!

Still, all these events have denied me my writing time. That bothers me on many levels. It makes me feel better just to let you all know what's going on with me, since I'm accustomed to a certain weekly output. On the other hand, I realize that life does not always offer the best circumstances in which to create. And if I have to go into "writing dormancy" more than usual in the coming weeks, I will have to face it. I apologize in advance if I don't crank out my hoped-for three or four posts every week.

I always get so many ideas during my breaks. When I just live and observe, I amass new thoughts, experiences and impressions. I know those ideas will all buoy me when I settle down into another long writing phase. I've actually jotted down three big ideas for longer pieces in the future. Although I do not have the time or space to discuss them all here, I will say that they involve these issues: Truth; confessions; power; capital punishment; free will; death; sexuality; categorization; identity; desire; subjectivity; happiness; prejudice and reflection. I have conceived both fictional and nonfictional structures in which to explore these themes. But my piece on sexuality will be part reflective, part anecdotal and part polemical. Think of it as a sequel to Foucault's work on sexuality, with a personal twist to make it accessible.

To share some detail from my own personal experience lately, I have been entertaining serious doubts about my own sexuality. And my doubts move in an unconventional direction. Namely, for almost 14 years I have been quick to characterize myself as "gay." But in fact I'm not so sure what that means anymore. By the same token, I cannot say what "straight" means, either. In truth, the only reliable conclusion I've made in this inquiry is that sexual identity is never clear-cut. That is because it reflects basic desire. Basic desire, in turn, is purely subjective. It is impossible to categorize desire because there is no limit to individuals' deepest subjective tastes.

I don't think people appreciate just how fluid sexual identity is. That is what I will address in my piece. In the process, I will discuss the unfortunate human tendency to associate absolute meaning with artificial categories. I plan to show that categories like "gay" and "straight" are not talismanic. Rather, I will show that they are at best "rough guidelines" that exist in various proportions in us all at different times in our lives.

I also plan to discuss why I think the term "gay" is absurd. When it comes to categorizing groups, sexual "orientation" is a dubious--and barely unifying--characteristic. That is not to say that people who identify themselves as "gay" do not merit certain assistance or solicitude under law. My main argument will be that "gay" is not a good identifier, nor is it absolute. There are plenty of people in the world--including me--who find men attractive, yet have no difficulty whatever finding women attractive, too. The bottom line is that one desire never excludes another. And "gay" is a category that essentially implicates a particular sexual desire.

So that's what's on my mind these days. Forgive me for the sparser posting. I promise there is plenty more to come. I have a whole list to get to!

Take care. And thanks as always for reading my archives.

Oesterhoudt

MOMENTS IN TIME : JANUARY 1, 2000

A REFLECTION

Sometimes memories return to me with uncanny clarity. It is not just the clarity that strikes me. More often I wonder why certain memories return to me so long after the event. After all, of all the things I have experienced in my life, why would one day's details suddenly reemerge? What triggered it? And then a more vexing thought crosses my mind: As clear as my memory seems to me, perhaps reality was very different from what I remember? Who can say now? That is one reason why memory fascinates me so much. It is exquisitely subjective. It seems real, but only to ourselves.

I got up this morning and suddenly remembered December 31, 1999. On that day, I worked from morning to night and beyond. Back then, I was a 22-year-old kid with a "bowl haircut" and a jean jacket. I wore ripped $30 pants for days at a time. I was a college senior who memorized Nietzsche quotes without fully comprehending them. I basically had no money; my mother gave me about $20 a week to spend. So starting in 1997 I worked as a DJ to make a few extra bucks. Much to my good fortune, I met a much older guy named Joe who had been DJ'ing parties around the city for decades. He used to tell me stories about going home with women after disco parties in the 1970s. He was a Vietnam veteran and--to be kind--rather eccentric. He lived alone in a food-strewn apartment on 122nd Street brimming with records and 5 or 6 yappy Chihuahuas (one or two died over the years; but a few more were born, so I can't remember the exact number). Basically, the place was squalid. But somehow Joe kept getting gigs and holding his life together really well. He kept a zillion post-it notes all over his bedroom to remind him to do this and that each day--and he always got it done. For years, we worked really well together. He farmed me out to jobs he couldn't do and I gave him a cut of what I made. Plus we became really good friends.

Both Joe and I knew that New Year's Eve on Y2K would be a gangbuster night for DJ's. After all, everyone was partying that night. Some people thought the world was going to end. I knew it wouldn't. But it was an unprecedented atmosphere. And most importantly, entertainers like us were in demand that night. So we could charge huge fees and we knew people would pay. We could name our price for a change.

Joe wound up scheduling a $2000 job. At the same time, he booked me a job for $1800. We agreed I would get $1500. He would take a $300 commission. That seemed fair to me; in fact, I was thrilled. For a kid who wore torn pants and got $20 a week to spend, $1500 was a treasure trove. I could live the whole semester on that--and all for just one night's work.

I remember the job exactly. We did it in a brand new loft apartment on 21st Street near 6th Avenue. Some nouveau riche woman and her husband were throwing a party. Joe and I drove down to the apartment the morning before the gig to set up. Joe drove a virtually unroadworthy mid-80s Chevy station wagon. It had no muffler and a pretty disgusting, food-like crust clung like a glaze all over the interior. The car had roaches. And Joe stuffed in so many speakers, wires, amps and record crates into it that I was amazed the bumper didn't scrape the pavement as we drove. In short, despite all appearances, Joe was a master of limited space management. The cops never pulled the jalopy over, either.

I remember schlepping all our equipment two flights up to the apartment. The woman and her husband were frantically decorating the place and setting up long tables for the hors d'oeuvres. I had a few words with her. She said she liked hip-hop and R&B. I said that was great because "that was my specialty." She seemed to like me. She didn't seem to like Joe too much, though. After all, at first glance he looked really gruff and he spent his time hauling speakers and wires all over the place. He was always polite and even charming. But he just didn't look the part. Some customers really used to treat him badly, and that hurt me.

After we set up the equipment, Joe and I sat in the car for a few minutes and talked about the plan for the evening. I would show up at the gig and do my thing. He would go to his gig and do his. Then he would pick me up from my gig and I would give him his cut. We would drive back uptown together and call it a night around 4 AM. It was a good plan. We then went our separate ways.

I remember the party went very smoothly. I got to play the music I wanted. The crowd was easy and did not complain. My DJ station faced east; the crowd looked west out the windows over 6th Avenue. Joe set up the lights and I controlled them with a little hand console. It took a while for the alcohol to get the party moving; eventually it did. I started off playing 70s funk and rare grooves. That gave a nice ambiance to the early part. Later, people started asking me to play hip-hop and assorted Top Ten pop. I obliged. I remember one Asian chick kept asking me to play Lauren Hill's "That Thing" over and over again. That tune always generated a huge crowd response, so I waited to play it until the place was really hopping. I kept telling her "it was in the pipe." She never quarreled with me; she just kept going back to her friends and dancing.

Before midnight, nervous excitement came over the room. People started wondering aloud whether the world would end at 12:01. I remember people throwing their drinks and hooting in the minutes leading up to midnight. I also remember looking outside and seeing helicopters flying low over the city with spotlights on. There was a lot of honking and yelling on the street below. I could hear it even over the music. Finally, 12:01 came. Nothing happened. A huge cheer went up on the dancefloor. Then the party went into overdrive. "Hypnotize," "Walking on the Sun" and "Backstreet's Back" were particularly popular that night. Oh, and of course "Groove is in the Heart" and "It Takes Two" made everyone move, too, even otherwise respectable-looking bourgeois with jobs: I always laughed when I saw white bankers singing along to rap songs. But by that point at the party, the alcohol was guaranteed to make everyone dance, no matter what was playing. Even so, as a DJ, I felt like I had accomplished something. Lots of drunk, happy people profusely thanked me for "all the great tunes" as the evening approached its end. It was always a nice perk to get compliments, even if the partygoers were fall-down drunk and virtually incoherent.

At about 3 AM, Joe showed up from his party. People had already started to leave. Beer and broken plastic cups littered the dancefloor, along with squashed finger foods and dirty napkins. Everyone was shouting, hugging, hooting, caressing and laughing. The mood was very good. Almost all the food was gone and the wine was running low. Joe went over to the hostess and whispered to her. She then came over to me and told me it was OK to start wrapping up.

Within 30 minutes, almost everyone had left and I stopped the music. The house lights came up. Joe started breaking down the lights and sound equipment. I chatted with the hostess for a while. She complimented me in the highest terms, even though she was utterly shitfaced. I still felt like I had done a good job; for my part, I did not touch a drink that evening. I had a few Sprites and some ice water. Finally, the hostess pulled out an enormous wad of $20 bills and handed it to me. I thanked her. She went away and I started helping Joe move all our stuff downstairs. Meanwhile, the hostess and her husband started brushing trash off the floor with two big push brooms.

It took us a good 30 minutes to haul all our stuff downstairs. We loaded it into the car and--once again--got it all to fit. After that, Joe and I shook hands and congratulated each other on a job well done. I handed him his $300 commission. Then he headed back uptown and he dropped me off at my dorm on 114th Street and Riverside. I wished Joe a happy new year and thanked him for being so generous to me. He said no problem and drove off into the predawn darkness.

I went upstairs to my room on the fourth floor. There was no way I could sleep after the night's toils. It was about quarter to five in the morning, January 1, 2000. I walked over to my single-size mattress. I took the enormous cash wad from my pocket and laid all the money out on the bedspread. I was in awe: $1500 in cash, all for me. I never thought I could ever make that much in one night. It was unbelievable. What a way to start the new year, the new decade, the new millennium. I felt like life could not get any better than this. I even felt that time had suddenly stopped, as if I could never get older, that this moment would last forever. After all, it was the year 2000! To that point in my life--indeed, in everyone's life--it had always been the 20th Century. I couldn't really fathom that life would go on as it always did. On that night, time froze as I sat there ogling my massive money pile. For a few hours, I felt utterly invincible. I felt that I controlled time and that I would never age.

I was hungry. I went out to get some food at Tom's Diner. It was extremely quiet. All the partying was over. A few stragglers appeared here and there, but that was it. I saw a few "2000" party eyeglasses in a trash can. It was still dark. As I headed down Broadway, a New York Times truck pulled up and a man tossed out the morning edition. I bought one. It had an unforgettably bold headline: 1/1/00. Underneath, in typeface almost as big, was a headline saying that Russia's President Yeltsin had resigned. A new man, Putin, was taking over.

Wow, I thought, everything was looking up! It was a fresh new morning in a fresh new millennium. I had $1500 in cash and there was a new Russian President. One era ended. Another was dawning. Time stood still and I was in control.

Then I went to Tom's and ordered a shake and fries. I stayed there for a while. I let myself get tired. Finally, I headed back to my dorm to go to sleep. It was dawning. Time for bed. It was a good night.

I still have never made that much money in one night as I did on January 1, 2000. I think that's why I remember it so vividly. It felt really good.

Too bad life got harder after that. But on that night, I didn't think anything could ever go wrong.

UNCOMFORTABLE SUBJECTS : PRIVATE RACISM

A REFLECTION ON RACE IN AMERICA

I want to take some time to mention what I'm planning to write over the next few days. I think it's especially important to lay out my intentions this time because I am about to venture into very difficult territory.

Whenever I set out on a new intellectual endeavor, I always think of my mentor: Friedrich Nietzsche. In this instance, I think about the title to one of his aphorism collections: Uncontemporary Observations. Nietzsche did not care whether he wrote about subjects that ruffled traditional feathers. He purposely contradicted the expectations of the "the present" and "contemporary" society. His ideas at times recapitulated themes from distant history. At other times, they foretold the future. In either case, he was not "contemporary." To the contrary, he purposely defied "contemporary."

Writers face constant pressure to be contemporary. After all, you can't be successful if you don't write to meet present expectations. Yet no one ever evolves without taking daring chances; and writers are no exception. By accident, I find myself in early 21st Century America: A strange, confusing, conflicted, changing civilization. There are certain subjects that we simply do not talk about, or at least we do not voice certain sentiments about them in public. It is irrelevant what we privately think about these "taboo" subjects. We just never voice what we really believe. Sometimes our beliefs are not even conscious.

Race is among those subjects. Personally, race is an obsession of mine. It frequently inspires my writing because it is so maddeningly relevant. Yet there are certain things we simply do not say about it, no matter how often we think them.

Race has played a pivotal role in American civilization from our earliest history. Through race, we have seen just how low American civilization can fall. Through race, we see our principles challenged. All our grand rhetoric about equality, dignity and fairness falls flat when applied to the American experience with race. It is no surprise that much of my satire involves racial realities in the United States. After all, when we honestly view race in America, we see several different Nations living in one. And they aren't all equal, no matter what the law says.

But I struggle with my own conflicts about race. In my writing and in my public expressions, I vociferously advocate equality. I believe that everyone in this country--no matter their origins--should have equal legal opportunities and a fair shot at success. I truly believe that. It is only just. We cannot claim to live in a just society if some people do not have the same chances for success simply because of their ancestry in a certain country or a certain continent.

Yet even in saying this I feel myself a hypocrite. In fact, I come close to a confession when I say that I am a racist. But we all are. Americans simply do not understand that racism comes in many shades. Some are overt, but most are extraordinarily subtle. Everyone in the United States is a racist in their own fashion; you do not have to be David Duke to be a racist. Rather, every American--including declared liberals--harbors deep-rooted cultural expectations about the "ways" of different ethnic groups. Every American believes on some level that people in other ethnic groups are "different" and "act differently" than they do "because that's the way they are." They do not necessarily mean it in a malicious way; but it is ever-present. And it is racism.

We are racists the moment we say: "Two guys and a black guy entered the room." I was raised with these distinctions. I also grew up in a distinct cultural background (southeastern Connecticut; and as the biological product of hardworking Northern European Protestant descendants). Both by nature and by operation of economic forces, that cultural background was racially exclusive. For the longest time, I never thought I was racist. How could I be? After all, I always learned that it was "bad to be a racist" and that I wasn't a racist because I did not publicly say bad things about people in other ethnic groups. But my own family--the same family that taught me these abstract lessons about race with the best possible intentions--cultivated a set of cultural values in me that made me completely dissociate myself from other races. Those values also made me intuitively judgmental toward anyone who did not share them. And on a subconscious level, I began to believe that my values were normal, while others were not. That was racist.

Racism is everywhere in the United States. It is on everyone's mind all the time. And it is intensely private. When white people eat at a restaurant and a black beggar enters the restaurant, I challenge everyone sitting there to say that they do not harbor certain negative assumptions about black people: "Why doesn't he work? Why do they beg? Why are they all so poor? They're all like that..." they think. They might be ferocious liberals and believe in equality. But in that cultural situation, I challenge them all to say that they do not make immediate judgments about black people in their own private minds. And it is not their fault: It is simply a function of their own cultural backgrounds reacting to another cultural background.

America elected Barack Obama. But that does not mean we are not beyond racism. My "uncontemporary observation" on this subject is that EVERYONE IS A RACIST. It is just a question of degree. We may bear no conscious ill-will toward other ethnic groups. Yet when we make even the most subtle assumptions about them, we are racists. Even disadvantaged ethnic groups engage in racism. I challenge any black person to say he harbors no assumptions about white people when placed in a social situation with them: "He's not going to be fair with me. He's not going to treat me right. He's going to condescend to me. He's going to exploit me. He's going to disrespect me. He's going to fire me because I'm black. That's what they all do. White people are mean and will hurt me any chance they get." Racism goes in both directions--all the time.

Overcoming racism is about more than turning to the law for superficial equalization. Overcoming racism is a mammoth cultural endeavor; and we are nowhere near achieving it. Until we truly harbor no assumptions or expectations about "how other ethnic groups act," and until we truly do not think "How typical" when someone from a particular ethnic group acts in a particular way, we are racists. Yet we do these things all the time without even knowing it. We are merely giving expression to the combined weight of our respective cultural heritages. Heritage bears down upon us in America as in no other country on earth. Nowhere on earth have so many disparate cultural traditions been thrown in with one another. And nowhere else has such burning intolerance arisen when those traditions clash.

Let me be clear for the record. I live my life to avoid racism in all things. But I am still as racist as every other American because I cannot honestly say that I do not occasionally make negative assumptions about other ethnic groups in difficult situations. In this sense, we are all racists. When a black youth wearing a doo rag, low pants, a crooked hat and gangster-style sports garb acts rowdy with his friends on a subway train, I intuitively think: "He is up to no good. He's going to cause a scene." I wish I didn't. But I do. I tell myself I shouldn't think it. I challenge any white person from my cultural background to claim the very same thoughts do not flash in his mind in the same situation.

I have no solutions to the racism problem. The best we can do is to forbear as much as we possibly can in our external behavior. We must try to understand one another as best we can for the sake of order and coexistence. It is relatively easy never to "act like a racist" or "say racist things" in public. It is easy not to be David Duke. But it is not so easy to truly drive racist thoughts from our minds in pressing circumstances.

I wish we weren't all racists. I really, really do. But we would all be dishonest if we said we weren't. And I will immediately call anyone a hypocrite who denies his own racism. Racism is not just the overt hatred we hear about in groups like the KKK. Racism is also about unconscious economic segregation. Living in a part of town that no black person can afford is racist, too. Supporting an economic system that perpetuates racial inequalities is racist, too. After all, why do most wealthy white people live in areas that black people cannot afford? Because they won't have to be around black people. When black people are around, it's a "bad neighborhood." Even using the term "bad neighborhood" is racism. It is no coincidence that "bad neighborhoods" are always the poor, black areas. And it is racist to assume the poor, bad areas are always black. Yet people who claim not to be racist use the term "bad neighborhood" all the time.

Consider a white real estate broker who thinks he is not a racist. He says to his client: "You don't want to live above 96th Street. That's a bad neighborhood." Why? Because black people mostly live there. How can that not reflect deeply entrenched, racist assumptions about black people? Think about how often we use terms like "bad neighborhood." They are racist. And most barely comprehend why.

Racism in the United States is exquisitely subtle. It is the inevitable byproduct of placing so many cultural backgrounds in close proximity to one another, along with the natural human propensity to resent those who are different. As such, racism is everywhere. I know it's not popular to say. But that does not mean we cannot honestly grapple with it. Is it terrible? Of course it is. But there are lots of terrible things about American life; and in my view it makes more sense to call a spade a spade than to pretend it's not.

This is my uncontemporary observation for the day.

HOW TO BREAK UNHEALTHY ATTACHMENTS TO PEOPLE

OESTERHOUDT ON RELATIONSHIPS

People often approach me for relationship advice. I don't like to flatter myself, but I'm good at it. I know a thing or two about human beings and their capacity to live with each other. I have credentials. I have been in a committed relationship for eleven years and I have endured every emotional, physical and sanity-damaging challenge you can possibly imagine. Along the way, I have coped with jealousy, envy, longing, lust, passion, disappointment, infidelity, vanity, heartache, reconciliation, misunderstanding, rage, sleeplessness, abuse, frustration, ecstasy, contentment, simple joy, tension and anxiety. I have even weathered trying health troubles at my partner's side, like unforeseeable life-changing accidents and mental illness.

When it comes to living with another person, I've been around the block. I'm not a boy anymore. I'm a man. That's not a boast. That's a fact.

In many cases, people ask me whether they should transform pleasant acquaintances into lasting relationships. Others ask me how to overcome consumptive attachments they develop to people, then the terrible disappointment that flows when their love interests do not reciprocate their devotion.

These are related situations. They arise frequently. When a person tries to force a relationship onto another level, a power struggle ensues. One person wants something the other might not. This leads to a disparity in desire, as well as wishful thinking and blind faith that the other person is acting in accordance with your fantasies. In short, it is emotionally dangerous. When you start expecting another person to act the way you imagine they will, you are setting yourself up for heartbreak or worse.

I did this in my first love. I became very close friends with someone when I was just a teenager. I loved our time together. We had a very special friendship and I felt respected whenever we met. Eventually, my feelings grew stronger. I wanted a romantic relationship. I started believing that he did, too. He really didn't. I wanted him to love me the same way I loved him. I turned it over in my mind all the time; it kept me up at night. I wanted to talk to him all the time, but I didn't want it to seem that I was the only one making the phone calls. So I would wait around for days at a time wishing that he would call me; and of course he didn't. When he finally did call, my heart would race and I would stumble on my words. I felt that I was speaking to my savior; he had all the power over me. It was just pathetic. I was slavishly dedicated to him even though he never gave me the reciprocation I craved.

It took me several years to break my attachment to this person. I wasted so much psychic energy on an illusion. I will never do it again.

Now I see clearly what I did wrong. I created a whole mental patchwork of fantasies about my friend. Those fantasies overwhelmed my mind. I expected my friend to act in accordance with them. It was unrealistic, of course, but when you're craving a person's love, you do not think reasonably. My mistake was this: I fell in love with a subjective fantasy image, not a real person. And when the real person did not act according to the fantasy script in my mind, I felt crushed. I expected too much; and I learned that people are basically inscrutable: They rarely act the way you really want them to.

My youthful attachment to my friend was unhealthy for another reason: It led me into slavishness. I hung on his every word. I followed his every action with total devotion. I delivered my fate into his hands. Whatever he did, I followed. I gave him all the power because I wanted him to give me what I wanted. I wanted him to love me so much that I sacrificed my own dignity and spirit to win his affections. I stumbled on my words when I was around him because he was my mental master. I wanted too much. That made me slavish.

I did not break my attachment to this person until I stopped wanting what he had to offer. And that is the lesson: If you have an unhealthy attachment to a person and they are not showing you the love you want, you must convince yourself that they have nothing you want. Once you do that, you will stop obsessing about them. You will regain your peace of mind and dignity. You will reorder your desires and think clearly again. True, it is hard to do. But you will thank yourself if you can pull it off.

Let us try to understand how this works. We develop unhealthy attachments to people when we WANT something they have. "Want" is the most important word in our mental lives. It expresses our truest desires. It honestly discloses who we are. No one controls what we want; our personality dictates it. We are never so happy as when we get what we want because it satisfies our deepest, most personal yearnings.

Problems arise when we want something that only another person can give. In this case, we cannot easily address our wants because we cannot directly slake them. And because the other person has what we want, we make concessions in order to entice him to give us what we crave. We indulge him far more than we should. We bow, scrape, flatter and stumble on our words. We make our love interest our master; he has power over us because he has the discretion whether to grant us what we want. That is unhealthy. It leads us into despair because we willingly enslave ourselves to his will. Disappointment and frustration become our dominant emotions. We never get what we want. And we are crestfallen every time our love interest does not act the way we expect--which is much more often than we'd like.

But there is a way to overcome this cycle. To break the attachment, you must engage your reason. You must take control over your own desire again. You must convince yourself that the other person has nothing you want. If you can do that, the other person loses his authority over you. He becomes indifferent to you. You get to say what you want, not him. You can pursue your own desire again without a fickle middleman. That is freedom in the purest sense.

I know it is difficult to do this when you are caught in an unhealthy attachment. It is hard to engage your reason when you are contorted with unrequited desire. But it is worth the effort. It helps to have a distraction that breaks your incessant attention to your love interest. In my case, I met someone else who took my mind off my obsession. It helped me turn my mind away from its destructive focus on unattainable affection. Within a few weeks, I felt free again. It was wonderful.

If you ever find yourself with an unhealthy attachment to another person, think about why you feel the way you do: You want what the other person has. You put your happiness in his hands. You heap unrealistic expectations on the other person and you disappoint yourself every time he acts some other way. You give him total power over the way you feel. Conceptually, it is easy to understand. To break the attachment, you must simply stop wanting what he has to offer. Once you control your own wants again, no one will ever tyrannize you with frustration and disappointment. And life feels much better when you're not frustrated.

SEEING, HEARING AND REMEMBERING : PATHWAYS TO UNDERSTANDING

AN ESSAY

In ancient China, Confucius allegedly said: "Tell me and I will forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I will understand." I had never heard this proverb before. It captivated me because it encapsulates many of my views about sense, speech, memory, experience and empathy. All these things relate to each other. And they all aim for one thing: Understanding.

What does it take to understand another person? Is it enough to hear a person describe problems with words? How about observing something firsthand? What is the most effective way to find understanding and empathy?

I have often written that we humans are subjective creatures. We know only what we sense. Unfortunately, we must also depend on language because our senses have a limited range. After all, we only feel certain about something when we perceive it directly. We would prefer to see something with our own eyes rather than hear about it in words from someone who saw it. We want to understand our surroundings and the people in our lives. And the only pathway to understanding is sense.

But it is a troubled pathway. For what can we really know, let alone understand? Knowledge is not the same as understanding. Knowledge is more banal than understanding. Knowledge means that we merely manifest a subjective belief that something is true because we perceived it. Yet understanding is more subtle. Understanding means that we not only know things, but we intuitively arrange our knowledge to tell a larger story. Knowledge is about details. Understanding is about narrative. Knowledge is just an actor. Understanding is the whole play. And we don't feel truly fulfilled until we really understand something: What good are isolated facts unless they tell us something more significant?

Confucius recognized that human sense opens the door to both knowledge and understanding. Yet he also recognized that there is a hierarchy in human sense. He says: "Tell me and I will forget," implying that hearing is a weak sense. How right he is. How often do we hear language and immediately forget what we just heard? It is difficult to glean knowledge from language, let alone understanding. It is incredibly easy to forget words. After all, words are a poor substitute for actual perception. But in many cases they are all we have to reconstruct our perceptions.

Sight is better than hearing. Confucius confirms this when he says: "Show me and I may remember." Here, he does not say he "will forget." If he perceives something visually, he says he "may remember" it. Again, Confucius is right. Sight links intimately to memory. Our eyes leave "visual impressions" on our minds long after images leave our present view. When we reminisce, we engage our "mind's eye." We attempt to re-see images that have long since disappeared from sight. We may not precisely remember what we see; indeed, with time, memory weakens. So in that way, Confucius correctly points out that we only "may" remember something after we see it.

And we see all the time. It is simply impossible to recall every single thing we visually perceive every day. Our memory works best only after we see something worth remembering, namely, something exciting, unusual, captivating or appealing. To a large extent, our own subjective desires color what we remember. If we are infatuated with someone, we remember how they look with great detail. We hang on their words and even remember what they say. Yet those subjective desires obscure other details. We don't remember many things we see because we are distracted with our love interest. We are not paying attention; our emotions cloud our perceptions. Thus, while sight may be a better way to acquire knowledge than hearing, we will never remember everything we see. There is just too much going on. We cannot know everything because our senses are imperfect.

But Confucius does not end his proverb with knowledge. He goes beyond. He ends with "understanding:" "Involve me and I will understand." Understanding is the ultimate goal; the proverb builds up to it. He does not equivocate here, either. He says: "I will understand."

What is going on here? And why is understanding better than knowledge?

Anyone can know facts. You must merely have functioning sensory organs to know whether something is hot, cold, smelly, coarse, green or blue. Some facts require complex sensory deductions and inferences, but deductions and inferences are just mechanical mental conclusions. Anyone with rudimentary reasoning power can infer one fact from another.

But understanding is more transcendent than that. Understanding combines knowledge with experience and intuition. It is one thing to know whether another person is sick, obligated, depressed or happy. It is quite another to understand a person who experiences those circumstances. Understanding requires a person not only to listen, observe and infer facts about another. It also requires him to put that knowledge in the light of his own experience and honestly try to feel what the other person feels. That is no easy endeavor. It takes time to assemble experience. That is why we tell young people: "When you're older, you'll understand." After all, how can you understand a complicated emotional problem if you've never experienced the emotions that make it a problem in the first place? If you do not have experience, you cannot truly understand. You can know, but you cannot understand.

Confucius was right to extol understanding as the "higher result" of knowledge. Why do we learn? Simple: So that we can understand. And why do we want to understand? Because understanding enlightens us. It makes the world more comprehensible. Understanding equips us to help others. Understanding counteracts prejudice and shortsightedness. Violence springs from misunderstanding and ignorance. It is hard to go to war with someone if you actually understand them.

Yet the fact that human beings constantly make war on each other bespeaks a sad truth: Understanding is not common. It is hard enough to acquire reliable knowledge through hearing and sight, let alone to understand larger implications about life. Most people never even acquire the knowledge they need to understand others. Understanding is impossible without knowledge. And only a patient person takes the time to obtain the knowledge needed to find understanding.

Who has time for that in our society? Who has time to listen? And most importantly, who has time to get involved with others in order to understand them? Confucius' proverb said that involvement results in understanding. That means living with others and experiencing their lives first hand. That means living with their problems, too. Involvement is not just a pervasive sensory journey; it also is an emotional one. When you involve yourself in another person's life, you eat, drink, sleep and breathe their problems. You sense what they sense. You obtain knowledge at an astronomical rate. And because you combine your experience with theirs, you necessarily will understand them. Once you understand them, you can empathize and comfort. Or you can turn away. In either event, you are enlightened. You are no longer ignorant.

But that takes a very long time. It takes a lot of energy. To achieve understanding, then, a person must not only have experience and knowledge. He must also be patient enough to involve himself in others' lives in a compassionate way.

Sadly, neither patience nor understanding are highly prized virtues in modern American society. Yet people yearn to be understood. In most cases, they must pay others to understand them. After all, time is money in the United States. No one has time to sit down and listen to another person's deepest thoughts, let alone get involved in their lives in a meaningful way. This is one reason why people are desperately unhappy in this country. They want to be understood, but no one has the time, patience or intellectual capacity to "learn" their woes. This leaves many people feeling isolated and forgotten. Even married couples never take the time to really understand each other.

I venture that understanding offers its own rewards. It is satisfying to understand others and to understand yourself. True, it takes time, learning and effort. But it feels so good to know another person understands you. By the same token, it feels good to give back by understanding others. It is an enlightened and compassionate way to live. Despite all the impulsions to the contrary, sometimes it is good to be patient in our society.

THE LAW HAS NO POWER OVER SOMEONE WHO DOES NOT CARE ABOUT HIS BODY

AN ESSAY

In many essays over the last year, I have paraphrased Martin Luther's argument that the law has power only over the body and property. See, e.g., On Governmental Authority (1523) at p. 23: "The temporal government has laws which extend no further than to life and property and external affairs on earth[.]" Luther draws a distinction between "worldly authority" and "divine authority." He says that the "world is God's enemy" and that a wise prince is a "mighty rare bird." Id. at pp. 60-61. Yet at the same time, he asserts that worldly authority fulfills God's will because it targets "wickedness" and protects meek Christians from violence. Thus, while worldly authority may be crass and unappetizing, it performs a "Christian" function by restraining criminals from inflicting violence.

These ideas influenced me. They further weakened my already weak respect for the law. I shared Luther's low estimation of the law precisely because of the law's base subject matter. In the final analysis, the law's power derives solely from its ability to impact men's bodies and their property. These are external things. They do not transcend time. They have nothing to do with men's beliefs, conscience or thoughts. They are ephemeral, even petty. Human beings who live only to satisfy their bodies and gain property are superficial creatures. Some might even call them hedonists, or at least fatally selfish. Ironically, however, commercial success depends solely on gaining property, which translates into bodily comfort. Commerce typifies "the world." It scarcely warrants surprise, then, that Luther said "the world is God's enemy."

Despite its superficial powers, the law relishes its authority. And for good reason: Because people value their bodies and property so much in this world, it makes sense that they respect the law. After all, the law can seize their property, injure their bodies and take away the things that give them pleasure. True, it cannot compel them to believe things or have honor. But most people could care less about those things. They just want to use their bodies as they wish and buy things that make them feel good. The law influences them because they know the law can impact their bodies and property. It holds them in check because no one wants to experience bodily pain or discomfort, nor does anyone want to lose property. The law works because people are superficial: They like their bodies and property, so they are afraid to lose them.

But what would happen if someone had utter contempt for his body or property? What possible influence could the law have on a man who did not care whether he suffered pain, or whether he owned anything? In a word, the law would wield no power over such a man. If he truly did not care whether someone imprisoned him, beat him, tortured him or executed him, nothing could possibly restrain him from acting in a way that would give rise to those penalties. In the same way, if he did not care whether he lost everything he possessed, the law would not impress him with garnishments, judgments, forced sales or seizures. Put simply, men who do not value their bodies or property can live beyond the law's influence.

That is not to say that the law would not take action against such a man. If the man committed a crime warranting imprisonment, it would imprison him. But the man would not care. In a strange way, his apathy and indifference to punishment would deny the law's effect. The law proceeds on the assumption that it inflicts suffering on an offender for acting in a way it condemns. It asserts its power by doing something to the offender that the offender does not like, just as a parent asserts its power over a wayward child by spanking him. The offender does not like bodily pain, just as the child does not like spanking. Yet if the offender really does not care whether his body experiences pain, what power does the law really have?

In short, anyone with pure contempt for his own body or property can deny the law's effect. Although the law rarely admits as much, it asserts power over its subjects by doing painful things to their bodies and property. How else would it maintain control if it did not threaten to take things away that people enjoy? How else would it force compliance if it did not threaten physical misery for failure to comply? Laws might seem "objective," but they really depend on basic human aversions to pain. By the same token, laws only function because they assume that people do not want to suffer bodily pain. Like any power institution, they enforce their will by threatening to do something the subject does not want. Legal scholars can talk all they want about "neutral laws." But in the end, laws depend on subjective reactions to threatened consequences. People don't like it when their bodies suffer or when they lose their property. So the law threatens those things in order to enforce its commands.

But what about the man who refuses to care whether he feels pain? The law cannot intimidate him. It cannot "entice" him to act as it commands. This is the purest possible rebellion against the law, for even if the law penalizes his body, he does not feel he is losing anything he wants. A penalty only asserts true power when the violator feels that he is enduring something he does not like. Most people do not like bodily pain. That is why the law generally works when it inflicts physical pain: It forces the subject to feel something he does not like. That is real power.

Not so for the man who accepts pain without caring. The law asserts no power over him. It does not force him to experience anything he does not want. By remaining indifferent to physical pain, he denies the law's power. He does not allow it to make him feel any worse than he would on his own. That is rebellion.

Still, how many people can truly ignore their bodies and their property? Nerve endings do not lie. From a theoretical standpoint, however, the best way to revolt against the law is not to care about your body or your possessions. That is a very hard thing to do in this society.

On the other hand, think about "martyrs" and "noble men." Jesus Christ endured excruciating physical agony but did not let it affect him. So did all the "Christian heroes" who willingly suffered torture and death because they had contempt for their bodies and the "things of this world."

In general, the law strikes fear because it targets the things that most people live for: Bodily comfort and property. But it loses all its power when it punishes people who do not care about those things.

OUR URGE TO BE FREE IS NOT ENTIRELY REASONABLE

AN ESSAY

We always hear about doomed criminals running away from the police. Chases always make the news. They seem to happen in California more than anywhere else. But no matter where they happen, the key element remains the same: Some desperate person tries frantically to delay the moment at which he will be physically restrained. He wants to be free. He wants control over his own body. So he thrashes with incredible energy to maintain that control. He even puts himself and others in mortal danger for a few more free moments. Even the most insignificant infractions put people to desperate flight. They even cause fatal car crashes while trying to escape from a traffic stop. In other words, men love freedom; and they cling to it no matter the cost or the danger.

Freedom has many meanings. It is a common word. George W. Bush used it ad nauseam as shorthand for a complex, biased political value system that had nothing to do with "a lack of restraint on physical movement." But today I want to examine the word's base, bodily meaning, not its metaphorical or rhetorical overlays. "Freedom" is an old English noun that stems from the adjective "free," which in turn relates to the German "frei." In essence, it implies a "lack of physical restraint on bodily movement." At base, it is corporal. It suggests an ability to move the body without being held back. It also suggests an ability to "go where one pleases" without facing opposing physical forces. In this sense, a "lack of physical restraint" intertwines with mental tranquility. People like to go where they want. No one likes to know he could be physically stopped from going somewhere. Physical "freedom," then, closely relates to mental "freedom," and even happiness: You can't be happy if someone prevents you from using your body as you please. Emotional satisfaction flows from physical freedom.

I like the words "free" and "freedom" more than "liberty." I am partial to hard-hitting, German-based words over obscure, imported Latin ones. "Liberty" is a Latin refinement on "freedom." At times, "freedom" and "liberty" mean the same thing. Yet "liberty" sounds somehow more grandiose than mere "freedom." During the Enlightenment, philosophers opted for majestic "liberty" over plebeian "freedom" when discussing man's "natural rights." In the process, they transformed "liberty" into a technical term. "Liberty" was no longer a simple synonym for "freedom." No, "liberty" carried its own theoretical weight. It became shorthand for an entire economic and social value system premised upon "individual choice, conscience and enterprise." John Stuart Mill named his famous ode to free market economic choice "On Liberty," while Adam Smith based The Wealth of Nations on the fundamental assumption that man must enjoy "economic liberty." In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously asserted that man's "inalienable rights" included life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." In all these examples, "liberty" took on a meaning far beyond "lack of restraint on bodily movement." It was something more than just "going where you want when you want." It was something freighted with metaphysical assumptions.

But today I am not writing about Mill's "liberty conception" or even "economic liberty." I am writing about pure, animal "freedom:" The subjective desire to be free from direct bodily restraint. Based upon my own observations, I believe that human beings have a natural desire to be free. There is both a physical and emotional dimension to this desire. Human beings--like their mammalian forebears--relish the ability to move as they please. They feel at ease when nothing constrains their bodies. By the same token, they hate the emotion that arises when some superior power prevents them from moving their bodies as they please. Dogs and monkeys scream when caged. They become agitated and violent. They obviously do not like limitations on their freedom to move. When restrained, their behavior shows they hate it.

Human beings hate being confined, too. Unlike animals, they know when others seek to confine them. That is why they struggle to avoid capture and "maintain their freedom," even if there is no prospect for success. They know how they will feel when they lose their bodily freedom, so they resort to anything to hold onto it. Human beings anticipate the emotional pain that flows from losing freedom. That explains why doomed criminals flee in desperate attempts to remain free. Even when they have no chance to succeed, people will always try to escape, if only for a few minutes.

But how is that reasonable? If there is no chance to succeed in an endeavor, why bother attempting it? In my view, the "urge to be free from bodily restraint" trumps human reason. After all, if human beings trusted their reason in all events, they would never try to avoid inevitable capture. They would not jump over electrified fences or drive 85 miles per hour the wrong way down a one-way street if reason guided their actions. No, something else guides their actions when they feel something threatens their freedom. Human beings will resort to utterly unreasonable behavior to avoid physical restraint. The "urge to be free" transcends virtually all reasonable imperatives. It overwhelms rational calculation and leads men to engage in dangerous behavior that is almost bound to fail.

In my eyes, all this proves that human beings are not purely reasonable creatures. No matter how much we applaud our ability to triumph over nature through reason, we retain extremely unsettling instincts. Our "urge to be free from bodily restraint" illustrates the lengths to which human beings will go to maintain their ability to move their bodies as they wish. Viewed rationally, who would think that mere bodily movement could trigger such intense emotional responses? But that is exactly the point: Reason cannot account for men's violent emotional responses to certain stimuli. For better or worse, men want control over their bodies, just as chimps and dogs want to roam uncaged. And just like chimps and dogs, they rage uncontrollably when anything constrains their ability to roam.

Physical confinement touches a base nerve in our minds. That explains why human beings resort to anything to avoid it, no matter how unreasonable or ineffectual. This has nothing to do with complex coinages like "liberty." It is just a fact of nature. And we will never escape nature.

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE IS A PRECIOUS COMMODITY--AND PSYCHIATRISTS SELL IT

A REFLECTION

I know a lot of people in therapy. Pretty soon I might join them. In one way or another, everyone deals with emotional disturbance and unhappiness in our society. Life can be incredibly painful. After all, we live in a competitive world. We basically contend with two types of people: (1) Indifferent people who want to outdo us; and (2) people we love who are biologically bound to die one day. It is stressful to cope with high stakes and loss all the time. We suffer defeats, losses and setbacks every day. Freud said that it is "much easier to experience unhappiness than happiness." Civilization and its Discontents, 26 (Strachey trans. 1961). Sometimes unhappiness grinds us into submission, no matter how optimistic we try to be. In brief, life takes a toll, even if you had a relatively stable childhood. And that's a rarity.

Yet for all our vulnerability to unhappiness and emotional pain, we strive for love. See generally Civilization and its Discontents, 33-34. We think that love will counteract our unhappiness, or at least make it more bearable. But we seek a very specific kind of love: Love without conditions or qualifications. We want love without first fulfilling others' demands or acceding to others' conceptions about "what we should be." As simple as it sounds, we want people to love us "for who we are," without manipulation or expectation. Generally speaking, expectations result at least in stress and at most in unhappiness. Expectations create a disparity between our conceptions about the future and reality. When reality does not match the expectation, we feel failure or worse. "Love with expectations" results in serious emotional pain. But love without expectations--simple, unconditional love--results in emotional satisfaction, even euphoria. That is what we want from life--strongly positive emotions--because when we feel that good, nothing else can bring us down.

But this is exactly the problem. After all, it is almost impossible to find unconditional love in society. First, our entire social structure does not really value individual happiness. Rather, it merely expects objective economic productivity and "service." Those two basic goals do not require happiness. Quite the contrary, they typically induce unhappiness. Very few people are ever happy about being "objectively economically productive" for someone else, nor are they ever happy about serving some domineering economic master. Yet "success" in our society flows from "productivity" and "service." It does not matter whether a "successful man" feels happy while he productively serves. It does not affect the bottom line. Subjective, individual feelings, in other words, simply do not matter in this objective social scheme.

But what are human beings if not feeling creatures? In the final analysis, every man and woman is a unique entity with emotions and thoughts. Emotions and thoughts are entirely subjective. While they might mean nothing to society or the economy, they mean everything to the individual who thinks and feels. Unconditional love is one of the best feelings a person can experience. Society, however, could care less about it. It is not essential either to productivity or service. This is why unhappiness is so rampant, even among people who appear "successful" and "content." They may reach "objective" standards for social success, but miserably fail to satisfy their own "subjective" emotional needs. In a word, there is much more to life than success.

We should not be surprised that it is hard to find unconditional love in our society. After all, everything has conditions attached in the merciless commercial crucible of life. A condition means something that must be fulfilled before something else is given. It is "bargain-like:" "If you cut my grass, I will give you $100." It channels behavior: You don't get the $100 if you don’t cut the grass. No one does anything for anyone else in our society without imposing some condition on performance. Conditions allow people to induce behavior in others. They allow people to tyrannize and manipulate others for their own gain. This might be perfectly appropriate in cutthroat commerce. But conditions attach not just to contracts and business deals. Rather, they attach just as often to human affections.

We want unconditional love because we are accustomed to conditional love. I read an article in the New York Times last week arguing that modern psychiatry can be explained by reference to "selling unconditional love" in a society that rarely loves, and only conditionally when it does. According to the article, living with conditional love cripples us emotionally. It said that even our parents do not often love us unconditionally. Much to the contrary, they typically want to "control our behavior" by baiting us with love. The article claimed that parents could warp their children not just by scolding and criticizing them, but also by excessively praising them. Each case implicates "conditional love." Praise creates an internal urge for conformity in a child, leading him or her to modify behavior in order to win the praise. Parents only give praise when the child acts "as they wish;" that is conditional love. Without fulfilling the condition, the parent does not praise--and does not love. Praise, then, can be just as damaging as critique.

If parents do not love unconditionally, who will? That is a serious question. If our closest relatives do not love us "for who we are," can we expect commercial actors, bosses and clients to do so? Certainly not. In fact, in commerce we never expect unconditional relationships. We always know that someone wants something from us in return for what they give. As fundamental as that "bargain imperative" may be in commerce, it is anathema to our emotional needs. We might steel ourselves to conditional relationships as we move through life. But in the process we deny ourselves the one thing that might bring us happiness. We will never find unconditional love in commerce; we will never find it in our careers. We never even find it within our own families. People always want us to act in some way that benefits them, or at least matches their sentiments. It is never enough to "be who we are." To fulfill conditions, we must always "be someone else." That leads to emotional ruin in the end.

This is the psychiatrist's niche. The psychiatrist, unlike the boss, the parent, the admirer or even the sometime friend, staunchly empathizes with his patient no matter what. He listens attentively. He does not impose his own moral or family-based judgments on the patient's choices or lifestyle. He offers the love that the patient's own parents refused to give without conditions. This is modern therapy. It is a dose of unconditional love in a world without unconditional love. Perplexingly, however, it is also a commercial relationship. Therapists do not support their patients because they genuinely want to give unconditional love; they do it because they are on the clock. In this sense, they offer "unconditional love conditional upon payment," but even that is better than purely conditional love.

Unconditional love is a precious commodity. The fact that so many people turn to therapy testifies to its pricelessness in our emotional lives. No matter how much we cynically harden ourselves to commercial realities and its myriad conditions, we always must attend to our own emotional health. Unconditional love makes us feel really good. It makes us feel better than any hard-won, competitive victory. Nothing can match it because it affirms our own personality without any effort on our part. It feels good to be loved "simply for who we are" without having first performed a song and dance to placate some demanding taskmaster.

Taskmasters surround us in life. They come in many guises. Even our own spouses and parents might force us to act in unappealing ways to win their love. When it comes to love, no one wants to compete. If we compete for love, it is not really love. We want others to love us because we are who we are, not because we do things for them. But this is a hard thing to do in a world that consistently heaps us with conditions and expectations. This society does not make individual happiness a primary goal. So it leaves us to struggle--often vainly--to obtain it.

MORALITY FIRST : MALE HOMOSEXUALITY IS DISGUSTING AND MUST BE STOPPED AT ALL COSTS

By : Dr. G. Strong Wacker, M.D., M.P.H.; Commissioner, The National Board for Family Health (1998-present); Physician (Urological Reconstruction & Urethral Science); Member, The Morality First League for Equal Protection Under Law (1993-present); Theater-Goer; Amateur Florist & Gardener; Senior Coordinator, Zac Efron Fan Club (San Francisco Branch)(2006-present).

In 2004, President George W. Bush made a concerted effort to ban gay marriage. Although Congress did not amend the Constitution to forever prohibit men from marrying men, he made his point. In fact, Americans cared so much about the marriage issue that they reelected him President that very year. Put simply, Americans know that male homosexuality is morally wrong. Bush won reelection because he publicly declared that no male would ever make vows to another male.

But stopping gay marriage did not end the debate. George W. Bush may have saved the country from gay marriage, but he did not save the country from male homosexuality. We believe that we must prohibit all male homosexuality, not just homosexual marriage. It is not enough to stop two men from combining their finances to cheat the Internal Revenue Service. Nor is it enough to stop two men from exchanging rings and swearing fidelity to each other. No, we must go further. As a society, we must say what we all feel: “Male homosexuality is disgusting and must be stopped at all costs, no matter who dies.”

As a society, we have a right to stop disgusting behavior. Our deepest moral impulses empower us to outlaw disgusting things, including public defecation, slovenliness and grime. When behavior arouses our disgust, we have a right to suppress it. When behavior smells bad, we must punish it. After all, it is disgusting. It makes us pinch our noses, recoil and cry out: “Yuck!” No one deserves to live around foul odors and disgusting behaviors. Indeed, bad smells and immorality form the basis for all our criminal law. Male homosexuality, like public defecation, slovenliness, fraud and theft, is both disgusting and immoral. We just don’t like it. We must remove its stink from our midst, just as our earliest ancestors removed decaying carcasses from their settlements.

We don’t like male homosexuality for many reasons. First, the idea of two men groping and fondling each other makes us uncomfortable. It is just not right. It looks disgusting, too. If it appeals to you, there is something very, very badly wrong with you. Second, male homosexuality presents a public health hazard. Homosexuals are disease-ridden, promiscuous, dissolute, lustful infiltrators who spread pestilence and death through our communities. Third, male homosexuals defraud our society by wasting their reproductive capacity on furtive pleasures. Rather than commit themselves to fatherhood and childrearing, they abandon themselves to aesthetic preening, perverted flirtation and “fun.” This costs our community live births and future citizens. Fourth, male homosexuality harms children. Homosexuals ritually rape children every day; if we care about our children, we must act to stop the homosexual menace. Fifth, homosexuals have untold political influence. According to United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia: “[Those] who engage in homosexual conduct tend to…have high disposable income [and] they possess political power much greater than their numbers, both locally and statewide.” Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620, 645-646 (Scalia, J., dissenting).

Put simply, homosexuals are devious, dangerous, disgusting, harmful to children, insolent, irresponsible, wasteful and seditious. We must act now, before it is too late. Our children and our sensibilities demand swift action.

Tradition justifies our effort to stamp out homosexuality. Justice Scalia is a brilliant jurist. We take heart in his legal pronouncements concerning the homosexual menace. He has written at length about government’s traditional right not only to criminalize homosexuality, but also about society’s basic right to hate homosexuals as part of our “moral heritage:” “[] I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible—murder for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals—and could exhibit even ‘animus’ toward such conduct.” Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620, 644 (Scalia, J., dissenting). Justice Scalia correctly equates homosexuality with murder, polygamy and cruelty. He knows what he is talking about; he went to Harvard Law School and he has served on the United States Supreme Court since 1986. According to Justice Scalia, homosexuality is just as morally wrong as killing your neighbor or torturing a dog. As a society, we have a right to condemn such abominable outrages. We have always had a right to condemn murder, just as we have always had a right to condemn male homosexuality.

In many ways, male homosexuality is more despicable than murder. After all, some murders offend us less than others. For example, we do not condemn a man who kills his wife’s lover in a jealous rage as much as we condemn a man who carefully plots his wife’s death with equanimous efficiency. Murder does not always arouse our deepest disgust; sometimes we even look with sympathy on the killer. Male homosexuality, on the other hand, is irretrievably disgusting. Nothing mitigates anal sex between two men; it is categorically disgusting. It is so revolting that no reasonable person could ever forgive it or look upon it with sympathy. The mere idea of two naked men kissing is simply nauseating. Murder does not always arouse such deep, rancid disgust. In that light, male homosexuality deserves our strongest condemnation.

Female homosexuality, on the other hand, presents a different question. Lesbians are beautiful to behold. I feel no disgust whatsoever when I think about two naked women caressing one another. In fact, I would very much like to join in any amorous adventures between two beautiful women. Unlike male homosexuals, lesbians pose no public health hazard. They do not spread pestilence and death. They do not rape children, nor do they have unlimited resources with which to overthrow the government. They do not waste their reproductive potential; lesbians can always get pregnant at some later date.

Put simply, lesbians are neither immoral nor disgusting. On the contrary, they are beautiful, especially when they allow men like me to join them in erotic contact. I speak for every American when I say that lesbian sex is neither dangerous nor unhealthy, provided that the lesbians in question are good-looking and would allow me to join in. I would not mind looking at two hot lesbians having sex; indeed, thinking about it arouses me to some extent. There is nothing wrong with that. It is not immoral.

I am certain that Justice Scalia would agree with me about lesbians. There is nothing in our moral tradition that recoils from lesbian sex. Our moral tradition recoils from ugly penises and anuses, not appealing breasts and vaginas. Males smell. Females do not. I would not mind looking at lesbian sex. For that reason, lesbianism presents no danger to society or our children. Lesbianism is not immoral.

Only male homosexuality is immoral. It is both dangerous and unhealthy. I would not want to look at it. We have a traditional right to hate it. For these reasons, we must stand fast against male homosexuals. We must heed Justice Scalia’s advice. We must defend against their disproportionate political influence. If we relax our stance toward male homosexuals for even a moment, they will take over Congress and legalize child rape. If we relax our stance toward male homosexuals for just one moment, they could infect our entire society with venereal diseases, canker sores, rickets, scabies, herpes, cooties and parasites. If we care about morality, health and reproduction, we must sound the alarm on male homosexuality. Stopping gay marriage is not enough. That is why we, the Morality First League for Equal Protection Under Law, are committed to stopping all homosexual immorality, no matter who dies. Tradition supports us. Justice Scalia supports us. Male homosexuals are no better than murderers, polygamists and animal torturers. Plus they smell and I would not want to watch them have sex.

We cannot be tolerant when so much is at stake. It may be 2009, but male homosexuals are just as immoral and dangerous today as they were in 1500. In 1500, governments burned male homosexuals because they honestly recognized how dangerous they were. We must not allow “progressivism” to blind us to those dangers. We must merely remember that male homosexuality is disgusting. No matter how fashionable it may be to “understand” male homosexuals, we cannot forget that they engage in smelly, abominable conduct that we have a right to hate. And by “understanding” male homosexuals we play directly into their hands. As Justice Scalia pointed out, they are politically powerful. As soon as we ease the pressure on them, they will overthrow the government and institute Federal policies subsidizing child rape and debauched all-male nude beach parties. Put simply, we must stand firm against this menace. We cannot afford to be tolerant with immoral deviants, especially when—as Justice Scalia told us—they have high disposable income and disproportionate political influence.

In sum, we have a political, moral and medical duty to stamp out male homosexuality because it is disgusting. Thinking about it makes me uncomfortable and nauseous. I would probably vomit if I stumbled across two men having sex. We must implement laws that correspond to our basic moral feelings. We must outlaw male homosexuality because it arouses my disgust, just as public defecation does. Like public defecation, male homosexuality smells and presents noxious public health hazards. If we care about health, morality and our children, we must take every measure necessary to suppress male homosexuality. Tradition demands no less. Our children expect no less. We must act now before homosexual conspirators topple the government and transform the United States into a vast disco Empire led by shirtless go-go dancers.

Yet we must spare lesbians. There is nothing immoral about them. I really like to look at them. I even think about them quite a lot in my spare time.

REUNITED WITH AN OLD FRIEND : FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

A REFLECTION

I was waiting for a friend in an office two days ago. Unlike most waiting rooms, this one actually had a bookcase with some good books, not just a table stacked with magazines about celebrity sightings. I looked over the titles. I saw familiar names: Kafka, Orwell, Dostoevsky, Bronte, Tolstoy, Woolf.

When I was younger, I loved literature. I dove into books, even did not fully understand them. I really thought literature would make me a better person; I thought it was good to read books. I even took pride in it. I went to school at Columbia in New York. They force you to read “classic literature” there. It’s called the “Core Curriculum.” Many of my classmates resented the compulsion to read so much. I actually enjoyed it; I disregarded the compulsion. I read for myself. I didn’t care what my teachers said; most of them were just graduate students anyway who had to teach the course to get their own degrees. I just conversed with the authors. I even read more over the summer because I liked the themes and ideas I encountered. I wanted to develop them in my head. I didn’t turn off my brain when the school year ended.

All these old impressions came back to me as I looked at that bookcase. A comforting feeling came over me, especially when I saw the name Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky was my favorite author from my first year at Columbia. I dedicated the rest of my college days to reading just about everything he wrote. I read all his classic novels: Crime & Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Demons, The Idiot. I also read most of his short stories, like Notes from Underground, The Double and The Gambler. Taken together, these books profoundly influenced me. I even used Dostoevsky’s ideas to measure every other philosopher and writer I encountered. Not surprisingly, I liked philosophers and writers who echoed Dostoevsky, like Nietzsche, Kafka and Foucault. By contrast, I reviled philosophers and writers whose ideas stood in contrast to Dostoevsky, like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Dante and St. Augustine.

Dostoevsky was my heroic standard. But then I graduated from college and he faded from my mind. Forced to contend with commerce, I had no time to read Dostoevsky, or anyone else for that matter. My concerns simplified: Work, make money, go home, try to make more money next year. There was no need to think or to be creative. You just needed to put in time. I went to law school in an effort to boost my earning potential and finally get over the commercial hump. Of course, that didn’t happen; twentysomethings dream big but do not have life experience to know that nothing ever pans out as anticipated. True, I might know more now than I did when I was 22. I’m just knee-deep in debt for it.

During law school, I read more than I have ever read in my life. But I did not read any Dostoevsky. In fact, I read books that Dostoevsky would have detested. I read books and judicial opinions that posited “truth” and “objective standards,” two things Dostoevsky routinely criticized in his works. At the time, I did not reflect on the dissonance between the doctrines I was learning and the ideas I absorbed earlier in my life. Not until recently did I uncover that dissonance. It took heartbreak, suffering, reversal, humiliation, rediscovery and self-evaluation to recognize the foolishness in seeking “truth,” “objective standards” and “commercial success.” In short, it took life experience to bring my intellectual focus full circle. Law school doesn’t teach that. And in college, you are too young to amass it. Yet after law school, I contended with personal trauma after personal trauma. The ideas I absorbed in college started to make a lot more sense than they did before I had experience. By the same token, life experience made me deeply question the law and its orderly, well-polished claims to truth. Contrary to every statute, case and order, there really were no objective standards in life. Life was mysterious and unpredictable, not codified and discernable. No legal test could measure it or even judge it. Right and wrong were not juridical concepts; they were nebulous power judgments.

I slowly recognized that my “radical” college ideas were not so far-fetched. Satire became my stock in trade. Satire helped me reconcile my old learning with the absurdity I saw all around me. Satire helped me dethrone the law simply by referring to life. In short, satire helped me “get back to Dostoevsky.”

All these things swarmed my mind as I looked at that bookcase. I picked up a book: “Dostoevsky’s Short Works.” For the first time in almost ten years, I was opening a Dostoevsky book. I perused the contents: Notes from Underground and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. I had always wanted to read The Dream of a Ridiculous Man when I was in college. I never got around to it. I was 21 then. Now, at 31, here was my chance. I began reading. Within seconds, I was transported to another world, a familiar one.

I was ready to read Dostoevsky again. At first, I was somewhat embarrassed when I noticed how much he had influenced my own writing over the years. I recognized at once that I had unwittingly become a Dostoevsky imitator. His sentence structures and ruthlessly satirical attacks on “powerful people” obviously made a deep impression on me. His style won me over when I was young and I internalized it over many years. It has become so engrained that I can’t avoid sounding like Dostoevsky, at least in some ways. I can think of many things I have written in this blog that directly appropriate Dostoevsky’s style. For that reason, as I read The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, I eerily felt as if I was reading something I had written. After that passed, I simply felt content. I was just reading my mentor’s words. I felt as if I had been reunited with a dear friend. It was a wonderful feeling after such a long absence. On the other hand, it made me feel good to know that I had been carrying Dostoevsky’s banner on my blog all along, even if I hadn’t known it.

What is it exactly about Dostoevsky that influenced me so much? There are several key ways. For one, he is darkly satirical. He exaggerates details to mock “powerful people”—especially those with ranks and “high standing” in society. At the same time, he calls his heroes “ridiculous” when in fact they are quite noble. In The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, for instance, Dostoevsky calls the protagonist “ridiculous,” “absurd,” “a madman,” "laughable" and “reclusive.” He is poor, lives in a one-room, partitioned apartment and has hundred-year-old furniture. Everyone laughs at him. But later on, we learn that this “ridiculous man” simply wants to treat others as he would like to be treated. For that, society calls him a blathering fool. That is dark satire—this is a man who has noble sentiments. He is not really ridiculous at all; he is only “ridiculous” in the judgment of a broken society. Society is ridiculous, not the good man it calls ridiculous. Dostoevsky knows irony. His sarcastic misanthropy definitely left a solid mark on me.

Second, Dostoevsky deeply understood that “truth” is an elusive—and judgmental—concept. He was one of the first authors to dig deeply into his characters’ conscious thought patterns. His narration, too, recurrently suggests that “things are not what they seem.” He stresses subjective impression and individual reaction to sense, not objective truth. He uses phrases such as “as if,” “even,” “somehow,” “in a way” and “some kind of” when describing people, events, feelings and recollections. This creates an overall impression that there is no “truth,” but rather only fleeting impressions in the minds of those who “were there” to sense something. The Dream of a Ridiculous Man abounds with these “uncertain recollections.” In fact, the reader consciously feels that everything is dark, muddled and indeterminate. When the protagonist recounts his dream, for instance, we have no idea what “actually happened.” In short, Dostoevsky understood that “truth” is in “the eye of the beholder.” Nietzsche picked up on this, too, when he argued that “there are no facts or truths, only interpretations.” In Dostoevsky’s works, every detail is an interpretation. Dostoevsky leaves it to the reader to put the pieces together—and that, too, is an “interpretation.”

Finally, Dostoevsky always tempered his sarcasm and satire with hope. This, too, influenced my writing. In The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, for example, the protagonist—who once gave up on life because “nothing mattered to him anymore”—ultimately declares: “I will not and cannot believe that evil is the natural condition of people.” He goes on to say: “’Knowledge is higher than feelings…[t]he consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness’—that is what must be fought!” The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (Pevear/Volokhonsky trans., Bantam 2008) at pp. 338, 342. In short, Dostoevsky takes a stand against “juridical, rule-based” approaches to existence. “Feelings” are better than “knowledge,” and “happiness” is better than “the rules of happiness” because “feelings” and “happiness” intuitively flow from within the individual. By contrast, “knowledge” and “rules” must be “learned according to an extrinsic system.” They are “objective standards.” Yet the protagonist is “ridiculous” for making these discoveries. He is “ridiculous” for daring to oppose “the rules of happiness” and deciding simply to be happy. This is the ultimate satire: It is “ridiculous” to be happy and to savor individual intuitions.

These last ideas struck a familiar chord with me. They seem to mirror my entire opposition to juridical thinking and the objective standards that the law attempts to foist on human beings. How true that we live our lives attempting to mold our behavior to “the rules of happiness” rather than allowing ourselves to simply feel happiness in our own way. Rather than “feeling,” we seek always to “know” some extrinsic rule. In so doing, we forget our own emotions and subject ourselves to an “objective standard.” Someone else laid down the “rules of happiness;” we struggle to learn them. When we fail to reach them, we feel bad. In conforming to those rules, we steadily lose our capacity to form our own impressions about happiness. That is tragic.

Yet Dostoevsky’s message is not entirely pessimistic. After all, the “ridiculous man” does not mind being called “ridiculous.” He resolves to fight the “rules of happiness.” In essence, Dostoevsky holds out hope for those strong enough to fight against objective thinking. He offers support to all the “ridiculous people” who think and feel for themselves in a world that discourages individual approaches to happiness and meaning.

That is a beautiful message. After all, I am a “ridiculous man,” too. I actually consider it a compliment, not an insult. Ridiculous people survive though the ages, not those who merely follow the “rules of happiness.” In fact, ridiculous people might even find their own happiness somewhere along life’s way. The important thing is not to mind being labeled ridiculous. Ridiculous people are special, even if they are not “successful.” Dostoevsky knew that, and that’s one big reason he influenced me so much.

THE LAW IS NOT AS HONEST AS YOU MIGHT THINK : LEGAL FICTIONS AND INTENT

AN ESSAY

I always knew that the law was imperfect. Even before law school, I harbored skepticism for legal process. Intuitively, I knew that human law did not aim for justice; rather, it aimed merely to provide order and to confound its listeners. Yesterday, I used satire to illustrate the law’s capacity to confound. Franz Kafka routinely alluded to the law’s obscurity in his short stories and novels, including The Trial, The Metamorphosis, Before the Law and In The Penal Colony. In fact, “legal characters” in those stories—whether executioners, judges or lawyers—speak an elusive language that their listeners can barely grasp. In the Penal Colony story, an executioner speaks only in French, while the condemned man stands there utterly oblivious to his impending doom.

When Kafka’s characters hear legal discourse, they fall into confusion. They know their lives and fortunes are at stake, yet they cannot figure out what the lawyers are talking about. It is oddly similar to the way Old Testament characters feel when attempting to figure out God’s plans. See, e.g., Job. For both Kafka and the Talmud, there is some knowledge inaccessible to the human mind. In Kafka’s world, the law represents “inaccessible knowledge.” It operates on a higher plane, somewhere beyond human understanding. It is powerful. It holds its subjects in its grasp. Yet it is incomprehensible, just like God’s will.

But the law is not God. It is a human invention. True, it confounds. It is hard to understand; in many cases it is maddeningly counterintuitive. Yet it can be understood. And in my experience, the more I understand the law, the more I see that it proceeds on hypocritical premises. It really has no abstract claim on right or justice, yet it aims to convince people that it does. With its perplexing rules, arcane exceptions and double-speaking rhetoric, the law ensures orderly property transfers and criminal punishment for “undesirable behavior.” These things do not come from God; they are men’s concerns. They affect men’s bodies and possessions. Most legal subject matter is not ethereal or majestic. Quite the contrary, it is yawningly banal.

It is not even completely honest. When I studied law, I marveled when I encountered situations in which the law simply “makes things up” to arrive at particular results. The law professes respect for “truth” and the “way things actually happen.” Yet in both practice and theory, the law sacrifices these things for administrative convenience. Judges call these embarrassing shortcuts “legal fictions.” They allow the law to segue effortlessly between practical reality and an artificial legal overlay. After all, legal results are not the same as actual results. It is one thing to say John killed Bill; that is “practical reality.” But it is something else entirely to say that John murdered Bill. Murder is a legal conclusion. It may or may not reflect “actual reality.” Instead, only a judge or jury—viewing the facts long after they happened—can decide whether to make the conclusion: “This is murder.” Murder does not really exist; rather, it is merely a judgment applied to past actions after the event. And the law manufactures fictions to help these post hoc judgments along, whether or not they conform with “actual reality.”

Intent is essential to many legal judgments. In criminal law, the word “intent” appears in virtually every case. Why? Simple: Because crimes are essentially written recipes. Legislatures concoct “crime recipes” that define behavior that they do not like. They then compile all their “recipes” in a book called the “criminal code” and let the Judiciary determine whether particular human behavior fits the “recipes” they wrote down. For example, the legislature may define the “murder recipe” as follows: “Murder is the intentional killing of one human being by another.” What is the recipe, then? Well, you need several ingredients. First, you need two people: one killer and one victim. The killer has to do something, namely, kill the victim somehow. The victim has to die as a result of the killer’s action. More importantly, at the time the killer kills, he must intend to kill the victim. That is a “mental requirement.”

This all sounds simple. But how does a “factfinder” decide—long after the event—whether a particular person “intended” to kill another? After all, intent is internal. We never know what other people “intend” at particular moments. That is a great mystery in life. Even if a person says what he wants to do, he might actually want something else. Lying aside, intent means a person’s subjective preconception concerning the future results of his conduct. Intent refers to what the individual thinks or expects will happen when he acts a certain way. Intent refers to expected results. In short, it is exquisitely individual; and it is virtually impossible to prove. When someone gets killed, for example, the killer may have expected something quite different than the other person’s death. He might have only intended to run a stoplight, or even just play a joke that went horribly wrong. He may have intended only to hurt the other person. Whatever his “expectation” may have been, it certainly was not to extinguish the victim’s life.

But this does not suit the law. After all, an orderly society cannot tolerate killings, nor can an orderly society cannot allow killers to merely say they “didn’t mean it” to escape the law’s wrath. Still, how does the law get around the philosophical difficulty surrounding intent? If the murder recipe requires intent, it must mean the law must prove the killer actually expected to kill the victim through his action, right?

No. In these circumstances, the law resorts to legal fictions. It does not have to prove actual intent. It must only prove legal intent. Legal intent means “intent sufficient to meet the technical definition of ‘intent’ in the murder recipe.” At common law, English courts called this “legal intent” “malice aforethought.” They could have called it anything, really. They could have called it “malice on Wednesday” and apply it every day. The name is irrelevant. But from a practical standpoint, it allowed the law to prove “intent” without proving what actually existed in the killer’s mind. How did it do this? It merely decided for itself what “malice aforethought” means. The law said it could mean “intentionally killing,” “killing with an ‘abandoned and malignant heart,’” “killing as a result of a felony” or “killing with premeditation.” It did not matter whether the killer actually expected these results to follow. It was solely the court’s decision whether to shoehorn his behavior into one of its pre-made categories.

Philosophically speaking, this is pure fantasy. Consider especially the “killing as a result of a felony” category. Under this fiction, the law declares people “murderers” who cause death by participating in a felony of any kind. This means that a robber becomes a “murderer” if the robbery gives the victim a heart attack. The law says: “The felony resulted in the victim’s death. That means the robber had malice aforethought. A man who causes death with malice aforethought fits the ‘murder’ recipe. Thus, the man is a murderer.” This is so even if the man—as a philosophical matter, did not expect to kill anyone by his conduct. He may even have intended something totally different. The law takes this fiction to absurd lengths. Courts have found men guilty of murder who sat in a getaway car while their accomplices robbed a store in which someone died. According to the law’s logical gymnastics, the getaway driver “participated” in the felony, and that “participation” resulted—however remotely—to the death in the store. His “actual intent” means absolutely nothing in this warped analysis. If it did, the law would never convict anyone. Intent is “too difficult” as a philosophical matter. So it settles for fictions and administrative convenience, smug in its belief that no one can really challenge its authority.

In my view, this is pure dishonesty. It does matter whether someone actually intended to cause harm in a murder prosecution. When the law labels someone a “murderer,” it affixes a crippling moral badge. As a society, we condemn people who make “harmful decisions” calculated to injure others. We condemn them more if they actually want to end another person’s life, then do it. In this traditional sense, “murderers” are people who truly want to kill their victims and carry out their desire with violent action. They deserve condemnation because they had bad intentions and acted upon them. Yet we do not as forcefully condemn criminals who do not actually kill their victims, like the getaway car driver or even the robber who had no intent to kill anyone. When the law foists “intent to kill” on these people—even when they actually intended something completely different—the law commits dishonesty. It is no excuse to say that it is “too difficult” to prove what exists in another man’s mind. It is possible to prove what a man intended using circumstantial evidence, even if he insists he intended something else. Neutral witnesses can say they saw the defendant screaming at the victim and waving a broken beer bottle at him before slashing his throat. That proves intent to kill even if the defendant says otherwise. But proving a man intended only to drive a getaway car from a robbery does not make him a “murderer.” It is facetious to say otherwise.

In short, legal fictions make the law look ridiculous. And when the law is verifiably ridiculous in one area, it loses credibility in others. Nonetheless, many scholars—and many jurists—see no problem with legal fictions. After all, according to these apologists, how else are we supposed to prosecute criminals for antisocial behavior? The apologists argue that society has a right to prosecute harmful and dangerous conduct, even if the defendant did not really intend to hurt anyone. They say: “If we had to actually prove intent, these bad men would walk the streets.” But what good does it do to prosecute people using philosophically false concepts? No one likes antisocial behavior and violence, but it is pure sophistry to argue that a getaway driver “intended” to kill someone in a store when all he really wanted to do was drive a car away from the store. From both a grammatical and logical standpoint, the getaway driver did not “intend” to kill anyone. Yet the law says he did. Is this not madness? Still, very few people question this result, because no one wants to defend a criminal. This is unfortunate, if for no other reason than the law—which should aspire to something higher than mere administrative convenience—shamelessly cuts logical corners for shortsighted results. In my view, this tarnishes the law’s reputation because it shows its willingness to bend the truth for convenience.

Law cannot take the moral high ground if it cuts corners. It cannot simultaneously insist on truth and justice while resorting to absurd logical gymnastics to manufacture convictions. I reject the argument that getaway drivers can be transformed into “murderers” because the “murder definition” is “traditional.” We should not follow bad rules because previous generations were too stupid or too cowardly to revise them. Tradition does not magically transform every practice into a indispensable fixture in our lives. Put simply, traditional “murder definitions” are just silly. Convicting people under these definitions cuts against reality. When the law does this, it darkens its own name. The law should stand for logic, consistency and conscientious adherence to genuine evidence, not perplexing rules that yield counterintuitive results. People want the law to be good. But it cannot really be good if it brands getaway drivers “murderers” as readily as it does serial killers. In a word, when legal fictions obscure practical reality, there is no reason why the public should respect the law. It is just being dishonest with us. And dishonesty does not deserve respect.