Wednesday IBR Recap

[daddytodd]

A dozen early IBR arrivals wound up eating at a Chinese place a couple blocks from the hotel last night; Carousel Gourmet, I believe it was called. It was cheap, and not bad. Oh, and did I mention it was cheap?

Sat in the lobby before dinner and talked at length with Stevo Harris of "A Bear's Life" magazine. He told me about his interview with Andrew Sullivan, which will be in the next issue (out in a couple weeks.) He said Sullivan was genuinely contrite about having carried water for the Bush Regime, and honestly sorry... that Sullivan became quite emotional talking about it. I asked if Sullivan seemed sincere, or if he was just doing bullshit damage control to salvage a wrecked reputation with the LGBT community. Stevo believes Sullivan to be sincere in his regrets. I'm not yet convinced; I'd need to ask Andrew my own set of questions before I believed his repentance, but I did start to get a sense of Sullivan as a man, and not as PURE EVIL, which is, quite frankly, how I have perceived him since 1999 or so, when I first became aware of him.

So I said to Stevo, "Please, don't  humanize Andrew Sullivan! I don't want my villains humanized. I don't want to know that Hannibal Lecter is just a misunderstood little boy, or that Darth Vader was an adorable moppet!" But alas, I fear I might have to approach Sullivan as a flawed (deeply flawed, from my perspective) human being, and not as the essence of quisling backstabber, willing to sacrifice his LGBT brothers and sisters for a tiny shred of political glory and financial gain.

Hmmm, not sure I'm ready to abandon that last bit. It's gonna take some time before I can see Andrew Sullivan as anything but  "a deeply flawed, though human, quisling backstabber willing to sacrifice his LGBT brothers and sisters for a tiny shred of political glory and financial gain." Yeah, that works!

I hadn't intended to talk so much about politics.

So, after dinner, we went over to the Lone Star for a couple hours. It was slow at first, but got busier by 11pm or so. John was having a great time, getting all kinds of attention from handsome daddies and bears. Yay John!

Comments

[that-dang-otter.livejournal.com]

Your post was not casual; you are actually thinking about the issue rather than reacting or getting on a bandwagon. I would be pleased if others were as deliberate and thoughtful.

I thought about what you wrote for a while, and I guess what doesn't work for me is the very notion of evil itself. The category simply makes no sense to me, viscerally or intellectually. I see politics as an ecosystem, full of pathologies that are unremarkable simply because they are so common.

I also don't think that Sullivan has done anything "blindly". He made the deliberate decision that the policies Bush promised in '00 were more important than his tactical games with the gay community. And that deliberateness, perhaps, is what made it so galling to so many gay people. I've developed enough of an understanding of gay Republicans that this does not particularly alarm me; although this particular choice turned out especially badly, I can't call the principles behind it inherently wrong.

There was a definitely time when I felt differently, and you have me wondering what has changed. I suppose that with homophobia facing a demographic dead-end, the Xtian right on the edge of self-destruction, and greater self-assurance and personal comfort with the homophobes themselves, it's a lot easier to ignore the Republican duplicity on this issue.

[daddytodd.livejournal.com]

"I suppose that with homophobia facing a demographic dead-end..."

Come to Utah if you would care to be disabused of this notion post-haste. That's not the reality of "Flyover Country."

[daddytodd.livejournal.com]

So, you believe that Sullivan KNEW that the rationale for war in Iraq was completely false? Or that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfield would do an appallingly inept job prosecuting the war?

That's the "blindness" that I'm referring to; the willful acceptance of clearly fraudulent evidence of Saddams's WMDs (or whatever the rationale du jour) and Bush/Cheney competence in order to get the war underway.

The alternative -- that Sullivan KNEW it was all cooked evidence, but went along with it for political expedience -- paints a far worse portrait of Sullivan's depravity than even I care to ascribe to him.

[that-dang-otter.livejournal.com]

I think that Sullivan had reservations about the war but genuinely believed that it was a good idea based on what he thought was reasonable evidence. Colin Powell's presentation to the UN had a lot of credibility at the time.

I remember it like yesterday, and had a serious discussion with my partner about what he said. My gut reaction was, Powell is a reasonable guy and if he's laying it out like that, it's probably true. It took about a week for the "but wait a minute..." thoughts to become more apparent. Sullivan had a much closer view, but from what I think I understand of this administration, I can't call that mistake the result of blindness.

I was myself an agnostic. I found the arguments in favor of war significant, but not compelling enough to cast a vote in support of it. If Sullivan was 70% in favor of the war, I was only 35% in favor. But I can easily imagine where an extra 35% might have come from.

I also wonder if my attitude towards him is affected by having never seen him on television.