Vernal Equinox

Fifth Anniversary of the American Invasion of Iraq

I always gravitate toward Code Pink, some of whom had come directly from having been arrested for blocking Senator Dianne Feinstein's office with a Die-In...

EASTER LADY on West Portal Avenue

I am always intrigued by the fantasy window displays of Alexander Collections, 309 West Portal Avenue, San Francisco.
When I saw this one, the light was such that reflections made it impossible to photograph through the front window...


Of course, click on the photo if you want to see the elaborate clothes more easily....

Richard Rorty Speaks

In the introduction to THE FUTURE OF RELIGION, editor Santiago Zabala, seeming to draw on Rorty ideas, writes: "Accepting the constitutively divided, unstable, and plural condition that belongs to our own Being, destined to difference, to impermanency, and to multiplicity, means being able to actively practice solidarity, charity, and irony. ...

" ... The man who withdraws his attention from the supernatural world and concentrates on this world and this time ('saeculum' means also 'this present time') exerts himself to realize the ideals of pluralism and tolerance and to prevent any particular vision of the world from imposing itself by means of the authority attributed to it."

In THE FUTURE OF RELIGION, Richard Rorty says:

"Ecclesiastical institutions, despite all the good they do -- despite all the comfort they provide to those in need or in despair -- are dangerous to the health of democratic societies. Whereas the philosophers who claim that atheism, unlike theism, is backed up by evidence would say that religious belief is irrational, contemporary secularists like myself are content to say that it is politically dangerous. On our view, religion is unobjectionable as long as it is privatized -- as long as ecclesiastical institutions do not attempt to rally the faithful behind political proposals and as long as believers and unbelievers agree to follow a policy of live and let live."


"My sense of the holy, insofar as I have one, is bounded up with the hope that someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law. In such a society, communication would be domination-free, class and caste would be unknown, hierarchy would be a matter of temporary pragmatic convenience, and power would be entirely at the disposal of the free agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate."


"Cutting oneself off from the metaphysical Logos is pretty much the same thing as ceasing to look for power and instead being content with charity. The gradual movement within Christiantiy in recent centuries in the direction of the social ideals of the Enlightenment is a sign of the gradual weakening of the worship of God as power and its gradual replacement with the worship of God as love. ... I think that if the churches gave up the attempt to dictate sexual behavior they would lose a lot of their reason for existing. What keeps them around is this deep, Freudianly explainable desire for purity, ritual purity. There is something deep to appeal to there, and the churches are good at doing so. But once Christiantiy is reduced to the claim that love is the only law, the ideal of purity loses its importance."

"It seems to me that the idea of a dialogue with Islam is pointless. There was no dialogue between the philosophes and the Vatican in the eighteenth century, and there is not going to be one between the mullahs of the Islamic world and the democratic West. The Vatican in the eighteenth century had its own best interests in mind, and the mullahs have theirs. They no more want to be displaced from their positions of power than the Catholic hierarchy did (or does). With luck, the educated middle class of the Islamic countries will bring about an Islamic Enlightenment, but this enlightenmenet will not have anything much to do with a 'dialogue with Islam.'"

"I'm very pessimistic about the political future because I think that democracy only works if you spread the wealth around -- if you eliminate the gap between the rich and the poor.
This has actually been happening in certain small Northern European countries like Holland and Norway. It happened to a limited extent in the United States during the fifties and sixties. But everything changed in the United States around 1973, with the first oil crisis. Since then we have become a more divided and a more selfish country."
"I do not have any faith either in socialism or in capitalism. It seems to me that in the industrialized countries capitalism only became tolerable when the state's intervention created the welfare state and thereby brought the capitalists, to some extent, under democratic control. What we are seeing now is that, in the absence of a world government -- in the absence of a global authority that could put global capitalism in the service of democracy -- all the worst features of capitalism are reemerging. ...


" ... We should have had economic globalization until we had a bureaucratic structure to regulate global capitalism, in the way that some countries have been able to regulate it within their own borders. We have unfortunately been overtaken by events. I cannot attach any meaning to socialism anymore. I used to think I was a socialist, but now I do not know what a socialist economy would be like."

Aspects of Magnolia

The Elephant Welcomes the Year of the Rat

When my god-daughter drew this when she was very small, her mother must have prompted the inclusion of a rodent. With its ability to gnaw, the rat is a good colleague for the Remover of Obstacles, the gentle elephant-headed god Ganesh (Ganesha).

Birds

Parrots at the Ferry Building, San Francisco






The Greater Scaup




The American White Pelican

Harvey Milk Memorial, Washington, D.C.

I guess there were suggestions that a memorial to Harvey Milk be built in Washington, D.C. I don't know if anything has come of that. Yet my friend Robert Minichiello came up with plans for one that I have just uncovered -- as I will probably be uncovering things by him for years...


As it reads on the plans: "Exterior Frieze of Metal Letters: FRIEND, I AM NEITHER MAN NOR WOMAN, I AM LOVE THAT IS MORE THAN WORDS." - Paul Claudel, 2nd Ode.




"...an open-air pavilion from which both nature and history can be contemplated..."



"The columns made of green-colored stone such as granite or serpentine marble, sitting on a floor of polished blue-black granite, and supporting a frieze and cap of bronze, structured steel pipe and ring-beam, and a reinforced concrete foundation..."



"An Interior Frieze of Bronze Panels: Six Scenes from a History of the Struggle for Individual Rights," depicting (1) Rosa Parks Rides in the Front of the Bus; (2) 1965 Voting Rights Act Signed; (3) Martin Luther King and the Washington D.C. Rally: We Shall Overcome; (4) Harvey Milk Elected First Gay Supervisor; (5) Dianne Feinstein Tells Press of Double Murders; (6) Gay and Lesbian Freedom Day, Autumn 1987, Washington.

The Tragedy of Lawrence King

Perhaps you have heard of Lawrence King, shot at age 15 by a classmate at their junior high school in Oxnard, California. A vigil was held here, and there is a memorial for him in the LGBT Center where people may record their response to his death.


King took his seat on the morning of 12 February in the computer lab of his Junior High. "Two gunshots were fired into the back of his head, ending his life. He was kept on life support in order to have his organs donated..."


"King," living at a center for abused and neglected children, was "self-identifed as gay and sometimes wore make-up and feminine jewelry to school." While he was subjected to bullying and ridicule, the school did nothing to protect his rights. He was shot by 14-year-old Brandon McInerney.
29 February: Since making this entry, I have learned, from an impassioned plea Ellen DeGeneris made on her show, that Larry was killed because he had asked Brandon to be his valentine (I suppose it was one of this printed cards: Will You Be My Valentine?)

How great to live in progressive Oakland