Pierre Tristam: Bush Beds Down with Iran/Candide's Notebooks

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L'Infame
Bush Administration Beds Down with Iran
Pierre Tristam/Candide's Notebooks, Jan. 28, 2006

Two Iranian gay teenagers, one 18 the other 16 or 17, were hanged a few months ago in the city of Mashhad in northeast Iran, for engaging in homosexual acts. They had a choice, of course. The compassionate and merciful Iranian law gives gay offenders the choice of “being hanged, stoned, halved by a sword, or dropped from the highest perch.” The equally compassionate and merciful law, incidentally, spares gays of the death penalty for engaging in penis-rubbing between the thighs. Death is reserved for non-Muslim offenders.

So it was to be expected that Iran would introduce a measure at the United Nations denying two gay rights groups the right, like 3,000 other non-governmental agencies, to have their voice heard at the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council. Cuba, Sudan, Senegal, Pakistan, China and Zimbabwe, where gay-bashing is also sport, supported Iran. No surprise there, either.

A bit more surprising (but only a little bit so) was the United States bedding with Iran and that murderers’ row of medievally slouching nations, and rubbing its pandering tumescence between the thighs of the religious right. A few years ago it would have been an outrage: The United States, siding with a tyrannous régime in support of a regressive act that crushes the human rights of others. But it is now routine. The Bush Administration can no more stand for human rights than the regimes of Central Asian republics, where merely uttering the words inspires official suspicion.

Still, it’s one thing not to be surprised by the administration’s neo-barbarism anymore. We get examples of it virtually every day. It’s quite another to react to it with barely a shrug, or its media equivalent: a ten-second mention on the news, a 330-word brief in just one of the national newspapers. Has the American conscience been corroded that deeply by the Bush years? The question answers itself for needing to be asked. The Bush Administration is being its consistently contemptible self. But America, so easily acceding to the contemptible? This is new, and worrisome, and contemptible.

THE DAILY JOURNAL

VANPOEM

As One Put Naked Into a Cigarette Boat

Continue chiding, since it's part of the new aesthetic,
and parcel to our coming home, as if
we'd disappeared into the burning bush
that calls to those who sit vacantly in parlors
awaiting a fate freighted with song and dance.
I stroll while staring and raging
with difficulty at the stubborn sky.

On my honor I step a little distance
from behind the curtain, only to disappear
the moment no birds sing, which occurs frequently.
Leaves dustier than furniture, the sound
of sleeping grating through the cosmos,
my footstool, my only talisman.
It's been real, arguing on your behalf.
Gray cobweb shadow, falling, floundering,
finding a place to not be shy and think
boldly about the oldness of beauty, a place
to rest its weary insubstantial head.

It may be that I stand on the threshold
of the checkout line, unsure of what
to be impulsive about, which momentous emptiness
to spontaneously identify my alienation with,
what kind of languor to slide into

before being reduced to grubbing for credentials,
locked in that tumid late-afternoon skin,
effervescing in its sea of dreams.
And all the things hearkening back to it,
the boat ride to breaker beach
there at the end of one world
where it paid to rage at the stammering waves
that kicked and screamed solely for my benefit,
staged objections to the inexorable fact of me.

Look: I've installed a turnstile in my kitchen,
so your picture-postcard of desolation has no power over me.
In this doggy-dog world land is made motionless
and the broads are standing on the wharves
with some of that sipping whisky on those silver trays,
which we'd be a bear to pass up. You speak
of the old gods who've washed up on shore,
but I don't see them, don't hear their hue and cry,
though their maze awaits us, will amaze us.
Here, let me get this little rock out of my damn shoe.
Then we can talk about paddling off to parts unknown.

—Van Foreman