We watched a lot of the convention speeches last night, after spending most of dinner talking about politics. The Dad Index isn't particularly useful for monitoring politics, since I think my father derives great joy from being contrarian and disrespecting everyone in the national political scene. The Dad Index is always down on everything. The dinner conversation, though, allows us to take pre-speech and post-speech Index readings.

On Democrats in General. This one wasn't affected by the convention itself. Both before and after watching convention coverage, my mother claimed to like Democrats in general, and expressed some fondness for both Bill and Hillary Clinton. I think this shows just how successful the rehabilitation of the Clinton public image has been; just a few short years ago my mother was calling the one of them a scumbag and the other evil.

On Ted Kennedy. Pre-speech: the Mom Index rates Teddy quite favorably. If he did horrible and stupid things when he was younger (cf. Chappaquiddick), she said, it's heartless to hold him accountable for them in light of the fact that he lost both of his brothers so young. He's had a hard life. Post-speech: "Susan, honey, you don't think he was drunk, do you?"

On Barak Obama. Pre-speech: "Isn't he an Arab? He's Egyptian, right?" A quick primer on his background didn't help all that much, but a short bio piece on the local PBS station built some sympathy for the skinny kid from the South Side, on the basis of his having lost his father so young. Post-speech: In what I consider the greatest tragedy of the evening, my mother missed Obama's speech on account of having fallen asleep while Howard Dean was talking.

On Teresa Heinz Kerry. Pre-speech: My mother was horrified by the whole "shove it" business, declaring Teresa rude and unlikeable. Post-speech: My mother roused from her Dean-induced slumber while Teresa was speaking in tongues and excused herself from the room to get some water. She came back in time to hear the great spin about opinionated women speaking their minds; I thought that was a nice bit of work, myself, turning the press flap in to a positive, and it played well on the Mom Index. "Good for her, you tell them" was the final verdict on the potential First Lady's speech.

In Summary: While my mother found it baffling (if cute) that I ended the evening by proclaiming that the Democrats were restoring my faith in the machinery of politics by finally getting off their asses and promoting a positive message, she did agree that it was a good showing overall.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

It's about freedom. Everything else -- security, "traditional values," our standing in the wider world -- is secondary, mere means to an end. We lose sight of America if we lose sight of that.

Most of the teaching I've done has been in the history of science, where this is a particularly difficult task. It's easy to say that the ancient Greeks were stupid for thinking that the stars were mounted in celestial spheres, or to say that Descartes was stupid for thinking the soul was a substance located in the pineal gland, or to say that the Catholic Church was stupid for not believing Galileo. It's easy, but it's pointless and it doesn't teach you anything interesting. What's much harder and much more meaningful is understanding why the Greeks and Descartes and the Church officials had good reason to believe they were right.

I say this is particularly difficult in the history of science classes, but it's not like it's easy in the other history classes. You don't learn anything from saying that the Supreme Court justices who decided Dred Scott or Plessy v Ferguson were stupid and racist. The more important lesson is understanding why the best and brightest legal minds of their times were convinced that those decisions were right. Your baseline assumption always has to be that people do things because they believe the things they are doing are correct.

One consequence with looking at things this way, of course, is that you start to disengage from agreeing or disagreeing. I disagree absolutely and on basic principle with the people who were opposed to women's suffrage, but that doesn't excuse me from having to understand why they thought letting women vote would damage the basic order of society.

Another consequence, at least for me, has been that this baseline assumption follows me out of history and in to the present day. When government officials take actions that look stupid or malicious, my feeling that they're stupid and wrong has to run in parallel with my attempt to understand why it makes sense to them, and why they think they're doing the right thing. It's at best an uneasy and uncomfortable place to be, inside my head.

Here's about what happened: first there was Eleanor Arnason. At WisCon, Eleanor was one of the guests of honor, and she gave a big polemical speech at the guest-of-honor ceremony, all anger and radical politics, and it made me realize that I've kind of disengaged from the big picture. There's a lot of big-picture going on out in the world, after all. I have a lot of conversations but they're all kind of abstracted, even when they deal with topics I used to care passionately about.

What happened next was that I spent a couple of days re-reading some of Marge Piercy's writing, while working on an editorial for Strange Horizons. Marge Piercy worked her way in to my heart through her fiction and her poetry, but she writes (and interviews) very eloquently on topics of politics and radicalism, and reading the essays and interviews in Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt had the same effect on me that the Arnason speech did. Which is to say, it felt a little like waking up and wondering when I got so complacent.

The last step was having an argument with someone in which I was told that the only reason I care about civilized political discourse is that I'm a political moderate. That threw me, because the person I was arguing with was someone who I've talked politics with before, and she knew damn well that my politics aren't moderate. Or, perhaps more accurately, she should have known. But that's where you start to wonder, isn't it? Have I actually lost track of the issues I care about? I don't think I have, but it's hard to tell.

So it's hard, in all of that self-doubt, to talk about anything at all. Bear with me.

Unfortunately, we lived in a small, ethnically homogeneous town in southwestern Virginia, and in second grade there were three of us in Ms Branchaud's class who could concievably be considered "diversity." On our annual Culture Awareness Day, the three of us would be trotted up to the front of the class for a special show-and-tell, during which we would show off some cultural artifact demonstrating how we enrich the fabric of American society with our weird foreign ways. On this day, Benjamin (Jewish) wore a yarmulke to class. Kanaka (Indian) brought a small figurine of the Hindu god Ganesh. And I wore an elegant Korean hanbok, an elaborately embroidered silk garment that had been passed down through generations of my family to me.

Or, to put it in second-grade language: there was the guy with a frisbee on his head, the girl who prayed to elephants, and the boy in girl clothes. Needless to say, we got beaten up almost as soon as recess started.

I want to point out, this wasn't anything having to do with racism. It's just the nature of second-graders to mock and torment kids who exhibit any difference at all. The first kid in our class to start wearing glasses, for example, got into fights every day for weeks, until Bruce broke his arm playing touch football and we all got distracted by the cast. But I think this illustrates, on small scale, why the rhetoric of political correctness is failing ethnic minorities in America.

Politicians will often make grand, sweeping speeches about the virtue of "diversity". The ethnic and cultural diversity of America, they will argue, adds vitality to American culture by offering fresh opinions and new points of view.

Hogwash. Diversity, as far as it goes, isn't a virtue at all. It's already an undeniable fact of life for residents of almost all American cities that this country is no longer a white, Christian, Anglo nation, if it ever was. "Diversity" takes no work. Moreover, race riots, like the one that gutted Los Angeles' Koreatown in 1992, are still possible even in the most ethnically diverse of American cities.

"Tolerance", I suppose, is a bit better. "Tolerance" at least moves us away from outright violence between minority groups. But mere tolerance is still not the same thing as acceptance. Consider the recent history of the gay culture in America. Will and Grace has been a hit sitcom since 1998. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was the cultural phenomenon of the year last year. Ellen Degeneres' eponymous talk show has already won four Emmys in its first season on the air. Tolerance of gay culture -- or at least, of depictions of gay people in the mass media -- is at an all-time high.

But as soon as homosexual couples start demanding the right to have their relationships recognized by the law in the same manner as their heterosexual counterparts, states start passing laws defending the institution of marriage from being sullied by this queer taint. The apparent "tolerance" of gays in America is still, at best, a superficial, begrudging acknowledgment of our existence. Former blogger noahlogue went further and once referred to Queer Eye as a kind of gay minstrel show -- straight culture's ironic and patronizing appropriation of those aspects of gay culture it finds humorous or useful.

I’d like to suggest that we stop thinking about diversity and tolerance as if they are ends in themselves. If American society values diversity at all (and democracy inherently should), it has to be in the context of an active, engaged pluralism in which individual cultures interact substantively with one another while preserving their own unique and valuable aspects. I would argue that the cultivation of this intercultural dialogue should be the real ultimate goal of all identity politics.

Now you see where I’m going with this.

Diversity isn’t a goal; it’s an undeniable fact of life in modern America. But multiculturalism without intercultural understanding is dangerous, as different cultures have different and often incompatible values and interests. Recent history provides any number of examples of multicultural nations where internecine tensions remain unaddressed and eventually turn into ethnic violence. And the problem with tolerance alone without a commitment to dialogue is that it doesn’t provide a way for groups in conflict to cultivate a truly pluralistic common society.

Political values, like all social values, are culturally contingent, and insofar as American society can be thought to consist of competing “red” and “blue” political cultures, I would argue that American political discourse between liberals and conservatives demands the same kind of active engagement that the interaction of any cultures in conflict do.

What’s most upsetting about the vitrolic tenor of American political discourse, for me, is how much it sounds like the rhetoric of ethnic conflict. Both liberals and conservatives accuse one another of being immoral, leading to a contemptuous sort of superiority complex. For pundits like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Roger Moore, and increasingly the webloggers who attempt to emulate them, political discourse is all about belittling their interlocutors and suggesting that their opponents are not only less ethical and less rational than they are themselves, but also somehow less human.

The internet has this amazing unrealized potential to become just the sort of meeting space where pluralism can flourish. Getting to know how The Other Side thinks about an issue could be as easy as hopping over to a conservative chat room or reading through any of the now countless gay blogs on the net. And message boards, to me, seem like they could be the perfect place for people from different backrounds and different political cultures to interact.

But as it stands now, the internet may only be helping to exacerbate the problem, because it's so easy for me to limit my reading to only those blogs that I already agree with. Why should I have an open mind, I might think, since there are all these people who already agree with me?

So while we here at specialagency have been a little obsessed with how the political discourse in America is broken, I'd like to suggest that the problem is really much deeper. People naturally just aren't good at dealing with people who are different from themselves, and the ability to be open-minded when confronted with difference is something that has to be learned. The impulse that drives us to be intolerant -- whether this manifests as racism, homophobia, sexism, religious intolerance, or poisonous political rhetoric -- is always the same, and, unfortunately, all too human.

Wiley has been a fixture on Page 2 for as long as there's been a Page 2. Last night, while watching the start of Game 4 of the NBA Finals, something hit. He succumbed to heart failure a short while later.

R-Dub could write. Check him out.

There's a collection of thoughts here from people who actually knew him. Bill Simmons got to me. Just a few weeks ago he and Ralph spent the day e-mailing back and forth about the NBA Playoffs. Good times. More recently they teamed up for a live chat, after Larry Bird's recent remarks. Those two were just getting good for each other. When Simmons wrote about the Simpson trial at the end of last week, he was himself. Mostly. There's a depth in that piece, almost buried, that you don't usually get from the Sports Guy. I thought then that this thing with Wiley was working well. It's a shame.

Thanks for the words, Ralph.

The book presents evidence that voters in red and blue America are not far apart. Majorities in both places support stricter gun control as well as the death penalty; they strongly oppose giving blacks preference in hiring while also wanting the government to guarantee that blacks are treated fairly by employers. They're against outlawing abortion completely or allowing it under any circumstances, and their opinions on abortion have been fairly stable for three decades. Virtually identical majorities of Blues and Reds don't want a single party controlling the White House and Congress.

I don't have any reason to disagree. There are key philosophical differences between Republicans and Democrats, but these generally relate to means, not ends. In the article, Professor Alan Wolfe asserts that gay rights are "the great exception" to this trend, but there is evidence that attitudes are softening on this issue as well. Tierny paints a picture of a nation in which we all basically get along, but are driven to opposition by the political parties and the chattering class.

What's all this about unprecedented vitriol in political discourse, then? Part of the answer, I think, is in this article by Tim Noah, published in Slate two months ago. In an article on the extent to which individual counties are becoming increasingly politically homogenous, Noah writes, "The likelihood that you will ever argue politics with your neighbor is diminishing rapidly, because it's less and less likely that, politically, you and your neighbor will ever disagree." Having divided the past seven years between Cambridge, Berkeley, and Long Island, I know exactly what he means. In the first two places I feel terribly conservative, while in the third I feel almost dangerously liberal. But while I suspect that the crews from Charlie's Kitchen (in the heart of Harvard Square) and Pier 44 (on Long Island's Great South Bay) would view each other with a good deal of suspicion, there's not a great deal of difference in what they want for this country. And that's exactly why I'm so concerned about how we talk to one another.

Tierney paints a picture of political elites engaged in an ugly rhetorical war while Billy Average shrugs and goes about his business. He blames special interest groups and gerrymandered safe seats for placing undue favor on candidates at the extreme of each party. I'm not so sure it's that simple. If political parties are increasingly creatures of their membership, as demonstrated by the rise of the primary system at the expense of party bosses, it's hard to say that elected leaders are not representative of the parties that back them. That's not to say that many people wouldn't prefer more moderate alternatives, but I'm unwilling to let the electorate off the hook for democratic choices. President Bush's victory over Senator McCain in 2000 was a victory for extremistm over moderation, but the same cannot be said of Senator Kerry's triumph in this year's Democratic horserace. The only point there, I think, is that primaries don't necessarily promote candidates on the extremes; the voters have to be willing accomplices.

As further evidence of the narrow gap between Republicans and Democrats, Tierney points to the willingness of voters to support candidates from each party. He says, "The six bluest states in 2000, the ones where George W. Bush fared worst - Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Hawaii, Connecticut and Maryland - all have Republican governors. Even California went red last year when Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican, became governor." I don't believe it's a coincidence that there's a lot of shoreline in those six states. What the article misses, and I believe is crucial, is that our politics are regionally influenced more than anything else. I suspect that on a fundamental level, Governor Pataki of New York has a lot more in common with Senator Schumer than he does with Senator Lott. The most divisive aspect of our two-party system is that the Republicans and Democrats are expected to function on both state and national levels. As such, local and statewide elections are -- whether implicily or explicitly -- influenced by the views of people from all corners of the country. As long as southern, evangelical Republicans are vehemently opposed to abortion, the issue cannot be truly closed even in places much closer to consensus on the issue. Democrats enthusiastically welcomed Congresswoman Herseth's recent victory in South Dakota, but as far as I can tell, my Republican governor is more liberal than she is. It's a dangerous time when people are inclined to support people they would otherwise oppose on the basis of party affiliation.

This isn't necessarily anything new, but I think regional differences have been accelerated and magnified by the technological innovations of the last half century. People are much more likely to move these days, and it seems that when they do move, they wind up with neighbors more like themselves than before. The Internet has created such an echo chamber that it's possible to spend the whole day communicating and never encounter a truly broad range of opinion. It doesn't particularly matter that there's not much difference in ideology across the spectrum: in my experience -- and this experience seems similar to that of others -- people are very unlikely to consider what other people think about an issue. It's not just that people are agreeing to disagree; there's a feeling on both sides that people who disagree are not just wrong, they're bad people.

There's a reason for this, but I'll be damned if I know what it is. So much rhetoric of both liberals and conservatives is tinged with alienation. Both sides feel that mainstream America represents someone other than them. So who does it represent? Does our democracy pander to an aggregate that doesn't exist in reality? Or are people on both sides wildly overreacting in a quest for complete victory? Representative democracy never has been and never will be the best way to achieve full implemenation of one side's agenda, but it seems to me that compromise is increasingly dropping out of the vocabulary. Noah closes his article with:

What do all these numbers mean? They mean that within the universe of people who vote in presidential elections, nearly half of us are likely to be smug in our political views, while nearly one-third of us are likely to feel absolutely certain that the winds of history are at our back, rendering us utterly boorish. That's quite a market for political candidates and radio talk-show hosts to tap. Indeed, they'd be fools not to.

I do feel that the level of antagonism in political discourse is uncommonly high, and I worry that this division is fueled by something that transcends the issues of the day. If this is the case, merely pointing out the similarities between the agendas of Republicans and Democrats is not enough, as they're largely irrelevant. What's vital, and much more difficult, is to discover why people who might generally be able to find common ground are increasingly unwilling to do so.

Read the whole thing.

I'm not sure what to make of an article that leads with this paragraph:

Everybody knows awards shows are pointless. That's why nobody watches the Oscars without getting a blood transfusion before the credits and another one by the time Phil Collins sings.

Call me Stodgy McStickinthemud, but I've always felt that the front page of a newspaper section should devote it self to, well, non-pointless things. What gives? Is this award show different?

But what about the MTV Movie Awards? They're supposed to be pointless because they're for young people and young people don't care about anything, especially things like voting and catching venereal diseases.

I see. It's okay to cover pointless things when they're supposed to be pointless. Because all the kids today have herpes.

"Who wrote this?" I asked myself. I secretly hoped the author was a thirteen-year-old contest winner. He's not. He is AIDIN VAZIRI: MUSIC JOURNALIST. His web page archive stretches back to May 2004, but it seems he's been around longer than that. His recent interviews with Jena Malone and Eric Idle drew critical letters, both of which take Vaziri to task for belittling someone. He has a massive web presence that I don't particularly feel like sifting through right now. Back to the article.

Vaziri's piece is excellent for keeping me spoiler-free until the weekend. He only reveals one winner, in the penultimate paragraph (he closes, succinctly, with "Good job blowing everything, MTV."). The rest of the article is devoted to criticizing everyone who showed up. Lohan's breasts, Ashton Kutcher's chewing gum, and Quentin Tarantino's pants are all on the receiving end of Vaziri's withering pen. The Beastie Boys even take a hit for daring to be so freaking old. Aidin is good enough to provide a history lesson (it's not every day that the Modoc War gets a shoutout), but the rest is pretty devoid of content.

Why, then, was this article written? Vaziri admits at the start that his subject is pointless (intentionally so!) and reinforces this by providing precious little detail of the awards program. What he's written is not so much television coverage or even television criticism, but television blogging on the printed page. People read newspapers for coverage of the day's events and informed opinion on a wide range of subjects. Writers naturally bring something of themselves to a piece (the best ones do, at least), but the focus is generally the opinion, not the opiner. A decent share of writing on the web, on the other hand, is stylized ranting, in which the voice of the writer is more important than her subject, and some of it is darn good. I consider Television Without Pity an invaluable resource, but it's not journalism. Neither is this article.

Of course there's crossover between the two forms. The blogs over at The New Republic generally meet excellent journalistic standards, and people read Dave Barry's column because he's Dave Barry, not because they're keen on exploding toilets. But columnists like Barry have a difficult task of blending observation, humor, criticism, and temperance, and Vaziri has failed to clear the bar. Ultimately, I don't really care what Aidin Vaziri thinks about the MTV Movie Awards, and his article does nothing to make me care.

What's the point of this, then? I'm concerned. There is a generation of young writers growing up on the Internet, immersed in a style that is both entertaining and liberating. But it is also limiting and, in the wrong hands, petty and myopic. The best critics criticize because they care; the worst criticize because they can. It's important that the former don't lose out to the latter in this modern age.

That said, it's disappointing to see people who I'd expect to be grieving instead trying to score political points. Over on The Corner, they're dredging up everything Senator Kerry has said about Reagan over the past 25 years (including, to their credit, this). Among the choice entries is this quote from 1992:

But, you know, Abraham Lincoln didn’t serve, but he saved this nation and sent men into combat with moral authority. Ronald Reagan certainly was never in combat. I mean, many of his movies depicted him there. And he may have believed he was, but he never was. And the fact is that he sent Americans off to die. Bill Clinton I believe because of his experience, because of the agony he went through facing this kind of dilemma will understand the consensus that you need in this nation, the fact that you need a winning strategy, the fact that you do not send young people, young Americans off to war, unless you are committed to win it, and I think Bill Clinton would come to the Presidency equally as aware of those principles we learn in that agony as anybody else.

The spin here is captured in the post's title: "KERRY: REAGAN DIDN’T SERVE IN VIETNAM (AND I DID)". How callous of the Democratic challenger to impugn President Reagan's military service a mere twelve years before his death! But isn't Kerry's point here that it's perfectly all right for a Commander-in-Chief to lack military experience? I mean, Democratic politicians aren't really in the habit of smearing President Lincoln's character, so isn't associating him with Reagan a positive thing? Sure there's an obligatory partisan jab in there, but it seems to me that this quote is a defense of then-Governor Clinton's ability to lead the largest military in the world, citing Lincoln and Reagan as presidents with a similar amount of prior experience.

Too many 21st-century Republicans cynically hear invective whenever their opponents open their mouths. A sad reminder of how far they've come from the party that embraced "Reagan Democrats."

There's more to it than just generalized hostility towards religion, though. (and more to it than the fact that, for at least one of the panelists, this panel was more about personal theraputic value than it was about thoughtful discussion.) Religion, Christianity in particular, has become a politicized issue in America. I can see how it happened--conservative politicians have brought religion in to the dialogue as though it was a thing that belonged to them, which means that anyone opposing their political positions has to engage with their religious positions. Once that's happened, it's easy to see how people on the left, especially people who have been agitated beyond the point of reason, start to see religious belief as tangled up with the conservative political agenda.

In the spirit of inclusiveness, I feel like I should say that it's not only the right that politicizes issues. The right has politicized both religion and patriotism, but the left has politicized (for example) environmentalism. It was hard work, by the way, finishing that sentence. "The right has politicized both religion and patriotism, but the left has politicized... er... uhm..." The problem being, of course, that from where I stand it's easy to see what issues the other guys have made partisan, but not easy to see the same faults in the people I mostly agree with. I'm trying, though.

WisCon also tends (strongly) towards a left/liberal atmosphere. That's not particularly surprising, or in of itself particularly controversial. This year, though, a lot of people (many of them proudly self-identified liberals) felt that the atmosphere had crossed some line from "biased" to "intolerant". Those are both loaded words, so here's what I mean by the difference: someone with politically or socially conservative tendencies should expect, coming to WisCon, to be argued with. They should not have to expect to be vilified.

Vilification abounded at WisCon this year. I didn't attend a lot of panels (I didn't attend any that I wasn't on, actually) because most of the ones I went to were kind of horrifying. (In the interests of fairness, I should say that I did have one fabulous panel, on the multiplicity of feminist identities and the conflicts between generations of feminists.) I watched a room full of people take at face-value the statement that political conservativism leads people to violence; when someone tried to suggest that crazy people can be found all over the political spectrum, they were mostly ignored.

And then there was the religion panel, already discussed a little over at Jed's site. I've deconstructed that panel experience so many times since it happened that I'm having trouble mustering the energy to do it again, but the short version is that I spent most of that hour and a half being kind of appalled that so many people could say with such straight faces that a Christian belief system is intrinsically tied to hatred, oppression, and violence. ("Appalled" was periodically broken up by "amused"--other panelists kept insisting that I was a Christian myself, no matter how many times I said that I wasn't, apparently just because I was taking the position that the theology of most established religions can be flexible enough to encompass a variety of social and political beliefs.)

I know I've got more to say about it, but for now, I'm still kind of processing. It's one thing to have been saying that anger and fear are keeping people from meaningful political discussion. It's another thing entirely to see that problem played out so clearly in an environment that I've come to associate with meaningful discussion.

So what's the problem? I blame the thumbtack-hole placement. That thing's been hanging on Secretary Ridge's wall with yellow at the bottom for way too long! Can't some enterprising fed turn the spinner so orange is at the top? I say we let gravity take care of Osama. Maybe then they'll finally re-open those BART restrooms.

First:

The habits of racism in America have not all been broken. The habits of respect must be taught to every generation.

Second:

The sacred institution of marriage should not be redefined by a few activist judges. All Americans have a right to be heard in this debate. I called on the Congress to pass, and to send to the states for ratification, an amendment to our Constitution defining and protecting marriage as a union of a man and a woman as husband and wife. The need for that amendment is still urgent, and I repeat that call today.

...

Ryan Lizza has a rundown of highlight from Zogby's latest. The key bit: "Bush and Kerry are tied in the red states (45-45)."

I've heard a lot of concern from the left about Senator Kerry's inability to capitalize on the hits Bush's popularity has taken over the past few weeks. But this poll seems to indicate that while no part of the country has gone whole hog for the challenger, the incumbent is dangerously weak even among his base. And, if one believes in trends, this chart is pretty encouraging.

It was maybe 11:00pm when I looked back and noticed that the crowd had spilled off of the sidewalks and into the streets. The police, incongruous in their angry black riot gear, had closed off Mass Ave from Central Square to Harvard to make room for everybody. The street was packed, body to body, as far as you could see. There were a smattering of hand-made signs speckling the crowd -- Mazel Tov, and We Are Equal, and my favorite of the night, one that simply read Yay!

Far on the other side of the street, there were maybe 50 or 60 protesters, holding up signs of their own. There was "God Hates Fags", of course. But then there were ones that just didn't make any sense. "Fags Doom Nations," like that's something we do in our spare time. ("Hm. I've got half an hour until my next class. Hey, I know. I think I'll doom some nations.") And then there was the one that said, "God Blew Up the Space Shuttle." (What? Are you at the right protest?)

The bunch of flowers I was handing out was gone within half an hour or so, long before they started the digital clock that was counting down the seconds until the clerks began issuing licenses. At midnight, the crowd let up a huge cheer and started chanting, "We Are Equal!" I don't usually like the chanting shit very much, but there was a kind of mad euphoria that swept the crowd, and I found myself screaming aloud with the rest of the crowd, pumping our fists in the air like little revolutionaries.

We kept singing and clapping for the couples as they emerged from City Hall into the glare of the flashbulbs and floodlights. There were indiscriminate showers of rice and confetti, and somewhere on the other side of the crowd a brass band started playing Mendelssohn's Wedding March. Some couples held their licenses up for us to see. Some flashed us a quick smile and kissed on the steps. Others just seemed to float down the steps, completely oblivious to anything but one another.

It was the best. It was like Pride and New Years and Christmas and your birthday all at once. I saw all these people I knew, including straight friends who came out to support our community and be counted as allies. We cheered, we chanted slogans, we sang every song about marriage we could think of, and whenever a couple emerged from the building, we cheered and sang all the more.

I couldn't stay until the end. At 1:30, there were still couples streaming out of City Hall, but my legs threatened to give out from under me.

When I woke up in the morning, my pillow was covered with rice and confetti.

I had a friend in eighth grade who changed the spelling of her name every couple of weeks. She started the year as Shannon, and ended it as Shanyn, and to her credit (?) she stayed Shanyn at least through the end of high school. (For all I know, she's still Shanyn, but I haven't heard from her in about ten years.) In between, she went through Shanon, Shannin, Shynyn, Shannan, and anything else even remotely plausible. This kind of thing happens in eighth grade, and not just to the girls, although it's pretty much only the girls who make inappropriate use of the letter Y. The boys just fiddle with nicknames and other short forms.

Reading through the awful baby names site, I was dredging my memory for bad names I've encountered in my life, and there really haven't been many of them. We had one unfortunate firstname/lastname combo in my high school (Mike Grifone) and one name with associations most of the other students didn't catch (Hana Lee), but that might have been it. Oh, wait, I forgot about Krystal Tweedle.

It's not that I don't understand the desire to name your child something out of the ordinary. I went through elementary school and high school in a class with three other Susans (and two Suzannes). I just, it's just, I mean, no. Never mind. People who would name a child McKynsy Nycolle aren't speaking the same cultural language as I am.