Lex Dexter Anthology, 2012

Those of you who know me lately know that I'm both laboring and lying dormant under adverse conditions, enough so that even a cheeky blog post or two can turn tough days into half-victories. Because I love the people who read this blog, because I need them and I want their attention, I've compiled this "anthology" of the best of a blogging bender I've tossed off like apple seeds over Organizing Grievances, the Prisonship and Boatzone3. Comment if you dare and you'll find it's not unlike conversing.

Politics:

• My journey with the contraception debate: I know you were hoping another white dude would weigh in on women's reproductive health, so I do it long-form style, and end up, I think, in a place from which white dudes needn't un-invite themselves.
• Glenn Beck was recognized to advance white identity politics for the Washington Post, and I objected my way into some kind of neo-Habermasian stance. Can you imagine Jurgen Habermas angry? I tried.
• Thankfully this silly Habermasian roleplaying, and the socialist stuff underpinning it, attracted Gabba Weeks' attention: my response to his response.
  
• An attempt to shut this issue down and move on to its theoretical implications: "contraception-constitution-catholics-redux." and I think aloud about one or two things he said.
  
• My comments on Timothy Snyder's suggestions for "How Democracy Can Save Europe."
  
• Major Depressive Episode, brief reprieve: Getting weird and feeling weird about Rick Santorum's dead child. [Cue Joe South, "Games People Play."]
• Zizek speaks of Occupy and the Left: My forthcoming blog trilogy, which I haven't told you about and you aren't holding your breath anticipating? There's a key to that hidden here.

Autobio:

• Kate Carraway on drinking/not drinking while Thirtyish: a new favorite writer inspires me to assess what condition my condition's in.
  
• A pretty photo of pretty window dressing: that's all it took to take me back somewhere.
  
• 32-33 vector: Unclassifiable and a favorite. Somebody spray-painted a swastika on our driveway and my jaded response begot a guilt response that encompassed punk, maturity, propriety and the idea of art's autonomy.
  
• Maybe you shouldn't dream at all: Quotation from a crime novel frames just a paragraph or two about suicidal ideation, as much as I'm comfortable indulging in.
  
• Mommy told me it'd be fine if I watched Last Tango in Paris. Mommy lied, as I found out on the insomniac early morning of my 33rd birthday.
  

Music:

• The Annual Prisonship Bestuv List, this time featuring sub-lists of honorable mentions, letdowns, and "too early to tell," as well as the top 15 LPs of 2011. I worked days on this thing and received 1 comment.
  
• I write about and share a track from New Zealand's Bats. Turns out I have a lot to say.
  
• Comedian and personal hero Jen Kirkman talks Kurt Cobain and his non-jock persona, and I cannot help but chime in.
• I piggyback on Gabba and Andrew's smart thoughts about the over-hyped Fucked Up, whom some of us dig nonetheless.
• I post a video of Led Zeppelin playing "Achilles' Last Stand" and end up discussing my recent purchase of Zep's Presence and the redundancy of a rock dude saying, "Yo, Led Zeppelin rules." Then I talk about how Zeppelin rules.
• I went to a very fashionable rock show featuring SF's Brilliant Colors and London's Veronica Falls and came to some conclusions.
• Far from fashionable, the best thing about music in Michigan is Easy Action. I try and I try to explain why.
• A return to swastika content, inspired by Vice's coverage of the band Ice Age and misperceptions of their zine art that lead to misperceptions of their politics.
  

Sex:

• Amidst the contraception debate, a consideration of the mandated condom use recently stirring up the Cali porn industry seemed like a good idea. This one's as close as I get to a certain writer-thing I'm trying to pull off. Let me know what you think?
  
• Is now the time for fair trade porn? Let's talk about something else, and about fair trade porn, says me.
• Kate Carraway, Girl News: "Girls and work" and my unsolicited response.
• Kate Carraway, Girl News: "Girls and girl-on-girl" takes me places. Come along.
• Kate Carraway, "I'm soooooo bored of not having sex sometimes that...": I swear that the blogs these pieces inspire aren't filthy, just fanciful. She's my favorite writer I've happened upon in ages.
• "Paying the Price": A long, early morning survey of Cynthia Nixon's defiant anti-essentialist sexuality, Chester Brown's autobiographical graphic novel about his time frequenting prostitutes, and the sexuality of a depressed thirtysomething man.
  
• Yes, Mastur: I don't hate masturbation, but I don't feel like elevating self-love past the point of self-reliance. Getting more confident with wielding my Foucault, I go after what's repressive about pleasure and the difficulty of sexing transgression.
  
• Probably my best sex work this year: I try to weigh the ubiquity of sex and power versus death and desire. We see through a glass darkly, some say; in this case, I see through Vice Magazine's guides to "giving head" and "eating pussy," respectively.
  

Glenn Beck, We Are All Catholics Now

“The state has no right to say how much religion any American can practice. It’s our right, and it is the first one our Founding Fathers protected.”
— Glenn Beck - The Washington Post - Why we are all Catholics now

I’d shit myself and then kill myself if I believed this pronouncement to be true. I doubt female genital cutting would last long under police surveillance, no matter whether it was couched liturgically. And neither do denials of women’s rights and/or workers’ rights deserve constitutional protections under the auspice of religious freedom.

Thought experiment: should secularism, let alone atheism, be understood as “religious” or as worthy of equivalent protections? I think atheism and its cousin agnosticism are closer to “religious” in the sense of being formal identities subject to protections against discrimination. After all, you always hear about somebody or other somewhere declaring victory because they have had a menorah or nativity scene removed from a campground or town square. Plus which we have the “New” Atheism to thank for reintroducing elitism into a discourse that never rid itself of the accusation of elitism. These victories can satisfy a sardonic side of me, and little else.

No, I’d much rather see a struggle for a new secularism in the United States. Rather than countering identity politics with identity politics, a new secularism might constitute a space/between identities: a non-discursive knowledge/power that generates something other than the current age’s proliferation of subjectivities. Science, skepticism, solidarity and the social, democracy and economic security.

Only this deep into postmodernity could one lapse into utopianism while yearning for a resurrection of the secular. But when even Habermas has abandoned the latter as a precondition for fair speech, what’s left but to dream about but a rationale for justice and material distribution which, itself free of godheads, is big enough to encompass how we do or don’t worship and who we think we are?

[Much, much, much more on this in the context of the contraception debate, can be found here.]