Mykel Board says: You're Wrong

YOU'RE WRONG 

An Irregular Column

by Mykel Board

   [This has been a tough month. I'm preparing for my first South American trip. Thirty days: Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina. Shots, visas, email scams. Besides that, two of my parent's best friends died. Married, they died within twelve hours of each other. Talk about romantic! Plenty of other stuff has also fucked up my life. So I decided, this month, to let a lot of other folks do the talking. Lotsa long quotes in this one. Enjoy the (partial) break from me.] It's more annoying than a cell phone in a restaurant. First, a little red mark. Just on the surface. Right at the sit-point. Lowering my pants, I trace the edges in the bathroom mirror. "Ouch!" right here, just a vague deep pink.

   Over the next few days, the red consolidates. Now a pimple, the sore area is smaller, but more painful. I touch the spot. There's a hardness beneath the surface. A forming volcano, the lava gathers under the gluteal skin for the final explosion.

   Today, pursuing other pain and pleasure I lower my pants. Nupercainal in my right hand, I press the tube, squeezing the translucent paste onto the middle finger of my left hand. Slowly, I insert that finger into the deep brown hole. Ah! Feels good... shit! I should have cut my nails.

   When I withdraw, I wipe my hands on some toilet paper. Then I check out the pimple. It's ripe. A nice red mound, with a puss- filled whitehead on top. Using my still sharp fingernail, I scrape it over the whitehead. Ugh! Ugh! The dome falls. A thin sliver of puss shoots out the pimple top. It snakes up my finger, oozing up to the knuckle.

   Watching in the mirror, I use the nails of my thumb and middle finger to continue squeezing the puss out. Finally, a single dark red drop emerges from the hole. Then, it's a splash of pure alcohol. Ah! Glorious pain! A band-aid, and I'm as good as my usual old self.

   I pull up my pants, and head back to the computer. My email, as usual, is filled with ads for "natural viagra," promises of "$10,000 a week" and calls to write letters of protest against some miscarriage of justice. Among the latter are several from protesting the Afghan Taliban's cutting the fingers off women with nail polish. Homos also don't like the bearded ones either. It seems they bulldoze brick walls on the native buggers.

   I like fingers on women. Every try to jerk someone off with five stumps? And homosex is difficult under a pile of bricks, I guess. I never tried. Still, I hold off sending my protest. Something bothers me about the petitions. Some vague feeling I can't quite explain. As it turns out, I don't have to.

   From the Beloit alumni mailing list, I get a message about the Taliban. It's in response to an earlier message that said:

     "Women's Rights is not a small issue anywhere and it is UNACCEPTABLE for women in 1999 to be treated as sub-human and so much property. Equality and human decency is a RIGHT not a freedom, whether one lives in Afghanistan or elsewhere."

   In a fit of brilliance, my new email message answers this. That answer lets me see exactly why I didn't send my solidarity letter. Here's an edited version of what the author writes:

     I couldn't agree more, but hey, I'm an American guy, raised in the Midwest and educated at a Liberal Arts College.

     Of course, what's tough for the Afghan women is that they had been exposed to Western Culture (as had the Iranian women who suffer under the Ayatollahs) and having tasted Western Culture, decided they liked it better than the strictures of fundamentalist Islam. But that doesn't make "us" right and "them" wrong. "Cultural context" is the issue here.

     Less than thirty years ago [in America] homosexuality was considered an aberration. It was taboo-- an abomination in the eyes of God, or at the very least a mental health problem. Today our society pretty much recognizes and accepts the fact that ten percent or so of our population is wired gay and so what. It doesn't make you a bad person.

     Recent statistics indicate that 25% of our young women and 12% of our young men will be molested by an adult. Our culture still sees that as an aberration, a taboo. But that's a HUGE number! It indicates a large population of molesters (more than 10% of the population?) and none of us at this point in our cultural development can possibly envision a time when pedophiles or incest are accepted the same way that we now consider Homosexuality. Hunh-uh! No way!

     There was an anthropologist living among the Iban (I think) in Irian Jaya a few years ago. He'd lived among them for over 25 years, was considered an elder in the tribe and engaged in the tribal rituals, including the ritual fellating of all the elders by the young men as they passed into manhood. These adolescent boys would have been psychologically damaged had they been prevented from ingesting the elders' seed, symbolically making them adult members of the tribe. So this anthropologist returns to teaching in the US -Boston, I think-and WHAMMO! Before you know it, the good doctor, former elder of his tribe, is serving hard time in a Massachusetts penitentiary for child molestation. Seems he'd brought some of the young lads home with him for a Western education, but they'd clung to a few traditions of their own. Cultural context.

     Do we really want to intercede in every other culture and demand (by force of arms) "there will be no more veiling of women in Islam, no more female circumcision in Africa, no more male circumcision in Judaism, no more Peyote rituals, ritual scarification, cow worshipping, dog butchering, serpent handling, clog dancing, soda straw slurping, monkey bun handling, ferret trousering, fist fucking, or talking with our mouths full in any culture anywhere ever again or else?!"

     If fundamentalist Islam is a tyranny upon women, then -as a Western man, steeped in the philosophies of the Enlightenment as paraphrased by our Founding Fathers*-- I say they should take up arms and fight for their rights! Not practical? Too messy? Let the Taliban eat Hungry Man dinners out'a their own damn microwaves. Or heat 'em up with those gol' dang Stinger missiles they're always shootin' off everywhere. Who armed those guys anyway? (buzz, buzz, buzz) Jeez! We did? You sure? You mean we were interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign state? Again? Well, let 'em eat Twinkies.

   Besides the cool writing, the writer is, of course, right. Injustice and evil fill our own society. This culture is so totalitarian and hypocritical, that we've lost the moral right to interfere in other cultures.

   America has a higher percentage of people in jail than any other country on earth. We murder people as punishment. We put people in jail for actions that hurt no one. Our government easily and arbitrarily removes the right to consent, to privacy and to freedom. We force God on people through our money. We allow Nike to hire slaves, and make huge profits off the remainder. The list goes on and on. How the hell can we claim a moral right to criticize another culture, let alone interfere in it? Anyone except the most narrow-minded feminist or blinded patriot can see that.

   I'm not advocating a muzzle. If you want to criticize the Taliban, go ahead. It's your right. At least for now. But as a country, we have do not have the ethical license to interfere in other cultures-- not as long as ours is so flawed. While the cultural goals should be

   1. Anything by consent. 2. Reform not punishment.

   We can't demand them from others, until we have them ourselves.

   There is one valid international demand, however. Most Americans have the right to leave. (I'm not sure about convicted felons.) That is one of our most important freedoms: THE RIGHT TO COME AND GO AS YOU PLEASE.

   If a country doesn't operate the way you like, you should be able to leave that country. That is primary, and worth fighting for anywhere in the world. No one should HAVE TO leave. No one should be forced out. But everyone should have the option. Fuck, I leave all the time-- though I keep coming back.

   The B-side of that demand, however, is that there must be some place to go. What good is the right to leave if there's nowhere to leave to? All countries need to declare a universal right to enter. All counties need to let anyone, for any reason, enter and stay. Period.

   It's easy to be self-righteous. Just say, "the poor Afghans (or Koscovos or Somalis or you name it) should allowed to leave a country that oppresses them." But, if you say that, you need to know that means you might find one living next door to you.

   As for other rights. Our culture turns them on their head. Consent is not consent. Agreement means nothing.

   In Holland, the age of consent is twelve years old. In America, the law says sex is bad for kids, like smoking. Isn't the whole idea mad from the get-go? What kind of culture says that someone saying "yes" is too young to say yes? What kind of culture advocates punishment for something everyone involved think is fun?

   Little Jenny Jones plays doctor with Bobby Schicklegruber down the street. Jenny is twelve. Bobby is nineteen.

   "I'll show you mine if you show me yours." says Jenny. She reaches for Bobby's zipper. Bobby smiles as Jenny reaches inside and pulls out his manly muscle.

   "How does it work?" she asks.

   "Well," says Bobby, "try rubbing it back and forth, like you're making a snake out of clay."

   "Like this?" asks Jenny.

   Bobby nods, now not speaking.

   "What happens now... Whoops! Your snake spit at me." says Jenny.

   They both laugh. Then Jenny's mother walks in. Soon Bobby's in jail. Ten years in the clink. A lifetime of being hounded by zealots under Meagan's law. He might kill himself.

   You tell me that's not as evil as cutting off a few fingers. You tell me that punishing kids for playing is somehow better than pushing brick walls onto adults.

   Another scene: This one in a NYC firehouse. It's the day after a successful suit by a firelady. The guys had Playboy pictures inside their lockers. Now they're taking them down. Sexual harassment says the court. There was a lawsuit.

   No more joking. No displays. You have to look over your shoulder. Tightrope walk on a thread. Be careful not to offend. Fun is illegal, at least where you work.

   "That's a sexy haircut," one of the firemen says to the firelady a few weeks later. He's trying to mend the fences that have poisoned the atmosphere in the stationhouse.

   Pow! A swift kick comes to the back of his knees. He goes down.

   It's the captain. He apologizes to the woman.

   "Sorry," he says. "He didn't mean anything by it."

   You think these prohibitions are "more civilized" than a veil? You think taboos against complimenting, touching another person or even ritually swallowing your elder's semen are any more civilized than killing butt-fuckers? To put it in two words: You're wrong.

   Our culture, our society, our lives are no less fucked up that the Taliban. Until we unfuck them, we have no moral right to change others, either by force or coercion.

   I lie naked next to Ms. K. I lick the back of her neck. Sliding downward, I use my tongue to trace the railroad of her spine. Ever southward, I reach the end and continued licking, deep in the dark crack. Before zeroing in on the black hole of a target, I nibble along each cheek. There is a little red lump, a pimple, much like mine. I reach a long nailed hand toward the pimple and squeeze it between my thumb and middle finger. PAM! A foot snaps backward and kicks me on the back of the head.

   "Ow!" I complain, "I was only trying to ease the puss out of your pimple."

   "Ease the puss out of your own pimples," answers Ms. K. "If I want the puss out of mine, I'll do it myself."

   I guess that's the whole point, huh?

ENDNOTES: [Thanks to your protests, sit-ins, marches and church burnings, there are no longer length restrictions at MRR. All power to the people! Yeah! Still, visitors to my website: www.freeyellow.com/members2/seidboard/index.html, or subscribers (email to: MykelB@ix.netcom.com) will receive a few extra endnotes.]