Remember George Allen’s “macaca” moment? This new citizen surveillance makes the Bush wiretapping seem like clothes-pinning onto a frayed string between tin cans.

Republican Representative Sally Kern, from Oklahoma, was recently recorded at a district fundraiser explicating the homosexual agenda. In the audio recording, she sounds like Mr. Mackey, the South Park guidance counselor, who ends sentences with a nasal “m’kay?” As cutlery and dishes clank in the background, Ms. Kern tells her peacefully masticating listeners that homosexuality is a bigger threat than terrorism or Islam, which is pretty big, m’kay?

It sounded like a dinner theater performance nightmare I had once. The audience munched contentedly and was completely passive as Ms. Kern listed gay outrages. Gays are recruiting children two years of age. That’s why they want early childhood education. They are infiltrating city councils in Florida and even Eureka Springs, where they have that Passion Play, m’kay? Homosexuality is like cancer in your little toe. It is deadly and spreading. It is not a healthy lifestyle. The gay lifespan is shorter because of suicide, illness, and discouragement.

Ms. Kern said she was not gay-bashing. She also noted presciently that even talking like this could put her in jeopardy. Nevertheless, she plowed on courageously, m’kay? The audio of her talk was posted, whipsawed around the Internet, and was picked up briefly by CNN. Many gay organizations and their allies are demanding her removal.

But otherwise, Ms. Kern’s comments and the murder of Lawrence King, a gay middle schooler in Oxnard, California, barely make news. After being the wedge issue in many of the last elections, the eerie silence on LGBT issues in this current campaign has been unsettling. “Go to my website,” is not an acceptable candidate explanation for the absence of LGBT issues.

While some of my colleagues like getting things done below the radar, like Mae West, I’ve always felt it’s better to be looked over than overlooked.

God is kicking back. Through His spokesman here on earth, Pope Benedict (don’t tell W!), He released a newly upgraded list of sins of the globalized world at a Lenten Apostolic Penitentiary Seminar. The Pope had power-pointed the more venial sins of road rage, drunkenness, and rudeness in an earlier address last summer.

The new mortal sins are not to be replacements for the traditional one-word individualistic sins of pride, envy, gluttony, lust (Eliot Spitzer did not get that memo), anger, greed, and my personal favorite, sloth. They are additional multi-word “socially resonant” sins like carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, taking or dealing in drugs, or excessive accumulation of wealth. Think social networking with hell time. I know I do. It was not clear if confessionals would be renovated for higher occupancy.

I confess to quickly scanning the list, looking for the sin of homosexuality. It was not there! Maybe it’s understood. It was like being dropped from the big annual Papal Magazine “Sinniest Sins Alive” special double issue. For a while there, homosexuality was like being cover-boy Matthew McConaughey doing his buff beach workout. Nunc nihil.

One morning, while reading the paper, she announced, as if I'd asked, that she finally knew her preferred form of reincarnation. Still drowsy from my night patrol, and frowsy from trying to make sense of Maureen Dowd*, I asked, "And?" As if she were declaring a Halloween outfit, she stated that she wanted to come back as an Unconflicted White Man. The "straight" was understood.

While my fallen away catholic beliefs still imbue my eschatological hopes for an afterlife, I have totally embraced her tenet. Not George Tenet. Though he is a perfect example of UWM. In the midst of endless war, UWM are perfectly at peace with themselves. Wide-awake from cricket racket, I think, "He must have some regret for what he has done." It is pure projection on my part.

The UWM roster grows each day. Donald Rumsfeld, who demurs that he is now "out of the loop" on the war, wants to start an institute to encourage more civic participation in government. In the Vanity Fair that finally chronicles the media goring of Al Gore, Gung-ho war ho, Christopher Hitchens, chronicled not his war makeover but his spa treatment. Karl Rove angles to captain the "Swift Boat Veterans Threatened by Powerful Women" aka, the Giuliani campaign. Dick Cheney continues in his role as head of the Execulative Branch of government.

In China, when officials err, they have the decency to kill themselves. In the US, they go on victory-lap, book tours.
The press rollout of UWM Alan Greenspan's pre-emptive save-facebook, could serve as a model for a coordinated, well-executed exit strategy. Like a bad penny, Greenspan was everywhere - Newsweek, Jon Stewart, The News Hour. On Sixty Minutes, he cheshired as the blindingly blonde, embedded reporter Leslie Stahl dimpled, "You were a jazz player?" The under-reported party spoiler was Naomi Klein's simultaneously released, Shock Doctrine, as welcomed in the discourse as an unclaimed backpack in a bus terminal. If I Did It v. You Know You Did It.

The Grandmaster of UWM, If-I-Didiot in Chief, announced in a recent legacy building interview, that when he leaves office, he wants to start a Freedom Institute. "In other words, people can come to the institute and talk about freedom." His tight tautologies make Miss Teen South Carolina's ramblings sound sane. Mostly he noticed that you can make big bucks speechifying, his Dad, Bill Clinton, such as. "Got ta fill up the coffers, y'know."

Southern Methodist University is resisting housing the Bush Presidential Lie-brary. I think they should put the Bush Shelf at the Creation Museum. Nestle it into one of the Six C's of Creation Dioramas. It would fit perfectly in Corruption and Catastrophe. Rapture Man is divinely unconflicted because he has done his job as independent contractor of pre-collision intelligent design. The landing strip for the second coming is ready. His work here is done. He is the one in whom only he is well-pleased.

Kate "*Dowd is still big; it's the paper that got narrower." Clinton is a humorist.

In fall, 2001, he was forced to take off his lab coat and put on his bombardier jacket to deal with terror cells, not stem cells.

Now, due to the enormous progress in Iraq (i.e., everyone has fled or is dead), our favorite political scientist has donned his white coat and wraparound safety glasses again and claims responsibility for the latest discovery in cell technology.

Picture a young Frankenbush surrounded by bubbling, billowing beakers in his secure lab down in Nixon’s old bowling alley. With his trusty Mr. Wizard chemistry set, he adds four pluripotent genes. Eureka! Thanks to him, instead of using human embryo cells, researchers can now use cells from human skin, especially if the skin is straight, white, and Republican. Researchers are already prospecting around plastic surgery sites in Palm Springs.

In Colorado, this discovery will free up the embryos needed for the Embryonic Personhood Ballot Initiative just approved by the state supreme court there. The arduous task of going door-to-door collecting thousands of signatures means they are going to need more blastocyte boots on the ground.

The New York Times, an inch and a half narrower and yet still wide enough to carry Dowd, Brooks and Kristol columns, reported and seemed to believe that the President had modest goals for his last year in office. I heard that snort. What? You think they are going to attack Iran? Apparently you did not read David Brooks’s assurance, “The Bush Administration is not going to attack Iran. Trust me.” That “trust me” thrust me into a frantic search for my passport. It has not expired. I have pages left.

The Bush policy of unintended consequences has taught us one thing: one person can change the world. In just seven excruciatingly long years, Bush’s arrogance has destroyed the United States as the last remaining superpower. It’s OK. I was never comfortable with all that unseemly messianic, empiric, chest-thumping.

When you’re a haughty, unbeaten number one, everyone resents you.

It’s a lot of pressure, and you become like Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots. Spying on other teams, getting caught and denying it, piling on, running up the score, taunting, glowering monosyllabically at press conferences, and wearing whatever old cut-off hoodie you want.

Bush and his buddies have greased the skids of our decline and finally lost one for the Gipper. Guantánamo and torture made our national symbol the American spread Eagle. Welcome to Post-America. When not slightly heartbroken, I’m oddly relieved.           

Kate “There’s a thinkers’ strike in the White House” Clinton is a humorist.

At the gym, I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream, about how 9/11 has been seized as a way to restore “traditional” heterosexual manhood, marriage, and maternity. While my gym mates hum along to “We are the Champions,” my reps sound like “1, 2, 3—Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I’m sure the guys working out at the gym are puzzled by my glowering at them in the mirror.

No matter what you think of her, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has restarted our national conversation about gender. And girl, do we ever need to keep talking. I try to do my part to keep the conversation from being reduced to little more than a dismissive crack about “playing the gender card.”

In 2007 gender was at the heart of all kinds of seemingly unrelated events. Madame Speaker Nancy Pelosi was maligned for not reaching political benchmarks—the implication being that she fell short because she’s a woman. But I like to point out that doing things constitutionally in the bright light of day takes longer than doing them unconstitutionally in the dark of night. I wish Pelosi’d had thought bubbles over her head during MONTH TK’s State of the Union [aka the “If I Did It”] address.

When Don Imus referred to the Rutgers Women’s Basketball team as “nappy headed ho’s” and “Amazons,” it was not a proud moment for people holding the white race cards. But the women’s real offense was that they were playing like boys. Actually, better.

The Imus mess did give us a chance to read about women in sports, or at least near sports. Perhaps because The New York Times is an inch and a half narrower, and New York sports teams are so good, the sports section is unable to cover more—or any—women’s sports. It’s not limited to sports. If you were to read the obits every morning to your girlfriend, as I do, you’d be able to announce after a quick scan: “Great news, honey, absolutely no women died today.”

In other women’s sort-of-sportsnews, the New York Knicks coach, Isaiah Thomas—spiritual son of Justice Clarence Uncle Thomas, who’s still ripped and resentful from back in 1991 about Anita Hill—maintained his petulance after the elegant Anucha Browne-Sanders won her sexual harassment case against Thomas and Madison Square Garden. Sprinter Marion Jones also proved she was a class act as she apologized for her juice use.

In television, suits are still confining talent by gender, whether or not they admit it. When Katie Couric was allowed to break the testosterone ceiling and sit solo as nightly news reader, prime time news was of course past its prime. Still, her impudence was noted by Mr. Bitter, Dan Rather. Rosie O’Donnell, fresh from being fresh on The View, was unable to make a deal to do late night comedy. Ellen DeGeneres, who seems less comfortable with the lesbian card she was dealt than do her straight guests, was allowed humanity by playing the canine card.

Can a woman handle the presidency? Oh, come on. But America is pretty much the last of the Western nations to get it. Our big democratic U.S. seems even more preposterous with its sexist doubts now that Ireland, New Zealand, Finland, Switzerland, the Philippines, Liberia, Germany, Norway, Chile and Argentina have elected women heads of state. And don’t forget the Queens! In England, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the Village.

In the Middle East, gender is still a conversation nobody wants to have. After our friend and ally Saudi Arabia sentenced a 19-year- old woman, gang-raped 14 times, to 90 lashes for violating Saudi segregation laws forbidding men and women from associating, I waited for our international image ambassador Mr. Karen Hughes to say something. Naturally, Hughes did nada. On appeal, the Saudi woman’s punishment was increased to 200 lashes and six months in prison for trying to influence the judiciary through the media. Somebody get her Paris Hilton’s number.

Here’s something worth talking about: Gender multiplied in 2007. At least that’s how it seems to middle America. A lot of us knew it all along. When the transgender card is played and the T is dropped from LGBT in an amended ENDA, I like to point out that no matter how straight-acting we try to be, we are gender outlaws. Michigan’s Governor Jenifer Granholm, after some hard lobbying by Michigan GLBT groups, did the right thing and issued an executive order barring discrimination against transsexual state employees. The Michigan Coalition for Traditional Family Values vowed a fatwah. On Fox News, Sean Comb’s [SP???] tiny head blew up.

Having upped the gender ante in the presidential race, Hillary is taking hits on prejudices we hardly know we have. Do we really respect her choices as a woman? Do we have to? When the American people shrugged that they didn’t care what Hillary’s husband did sexually in private as long he did his job, it was exactly what gay people have been saying for years. But that whole episode still frosts women. Recently, my friend Juan, the big African-American queen and doctor of sociology tried his gay-male best to explain it to me at dinner.

“Married women have a pact,” said Juan, leaning in, power-pointing with a forkful. “If their husbands cheat on them, they vow they’ll leave, especially if the husband embarrasses them publicly. But in fact, the women rarely leave, and they hate themselves for their inaction. So there’s Hillary, a powerful woman, whose husband cheats on her, gets caught, goes on TV, denies it and gets impeached. By standing by her man, Hillary is an affront to married women, a reminder of their weakness, a hologram of their self-hatred.”

I’m not convinced self-hatred is so gendered, but when an older woman in South Carolina stood and asked John McCain, “What are we going to do to beat the bitch?” I did find myself shaking my head, muttering, “Why do you hate yourself so much?” McCain’s uncomfortable chuckle, suggested that he’s thought, heard, or said worse.

Of course, I support Hillary not just as a gender lens and barometric pressure reader of sexism, but also as an actual woman with a big laugh, big brain, and cleavage, for god’s sake. I was the first in my neighborhood to sport a “Hillary’s First Day: 01.21.09” bumper sticker.

Don’t think for a moment that I am not taking all manner of flak for my Hillary support at home. My dear partner loves to out me as a Hillary supporter to friends, family and elevator guys. She is appalled by Hillary’s hawkishness, her equivocation on gay marriage, and her three day delay in refuting General Peter Pace’s claim that homosexuality is immoral.

I agree. Then I paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld right back to her, “You go to the polls with the candidate you have, not the one you wish to have.” In 2007, she closed the deal: Hillary is my guy.

An Army of Ex-Lovers: My Life at the Gay Community News, [University of Massachusetts Press] by Amy Hoffman is a memoir of early Gay Liberation in Boston during the 1970s. GCN was a scruffy, challenging, informative, radical weekly newspaper. Despite its small circulation, its reach was wide, not only as a cauldron of progressive gay ideas about class, race, art and politics but also as a school for scandalizers who went on to found and run major national gay organizations in the movement.

Hoffman is a wicked funny writer. In sly detail, she interweaves her own gay story, the marginal characters that came and went at GCN and her attempts to translate it all to her family. Most surprisingly, it is an unlikely gay love story, between a Jewish lesbian and a very tall Irish gay man. Their love and friendship were no small feat in a time of lesbian and gay male separatism. An arsonist’s fire destroyed the offices of GCN, and with it the fierce and fragile energy that had sustained it. Hoffman’s well-researched memoir is an important record of a time pre-AIDS, pre-gay marriage and pre-gay chic.

Map of Ireland [Scribner] is a novel by Stephanie Grant also set in Boston in the early 1970s. Set against the seething backdrop of busing in South Boston, it is a coming of age story of Ann Ahern, who could have used a Gay/Straight Alliance in her high school. Grant does right by the complexity of her main character. Ahern has a mouth on her. She’s a tough jock, a romantic, who keeps loving people who are the wrong race and the wrong gender. Grant is also “wicked funny”, as they say in Southie, and tells a rambling, rollicking good story that honors her own Irish roots.

Each work stands solidly on its own, but because I read them in tandem, there was a satisfying overlap. The city of Boston in the 1970s is both a main character and a setting for race and gender battles. Both books have fully drawn characters impelled by a wonderful, confusing, liberating lust, denounced by Catholic fundamentalism. Ann Ahern’s fascination with burning things got her into trouble. I found myself wondering for a second if she had anything to do with the GCN fire. But I suspect her story would have been quite different if she’d stumbled on the GCN family.

“Above the Atlantic’s rim she saw a rain’s fallstreaks curve. A stillness of empty space marked all she saw. It was this loping shore of mineral silence people meant when they said ‘the dunes.’ The surface of the moon might look like this: rudimentary.”

Dillard captures Ptown in all its seasons, summer people and constant tidal changes. The Maytrees fills the fiction gap between Provincetown memoirs such as Mary Heaton Vorse’s Time and the Town and Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast, and Karen Krahulik’s historical study Provincetown: from Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort.

Dillard claims that after writing The Maytrees, she is tired, and she is not going to write any more novels. This is understandable, but it’s a loss. And eight-year project, The Maytrees was originally 1,200 pages long and packed with historical and natural detail, but Dillard decided that her simple love story could not support all that. Although she fully renders the characters of the Cape, and the cape itself as a character, in the 217 pages that remain, one wishes the edited material could be an addendum to the book, like the extra features on a DVD.

Set in the 1940s, The Maytrees is the love story of Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree. They court, marry, and have a son, Petie. Toby leaves Lou for the town hoyden, Deary Hightoe, and the two move to Maine. Lou raises Petie and achieves a life without resentment. Twenty years later, Deary develops heart problems, and Toby returns with her to Provincetown. Lou cares for Deary, who is, after all, her old friend, and Lou and Toby reconcile. These are the bare bones of the story.

Today, the few remaining old-time year-rounders often refer to Ptown as the world’s largest open-air insane asylum. The Maytrees is peopled with a supporting cast of nonconforming characters: Reevadare Weaver, the much-married, much-hennaed, BYO-everything party giver; Cornelius Blue, a full-bearded denizen of the dune shacks, the remote, falling-down artists’ dwelling along the ocean; Hiram and Elaine Cairo, professor from New York; Jane, their non-dissertation writing daughter who marries Cornelius, twenty years her senior; and Lour, Toby, and Deary themselves. Deary in an architect who sleeps in the dunes wrapped in sails because “she claimed to like the way the starlight smelled on the sand.” Toby, a veteran of Word War II, moves houses in Ptown for a living and writes epic poems in red composition books.

Toby leaves Lou the day after Petie is hurt in a bicycle accident. Toby uses his wife’s willingness to forgive the driver who’d hit her son to bolster his decision, although he himself will ultimately benefit from Lou’s capacity for forgiveness. Lou, who had watched her mother polish her grudge against her father, who abandoned the family, as “the sold project for the balance of her life,” decides that she will not be “ ‘Poor Mom’ with periodic walk-on roles as grieving and piteous victim.” After her dune neighbor, Cornelius says, “Lou, I wish you’d stop poisoning yourself,” she hikes up he Pilgrim Monument, a granite tower in the center of town:

From the top she looked at flat sky, flat sea and flat land. She was ready to want to stop this. Thereby se admitted – barely – that she could choose to stop. For one minute by her watch, she imagined liked Maytrer impartially. For only one minute by her watch she saw him for himself. That day, having leg go one degree of arc only, for one minute, she sighted relief. Here was something she could do. She could climb the monument every day and work on herself as a task. She had nothing else to do. Their years together were good. He was already gone. All she had to do for peace was let him go.”

Her monumental, quotidian grieving frees her, and thus free, she hopes “scandalously” to live her own life. She tries to hear her own thoughts. She reclaims “what she had forfeited of her own mind, if any. She took pains to keep outside the word acceleration.” Her dune shack becomes the room of her own. “The bay and ocean and daytime sky did not change. Lou lived in color fields. By habit, she ignored the Cape’s manmade changes.” She paints again. A true New Englander, she cuts out al radios but the Red Sox. She learns to look our for “resentment, self-cherishing and envy. Though town, national and world life gave her fits, she formed the habit of deflecting them before they dug in.”

Freed from the “tar pit” of grief and the miasma of town gossip, she wonder, “Why take personal offense if two fall in love?” She enjoys the newsy letters Cornelius receives from Maytree, orders his new book of poetry, and writes to Maytree and Deary, inviting them to back to Provincetown.

As the real estate boom and big money – for some, at least – have hit Ptown with a plague of gussied up, airtight houses equipped with motion-sensor security lights, I read with nostalgia of the Ptown of old. Dillard says she wanted to call her book Romantic Comedy about Light Pollution, but her publishers didn’t like her joke.

As a manual for transcending life’s sorrow and savoring life’s joys, The Maytrees is the most practical of self-help books.

Plain old Hypocrisy Fatigue I can handle. Harriet Miers, she who wanted be on the Supreme Court, showing contempt of court? Ho, hum. Alberto Gonzales, the nation's leading law enforcement officer, preemptivey ordering the Justice Department not to prosecute contempt of Congress charges if they concern assertions of executive privilege? He wore me out with his hypocrisy long ago, and his is no mind of mensa.

But after Ted Haggard and Mark Foley, I knew I was in the throes of a full blown SHF attack. And when the story unfolded about David Vitter, I felt like a drowsy chaperone at yet another orgy. Yawn.

Back in the good old days of the Clinton Impeachment, after the multi-philandering Newt Gingrich stepped down, his successor, the Speaker-elect, Bob Livingston resigned when his extramarital affairs became public, thanks to the investigative hustle of Larry Flynt. Louisiana legislator, Vitter, campaigned for Livingston's vacant pedestal and won. During his campaign, Mrs. Vitter was asked what she would do if her husband cheated on her, and she said, "I'm a lot more like Lorena Bobbit than Hillary. It he does something like that, I'm walking away with one thing, and it's not alimony, trust me." You go girl!

Vitter is a family values, anti-choice, abstinence-only social conservative who called for Clinton to resign to "preserve the moral fabric of the country." He lead the election year fight to bring the Marriage Protection Amendment to the Senate floor. He smarmed, "I don't believe there's any issue that's more important than this one." Ah, but there was: how phone logs work.

The still hustling Larry Flynt notified Vitter's office that the Senator's number had appeared several times in the phone logs of a DC Escort Service. From an undisclosed location, perhaps on a tryst with the no-show Harriet Miers, Vitter e-pologized for the very serious sin of his past, took responsibility and said that he had received forgiveness from his God and his wife. Apparently Lorena Vitter's vitriol has a cut off date. No word yet on whether Giuliani has dropped him as his Southern regional campaign manager.

During his prayerful seclusion, Vitter received more allegations from other prostitutes surfaced challenging that single "sin" statement. Salacious rumors of a diaper fetish, Pampers not Astronaut, whipped through the internet. You can be sure Joe Lieberman, the senate swinger, did not start them. He needs Vitter to stay. After a week in which he worked on his press victimization ‘tude, Vitter held a press conference flanked by his wife Wendy, ably played by Allison Janney, CJ, the press secretary on West Wing. And then he was back to work.

Despite all the dizzying, juicy details, my schaden has lost its freude. Like Erectile Dysfunction [I guess] I just can't get it up anymore for the predictable disconnect between screed and deed. Blow jobs pale in this seven year snow job and I'll take orgasm over wargasm any day. Give them all a per diem.

Kate Clinton is a stand-down comic

Alcoholism affects 20 to 30% of the gay population. In a 1982 study, 35% of lesbians surveyed reported a history of excessive drinking compared to 5% of heterosexual women. Thanks to Britney, Lindsay and other fully loaded wild girls, the gap may be narrowing. Almost one third of lesbians and gay men are addicted to drugs. It’s not that homosexuality causes addiction or addiction would just be a gay problem.

We live in a country fueled by alcohol and drugs. What we witnessed after Katrina, was not just a natural disaster but a whole area of the country going through an unplanned detox at an involuntary rehab. The president is a death-denying, dry drunk who once deliriously and mistakenly described Dick Cheney as “a half glass full kind of guy.” There’s no telling what Laura is on. For her sake, I hope it’s something.

Now, I can assure you, I’m no angel. I played in a lesbian softball league, not for the love of the game, but for the after-beer. Ditto, golf. If you had one bottle of wine with friends at dinner, why not eight? I would still be smoking pot if I could find things on my computer. I came up in a lesbian culture that had chem-free seating areas. I thought it was quaint, probably good for those who really needed it, but not for me.

Nor am I Carrie Nation, that old temperance babe of the early 1900s who perfected an anti-saloon direct action she called “hatchetations,” the envy of any ACT UP-per. The only good thing that came out of Prohibition was Mafia movies and eventually The Sopranos. [Cut to black.]

And I don’t mean to bite the hand that gave us Zima. Years ago, when Absolut-ly no one was funding gay anything, liquor companies saw a niche and poured it on. Gay leaders, desperate to keep their doors open, agonized over being taken on by liquor companies. I don’t ascribe malicious intent, but as I walk through the last stumbling, mumbling partiers at the end of gay prides, I think of the Russian czars keeping the peasants pacified with cheap vodka.

I’m not tryin to make you go to rehab. No, no, no. That’s way too much eyeliner for me. The next few years of gay liberation require our consciousness. As we win freedom a day at a time, I promise it’s going to be a real high. Have a $6 bottle of Pride water instead. Have the one with bubbles.

CCD, occurs when a hive’s inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers. Sounds like a planning meeting I once attended for a gay protest at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll. Each day I check urban legend debunking sites for news that some bored high schoolers from North Dakota started the rumor. So far nothing.

Apian scientists posit many causes for the deaths of the bees: mites, pesticides, radioactive waves, cell phones, genetically altered foods, global warming or all of the above. I think it’s Starbucks in the ground water. Absorbed by plants, the caffeine makes the bees busy-busy, then crazy-busy, then dead from overwork. No more little bees’ knees jutting from peonies, obscenely pantalooned in pollen.

Albert Einstein, one Alberto we can believe, said that after the bees disappear, humanity has about four years left. I don’t want to sound like some Nostra Dame, but we have already begun to see a corollary collapse. It is BBCC, Baby Boomer Colony Collapse. Quite frankly, I couldn’t be happier. And I am one.

My Baby Boom generation has been endlessly, tediously fascinating to itself. Spawn of World War II, we grew up on Spocks. We rocked from Elvis to the Beatles. The Vietnam war was our first quagmire. We did drugs, inhaled, fought for civil rights for women, blacks and gays. Love meant never having to say you’re sorry. Our idealism was supposedly killed with Martin Luther King and the Kennedys.

Some late boomers got conservative, corporate, rich, did cocaine. In our inevitable fifties, many did Viagra, Botox and hormones. Aided by our Uncle Toms – Brokaw and Hanks – the rich, who had not served in the first quagmire because they had other priorities, grew nostalgic for those so-called greatest generation wars. When attacked in 2001, we were pumped up and ready. We gave ourselves rhetorical goose bumps about freedom goosestepping. Iraqnam.

Talkin’ ‘bout my generation, George Bush, King Baby-Boomer-in-Chief and his loyal cronies, have not represented well. The defining moment of his “administration” is not 9.11 but Reno 911, a cable cop show whose tagline is, “No one does a better job of not doing a better job.” The BushClintonBushClinton [BCBC] double helix of hubris is the buzzkill of BBCC. Though Hillary is a woman, there’s cold comfort on the farm with, “You go to the polls with the candidate you have, not the one you wish you had.”

Now in our sixties, we are terrorized by death and, of course, no one has ever experienced that quite so exquisitely. It is unseemly for us to be called Baby Boomers. We are Geezer Boomers. We should just get out of the way – work for Habitat for Humanity, do Meals on Wheels, be Literacy volunteers. I’m sorry. Our work here is done. It’s time to step away from the hive.

What came next in Hardaway’s attitude adjustment regimen? We could ask Isaiah Washington (still employed at Grey’s Anatomy at press time). But he's not saying. Come to think of it, Washington’s not saying anything. About a hundred times more polished than Hardaway, Washington successfully avoided lockup the first time he came out with the F word at the office. Only when the ‘intense’ actor slipped and threw F bomb number two was it time for gayhab.

Due to security concerns, the location of the Gay Slur rehab is known only to the directors of GLSEN and GLAAD. Persistent rumors place it right across the street from the top-secret unit where they housed Mark Foley and Rev. Ted “absolutely heterosexual” Haggard.

While the rehabilitation methods are shrouded in mystery, we do know Washington successfully completed the process. He was released into the community service program, where he will donate a free performance on Dante's Cove and allow gay designers to pin fabrics on him on Project Runway.

Gayhab is obviously just the latest twist in the slur rehabilitation biz. Everybody’s so tetchy, a whole Sesame Street alphabet of offense is available for rehabbing. The N word, the F word, the Q word. (Not Queer: Quagmire.) Mel Gibson is now building a Malibu campus for the Jewish Slur and Chemical Dependency unit. Michael Richards has been looking for investors for his N-Word B-Gone Unfunny Farm franchise, but so far no takers - although with his tendency to jump around in fat-black-woman, soft-bigotry body suits, Eddie Murphy is starting to look like a possible partner.

But, hey, this field is wide open. Now that saying something mean gets you in more trouble than doing something mean, I recommend we fashion future slur rehab technology on the Sarah Silverman Program. You'll learn to say anything you want if you say it innocently enough while wearing a two-toned cotton baseball shirt. You’ll create a post-p.c., guilty-pleasure persona that’s babe-licious, witty, winning. Say it funny like you don't really mean it, and you'll never have to meet with GLAAD or GLSEN in a small dark-paneled room.

* Written before the blonde bombshell Coulter-bombed

Perhaps more noteworthy than the upsurge of sleep numerology in these last years of the Bush Administration is the intriguing phenomenon of the traveling exhibit known as Body Worlds. In the last two years, millions of people in the U.S. have attended sold-out exhibitions of human bodies and body parts preserved and frozen in various poses through a process called plastination. Gunther Von Hagens, a German anatomist, invented the technique, put the show on the road, and put me off Rocky Road Haagen Dazs for a while.

The stated purpose of Body Worlds is the “education of the layman about the human body leading to better health awareness.” Thus the compare-and-contrast exhibit of the smoker’s and non-smoker’s lung, the free-standing circulatory system. The Swimmer, the Archer, the Equestrian, and the Pregnant Woman and her eight-month fetus are some of the more popular displays.

But we are kept from seeing un-plastinated bodies of our dear soldiers returning from war zones. We are all left behind.

Full disclosure: I have not attended. Whenever I saw the ads for the show, I mistakenly dismissed them as movie promos for Matrix IV with a filleted and bug-eyed, crouching Keanu Reeves. A surprising residual reverence for the body as Temple of the Holy Ghost keeps me away.

It can’t be pure sensationalism that drives people to the exhibit. Since most science has been transformed into political science, people want information. We used to just call it General Science or Biology. Now it’s all multiple choice.

Word has it that when he’s not deciding to surge, or bullying surge protectors in Congress, George W. Bush has been ruminating about his legacy. Southern Methodist University, whose motto is the unintentionally ironic “The Truth Shall Set You Free,” is the proposed and reluctant site of the Bush II Library: a half-stack of unreadable, blackened FOIA vetted documents, leather-bound copies of My Pet Goat, the French existentialists, and “some Shakespeares.” Go Mustangs! The money could more suitably be spent on the GWB Fitness Center.

Or the GWB Body World show? They’re generally money-makers, but W. can run it into the ground in a few years. We would select different personalities from the Bush years, determine their perfect sleep number, induce a state of even more suspended animation, and put them in dramatic poses. The War Criminal/Advisor (with Henry Kissinger, we won’t have to do much). The Anonymous Source. The Retired Military General. The Political Director. The Devoted Personal Assistant/Supreme Court Nominee. The Mother (at last Barbara would be silent). The Hunter. The Hunter’s Friend with actual buckshot in his face.

We could authorize a road show to travel the U.S., and if we run out of sleepinates, dip into the reserve of actual dead people. Ken Lay could at last be a cooperative witness as Corporate CEO.
If this gives you a creepy, quasi-necrophilia feeling, you don’t have to go to the show. But it could keep them all from starting their own consulting firms.

Kate “I Still See Dead People” Clinton is a humorist .

We laid over in London, where the papers were speculating that Bush is on the sauce again. We finally landed twenty-four hours later in Nairobi – have I told you how much I love Ambien? – and got news that the Dems had taken the House!! There was toyi-toying by the luggage carousel. Even the Kenyans were happy. They, of course, hope that their favorite son, Barack Obama, will be the next president of the U.S. as if that will somehow solve their problems.

Before we could get more election news, we flew north to the Rift Valley, out of range and off the grid. On my birthday, someone managed to pick up an errant Blackberry signal or perhaps a drum beat and we heard that Rumsfeld had resigned. For my 60th I hope to get smoke signals that George is to appear before the International War Crimes Tribunal. Impeachment is too good for him.

Africa is so stunningly beautiful, you can see why those chilled, old white Europeans just had to have it. The long range effects of their colonizing – genocide, overpopulation, civil war, illiteracy, poverty, environmental havoc –foretell the dire, long range consequences of Boy George’s colonizing binge, I mean democratizing campaign, in Iraq.

Each time, in the last six years we’ve traveled out of the U.S. we’ve dreaded the return. From Lula’s new Brazil. From Mary Robinson and Mary Patricia McAleese’s Ireland. This time was different. When we landed, everyone was a week ahead in their gloating, but I assure you, I have caught up. I had shows immediately, and selfishly worried that the electoral change would be a hard adjustment. Comedically, I admit to having grown lazy. What’s been bad for us, has been good for me. But no worries! Maybe no more goose-stepping yes-men, parroting the Republican party line. But here’s to the nutty, messy Democrats. Arguing behind closed doors, then spilling, brawling into the streets. It’s pluralism, baby!

Is it me or is there a slight uptick for women? Despite the Grand Mufti of Australia’s pronouncement that a woman without a hijab is like a piece of raw meat; despite our exporting fundamentalism and all its misogynist works to Canada, I sense a slight Winter Solstice turn toward the light. I count the defeat of the anti-choice measure in South Dakota, the many women elected and re-elected, the likelihood of a woman, a socialist, as the next president of France. Hey, Britney dumped Kevin.

So, I’ll be smiling that night in January, when that gnarly little guy swings open that big wooden door and barks, “Madame Speaker.” And I will watch happily when Nancy Pelosi sits pertly upright in her double knits, next to Dick “Waterboard” Cheney slumped and grumpy behind George as he labors through his “If I Did It” State of the Union address. I won’t be drinking a Woolite-tini. I’ll be munching New York City’s own trans-fatless Freedom Fries.

Kate “I heart Arizona!” Clinton

Well, I’m nothing if not civic, so I consulted my inner pollster. What word would get our positives up and our negatives down? I wanted a word for marriage that was values neutral. Perhaps something from a food group – Cinnabon? Everyone loves Cinnabon! Something that represented our conflicted feelings on marriage – those who can, care less; those who can’t, care more.

Here’s what I realized. Our enemies are right: There is no other word for marriage. So let’s keep the word, but put it in quotes to represent all our ambivalences. From now on, I think it should be mandatory to do those double pumped, bunny-ears with your fingers in the air every time you say the m-word or any of its variants. We got “married”. She asked me to “marry” her. If you don’t, it’s a felony punishable by reading Mary Cheney’s book.

Whatever you call it, Oprah won’t do it. After she established her “just friends” cred with Gayle, for the tedious nth time, Oprah felt confident enough to do a show on lesbians coming out of “marriage” to men. Apparently, these women were so pretty, people complained that they could not have been lesbians. One of my favorite lesbophobic tropes. Listen, after what happened to Oprah with James Frey, I am sure each lesbianic background was completely fact-checked. And I’d like that job.

Despite Oprah’s breathless ratings driven attention to this phenomena, it’s really quite old and ordinary. Like me. In the early 1980’s I was performing in Ohio, and staying in community housing. Unlike other more marginal, earnest, crunchy granola billeting, this was a solid, upper-middle class suburban house in a very straight neighborhood far from the homo-heights gay section of town. One of the women had been “married” to a man and had gotten the house in the divorce. After some wine, over an unapologetically meaty, wheat-laden meal, she regaled us with stories of the neighborhood.

Imagine the voiceover for Wisteria Lane as a very randy, mischievous lesbian. Talk about desperate housewives. The women got the children off to school, hung out at one of their pools, paired off, and were back before everyone came home. Things were especially busy on warm summer nights – they had an elaborate system of lights to indicate when someone was available. This was years before Melissa Etheridge sang, “Come to my Window.” My new friend said that on a family trip to the Magic Kingdom one of the women had shagged the girl in the Peter Pan costume.

When you realize that even same old sex “marriage” is really a secret gateway to lesbianism, you begin to see the Right’s paranoia. No wonder they call Ohio a battleground state.

If the Creek Don’t Rise, My Life Out West with the Last Black Widow of the Civil War, by Rita Williams, is her story of being orphaned at four and being both unwanted and raised by her resentful Aunt Daisy in the Colorado Rockies. The long lunacy of slavery fuels Rita’s story of extended family, legacy, and ambition in the 1960s and 70s. Williams is a great storyteller and at excruciatingly personal moments, layered with adolescent angst and racial isolation, I hoped she was lying, but knew she wasn’t.

Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security-Obsessed World by Eve Ensler is a mix of personal history and reportage. She candidly reveals the terror beneath her secure-seeming childhood and connects that with the terror told her by women in Mexico, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and America in 911 and Katrina. Ensler’s voice is of a practical and spirited spirituality as she worries the many complex strands of the conundrum of security and freedom. I kept thinking of Mae West’s devastating, “Most men want to protect me; can’t figure out from what.”

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, though it lacks the long clarifying subtitle that is apparently mandated in publishing law, is a stunning, poignant, literate graphic memoir. And you thought Jim McGreevy’s memoir was graphic. This is a memoir that keeps on giving. I reread it. I stared at individual pages. Through nearly obsessive, perfectly rendered graphic detail and sparely perfect prose, Bechdel documents her coming of age as a woman and lesbian in the context of her relationship with her closeted father.

Somewhere the poet, Muriel Rukeyser, who asked, “What would happen if one woman told the truth of her life?” and answered, “The world would split open,” must be smiling.

The UN had morphed into a middle school playground at recess. There was bullying. George Bush was talking directly to the Afghani people, as if they had electricity and were watching him on their flat panel TVs. There was the “I know you are, but what am I?” taunting, from Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There was name calling from Hugo Chavez. The onlooking crowd of delegates did “Oh no you ditn’t” neck moves that needed no translation. Unfortunately, some of these boys have nuclear sticks and stones.

Perhaps it’s the lingering sulphurous futility of trying to make something logical out of war that has so twisted our times.

In his efforts to open religious dialogue, The Pope said that Islam is evil and inhuman. Now come on over for some beer and a brat! Who is his press person? Someone from Tom Cruise’s old entourage? I tried the papal “apologia” in confession: “Bless me father, I’m sorry you think I’ve sinned.” I was asked to leave.

In response to the selectively released intelligence study which stated that our presence in Iraq is worsening the situation there, that master of illogic, Dick Cheney, said we must stay in Iraq because the situation is worsening.

In dizzying daily conversation, those who have changed their position on the war think they deserve more street cred than those who were against it from the start.

What to do in the face of such paralyzingly deliberate, denying illogic? In addition to the bracing necessary acts of civic participation – working for a candidate, voter registration, running for office, voting, fund-raising, phone banking, poll monitoring – I humbly suggest another tactic.

The sit-in was a simple, brilliant tactic of the civil rights movement. The die-in was a brilliant tactic of the AIDS movement. To those esteemed protest methods, I would add the laugh-in. Not that too short-lived variety show from the Nixon years, though it is still quite subversive, even in reruns. No, the laugh -in maneuver I’m talking about can be done in large groups or one-on-one. So far this hidden weapon cannot be detected by the new Behavior Detection Officers on security.

After listening to huge steaming piles of illogic for a respectful five minutes or so, let go with a guffawing, rip-snorting howl of bend-at-the-waist laughter. If you have infiltrated a crowd, a lecture or rally, let out your whoop, pound on the seat in front of you, recover yourself, then perhaps with a small wave of the hand, indicate to those around you that you’ve regained your composure. Wait ten minutes and do it again.

If it’s a one on one situation, or a small dinner party, as you right yourself after your hoot, wipe your eyes, try to catch your breath, sigh, look at the speaker, do a respectable double-take, and wide eye the person with, “Oh my God, you mean it.” Repeat. They will never say those things again with any degree of confidence. It’s a sure no-fire way to interrupt illogic.

Kate “Spit-Takes for Peace” Clinton is a humorist.