In “Poker Face,” her second number-one single, Lady Gaga sings of fantasizing about a woman while sleeping with a man. I am intrigued by outright proclamations of bisexuality in popular culture, especially ones that do not cater to a heterosexual, male audience; so a first listen led me online, where I watched Gaga rearrange the pop hit into a piano ballad that highlighted her strong vocals and singer-songwriter identity. She then released “Bad Romance.” Although the budget of the video and its premise were extreme, there was a catchy dance number to warrant its popularity. Underneath the spectacle of Lady Gaga, I was mesmerized to find a twenty-three-year-old, hard-working woman with a strong voice and desire for the kind of Warholian fame that glorifies the artist as a revolutionary figure, not just as fodder for the tabloids.

She redesigned her body into a petite figure that looks starved of almost everything except salad and diet coke, if not the other variety.

Once I and the rest of the world became fixated on Lady Gaga, the contradictions of her character quickly surfaced. Although she struts around in avant-garde fashions, she also sports the bronze skin and platinum-blonde locks that have become a signature look of the present generation. In her transformation from an unknown Upper East Sider to a celebrity citizen of the world, she redesigned her body, possibly getting a new nose job and certainly rebranding her body into a petite figure that looks starved of almost everything except salad and diet coke, if not the other variety. Her image is nothing short of conventional, even though she claims to be a freak.

As her videos become more elaborate, they also stray more and more from the meaning of her songs. Her video for “Telephone” chronicles a lesbian couple out to poison the men that degrade them, yet the lyrics of the song just recount a person in a club who doesn’t want to answer her ringing mobile. The “Alejandro” video, which Gaga describes as having a “homo-erotic militaristic” theme, ends with men ripping off Gaga’s clothes and groping her with an animalistic hunger. If the video was meant to be a statement regarding the discrimination of gay men, it was lost on me. All I saw was an orgy, and a male-dominated one at that. The biggest hypocrisy to emerge was when, at an event promoting HIV awareness, the singer said, “I can’t believe I’m saying this—don’t have sex. It’s not really cool anymore to have sex all the time. It’s cooler to be strong and independent.” This came from the girl who rose to fame by declaring, “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.”

If Gaga wants to encourage abstinence, she should reconsider her career moves, especially the erotic videos she creates. In “Alejandro,” she’s filmed in her thin, nude-colored skivvies thrusting with a man in bed. She’s broadcasting this simulation of sex to her entire fan base, which could hold meaning if she didn’t then come out and oppose promiscuity. Sex in art does not necessarily mean exploitation but in this case, it appears so. Even her fashions, while eccentric, always flaunt her frame, exposing her hyper-feminine figure. Showing skin can be an expression of freedom or a tool for womanly empowerment, but Gaga’s move hardly seems political. It seems a compromise she must make to get away with her “performance art.” The wilder the video, the fewer clothes she must wear. Ergo she flaunts everything, especially her vagina.

The vagina has been the only territory left unexposed by female pop stars, and Gaga seems to be famously exploring this exclave again and again. If Gaga’s desire is to become a pop-music pioneer, she has succeeded, since no figure in the history of her field has glamorized the vagina as much as she. Christina Aguilera wore assless chaps, and Britney Spears exposed herself when she emerged from a car without panties, but no female pop star parades and flaunts her privates with such microscopic obsession. In “Telephone,” a strip of caution tape was all that covered Gaga. At the Grammys, the cut of her unitard seemed centimeters away from her labia. In “Alejandro,” she directs the viewers’ eye to her bottom half by marking her vagina with a cross. At the Brit Awards, she had an actual “vagina slip” because her see-through body suit failed to cover her heart of darkness, though the unveiling seems operative to me.

Rolling to a stop at an average American intersection, a crone caught my eye from across the way. A sign was strapped awkwardly over her shoulders, and (though the carefully scrawled slogan eludes my memory) the message that decorated it was simple: Jews control the world; their extermination is our priority.

As a somewhat prodigal member of the Tribes myself, a near-biological rage jittered across my body like hot sparks stirred out of a dormant fire. I rationed out no logic for her. There were no carefully constructed arguments. I didn’t want to dissect her purpose. In fact, I didn’t even consider who she was. This little old woman, standing with her arms around her sandwich-board poster, had breached too many clauses on the social contract: She had plunged me back into the dusty, bloody world of Hobbes’s state of nature. I wanted nothing more than to exit my vehicle, shred her sign to confetti, and cover her in contemptuous saliva.

Relying on the emotional response of our reactionary species seems like an exceedingly poor measure for determining criminal culpability.

I settled for giving her the most offensive middle finger in the history of middle finger giving. After all, this is America.

And, indeed, no middle finger would have been needed at all if this intersection had instead been a circle in Paris or an avenue in Cologne. I would not be tempted to provoke the sword of society, for the woman would have already fallen upon those brandished by the Polizei and the European Union.

To clarify: It is not legal to hate Jewish people in postwar Europe—or, at least, it is not legal to say so. The horrors of seven decades past have revoked any right to display public hate towards Jews. While the law is certainly hard-won in its own right, I am grateful that my great-great-grandparents embarked on a voyage to Manitoba in the nineteenth century.

Robert Faurisson, a long-jowled gentlemen born in Surrey County, just outside of London, was a tenured professor of French literature at the University of Lyon from the early 1970s until his dismissal in 1991. Faurisson’s expulsion, permitted under Europe’s Gayssot Act, came at the end of a long line of struggles with European law, the worst of which boiled over in late 1978 and early 1979 (a time remembered for Voyager’s passage of Jupiter, the rise of Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran, and President Jimmy Carter’s being attacked by a swamp rabbit while fishing in Plains, Georgia). On 16 January of that year, Faurisson wrote his second of two letters to Le Monde, France’s daily evening newspaper, in which he denied the existence of the Zyklon B gas chambers used by Nazis during the Holocaust (This was on the heels of his 1978 authoring of a French text titled “The Diary of Anne Frank—Is it Authentic?”).

With the publishing of this second paper in Le Monde, Faurisson was invited to interview with French radio host and head of politics at Radio Europe 1 (formerly Europe n° 1), Ivan Levaï. For twelve minutes and twenty-eight seconds on December 17, 1980, the two men’s voices punctuated the airwaves in a rising crescendo as Levaï questioned Faurisson on his thoughts about the treatment of Jews during the war. The on-air disclosure brought to full public bearing the already-inked expressions of Faurisson’s historical revisionism, and he made clear to summarize his thoughts well: “The alleged Hitlerite gas chambers and the alleged genocide of the Jews constitute one and the same historical lie, which made possible a gigantic financial-political fraud, the principal beneficiaries of which are the State of Israel and international Zionism, and whose principal victims are the German people – but not their leaders – and the entire Palestinian people.” The producers and host of Expliquez-vous (Explain Yourself) were certainly given what they asked for.

To the citizen of a nation whose politicians and pundits are so swollen with the bruises of Nazi jabs that black-and-blue fades into the star-spangled stripes of partisanship, Faurisson would be an offensive, ignorable titmouse: chirping on the sidelines with all of the other songbirds. Would only have Faurisson been so lucky to be a titmouse: in July, 1981, he was found guilty of criminal charges of “racial defamation” and “incitement to racial hatred” for his words on Expliquez-vous and was ordered to serve a three-month prison sentence in addition to paying both a 21,000 franc fine and a multi-million franc reparation for his public declarations on the Holocaust in magazines, on radio, and on television.

The coverage of Woods’s sex life requires me to propose something [...] obvious: the women with whom Woods had sex were not victims.

Yet those who make a habit of letting facts form their opinions – rather than allowing sensationalism or schadenfreude to do so– will notice a crucial difference between Woods’s most recently publicized indiscretion and Polanski’s 1977 crime: Woods slept with a twenty-two-year-old, while Polanski raped a thirteen-year-old. This seems to be an important point, but a widely circulated article in New York Daily News – building off of a piece in the National Enquirer – only briefly mentions the woman’s age, preferring instead to focus on the predatory imagery of Tiger cruising by in his SUV and hitting on a young coed who, it seems, was a helpless slave to a babyish infatuation with the golfer. I insist we remember that a woman of twenty-two is not only legally authorized to imbibe Woods’s “Special Drink” (which turns out to be a disappointingly dull combination of Corona and rum): she is, in fact, also legally authorized to consent to sex, even if it happens to be with a rich, famous, and married athlete.

My distinction between Woods’s copulation with a twenty-two-year-old woman and Polanski’s rape of a thirteen-year-old child should strike the reader as superfluous. Still, the coverage of Woods’s sex life requires me to propose something that I originally assumed was obvious: the women with whom Woods had sex were not victims.

Amid the commentators intent on convincing us that Woods not only took advantage of his mistresses but violated women everywhere by promoting misogyny, the arrival of lawyer Gloria Allred is positively laughable (and predictable). In “defense” of two of Woods’s former lovers, Allred styles herself as the lone vanguard against the golfer’s romantic and sexual tyranny. Demanding apologies to his bedmates, Allred cries that “women are not transgressions. They are human beings!”

I shall be the first to agree with Allred (on more than a definitional point) that women are human beings. Indeed, women are human beings that can make their own sexual choices and take responsibility for them. Yet taking responsibility does not seem to be among the PR plans for Allred’s clients and Woods’s other lovers (who, after all, are ultimately aiming at damage control).

Tubeworms teeming in the Mariana Trench, the harshest, most abyssal region of this planet, reveal a moribund fact: that life is always everywhere relevant. If you think I am posturing, then gray your hair with the following paradox; its parts, when taken together, inspire a vexed dimpling of the brow.

Act One. Momentarily suffering what is strategically labeled a “depression,” a woman hires Dr. George Tiller to drive a needle through the muscular tissue of her abdominal wall and into the bloated, ripe plumb of her uterus. There, digoxin, the same chemical agent by which the serial killer Charles Cullen collected the forty-five trophies of his nursing career, induces a series of strengthening spasms, kicks, and convulsions until the chaos of cardiac arrest has stilled the hideous strength inside her. Waiting, vegetating, out in a motel somewhere among the unmemorable cornfields of forgettable Kansas, the woman picks the lint off the comforter on her bed, glad she does not have to stir night-long in the sweet stink of a hospital, whose nasal moxie would bully her into remarking her location; she can begin to repossess herself now, well before she’s returned to St. Louis, where she contracted the Thing and abided it as long as she could tolerate. Four days later, after the expanding dowels wedged through her cervix have warped it to the requisite size, the woman squats over a commode and squeezes, pushes, in the defecatory manner, as webs of sweat thicken on her temples like the trappings of any both strenuous and healthy exercise. Then a clunk resounds, bone-hard and heavy, on the porcelain sole of the gaping maw beneath her birth canal: “It is finished,” she seems to say. This is not like an egg-white, a tadpole, or even an eerie figurine; in fact, the blue-faced gaze could be mistaken for the vacant stare of a nine-month-old in a neonatal ward. It is, whatever it is, still a Thing.

Nine-months grown and four-days decayed, the fat homunculus of the brown-stained swaddle, the Tom Thumb of the garnet gangrene, turns in the latex hands of Dr. Tiller.

Act Two, Scene One. The boyfriend, whom can be called “Reggie” (because this act is different insofar as it can present things as human), enters the recovery room behind the snapping Crocs of Dr. Tiller, OB/GYN. Unacquainted with the initiatory rites of fatherhood, Reggie bothers the nearest orderly for an antacid, for his groaning bowels bemoan his latest contribution to this comedy of errors; that is, since “It’s a boy,” he was told, the suction of cheap-cigar smoke would have been a sensible pretense for him and the pediatrician of his heir manqué. (Alas.) Having survived her second round of waiting, presumably by tearing shapes off the baking sheet that lines the plastic pseudo-divan on which she now poses, “Regina” sights Reggie and shows her ecstasy in the celestial altitude and goalpost position of her arms. They perform an embrace suiting the common-law stage of intimacy and then, each assured of the other’s satisfaction, turn to their steadfast George Tiller, whose countenance is no longer the very image of a canker sore.

Act Two, Scene Two. Two hours have expired since Regina passed her gallstone into a commode, and one hour since Tiller filtered out the jellyfish of her afterbirth. Interrupting these family matters with a mannerly cough, the couple’s stork has announced the return of the portable toilet, which the orderly conveys carefully, as though it were a manger. Nine-months grown and four-days decayed, the fat homunculus of the brown-stained swaddle, the Tom Thumb of the garnet gangrene, turns in the latex hands of Dr. Tiller, a duet of spiders wrapping their prize, until the moldering midget emerges clothed from his crapper crib, having knocked his bleeding crown on the way out of the head (Aghast, the boy looks like he’s had a heart attack). In cuddles with the onetime “temporary depressive” Regina, whom the boy can’t call “Mom,” he humors a poke from Reggie, or sleeps like a rock, while Tiller reviews the medical report and tells them that nothing was wrong with their “baby.” Regina, Reggie, and the baby have up to three hours before the big bye-bye and decide, as Tiller told them is normal, to make the most of their life together. Once the orderly arrives with the clinic’s camera, available to patients for no additional charge, the couple crowds around the late-term abortion for a prideful portrait to be hung above the cracked mantle in their happy home. Then, helped by hands shoved under his camel-toe armpits, the baby steps from an inkpad onto a certificate that, when framed, will display footprints the imagination can follow on a rainy day. Having resisted the urge to name him before they saw him, Regina and Reggie now decide it’s “Thing” and are convinced they’ve got it right. Not three hours but seven minutes have flown, and that’s the lucky number, so black-footed, baby-photo Thing is back in the toilet. Come as soon as gone, Tiller wheels the porcelain perambulator through a sterile hall and a febrile quarantine, where he tips Baby into the crematorium whose fire has curled and closed the hands of sixty-thousand Things in the gesture of a droll farewell.

Dear Santa Claus,

P.S.: We’re going through budget cuts and a health initiative this year, so no cookies and only soy milk.

Mr. Obama,

Sending regards as warm as the heart of Yongbyon,
The Government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Yet many foresighted analysts wag a cautionary finger at these citizens. Governmental regulation is, they say, somewhere between “ineffective” and “malicious.” Unquestionably, the American Mecca of free-market economics is the Cato Institute, located in Washington, DC. Striving to inform Americans of the effects of governmental intervention, often to many Americans’ distaste in the current political climate, Cato fervently seeks to widen the debate on public policy to include the more trenchant, long-term consequences of legislation.

I recently had the privilege of sitting down with Jerry Taylor, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, to discuss the government’s role in the energy market. Taylor, one of the most influential critics of federal energy and environmental policy, is a frequent contributor to major news networks, appearing regularly on NBC, CNN, BBC, and Fox News; his op-eds on public policy have graced the pages of newspapers, journals, and magazines across the country. He is a member of the International Association for Energy Economics, and he has served on several Congressional advisory bodies, testifying on Capitol Hill at crucial junctures of political decision-making.

Igor Sadovyi: Hailed as a huge success by the Obama Administration, the “Cash for Clunkers” initiative led to a notable increase in automobile sales for automakers. Yet some are saying that the environmental effect, at which the program was targeted, was negligible. What is your opinion on “Cash for Clunkers,” and should we expect to see similar initiatives in the future?

Jerry Taylor: It was really a stupid policy, but a very popular one, meaning we’ll likely see more of these stupid yet popular policies. There’s a mountain of academic works that have slapped around “Cash for Clunkers” by quantifying costs and benefits, finding that this is one of the worst government programs in modern history. A lot of those tabulations are being done by non-ideological sources like the University of California Energy Institute, a place where you wouldn’t expect to find slash-and-burn campaigns against governmental policy.

IS: As American drivers continue to spend inordinate amounts of money on gasoline, questions are being raised regarding the levels of federal gasoline taxes. In the past, you have advocated for the abolition of these taxes. What, in your judgment, is fundamentally wrong with having federal gasoline taxes, and what would getting rid of them accomplish?

JT: They’re not correcting any externalities: Whatever problems you find without the tax will be around with the tax. If your issue lies with pollution from cars, then tax pollution; it’s more direct, and more effective. If you want to reduce dependency on foreign oil for reasons of national security, then you tax foreign-oil imports. You don’t tax gasoline; that gets nothing accomplished.

IS: What is your view on current and proposed cap-and-trade programs, on their benefits and their shortcomings?

JT: That’s a big question. The simple answer is that the cost associated with a cap-and-trade program outweighs the benefits. It is obvious if you just look at the benefits that occur from US gas emissions: If you try to run those emissions through climate models, you’ll find that temperatures are reduced by just a fraction of a degree Fahrenheit—nothing of consequence. The benefits are virtually immeasurable. The cost, depending upon whom you ask, is either small, medium or large. Any cost, be it small, medium, or large, is going to be greater than an unquantifiable benefit.

his past summer, I traveled to Senegal to work on an archaeological field project led by Francois Richard, a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, and Ibrahima Thiaw, a professor of archaeology at Dakar’s Université Cheikh Anta Diop. Senegal, a small country tucked into the western-most region of Africa (the so-called “dark continent,” depending on the textbook one reads), has something of an under-appreciated archeological history. At the time, my largest goal for this experience was to shed light on the history of a people for and about whom few historical documents exist—it was, in this spirit, an opportunity to make real-world use of my academic skills. Yet the lessons one learns in the classroom, I quickly found, do not easily translate to the field.

After managing to lose twenty American dollars in the midst (and confusion) of my arrival at Léopold Sédar Senghor International Airport, I had the dizzying realization that I was not in Kansas, or at least Chicago, anymore. I was in an unfamiliar country, my knowledge of French was, at best, sub-par, and I didn’t know anyone other than two other students whose flights would not arrive for many hours. The burden lay solely on my shoulders; I was to make friends and learn to communicate with the people in Dakar—the same people whose ancestors were to be the object of my study.

From the start, the smallest tasks were made strange. Taking a taxi, for instance, required a bit of patience: After flagging down one of the many dilapidated cabs that circled the city, I had to bargain for my rate (It is a rite that seems to be inscribed onto the character of almost all sectors of business in Senegal). There was no digital ticker that slowly climbed as I’d waited at a stoplight; there was no direct fare from the airport to important landmarks; there was just bargaining. Yet as much as we tried, it was hard to haggle for good prices: Everyone in my group stood out as Americans—even me, despite my Jamaican heritage. Stranger yet was living at a Catholic mission in rural Ngasobil, not far from the city of Joal, where running water rushed sporadically through the pipes and the electricity hummed in and out as it seemed pleased to do—this not because of a lack of infrastructure, however. It’s the politics of the place: Senegal’s president, Abdoulaye Wade, makes an absolute priority of Dakar, achieving sometimes a complete absence of water and electricity from the marginalized Serer population on the coast.

Yet I learned to adapt to the conditions, carrying flashlights to dinner for when the power would go out, and storing water so that I could take a bucket shower and have something to drink. Coming from a country where a blackout (in 2003) could be met with widespread hysteria, it felt strange to realize, firsthand, that blackouts were a fact of life. Of course, we were there to do archaeology, and we’d endure what we could to accomplish that goal.

And archaeology we did. We had been laboring for days in the blazing sun when, during one of our mapping phases, something happened that I shall never forget. While we mapped, the many local kids who played around on the beach near our site – always curiously watching our work and shyly asking questions – helped one of our groups refill an excavated unit. It was welcome help: With the addition of twelve extra pairs of hands scooping sand into a two-by-two meter pit, the team was able to finish well ahead of schedule. Yet I was deeply impressed by the innocence, and the accompanying naiveté, of their actions. Did these children know that they had just aided in an archaeological dig whose findings could, possibly, transform the past of Senegal?

When I posed the question to Professor Thiaw, he told me that the people of Senegal recognized their past only insofar as it was convenient; fieldwork like ours has the potential to raise issues involving slavery, issues that many Senegalese prefer to de-emphasize because they don’t mesh well with their contemporary view of their society. I realized that, although I had grand ideas about giving a voice to the subaltern, to re-interpreting a dominant historical narrative, the people of Senegal were largely uninterested in the history I was trying to reveal: their own. Yet this disregard does not seem unusual when one puts it into the greater, and sometimes conflated, context of Africa and its attitude towards the past. There has been a push in recent years to distance the continent from its history so that it can compete in the global market economy, unencumbered by historical politics. This act of forgetting obscures, of course, the reality that today’s Africa is a product of its past—colonial or otherwise. Without working through the pain that this past has inflicted and still inflicts on the present, Africa threatens itself with stagnancy.

n Wednesday, we lost a mainstay of modern American politics. For almost half a century, Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy championed what his heart told him was just.

Breaking legislative deadlocks, forging unsuspected political alliances, and advancing urgent – by some accounts importunate – initiatives, he left his mark, as his legacy will continue to do for some time.

Although his life was occasionally marred by scandal and controversy, Senator Kennedy found stability in Victoria Reggie and, we would hope, laid his inner demons to rest when he publicly recognized, and apologized for, his “own shortcomings: the faults in the conduct of [his] private life.”

A large measure of Kennedy’s political success owed to his sincere and tireless passion. Whether one appraises his beliefs as laudable or one views them as misinformed, Kennedy’s stature as a public servant can hardly be questioned—at least regarding the degree to which he attempted to achieve all he promised his constituents.

I had the pleasure of meeting Ted Kennedy while serving as a Senate Page for John Cornyn (R-Texas). I had been waiting downstairs of the Capitol – near the trams that whisk staffers and politicians to and from the Hill – notifying the Republican cloakroom of the various senators on their way to a vote. As I began to proceed to the Senate chambers, I found myself walking next to the Senate lion himself.

After exchanging a short “good day,” the senator noticed my shiny, smooth-belly-ostrich cowboy boots and joked, with a big smile and a warm demeanor that I could not have expected, that I “must be the page from New York, for Clinton.” I laughed and rejoined that I was, rather, paging for the man who equated gay marriage with civil unions between men and “box turtles.” Ted chuckled as we headed towards the elevator on the way up to the Senate floor.

I then informed the senator that my boots were actually out of dress code for pages and that I’d been reprimanded on a few occasions—much to the amusement of the boot-bedight senators Cornyn, Enzi, and Lott. I told him I didn’t mind as my boots, which have been in my family for years, are a source of my pride and represent who I am. I’ll never forget his response:

“Well, as an outspoken person, you’ll soon learn that your confidence in your character and convictions, whatever they are, will never please everyone. I guess if we please everyone we never truly fight for someone.”

The elevator door opened and the senator promptly bid me goodbye as he made his way to the floor to fervidly fight for someone. I lingered in the elevator for a few seconds, humbled and inspired by the unexpected exchange.

This Saturday, Senator Kennedy will be buried at Arlington Cemetery. From a grave nearby and a plot looking down from a neighboring hill, Robert and John will welcome their brother home after all these years for continuing the impassioned legacy they had begun and to which they devoted their lives.

Outlining the issue and its best solutions needs to be done, therefore, at a graceful rhythm and with the utmost attention to particulars.

The fundamental problem with the current system is two-fold: soaring premiums and availability flaws.

Addressing the latter defect, the most cited statistic is the 46-million Americans who do not hold health insurance. Many take the fact at face value, deciding that these people are uninsured because of extenuating circumstances and that they would purchase insurance if they simply could afford it. Yet Medicaid is available to low-income individuals, and Medicare is available to the retired; while accounting for the shortcomings of both programs, the welfare-inclined must look elsewhere when trying to explain the status of the uninsured. Multiple studies have found that a large portion of the demographic consists in young, risk-loving individuals who would rather face the uncertainty of their future livelihood than pay high premiums. Of course, it’s not just the young who suffer high rates (and the young don’t suffer inflated prices just because of the hazards associated with vernal, spirited lifestyles). The cost of health insurance is skyrocketing across the board.

The Pelosi plan, backed by Obama, opts to establish a public-option program that – at least in name – allows one to choose between a private plan and a federalized plan whose prices are controlled by the government. Yet the choice no American has entails that, either way, everyone must pay for the public program. Choose the private option, and you’ll end up paying for both.

The government’s fickle method of lowering costs is, meanwhile, to contrive a monopoly over health insurance by plunging its own prices beneath those established naturally by the market; by sustaining a loss that only it, the government, could survive; by forcing private insurance companies to lower their own premiums in order to compete and, thereby, running them out of business. How the government is to fund its losses will be through taxes and deeper debt.

Having garnered the disdain of Republicans and fiscal Democrats alike, the proposed surtax on the wealthy has, of course, been one of the major impediments to the acceptance of the plan; increasing taxes during a recession, which further reduces spending in the economy, is also a terribly unpopular proposal. The failure to achieve even full party support before the August recess, a failure that has delayed any vote on the bill until the autumn, is undoubtedly a sign of weakness.

No one claims that healthcare reform is among the least of this country’s priorities. Yet only bipartisanship, backed by economically sound and economically just solutions, can lead to successful and lasting healthcare reform that is beneficial to all Americans.

It will be useful to string out a number of ideas, presently entering the discussion, that are alternative to the Pelosi plan in part or in whole.

Bobby Jindal, former governor of Louisiana, has proposed that the government post price data for all medical expenses. While this action might seem superficial, it would allow consumers to swap between various treatment alternatives manageable within their own budgets, giving them the ability to choose their optimal providers and medical procedures.

The atmosphere at the 2009 parade doesn’t feel too different from the party atmosphere at the ’08, ’07, or ’06 parades, even though organizers have tended to highlight the fact that this is a big one. It’s the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots in New York City’s Greenwich Village, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn refused to let the New York City Police Department shut the bar down and started riots and demonstrations that continued in the Village throughout the early morning of 28 June 1969 and for the next few days. Technically, it’s only the 39th Pride-esque event: the first “Gay Power” marches started in June 1970, and generally became “Gay Pride” only in the ’80s. But nitpicking aside, it’s a not-small deal that the most recent, most public and outspoken incarnation of the gay-rights movement is about forty years old.[2]

It’s also the fortieth anniversary of contralto, addict, and icon Judy Garland’s death. Which may or may not have had any bearing on the Stonewall riot itself, depending on which account you read.

But age and death are no more the focus of this parade than of the three that preceded it. The floats – PRIDEChicago’s official registry lists 250 of them – are huge and teeming with drag queens and go-go boys performing for the crowd, throwing beads and condoms and candy. (If it’s hard to keep dancing or mugging for cameras while in stripper heels or with wings strapped to your naked back for three-plus hours, the performers don’t show it.)

Most are like that, anyway. The official list identifies floats no. 7, 7A, 8, 8, 8 again, 8A, 10, 10, 10, and 10, 11, 12, 19, 20, 32,[3] 36, 48, 64, 65, 65A, 80, 81, 83A, 105, 106, 107, 107A, 108, 121, 191, 193,[4] and 195 as occupied by politicians representing various levels of government, geographical areas, and degrees of queerness. If you were to count each politician as his own float, even those who clustered in poly-politician groups (platonic running mates? cheaper registration? safety in numbers?), you’d find that 13.2% of the registered paraders were looking for your vote. (This figure excludes political organizations, largely to avoid straddling the line between bald-faced electioneering and authentic attempts to participate in or represent the LGBTQ community. Perhaps it’s not necessarily clear which of these camps would claim, for example, the Human Rights Campaign, which has a representative role but also a brand to sell.) These floats are a little less spectacular: most of the politicos seem to be trying to force some kind of dignity—then again, it’s an often hilarious attempt in and of itself.

If you subscribe to the popular idea that shopping is a way of “voting with your dollar,” the political tally shifts dramatic, and occasionally confusing, degrees. (So PepsiCo, Frito-Lay, and the Exelon Corporation [154-6] seem to have a fairly clear agenda—whereas something about nos. 21, “PFLAG & Wrigley Co.,” and 41, “AIDS Care & Google,” is suspect at best.) The number of legally recognized limited-liability corporations at Chicago’s 2009 parade was staggering, and it seems likely that the majority of ’09′s floats were corporate-sponsored.

There’s something comic about some of the corporate floats, in that it’s sort of hard for a savvy consumer to imagine the logic that led to their presence. This chronicler is not sure, for example, what bp (née British Petroleum – no. 163) expected to gain from their float. It seems that if a car is low on gas, one first considers where the nearest gas station is, then where the cheapest one is. Were there steps in deliberative the process beyond those, they would hardly include “Which of the available gas stations is more likely to use a teeny-tiny fragment of my money to hire go-go boys to gyrate for me within the next twelve months?” Put that way, it’s maybe not the worst thing to consider, but even after seeing the float, I associate Fritos not with washboard-abbed public pride but with tubby, very private, binge-eating shame.

It’s hard not to love the display, regardless of who’s paying for it. In classic camp style, enjoyment is enjoyment, no matter the source or the context. Casual observation and a couple of clumsily attempted man-on-the-street interviews tended to reveal that STOCKYARD sounds like it might be a leather-fetish magazine, that people don’t come to Pride parades to talk, and that, if there is something essential about the experience of the parade, it’s that Pride is fun.

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[1] The uppercase letters don’t represent an acronym or anything; they’re apparently a typographic conceit, and are reproduced sic throughout.

[4] Float no. 193 was, in fact, “Schroeder (people for)”—an even more ambiguous label that makes his bodily presence still less certain than Jim Madigan’s supra.