Who the hell is supporting Donald Trump?

March 10, 2016August 4, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 22 Comments

March 10, 2016

When I first started writing about the Trump candidacy last summer it was because his hateful rhetoric reminded of what I had heard in my many years of studying racist groups like the Nazi skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan. I feared for the brown members of my family but hoped that, like so many Trump products, the marketplace of ideas would send the Orange Aristocrat to the dustbin of history; that this “Ivy League” braggart with his horribly misspelled tweets and his potty mouth would be given a permanent time-out by sane political voices.

Well, we were all wrong. Somehow the Trump shell game has only gained followers. So the question is now, who the hell are these people voting for Trump? It’s easy enough to blanket characterize them of as idiotic racists flocking to the game show host’s cult of personality like good little Germans, but that angle is horribly problematic. It denies the fact that these are real people responding to problems that they believe to be real. Their numbers include some of my own friends and family members whom I’d never describe as knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers.

So pollsters and pundsters are wringing their hands trying to figure out who this mob is that might be driving the United States towards fascism while the rest of the world watches in horror and humor. “Donald Trump? Really? Sacré bleu!” YouTube is full of videos of Trumpists saying stupid, racist, and completely wrong things giving credence to the popular belief that they’re an army sub-moronic cretins who have fallen for Trump’s fact-free medicine show. But those folks giving the Donald their stiff-armed pledge don’t tell the whole story.

While ranking Republicans are freaking out, trying to unmask the Trump con (even Glenn Beck has compared him to Hitler) there’s something happening in the country. And that something is same phenomenon that is also driving people to support Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton.

It’s no longer a blue collar world

My master’s research was a thirteen-month study of a group of white supremacist skinheads in Orlando, Florida in 1989 and 1990. I was trying to figure where these little Nazis came from. Were they crazy? Did they have abusive parents? Did black guys steal their girlfriends? What I found was they were responding to the very real phenomenon of deindustrialization. The economic policies of Ronald Reagan opened the door for manufacturing industries to close up shop and head across the border and overseas in search of cheap labor.

If I work in a factory, I probably belong to a union and that union has used collective bargaining to secure a decent wage, paths to promotion, health care benefits, and maybe even a pension. I can work in an auto plant or a textile mill and still buy a (small) house and send my kid to (state) college. That’s the American Dream right there and it evaporated under Reagan. Of the people to move out of the middle class in the 1980s, two-thirds moved downward, not up. And it got worse when Bill Clinton signed NAFTA in 1993, accelerating manufacturing job loss and replacing them with shitty, low-wage, no benefit service sector jobs. Fifty years ago the number one employer in America was General Motors. Now it’s Wal-Mart.

These skinheads knew lots of people who had been laid off or downsized (including their parents). What was happening to America? they’d ask. The answer came from neo-Nazis like John Metzger (son of White Aryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger) who would tell them exactly why. It was immigration, Affirmative Action and a “Jew-controlled” economy conspiring to take away “their” country. A very real problem (deindustrialization) was given a bogus explanation (Jews) and followed up with a very old-fashioned solution (violence). A recipe that has driven the racist skinhead movement ever since.

In much of America, this problem persists. Wages are down and benefits are few and far between. The factory is gone and in its place is a Wal-Mart selling American flags made in Vietnam. There must be somebody to blame for this.

Donald Trump as a Strongman

Donald Trump is a hyper-masculine cartoon character. He wants to torture terrorists and kill their children. That is until one of his seemingly slow advisors hands a note saying that’s illegal. He wants to “bomb the crap” out of ISIS, unaware that Obama has been quietly doing just that. He wants to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S., “until we know what the hell is going on,” except for the fact that we do know what the hell is going on. And he goes on and on about how “they” are chopping off our heads (in New Jersey?). Most famously he wants to “build a wall” to magically keep illegal aliens out, seemingly oblivious to the fact that illegal immigration has decreased and deportations have increased under Obama. All that might not play well on college campuses where kids actually keep up on the news, but it’s a huge hit with the white boys in South Carolina and Mississippi.

My Orlando skinheads were little authoritarians who were frightened by the changes in the world and wanted someone to come along and give them a path out of the chaos to order. Unfortunately, it was older Neo-Nazis who gave them that very ordered worldview and action plan. There’s a real parallel with the Trumpists who are scared shitless of Muslims, Mexican immigrants and Black Lives Matters protesters who are upsetting their world. It’s hard enough to keep up with cell phone technology, let alone these non-WASPS who might push terrified whites off the privilege throne. So here comes Trump, railing against “political correctness,” and the “God-given-right” to push back against these darkies. “All lives matter,” he bleats. “I’ve got a big dick!” he promises us. “Believe me.”

Recent research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst found support for this idea. A doctoral student named Matthew MacWilliams found that Trump supporters, unlike the general population, demonstrated authoritarian personalities (just like my skinheads). Trumpists felt threatened by outsiders and were more likely to flock to a strongman who, they believed, would stop the changes that they feared the most. So Donald Trump says he’s going to build a wall on our southern border and suddenly he’s their savior. It might be too obvious to draw the parallels with Hitler here but the xenophobia of Trump and his core following is not exactly new. We can talk about how fear-mongering moves us toward another F word, fascism.

Fear is the Path to the Darkside

We’ve got plenty of evidence about the frightening views Trump supporters hold. A recent YouGov poll found that a third of Trumpists thought placing Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II was a good idea and one in five Trumpists thought freeing the slaves was a bad idea. No wonder Trump has been slow to disavow support from white supremacists. (He’ll disavow it with a hrumpf that says stop making me do this.) And disavowing someone like Klansman David Duke is much different than making a heartfelt statement about the evils of white supremacy. The bottom line is these are Trump’s people!

Trump’s support has been less in whiter states, like Oklahoma, where Ted Cruz has been winning. Researchers have shown that you find higher rates of racism among people who believe they are directly competing with minorities for the same jobs. Data has shows that Trump supporters overwhelming believe (wrongly) that Affirmative Action takes jobs away from whites and hands them to blacks. They also have the incorrect idea that their taxes go to welfare for lazy (minority) adults who refuse to work. This was a lie Ronald Reagan pioneered in 1980 to move working class whites away from the Democratic Party. Driving this trend are southern evangelicals who have little to do with Jesus and lot to do with racial resentment, according to recent research done at Vanderbilt University.

Trump protester sucker-punched at North Carolina rally, videos show

Trump has tempered is huge support from white supremacists by pushing a more politically correct version of racism that makes brown the new black. He’ll find a small number of African-Americans who are ginned up on the competition with Latinos for crappy jobs and place them in front of the camera at his rallies. They are victims of the same economic policies that he’s profited from but he tells us that he has a “great relationship with the blacks.” “No on has done more for equality than I have,” he recently proclaimed. So fuck you, MLK.

Earlier this week I was on The Gavin McInnes Show, the right-wing internet show that’s popular with anti-feminists and “angry white men,” having a surprisingly good discussion about racism and Trump with guest host Jim Goad, author of The Redneck Manifesto. I think we both clearly stated our points and I was glad to participate. Afterwards I got a tweet from a fan of the show that said, “ if u dont believe blacks have a problem with violence why do u live in a white city? Move to black Chicago and test your bullshit.” I’m trying not to engage these folks on Twitter but I wanted to explain to him all the years I joyfully lived in downtown Atlanta and that I purposely moved to historically black part of Portland. But he lives in fear and the fear drives his political choices.

The year of the “I’m not a racist, but…” voter

Of course Trump’s coded racism is clearly understood by his followers. The endless data is telling us who his supporters are. They are older, whiter and angrier. They’re angry at the how the country has changed in the last fifty years with all the feminists, homosexuals, non-English speakers, and most symbolically of all, Barack Hussein Obama, their black president. Like the white supremacists I studied, they want somebody to “make America great again,” when a white man could beat up a black protestor and not get labeled as a “hate criminal.”

The anger is also targeted at the “disastrous trade policies” of the “stupid leaders” in Washington (who are mostly Republican) who have been unable to stop the the “Obama agenda” from driving the country off a cliff (or to renewed prosperity, if you look at the actual economic measures). With merely the power of his awesome personality, they believe that Trump will transform the complex workings of all three branches of the federal government. (“Meat Loaf for the Supreme Court!”) Just like Mussolini, who Trump is fond of quoting.

The great irony is that the Trumpists are motivated by a very real problem, the erosion of the middle class rooted in the very policies that Trump has benefited from to make his money. Trump’s lovely ties are made in China where the cheap labor is. And it’s a problem that impacts EVERYBODY in the working class, not just whites. These policies, including the Clinton-signed NAFTA, are also motivating many Sanders supporters, but instead of blaming the people at the bottom (who are often not white), Sanders and his voters are more likely to understand the problem is systemic magnified by the influence of corporate lobbyists in politics. But that’s a more complex issue. Scapegoating Mexicans is easier for Trumpists.

Bernie Sanders might be able to reach out to these economically dislocated Trump supporters in a way that Hillary Clinton can’t. But they have to be willing to abandon their authoritarian need to bash outsiders and insiders who don’t look (or pray) like them. They will have to let go of their fear. That’s a big “If” and points to the sad reality that after Trump goes back to his golden palace, another strongman will likely arise with the promise of making America great (white) again.

Post-script (Aug. 3, 2016): Warning: This Trump rally video includes vulgarities and racial and ethnic slurs.

A Coyote brought her to us – Cozy’s birth week

March 2, 2016March 2, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

March 2, 2016

For the last year and a half I’ve been trying to get around to sending Dr. Stephen Girolami, at Providence St. Vincent Hospital, a thank you note for delivering our baby. He met Andrea when she was in full labor. Not the typical birth scenario. We had intended to “demedicalize” the birth and were on track to have Cozy born in a cozy bathtub at Alma Birth Center with a mid-wife. I had even practiced catching the baby.

But sometimes life has other plans. Cozy was already late so she definitely was planning a grand entrance. Our team at Alma and the Medical staff, including Dr. Girolami, at St. Vincent’s were all amazing and we will forever remember how they were there on our big day. So, here’s how it went down:

Wed. 8/13/14 – Day 1

Pre-labor starts, and we freak out thinking this is it and I cancel my last Prison Culture class at Portland State. We go to brunch at Milo’s, thinking it’s the last day we will be childless. We watch The Business of Being Born in Spanish, so Andrea’s mom and sister, who are here from Mexico, understand why we chose to have Cozy in a birth center. Our doula, Cassandra, comes by as contractions get stronger. No sleep this night.

Thurs. 8/14/14 – Day 2

One week past the due date. Contractions get stronger and I practice my new ukulele. Cassandra and Bree, our nurse midwife, come over and help Andrea work through the pain. I do an interview live on KGW about the Ferguson riots, hoping I don’t miss the birth. No sleep.

Fri. 8/15/14 – Day 3

Bree, our nurse-midwife, comes over to help. Andrea takes some walks around the neighborhood, howling like a wolf. We keep thinking baby is coming. No sleep.

Sat. 8/16/14 – Day 4

We check in to Alma at 3:30 pm. We get there a few minutes early and Andrea howling outside the locked gate attracts the attention of cyclists on SE Ankeny. Her sister heads back to Mexico because classes are about to start. Once inside Alma, Andrea gets in the water and Laura, our midwife checks her cervix dilation. Around 10:30 pm her water finally breaks. No sleep. (Maybe a minute for me.)

Sun. 8/17/14 – Day 5

Around 5 am Andrea sends me to get her mother to help comfort her. I see a coyote in Irvington on the way. Cozy’s spirit animal. A coyote brought her mother to America so the circle is complete.

Heavy labor continues. Andrea’s cervix reaches 10 cms, time for birth. But the cervix closes back to 8 cm, revealing a problem and the mid-wives consult on what is best for the baby. Around 2 pm, Laura says we would be best helped in a hospital with an epidural and Pitocin to get the baby out.

Andrea, her mother, and Laura climb in our Prius and I drive us all to St. Vincent’s hospital, which is not in Beaverton. Andrea says she is going to jump out of the car on the Sunset Highway. Alerted to her arrival beforehand, the hospital security guard puts Andrea in a wheelchair and sprints with her to the maternity ward. We all run after, as if in a movie. Laura consults with the nurses and Andrea gets an epidural helping with the pain.

It turns out that Cozy’s head is at a weird angle and she can’t make the tricky passage through the pelvis. A C-section becomes a very real possibility. Dr. Girolami arrives, and with great calm and confidence believes he can help get the baby out.

There in Room 324, with several nurses, Andrea’s mom, Bree, the ICU nurses, and I, Andrea begins her heroic push. Bree is holding her left foot and I am holding her right as Dr. Girolami says he can see the top of her head. Cassandra and Laura arrive, and Laura begins photographing the birth (annoying the doctor, who is focused mightily on getting Cozy out). “Let’s focus on the birth!” I say.

After an incredible hour or so, at 9:25 pm, Cozette Valentina is born and placed on mom’s chest. She’s 8 lbs. and 6 oz. and 21 inches. I cut the cord and think she looks like my dad. I quickly take a picture of mother and child so our friends on Instagram and Facebook can know that all is well. The nurses hand over the placenta to the midwives for encapsulation. We are moved to Room 447 in the post-partum wing. After 3 nights of no sleep, I fall asleep with my beautiful daughter on my chest.

Mon. 8/18/14 – Day 6

We are ready to go home, but the pediatrician, Dr. Jan, wants us to stay 48 hours and run tests. Bree helps us to advocate for what’s best for Cozy and we agree to stay for an extra day. Andrea gets lots of help with nursing and I change an awful lot of poopy diapers. I take Andrea’s mom home and bring back a burrito from Don Pancho’s. We play lots of Beatles in our room for Cozy, who we can’t stop staring at. I try to watch Under the Dome but Cozy keeps crying.

Tues. 8/19/14 – Day 7

I wake up early and grade a giant stack of PSU papers. Grades are due later in the day. Against the official advice of the doctor, but with the support of our midwife team (and the tacit support of all the female nurses), we are discharged at noon. Cozy is wrapped in the blanket my mother brought me home in 50 years ago. Andrea rides in the back with Cozy, but wants to make a pitstop at Starbucks for a caramel frappuccino.

We get home, neighbors have put up “Welcome home, Cozy” signs on the house and in chalk on the sidewalk. Andrea’s mom (and now Cozy’s abuela) opens the door and we start a new chapter.

Ben Carson is not retarded: The language of marginalization

February 23, 2016February 23, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 13 Comments

February 23, 2016

When our daughter Cozette was on her way to us, we had all the usual concerns new parents have. Were we emotionally and financially ready? Would our lives become unrecognizable? And of course, would our daughter be born a healthy baby.

The statistics are daunting. One in 33 babies born in the U.S. has a birth-defect of some sort. Of course, you would love that child regardless but the issue adds another level of challenges to the already challenging task of parenting. Many of those disabilities are mental in nature. For example, 2.5 to 3% of Americans experience some form of mental retardation. That’s about 7 million people. Neither Andrea or I smoke tobacco or crack so we felt the odds were in our favor.

When Cozy when was born, we counted her fingers and her toes. After a year and a half, she seems to be perfectly healthy and mentally awesome. And we often stop to think about those parents that have the challenges we escaped, maybe just because of a roll of the cosmic dice.

All this is to make a case about the language we use to marginalize those with disabilities. When I was in high school we had (secret) nick-names for many of the kids with disabilities, to quietly bully them behind their backs and make ourselves feel normal. I carry a lot of guilt around about that. If you are going to high school in 1970s Georgia in a wheelchair, you deserve a fucking Nobel Prize, not ostracization from kids who were a little bit luckier than you.

When I started studying the world of hate, one of the fist lessons was that Hitler targeted Germans with disabilities before he went after the Jews. He wanted to create a genetically pure race and forcefully sterilized up to 400,000 Germans who suffered from mental retardation, schizophrenia, epilepsy and other disabilities. The treatment of the disabled by the Nazis is one of the under-told horror stories of the Holocaust. Of course, there were similar eugenic practices happening in the U.S. at the time.

So, when I teach about hate crimes and hate groups, I also talk about the language of hate. I talk about the dehumanizing effect of calling people (PEOPLE) fags, wetbacks, bitches and niggers. When I talk to high school students, I especially discuss the trend of calling people “retards,” or saying, “that’s so retarded.” It’s not to shame or punish those kids that do it, it’s to enlighten them to the fact that words can hurt people who are already hurting. Instead of “punching down,” find another word in your growing vocabulary.

The impetus for his blog post is because, being an imperfect being, I don’t always follow my own advice. I was watching the GOP debates and the Bizarro World candidacy of Ben Carson. This alleged brain surgeon who may be wandering on to stage near your has talked about the Egyptian pyramids being grain storage units, joked about poisoning gay wedding cakes and believes going to prison can turn you into a homosexual. In the debates he seems stoned, at best, and maybe a little touched in the head (as my mother was fond of saying).

So as I was tweeting my witty tweets, letting the impulsive thoughts go straight to 160 characters for the entire planet to read, I wondered aloud if Ben Carson might be “retarded.” At the time it seemed like a rational explanation for his behavior. Of course, that would make him the first mentally retarded brain surgeon in America and therefore deserving of some highest of high honors (besides the White House).

I was busted by a Trump follower who asked if that was an appropriate tweet from a PhD. I don’t often agree with Trumpies, but she was 100% correct. I finally deleted it and any other reference to Carson being “special,” that might be seen as disparaging to my mentally disabled friends and family in the past, present, or future. I suddenly saw teenage Randy and modern Randy (who complains about trolls) standing there in the same spot. So much for growth, right?

And this isn’t about “political correctness.” Donald Trump and his thugs complain about political correctness because they don’t want to have to think about the hurtful nature of their rhetoric. They don’t want to worry about whether or not they are being bigoted because they are already bigoted. Being challenged on it undermines their able bodied-straight-white-Christian-male privilege. My job as a privileged person is to dismantle that privilege.

People should be taken to tasks for the choices they make and the things they say. That’s still fair game in a free society. But we can also be kinder towards the people we disagree with and the people who have traditionally been the butt of the jokes. My Polish family members would appreciate that.

Some of my fondest memories of my time at Emory University were volunteering for the Special Olympics. Those kids have such great hearts. It’s hugely humbling. I have been a supporter ever since. So, when I got called out on my silly comments, I felt that same guilt that comes with anybody who is aware of their privilege. The history of people with mental challenges is full of great heroism and courage. As someone who has dealt with depression, I have a tiny, tiny window into those struggles.

I don’t think Ben Carson is retarded. I wish I had found a better word in my “PhD vocabulary” to express my concerns about this man’s mental state. Experts have diagnosed Trump as having a narcissistic personality disorder. Pundits have wondered about Carson but it’s not my place to make a claim. I just hope he goes away soon so we can focus on the real threat of fascism that Trump represents. As someone who gets called a “libtard,” on a daily basis, I’d like to elevate the level of discourse that, in a tweet, I lowered.

We don’t win hearts and minds by marginalizing human beings who are different from us. We evolve by developing empathy with them. The Anti-PC crowd fears that challenging task. I want to encourage people to embrace it. I want to encourage myself to embrace it.

We now live in a “Live by the tweet, die by the tweet,” society where people, at their impulsive worst, are not allowed to make mistakes. Someone has taken a screenshot of your little blurb so be prepared for it to haunt you. I just wanted to apologize for mine.

18 thoughts for Cozy’s 18-month birthday

February 17, 2016February 17, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 6 Comments

February 17, 2016

How did we end up with a child who is a year and a half old? While she’s watching Sesame Street, let me quickly jot down these thoughts.

One does not simply “just leave the house” with a toddler.
Whoever invented the packaging for cheese sticks needs a very long Time Out.
Only here am I allowed to ask, “Can I smell your butt?”
If the kid eats food off the floor, she doubles as a pet.
So what if her two favorite words are “Dada” and “cracker”? White dads lives matter.
If she doesn’t get what she wants she bangs her head against the wall, getting what she wants.
She’s very helpful loading clothes into the clothes into the dryer. Along with my tools.
This girl is a dancing queen with moves that might be an alien version of crunking.
She loves her mama and dada almost as much as she loves Elmo and Ellen Degeneres.
If she likes you, she will blow you a kiss goodbye. She likes the checkout ladies at Fred Meyer especially.
When she eats an apple, it’s not to the core, it’s and the core.
She has her own language which is a mix of Spanglish, ASL and (I’m guessing) Icelandic.
There is great joy when the kid sits on her potty and grunts.
She was barking like a dog before Hilary Clinton made it a thing.
She likes to sweep the floor, unlike her mother.
The moment when she took “Wheels on the Bus” off her CD player, put Radiohead on and started space dancing.
She thinks the move of Sesame Street to HBO is a complete betrayal of the whole purpose of public television.
This baby is not a baby anymore.

A Valentines Poem for My Beloved Wife

February 14, 2016February 15, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 3 Comments

February 14, 2016

The Song of Sirens

I am a child of Daedalus

Who designed the Labyrinth to imprison our monsters

With wax and feathers attached to our arms

He told me not to fly too low

The sea would pull me into its waves

He told me to not fly too high

The sun would melt my wings

But I saw your face in the sky

And I reached up for your cheek

As I could feel the wax melt

Burning my legs

I only wanted to reach up, up, up

And I fell to earth

I fell below the earth

The Sirens collected me from the waves

And sang me your song

“The sea and sky are only blue

They are both too small for you

The time as arrived to be free

Spread your arms and

Come with me.”

Falling and flying at the same time

Detached from the profane world

Into your bosom

The warmth healed my bones

Your breath filled my lungs

In your eyes were cosmos

Give me infinity to explore

You are the great mother of creation

I am humbled before your power

You are the sad daughter of colonization

I want to nurse your soul to bloom

You are the honored judge of mediation

I am schooled by your soft wisdom

You are the seductive goddess of fascination

I want to dream inside your womb

Like a wanderer who steps off a cliff

I chose to depart the muddy road

Toward the glow of your beauty

My right arm grabbed by the archangel Raphael

And lifted to a new heaven

I leave the mortal pain below

To be born again in your resolute love

Pushing back against trolls

February 10, 2016September 6, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 41 Comments

February 10, 2016

My mother once called me here in Portland and said, “Randy, I just Googled you. There are some people who really HATE you!” Hi mom, welcome to the Age of the Internet Troll. She had stumbled across a white supremacist website where racists were having a field day bashing me. I have dedicated my life to studying them and their impact on the world so they don’t like me much. I have been branded by them as a “race traitor” and among other things (Jew, homosexual, pedophile, Yankees fan). It’s hard to go to an actual Klan rally these days so these rocket scientists spend all their free white time on the internet.

There is a neo-Nazi version of Wikipedia called Metapedia. For a long time they had an entry on me that described me as a “wheezing Ashkenazi Jew,” promoting a “Zionist curriculum” at “Portland College.” I’m sure my Presbyterian parents would get a kick out of that.

Racists have posted my office number and pictures of my house on line, but it never really bothered me. It meant I was doing something right. It’s the character assassins that I worry about. Behind their anonymous devices the trolls can take you down out of sheer boredom.

I was trying to track the traffic to this blog last night and Googled; blazak feminist blog. The usual stuff comes up and then a link to an article entitled, “Dirty Jew Perv Info.” It is a pretty extensive thread accusing me of sleeping with students for grades (and being a Trump hater). I almost threw up when I read it. There are a number of fake Rate-My-Professor entries from supposed students who supposedly had to have sex with me to pass a class. They were all posted the same day, the fall of 2015, more than year after my last class at PSU. It’s pretty obvious that they were created by one person but there’s a lot of people who believe whatever comes up on their screen. (No, Michigan did not outlaw gay sex.)

I’ve been teaching college classes since 1989 and ever since then I have had to deal with the rumors that I sleep with my students. So let me put this to rest right fucking now. 1) Nobody has ever gotten a grade in any of my classes for any other reason than an objective evaluation of their class performance. There is no favoritism for anybody. This is the sacred relationship teachers and students have and I am honor-bound to respect it. 2) I have dated handful of former students (aka adults) in my over 25 years as a teacher, after they had been in one of my classes (not during). People often meet at work and that’s where I work and if everyone is a consenting adult, nobody should care. As I have mentioned, Andrea was in one of my large intro-level classes and we barely even spoke until after the class was over. We are blissfully married and I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t believe in the incredible power of the love gods to connect two people who were meant to be together.

That doesn’t stop tongues from wagging and fingers from typing. Some of my (overwhelmingly positive) Rate-My-Professor reviews hint at this alleged favoritism and it pisses me off to no end. There is no actual human being that can say, “I got a better grade because I did this naughty thing for Blazak.” There are plenty of fake human beings it seems, but no real ones. There’s even a horrible website that is used to cyber-bully people called The Dirty. It has a post called, “Slept with the Old Teacher at PSU for an A.” First of all, I’m not that old. Second of all, the woman in question was my girlfriend for over two years and the pictures are from our Facebook pages. But it’s one of the top hits that comes up when you Google me. Great.

I’m not sure why I’m such a target. I understand why the Nazis and Trump thugs hate me, so maybe it is just coming from them. (Just look at the 519 comments on one of my Trump posts.) I also think the fact that I’m a man who embraces feminism makes me an easy mark. I know there are many women who think men can’t be feminists and I understand that. There are also men who see me as a “gender traitor” for espousing feminist values. I’ve been accused of “using feminism” to lure mindless females into my sex trap. I’m not even sure how that would work. It sounds like a movie on the Lifetime Channel.

I bring this up for a couple of reasons. The first is that now that my wife and I have a daughter, I really have to think about her safety. These trolls have put our home address on the internet and I have made it my business to know what unstable people are capable of doing. I’d also like to protect my legacy for her. There’s a good chance for a large chunk of her life I won’t be around to respond to the troll narrative and I would prefer her not to think I was a scumbag. I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my life but I’ve worked hard to be respectful of even people I passionately disagree with.

Second is the impossible task of managing your online reputation. Will Rogers once said, “It takes a lifetime to build a good reputation, but you can lose it in a minute.” Or the half second it takes to spread one career destroying rumor. I don’t doubt that the HR ladies who came after me so hard were using this manure as their fuel. It would never stand up in the court of law but their’s is a court of hysteria that’s becoming more and more of an issue. As someone who is back on the job market I don’t feel comfortable telling people to just Google me without forwarding this blogpost first.

As a feminist there are a ton of issues to unpack here, including the nature of power imbalances in relationships. I have to state very clearly that there is a power imbalance in EVERY relationship, especially between and a man and a woman in a patriarchal society. Two twins could be dating (I know) and the one who was born first would have power that the other wouldn’t. It’s how you manage that imbalance that matters. Is it coercive or cooperative? And this thing of treating women in college as “girls” who have no mind (or libido) of their own is inherently anti-feminist, denying women their own agency. So if someone gives me the exact criteria in terms of what age differences is “abusive” let me know and I’ll call Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones and let them know if they are safe from the Sex Police in the Hollywood HR office.

Can you tell I’m a little pissed off? I’ve worked hard to build a career that makes a difference. I’ve certainly posted things on the internet that I regret, including when I was mad. It’s a medium conducive to impulsivity and verbal diarrhea. There’s lots I’d like to scrub. But this troll trend is scary. If you can’t build yourself up you tear somebody else down with zero blowback. It explains why good people don’t want to run for office.

It may be a problem of my own creation. I’ve made a career out of provoking people. Most of the time it’s in hopes of opening up larger discussion about things like white privilege and rape culture. But I’ll admit it, sometimes it’s just for sport and I should reel that shit in. I love my wife and daughter with a force that is mighty so I want to protect them from this completely pointless noise. Maybe it gives me a little insight into how Hillary Clinton feels. As someone who occasionally wrestles with depression, I have to remind myself that the people who actually know me actually know me and good people don’t believe everything that they read on the web.

Somedays I think the internet should just be unplugged for good.

NOTE: I recognize that not all trolls are Nazis or Trump supporters. Some have advanced degrees of education and work in universities.

Violence is the answer: I’m over football.

February 2, 2016February 3, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 11 Comments

February 2, 2016

I give up. I was ready to give up on American football before Concussion, the recent Will Smith movie that focuses on the NFL hiding the issue of the staggering number of serious head injuries among players. I was ready to give up before the endless stories of boys in high school who have died while playing football. I was ready to give up before the continuous stream of stories about college and professional football players beating the women in their lives. I was even ready to give up before Justin Timberlake ripped Janet Jackson’s bra off at Superbowl 38 and the controversy was more about almost seeing her nipple than it was about the implied sexual aggression against women. You can have it, but I’m giving up.

I was ready in 1978, the day I sat on the bus after a B-team football game with the rest of the members of my team at Redan High School. We had lost the game and I took it in stride. But I questioned another player who was in tears. He said, “If you don’t care about this team to cry when we lose then you don’t belong on the team.” And then he beat me up. I quit the next day and joined the punk rocker team.

It might surprise some folks that I was a huge football fan as a kid. I was obsessed with the Miami Dolphins in the early 1970’s and can still name the starting offensive team (including kicker Garo Yepremiam). In 4th grade I wrote a letter to coach Don Shula asking him why the Dolphins never played my hometown Atlanta Falcons. After that the O.J. Simpson poster was on the wall right next to Farrah. There was nothing more blissful than a Sunday watching the NFL highlight reel and all the great tackles shown in slow motion.

In my podunk Georgia county (Dekalb in the 1970s), there were no middle schools. So 8th grade was the first year of high school. You want to feel small? And I skipped 5th grade so I was essentially a 7th grade kid in high school. The only way for a 12-year-old boy (or any boy) to stake his claim for Southern masculinity was to join the football team. No cuts. You show up to practice in the sweltering Georgia sun and you are on the team. You might be tenth string but you get to wear the jacket and be in the team picture and sit in the front at pep rallies. Oh, and you get cheerleaders cheering for you. And the only people that get to beat you up are your teammates.

So I rode the bench as an outside linebacker (#53) for three years. I was skinny but fast so when I did get to play I channeled those NFL films and did recover a fumble in one big game against Cross Keys High School. At most of the games me and the other sideline jockeys would smack our helmets against the bleachers to make it look like we got in some good hits. When I left in 10th grade I was happy to let the jocks have their game and get out without a serious injury. (The first year I broke my tailbone. The second year I broke my thumb. The third year I ripped a muscle in my back and got to sit in the hottub during afternoon practices.)

But it’s hard not to be a casual football fan with all the billions spent on hyping college and pro football. Even last year I wondered if feminism and Super Bowls could exist side-by-side. Football is the only major sport where there is not some reasonable equivalent for females. (And don’t you dare say, “Lingerie Bowl.”) At least Major League Baseball has women’s softball to narrow the gap. If my daughter wants to become a part of the NFL, her best option is to become the wife of a player and risk abuse that comes from a guy who is being exploited and has been hit in the head too many times. Or she can be a cheerleader, cheering on the guys and getting paid minimum wage. But who cheers for the cheerleader? Even management in the NFL is an old boys club. What’s a female football lover to do?

The abuse of women by players (and fans) is an old sad story. The new wrinkle to that story is the growing understanding of the cumulative effect of countless head blows that players get as part of their job description. And this starts when they are unpaid players in school. Yet people are still making millions off these young men killing themselves for our entertainment. A few will make it to retirement with a nest egg but more are just chewed up by the machine. There is even a Wikipedia page for NFL players who died while still playing and you have to stop wondering when you see all the suicides. But go team!

There is, of course, a racial and class element to this as poor boys from inner cities and rural communities are told their one way to the American Dream is through professional sports, especially the hyper-masculine world of football. They can have everything they see dangled in front of them on ESPN, including super-model wives. All they have to do is sell their soul (or brains, ACLs, and spines) to the game and hope they are one of the few that has a post-career life worth living.

This issue is finally getting some attention. The NFL reports that this season there were 317 reported concussions of NFL players. (Who knows how many are unreported?) And that number may be down because of better helmets for teams that can afford the latest, most expensive protective gear. I doubt the inner city high school team is in line for the new top-of-the-line Xenith helmets any time soon. And there is a new effort to decouple the violence on the grid iron from the violence in the home front that is encouraging. You just wonder if the neurology of football can counter a few well-meaning PSAs. But I have to say I have a big ol’ man-crush on former LA Ram Terry Crews and his efforts to bring these issues to the audience that needs to hear it the most. There are feminist football players, y’all.

In a society that claims to preach, “Violence is not the answer,” why do we still obsess over the macho violence of football? In football, violence IS the answer, and the harder the better. I’m not immune to this. As a kid in Georgia I would go to stock car races and PRAY to see a big crash. The game itself can be fascinating and artful and (in those slow-motion NFL films) can look more like ballet, than war. But there is a growing body count that is part of the cost. And that includes battered women who are beaten by brain-damaged players and former players.

I’m just not sure it’s worth all the hype. Sure it’s fun to meet friends to watch a big college bowl together. Maybe you even went to that school 100 years ago. And I know some people want to watch the Super Bowl “for the commercials,” but your are going to see every single one of those commercials a thousand times over the next three months (including whatever sexist crap GoDaddy and Carl’s Jr will throw at us). There certainly is a thrill to watching a live sporting event as it happens, and not TIVO’d (or like with the last Olympics, on a 3-day tape delay). To share in a global experience can be unifying and exhilarating. (Just witness my freak out for the World Cup every four years.) It crosses political, racial, class and even gender lines. I bet even Bernie Sanders has a pick for the big game. (I can hear him say, “I’m quite impressed the the Carolina Panthers ability to reduce the inequity between the salaries for its support staff and its management.”)

I won’t hold it against you if you are all in for the sport and Sunday’s Super Bowl. I’m out. I’ve devoted enough time watching reruns of players getting folded, spindled and mutilated and just thinking, “That’s awesome!” This year, out of respect for the dozen boys who died playing high school football in 2015, like 17-year-olds Luke Schemm and Andre Smith, I’m going to spend Sunday hanging out with my daughter. Maybe we’ll go to the duckpond or go shopping. And I’m trying to teach her to play catch so she can play softball someday.

Edit: I’m supposed to watch this Frontline story: League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis.

What does the Bundy militia really want?

January 26, 2016January 26, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 7 Comments

January 25, 2016

What does it mean to be a patriot? Does it mean upholding the laws of the land without question? Does it mean wrapping yourself in a flag and singing that dreadful Lee Greenwood song? Does it mean claiming an allegiance to the principles of the founding fathers and nothing else? Is Donald Trump a patriot? Is Barrak Obama a patriot? There are as many definitions of patriotism as there are flagpoles. That’s why the specter of the “patriot militia” is both comical and perplexing. I first interviewed militia members in Montana in 1998 and Oregon is now experiencing a new chapter in this both exciting and frightening American story.

If you live outside of Oregon you might’ve missed the rogue group of militia MEN who took over a Central Oregon wildlife refuge on Saturday, January 2. Since then the Malheaur National Wildlife Refuge has been occupied by a small group of armed men (and the women who have come to cook for them), claiming they have a right to the federally protected land (that originally belonged to the native Paiute people).

Their goal is to “return” the land to the ranchers who can profit financially off grazing on an area that has been designed to protect wildlife, including threatened migratory birds. These men have begun to tear up the land for roads, they have disrupted Native American artifacts, they have prevented biologists from having access to their worksites and have blocked the land from use by the citizens they claim to speak for. So what do they really want?

Not the Dildo Militia

It’s easy for us city people to laugh at these rural activists, mailing them sex toys and branding them as “Y’all Qaeda.” We protest the government with clever signs and they protest it with rifles. Both sides sport beards but ours are worn ironically. While there is plenty of local opposition to the Bundy Militia, led by a “car fleet manager” from Phoenix named Ammon Bundy, there is also some local support. At the root of that support is the wording of the tenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I know you probably know the 2nd pretty well by now, but do you know the 10th?

There is a great debate about the reach of the federal government into our lives that crosses political boundaries. Remember how the left pushed back against George W. Bush’s Patriot Act or how the right pushed back against Obama’s Affordable Health Care Act? This debate is as America as apple pie made from GMO apples that were grown with federal subsidies. If you take a literal reading of the tenth amendment, the federal government has no business doing either, and both the left and right are correct. Bundy’s group believes the federal management of this Oregon land for the American people is unconstitutional.

Also not defined as a federal authority is preserving land and protecting animals. Based on this rhetoric, the federal government has no business creating and operating national parks. If you want to march into Yosemite and start grazing your ironic sheep herd, you have that God-given right. I’ve been thinking about building a spa next to Old Faithful in Yosemite myself.

If that sounds crazy, it is. The Constitution was designed to be a living document. The first ten amendments, codified in 1789, are the backbone of our free society, but there have been seventeen amendments since then that give us the flesh and bones. (Although the 27th is pretty self-serving for the federalists.)

The problem is that many militia members (I don’t know if this includes the Bundy gang), don’t believe in anything that follows the original ten (aka, the Bill of Rights). That includes some biggies, like #13 (freeing slaves), #14 (birthright citizenship), and #16 (authorizing federal income tax). They talk about “Supreme Law” and the “Organic Constitution” because there is a belief that the 1789 document was handed down from God (similar to the 1215 Magna Carta and my 1962 Spiderman comic book). Now it’s certainly patriotic to think the U.S. Constitution is “sacred,” but it was written by imperfect men who disagreed as much as modern Republicans and Democrats. And most Americans would disagree with the Bundy militia’s extremist interpretation of the Constitution, making them a lot more like ISIS than they’d probably like to admit.

The Supreme Law folks don’t recognize most federal authority, including the FBI and federal courts. That’s why they think they can hold these “common law grand juries” to “indict” their opponents. They have zero legal power but they can make life hell for the targets of militia members by the filing of endless property liens. It completely subverts constitutional due process protections but the threat of the this action has kept many of the critics, including myself, wary from speaking out against them.

But as much as we might disagree with their macho tactics, this issue about the power of the federal government to infringe on our personal liberties is at the core of the American conversation. It was in 1789 and it is in 2016.

Conspiracy City

After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, we began to pay a lot more attention to patriot militias. One of the best books on the topic is Kenneth Stern’s A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate (1997). Stern accurately describes the militia world as a giant funnel.

At the top level are a lot of issues that many Americans can find common ground on, including gun rights, tax protests and land use regulations (which would include the debate over the best use of the Malheaur National Wildlife Refuge). People’s first contact with militia is usually rallying around these types of “Don’t tread on me” issues.
Then the movement becomes focused on anger at the “tyrannical” federal government as the enemy, not as a democratic form of governance by and for the people. Whether it’s old school “revenue collectors” or federally funded botanists, all federal agents are portrayed as enemies of the people (unless they are defending the country against foreign enemies or brown people crossing the border).
The next level is where the conspiracy theories kick in. Now that The X-Files is back on the air, these dark theories have whole new audience. The federal government is controlled by a secret cabal (The illuminati, Freemasons, aliens, etc.) working to deprive average Americans of their basic rights to life and liberty. The conspirators control the media, both major political parties, and the banks, so every time you use your debit card you are giving them data to run your life.
Below that, that conspiracy theory becomes a very familiar face, the Jews. That cabal is now ZOG (the Zionist Occupation Government), working globally to destroy white Christian society. The global banking system is the arm of their new world order and they have you eating bagels at McDonalds without even knowing it.
At the bottom of the funnel are the revolutionaries who believe a “second American Revolution” is needed to banish the Jewish occupiers and restore the supreme law of the founding fathers. This is where we found Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the militia men behind the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 Americans (including 19 children).

There are fewer and fewer militia activists the farther your descend the funnel. However, Stern posits that the more folks who come in at the top on broad issues, like 2nd Amendment gun rights, the more who will make it down to the bottom and a see events like Oklahoma City (and the standoff in Oregon) as a call to violently overthrow the evil federal government.

End Game

What is their endgame? Well, it’s safe to say the Bundy militia wants a federal government that does little more than sail aircraft carriers around the oceans, but they’ll settle for the Bureau of Land Management handing protected lands over to any white man who asks. “I got some cattle!” Ammon Bundy’s father is Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who’s cows have been ripping off taxpayers for years.

So it shouldn’t be that surprising that there is significant overlap between the federal government-hating militia world and the federal government-hating white supremacist world. Timothy McVeigh’s guidebook was The Turner Diaries, a poorly-written novel about Neo-Nazis killing “race-mixers,” bombing a federal building, overthrowing the government and launching nuclear missiles at Israel. They want to make America great again by taking us back to 1789, when the authority of (straight) white Christian men went unchallenged, before all this “political correctness” encroached on God’s chosen leaders. It all sounds like Donald Trump’s wettest dream.

It’s not clear what the racial beliefs of the white men hold up the Malheaur refuge are. One member has posted several tweets and videos about “Zionists” and nuking Israel. Their website. www.defendyourbase.net, had plenty of wild conspiracy theories (including some about Hilary Clinton) but was just taken down. I don’t know if they wisely unplugged it or it was the oppressive feds (or an anonymous Smoking Man), but it gave us a glimpse into their bent world views.

How to diffuse a stand off

After the disastrous standoffs in Ruby Ridge, Idaho (1992) and Waco, Texas (1993), authorities now know how to manage a siege with white activists (I’ll let others present the data on standoffs with black and Muslim activists). Those events showed the heavy hand of militarized federal law enforcement agencies and children were sadly killed in each.

After Oklahoma City bombing, the 1996 standoff with the Freemen militia in Montana turned out very differently. While many called for authorities to arrest the men, the feds waited them out for 81 days. They peacefully arrested the eight man who were later convicted for various charges, including threats against public officials.

The siege at Malheaur could go either way. You get the sense the FBI is playing the long game and hoping these guys will just get back to managing car fleets. But they may also be itching for a showdown. The militia movement hasn’t had any martyrs in a while and more than one have expressed a desire to die for the cause. There’s an assumption that Ammon Bundy, who is quite charismatic, can control all these rogue men who are just hanging out in his very unregulated militia. If one the rogues goes rogue, well, they’ll get the battle with the “tyrants” they’ve long dreamt about.

Malheaur occupiers Ammon Bundy and LaVoy Finicum have both talked to the media and presented their case in a very calm and articulate manner. They raise some important points about about the overreach of the federal government and the lack of the balance between individual rights and eminent domain. But their logic is rooted in a version on the Constitution that is not real. It’s a cartoon verson that cowboys cling to because it’s very simple and romantic. I can see how they are swept up into its poetry. But the real world is complex. We as a society evolve with this living document. Sometimes we decide that land is best used to preserve wildlife and usually we find a way to share it with law-abiding ranchers.

We can make fun of these guys. We can see how they’ve trampled the rights of the people of Harney County while pretending to defend them. We can see them as little boy soldiers obsessed with guns and cowboy hats. We can see them as entitled whites who are the media savvy face of a racist underground. We can see them as armed terrorists who would be dead by now if the were black or Muslim. Or we could see them as sparking a discussion about our faith in and fear of the government and what we should do about it.

As a parent the images from Oklahoma City haunt me. There are now children inside the encampment at Malheaur National Wildlife Refuge, perhaps being used as human shields or perhaps, like in Waco, being set up as sacrificial lambs for their revolution. Let’s hope they feel they’ve made their point and will return the land back over to the birds and biologists soon. My sense is that Bundy’s gang wants to spark a civil war and this isn’t going to end before spring.

Regular updates on the Oregon siege here at OPB News.

I’m in charge of your butthole: The intimate world of parenting

January 20, 2016January 20, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 4 Comments

January 20, 2016

This is a piece I’ve tried to figure out how to write for a while. It could simply be a meditation on something that every parent has thought about. Or it could be just plain icky. This could go either way. Here is something that every parent of a young child can relate to or here is something that screams for state intervention. Okay, here goes. There is a sensual element to parenting a child.

Before you get on the horn to DHSS, there is a difference between sensual and sexual. If fact, as I’ve written about before, being a parent can really interrupt the sexual. We’ve come to refer to our wonderful daughter as the “great cock blocker,” as we reminisce about the good old days when we were crazed weasels who, well, you can guess. All the time.

There’s still weasel action but there is also this other thing. Someday I will write about the increase in connection with a person you’ve had a child with, but this is the trickier area of the relationship between father and child. I was thinking about what to write about today when Cozy, now 17 months, started stroking my hair. I don’t know if she was doing it to be nice to her stressed-out dad or she was assessing how much conditioner I needed, but it felt nice. And I realized how many moments we have like that. Moments where we just snuggle or give kisses or just look into each other’s eyes and I wonder how bizarre it is that I’ve played a role in the existence of this beautiful creature.

It shouldn’t be creepy to be routinely humbled by how soft baby skin is. It’s like as if there was a freaking baby panda that was actually a cloud. I feel like like a chewed up piece of 80 grit sandpaper compared to even the bottom of her feet. There’s a whole industrial machine that sells “baby soft” products, but they can’t even approach my baby’s bottom. Since much of the time is spent holding or changing my daughter there’s a lot of skin to skin contact. Sometimes that’s depressing (“Honey, your father is not the Crypt Keeper, he just grew up in Georgia.”) but often it’s awe inspiring. Did we all start off so perfect and unblemished?

My ethnic heritage on my father’s side is Czech. Czechs tend to be moley people. Cozy was born this wonderful Czech-Mex mix. Her blue eyes turned brown after about a week. And a week after that she got a little mole on her butt. It just appeared like a message from my ancestors. Every time I change her, I’m reminded of that genetic line. Also when she runs around the house bottomless. Hey, sometimes you’ve gotta air your business out.

I grew up in a weird time and space, the South in the 1970s. On one hand it was the Bible Belt so there were plenty of people who thought bodies were dirty things to be covered (because of that bitch, Eve). On the other hand, it was the height of sexual liberation and people were walking around their homes naked with copies of Playboy and Our Bodies, Our Selves on the coffee table. (My parents were from Ohio and midwesterners just ignore anything sexual.) I have to think those mixed messages didn’t do the psyche of my generation any good.

Cozy bathes with her parents fairly regularly. She and I had a shower together this morning. It’s really just a way to be efficient. I can watch her if she’s in the tub with me and we can save water on the probably much-needed booty hose down. It is perfectly innocent but I am aware there are some very uptight people who would see it as inappropriate. I know at some point one of us will grow out it, but it’s a nice thing we share. I’ve got friends that showered with their kids into the double digits (in Georgia!), so maybe I’m too worried about the Bible thumpers and their cousins in ISIS.

It is funny when she waddles into the bathroom when I’m standing there peeing. She has this confused look on her face as she tries to figure out what my penis is. I always feel uncomfortable and sing this little song I made up.

What are you looking at Baby B?

What are you looking at, what do you see?

What are you looking at, you’re looking at me.

You better not be looking at my pee pee.

You can’t not have an intimate relationship with a child after you’ve changed thousands of diapers. I know her vagina better than I know most of my family members. And that thing is as clean as a field hockey coach’s whistle. (Wait, that sounds rather dirty.) As a stay-at-home dad, I am the primary agent of her undercarriage management. I often joke that I am on “Butthole Patrol,” because you don’t want to let a kid sit in a dirty diaper too long or you’re gonna need a power sprayer to do the job. (How I envy the French and their clever bidets.) As much as I want the kiddie potty to take over my job, their is something bonding about the diaper change ritual. Eye contact and mutual trust, and a song from dad. (This week it’s been David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes.”)

Freud, Foucault and Judith Butler all have written about the psychic damage done to boys who have to be weened from their mothers and switch their identification to their fathers. In this new age of stay-at-home dads there is the interesting question about daughters who have similar intimate connection to their fathers. How will Cozy’s psycho-sexual identity be affected by all this time we spend together, including the showers and diaper changes? Perhaps not at all, or perhaps she’ll have a solid sense of self that is not defined by one idea of gender or genders.

I do know it has affected me. Besides the protective “papa bear” mandate it fuels, I also feel more like an actual human being. This is a true connection between two people. She might not remember any of it, but I’ll never forget any of it. Before I put her to bed, we have a little dance to some soft music and she puts her head on my shoulder and I make a wish that this dance never ends.

How David Bowie Bent My Gender

January 12, 2016January 24, 2016 ~ Randy Blazak ~ 8 Comments

January 11, 2016

This is a strange bifurcation point on our blue planet. From this point on there is no David Bowie to share the world with. Like people born after 1980 who claim John Lennon, or those born after 1959 who claim Billie Holiday (as they have a right to), every child born after today will never anticipate hearing David Bowie’s new song on the radio or changing their fashion to fit Bowie’s new style. It’s all just back catalog now. He can’t be truly their peer. Fortunately there’s enough there for future generations to mine for inspiration.

I awoke this morning to a message from my friend Roy in England that just said, “Sad day for music.” A sense of dread swelled up. I know that I am likely to witness the passing of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Patti Smith. What will the world be like without them? For the moment we share the same sunlight and oxygen supply. When there is a lunar eclipse, I know that Paul McCartney and Toni Morrison are looking at it, too. I know there is a chance that I could bump into Smokey Robinson or Elton John getting coffee in an airport somewhere in the world. We share this tiny globe together.

But not with Bowie. He is gone so unexpectedly. I was in New York City all weekend and was waiting for today to get Blackstar, his heralded new album. The beginning of the next phase of Bowie in our lives. Would there be a tour? Would I get a new haircut to look like him? Again? I should have found him on his deathbed there in Manhattan to thank him. A kiss on his alien eyelids.

For those of us that came of age in the 1970s, David Bowie was more than a “rockstar.” He was an avatar of our awkward young selves as gangly beings who had just fallen to earth, genderless and omni-sexual. I was an Apollo kid so it started with “Space Oddity,” and imagining the astronauts circling our troubled planet. But when Ziggy Stardust arrived, I could see clues to a third path, somewhere between male and female that was beautiful and personal. Glam rock was liberation, even if was just the thought of it. “Rebel, rebel. You’ve got your mother in a whirl ’cause she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl.”

That was the beginning of me wanting to grow my hair long. Endless battles with my mother (“Boys with long hair are all on drugs!”) and my father (“Why would you want to look like a girl?”). Each half inch it grew, you’d get called “fag,” and “queer,” in rural Georgia. (Of course, once Willie and Waylon grew their hair out all that ended.) If word got around you were a Bowie fan, that was like declaring your homosexuality. “You must be AC-DC like him!” I didn’t really care. The music came from some place magical. His self-declared bisexuality created a safe zone for us as we engaged in our own space exploration. My sexuality was never an issue. The sanity of the world I expressed it in was.

All us misfit kids had Bowie. Before punk roared in, we had Bowie to speak for us and to tell us we were wonderful. “Rock and Roll Suicide,” must be an anthem for so many young people, both then and now, who feel zero validation from the straight world. It’s a reason to reject suicide as an option.

You’re watching yourself but you’re too unfair

You got your head all tangled up but if I could only make you care

Oh no love! you’re not alone

No matter what or who you’ve been

No matter when or where you’ve seen

All the knives seem to lacerate your brain

I’ve had my share, I’ll help you with the pain

You’re not alone

In fourth grade, when the other kids were obsessed with the Captain and Tennille, me and my little goon squad were memorizing “Young Americans,” and “Fame,” (listening for John Lennon’s voice). It was like a secret society. You had to say, “Oh yeah, Deep Purple rocks!” and then find out what kid in the neighborhood had a copy of Diamond Dogs you could borrow, being sure to hide it from your parents’ gaydar.

Bowie always defined gender non-conformity. Wearing make-up, dying his hair, wearing a skirt on Saturday Night Live. In a culture obsessed with a simple gender binary, what could be more rebellious than that? Boys keep swinging! For all us kids that didn’t quite fit in the butch boy/femme girl box, we had permission to mix and match and create something completely new.

My first sociology professor at Oxford College who radicalized me in so many ways had a bit of blind spot around queer issues. I remember him trying to make the case that we are all sexual but socialized to be heterosexual and if that process gets messed up we end up confused, “like David Bowie.” I remember thinking, Wait, that’s not right. Bowie’s not “broken,” he is just free and rebelling against social constructions of gender. He knows exactly what he’s doing.

So, yeah, I have every piece of music that Bowie has released (except Blackstar, which is sold out all over the city). I have b-sides and oddities. Have you heard the soundtrack to The Buddha of Suburbia (1993)? You should. I’ve seen him in concert several times. My favorite moment was at Live Aid in London in 1985. I was right front for the global event. All my favorite stars were there. I should mention that I really hated Bowie’s Let’s Dance album when it came out in 1983. It was such a commercial piece of fluff compared to 1980’s Scary Monsters (although it has aged better than I have). So I was supremely bummed when he opened with “Modern Love,” my least favorite Bowie song. But then he played “Heroes,” and it could not have been more perfect. We were there trying to feed the world, just for one day. There were tears everywhere. Bowie transformed us.

He transformed us many times. He loosened us from our moorings. He made being smart and aging into your 60s look really, really cool and never stopped playing with our weird obsession with gender roles. All the kids that got beat up for being “Bowie fags” can have the last laugh (the ones that weren’t murdered, at least). Now that he’s dead, everybody will claim him as their own.

He’s never not been with me. His ex-wife, Angie Bowie, was my first guest speaker at Emory, delighting my students with tales of Ziggy and Iggy and the glam explosion. I courted my wife, Andrea, with mix CDs that linked Bowie songs to Nina Simone songs. When Cozy was born, I sang “Little Wonder” to her repeatedly (and “Space Oddity” when I strapped her in her car seat). And she’s napping to Station To Station as I write this. I want her to have the sexual and gender freedom that was so hard for us over forty years ago. But for all the goon squads out there, Bowie made it a lot easier and cooler.

A lot will be written this week about the Thin White Duke as a “chameleon” and all the ch-ch-changes he went through, the movies he made and the fashions he inspired. I just think about us kids who didn’t fit in who got to feel that we had a very special space boy on our side.

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