Amid the ongoing ickiness of war and rumors of war, Shuttle Explosion II came along to remind us that American techno-might does not equal invincibility; that Americans can needlessly die horrific deaths at the hands of their own government’s wrong decisions (such as NASA’s chronic corner-cutting), with no overseas enemies involved.

If the deaths of these six Americans (one of whom was born in India) and one Israeli have any meaning at all, it will be to help dissuade a few more citizens from blind faith in their government and its promises.

WHILE MUCH OF THE NATION was being reminded about the frailty of technology, I spent the weekend (when I wasn’t moving the print MISC into stores) being reminded about the eternal strength of the plain ol’ human body, at the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival at Town Hall (a former Christian Science church). There’ve been countless erotic-art group exhibitions in town before, but never this big or this well-publicized.

The Friday-night opening and auction left over 150 people lined up outside waiting for the chance to enter the filled-to-capacity auditorium. Once inside, many patrons removed jackets to reveal the requested “provocative” attire. (Signs were posted at all doors leading to other parts of the building, announcing “CLOTHING REQUIRED Beyond This Point.”)

There were guys in leather chaps or Utilikilts or puffy pirate shirts. There were ladies in thong bikinis with body paint, or thongs and burlesque pasties beneath see-thru dresses, or vinyl hot pants and ’70s-esque knit halter tops. There were lots of corsets and other cleavage enhancers. The wearers of these costumes (some of whom were older and/or wider than the standard “model material”) all glowed with the pride of being admired, being desired.

There was a glorious vibe in the air of joyous celebration, of taking a vacation from winter blahs and sharing a form of instant intimacy with several hundred other adults. Unlike much of the “sex industry” (porn, strip clubs, advice manuals, etc.), there was no mercenary hard-sell attitude; not among the viewers and exhibitors and not even in most of the art.

There were 80 or so artworks on auction night, and over 200 artworks in the subsequent weekend exhibit. (About half the auction pieces were also on display the following two days.)

The artworks themselves encompassed most of the popular visual-art media. There were photos, paintings, drawings, cartoons, sculptures, and collages, in all sizes and shapes.

The subject matter of the works hewed close to a rather narrow variety of scenes, rather than the full possibilities of erotic expression.

There were many solo “figure studies” of women and men of assorted adult ages, nude or in fetish garb.

There were many bondage scenes, of a woman or man either tied up alone or being disciplined by an always-female dominant.

There were scenes of kissing and/or groping among lesbian, gay-male, and even a few hetero couples.

There were two or three scenes of fellatio, but none of cunnilingus.

There were no scenes of what used to be called “the sex act,” hetero intercourse. (One of the event’s organizers told me no such scenes were submitted.) The only penetrative sex shown was in a large painting of a gay orgy. (Once again, I thought, the Seattle art world’s reverse double standards were more open to gay-male sexuality than to straight-male sexuality.)

My first thought about the prevelance bondage art: “It’s just so 1998.” Some of the S/M scenes depicted the attitude of aggressive egomania that helped make the dot-com era so annoying. Others seemed intended to be “shock art,” as if we were still living in an era before there were adult novelty stores in half the nation’s strip malls.

But others recognized a more playful spirit to role-playing. Although the exhibition’s contributing artists come from all over North America, I pondered whether I was seeing the birth of a particularly Nor’Western flavor of erotica, and what that could be.

I decided it would be an erotica based on playfulness, closeness, and comfort. Instead of the “are we being transgressive yet?” bombast found in much NY/Calif. “alternative” sex art, or the artsy pretensions found in much Euro sex art, NW sex art would acknowledge that people have been having sex since before we were born, and having all assorted types of sex to boot. Het, lesbian, gay, bi, transgender, pain/pleasure, monogamous, nonmonogamous, multi-partner, solo, etc. etc.—none of it’s outré, all of it’s fun for those who’re into it. It’s all about connecting with other bodies and souls, keeping warm and passionate during the dreary winter days, being creative and positive, gentle and brash.

Sidebar: Before the exhibition, I’d seen the video Sex Across America #8: Seattle. It’s part of a series in which some hard-porn performers and their camera crew travel to different cities. This one featured hotel-room sex scenes taped in the (unnamed but obvious) Seattle Sheraton, Edgewater, and Inn at the Market, plus a billiards bar I’m sure I’ve been to under other circumstances; as well as clothed tourist scenes at the Space Needle, the Pike Place Market, and around Fourth and Pike.

While merely location-shot here by LA porn-biz people, the sex is a lot closer to personalized lovemaking than to most of the emotionless hot-action usually found in LA corporate porn. Especially in the final scene, with a real-life local couple (who’d previously appeared in an “amateur” sex video for the same director). Prior to showing off their well-practiced lovin’ technique, the couple’s female half is interviewed by the director: “So I hear the women in Seattle are really horny,” he says. The woman smiles back, “Yes! It’s all the moisture.” It’s a cute, charming prelude to some cute, charming nooky.

So there can indeed be a Northwestern eroticism. Another, more vital question: Can eroticism save the world, as has been pondered on this site and elsewhere?

The answer, like so much involving sex, is complicated.

The wide-open decadence of Berlin and Paris in the ’30s didn’t prevent the Nazis. Indeed, these scenes were among the Nazis’ first targets.

The ’60s hedonism didn’t do much to stop the Vietnam war or prevent the rise of Nixon’s gang.

The ’70s cult of individual pleasure merely foreshadowed the upscale “lifestyle” fetish of more recent times.

But a strong, supportive gay community, built largely around sexual enjoyment (and around demanding the right to it) is the dominant reason new AIDS infections have been stemmed in urban North America.

And today’s most pressing social problems all have sensually-based potential solutions.

Both fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity seek to repress sex, as part of authoritarian ideologies encouraging obedience and disconnectedness.

Today’s war fever is profoundly anti-sexual, promoting cold ruthless ambition at the expense of almost everything to do with freedom or compassion.

Our contracting economy keeps most of us shackled and frustrated, while rewarding a tiny elite of whip-lashing doms.

The suburban landscape is a wasteland of beauty-deprived arterial roads and subdivisions keeping people apart and isolated.

Sex and erotica, by themselves, won’t solve any of these. A consumerist, self-centered definition of sex could even help these problems get worse.

But it’d sure help if more people used sensuality as a way to become more aware of the world around them, and if more people used sexual intimacy and to learn how to empathically bond with people, to help bring back a sense of community.

And, of course, sex is always a good way to advertise a progressive movement. Spread the joy, share the (consensual) love, propose a world of more satisfying possibilities, and have tons-O-fun doing it.

Come out of the shadows and into the warm pink light.

…asking men to put the fullness of their yangness to work for a better world: Maggie Tapert, a US-born sex therapist now based in Zurich, offers a pro-peace essay, Prescription Pleasure. In it, she speaks out in favor of sexual self-empowerment for women as an antidote to a culture of violence and repression. But (unlike many of her colleagues in the “sex positive” movement) she also prescribes a similar path for men:

“Imagine for a moment that you could sit on the market place lovingly stroking a beautiful hard cock and all the men and women who walked by would admire it, or maybe lovingly stroke or touch it, sprinkle it with holy water or even just smile, nod and go on about their business. Imagine what a different world this would be. If your potent hard member were honored and encouraged by your community perhaps there would be no need for violence. If we loved your cock maybe we would see the end of war. Maybe. Who knows.”

Later, of course, she admits she’s not really advocating street nudity; she just wants to provoke her readers into imagining a world where pleasure was treasured, and to create such a world within themselves.

Bellevue Square is trying to evict FAO Schwarz. But the troubled toyseller isn’t backing down, and is making legal challenges.

It probably won’t end there. Where might it end?

I can see it now. The GI Joes and the Toy Story Bucket O’ Soldiers surround the store, vowing to repel any invasion. Some of the Cabbage Patch Kids start learning triage. Plamobil people start planting small explosives around the 14-foot bear sculpture, ready to turn it into an instant barricade. Some of the Barbies offer themselves as human shields in front of the soldiers. Other Barbies rebel against the whole scene, and go off into a prayer circle somewhere near the educational toys. Bert and Ernie are reprogramming the foot-powered giant keyboard into an early warning alarm. Pokémon villains Team Rocket are attaching incidiary devices to the radio-control model cars, ready to roll right up to the mall manager’s desk upon the receipt of the go-ahead signal (Tickle Me Elmo’s giggle). An expeditionary force of Sailor Moon dolls secretly maps out a counter-attack plan. They will lead a vanguard of Dragon Ball Z and Power Rangers characters in taking more mall territory. They will pelt the mall cops (and any stray shoppers) with Monopoly houses and Jelly Bellys, but only as a diversionary tactic. While mall management is looking the other way, Jay Jay the Jet Plane will fly off toward the Muzak control room, to deploy the toys’ ultimate weapon. The unbearable strains of the “Welcome to Our World of Toys” song will play continuously, at full blast, until an unconditional surrender is attained.

NEWS ITEM #2: Mainstream news media, both national and local, have suddenly discovered young anarchists, some 26 years after the first circle-A teens and three years after WTO. Whether the papers are trying to brand all antiwar protestors as extremists, or whether they really want to shed light on the philosophy of no-government, the issue’s a little more pertinent now than it was pre-George Dubious.

At the time of the WTO protests, many of us perceived a “withering away of the state” underway, giving way to effective rule by a stateless corporate elite. Some WTO opponents vocally wished for a resurgence of governmental paternalism, countering the often inhumane moves of Big Money.

But nowadays, governments and their bosses have reasserted their presence, in unkind ways. The White House occupant has embarked on a macro strategy of sleaze and graft, of taking from the poor and giving to the rich, of imposing or trying to impose a vast spectrum of police-state brutalities. I’m starting to wonder if, should the GOP goon squad win in 2004, whether there will even be a presidential election in 2008.

So: It’s again quite relevant to ask whether the type of megastate that can do this much harm on such a grand scale deserves to exist. The biggest argument in defense of Big Government these days might be that it’s the only thing that could stop terrorism and protect North American residents from hostilities by other governments.

Nine-eleven’s perpetrators were non-governmental but still quite authoritarian. They weren’t after “regime change” here, but did encourage hardline elements within the Muslim world to try and form harsh governments in their own homelands. Our government’s might has so far failed to catch or punish this non-governmental force, and is now instead being massively redeployed against another perceived enemy which had little or nothing to do with the 2001 terror attacks, but which, by being a government with real estate and a real army, is more convenient to deploy forces against.

Back home, the argument against big government could easily be made by invoking Iraq and North Korea as the horrific result of governmental leaders who’ve grasped the kind of extreme strong-arm power our own government now wishes to impose upon us. Even the right wing’s rugged-individualist factions (such as the black-helicopter conspiratists and the “Remember Waco” bunch) are starting to grumble at Bush’s creeping Big Brotherisms. And with most Democrats still shunning their party’s past insistence that governmental power can do good things for people, it’s easier than ever to imagine no (or at least a lot less) government as the only viable alternative to bad government.

But what would replace big government? Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson has fantasied about a future where business takes over everything government used to do, even the police and the roads. Modern anarchists themselves usually invoke collectivist neo-agrarian Utopias where everybody would (supposedly willingly) all be neopagan vegan bicyclists wearing all-hemp wardrobes (a prospect just as monoculturally scary as anything the Evangelicals can propose).

I, as longtime readers can surmise, have other wishes. I happen to like DVD players, rock bands, and cheese-flavored snacks, and want to preserve the technological infrastructure that makes them all possible. But less facetiously, I believe humanity’s too diverse and unpredictable for any preplanned Utopian scheme to ever work. We need a society that’s flexible enough and diffuse enough to allow countless ethnic/religious/gender/subcultural/etc. sub-nations to all pursue their own definitions of happiness. Government can help or hinder this, as can business.

I don’t have the answers, at least not yet. But I’m researching them, for a possible book-length essay/manifesto. Any suggestions on your part would be most welcome.

There’s now a “Masturbate for Peace” website, replete with bumper-sticker designs and silly little jokes n’ puns (and links to Viagra-selling sites). But it also has a more serious tone in its intro:

“We’ve entered a time of wars and rumors of wars. Threats of terrorism and mass destruction have filled the world with fear and brought us perilously close to worldwide conflict.

There’s no greater antidote for war than love. Feelings of hatred and distrust form the necessary basis of armed confrontation. Replace those negative feelings with love and you’re halfway towards resolution of any conflict.

However, any real love must start from within. You can’t love others without loving yourself first. And, of course, masturbation is the greatest expression of self-love. So it’s natural that we, the citizens of the world, are joining together to masturbate for peace.

As we begin with this act of self-love, we encourage others to do the same, to take pleasure in life and to share masturbation’s positive energy with a world in need.”

Of course, I’ll say being joyful to yourself isn’t enough. We must go beyond our own selves, sowing Tears for Fears’s proverbial seeds of love.

SEVERAL OTHERS have had the same idea we expressed here a few weeks back, calling for men to valiantly employ their manhood in the service of peace. F’rinstance, a couple dozen Floridians have joined a “Men for Peace” contingent, organized (natch) by two women, and posed in a nude tableau for pro-peace photos.

MONIKER MADNESS DEPT.: Reader Terry Hickman has a suggestion for our recent rename-the-USA query: Corporatia.

BRIT RESEARCHERS now claim that political protesting may be good for your health. And goodness knows there’ll be plenty of such healthy opportunities in the near future.

FOR SEEMINGLY EVER, the right-wing sleaze machine has dismissed liberals and progressives as naysayers, doomsdayers, and what Spiro Agnew called “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Commentator Jeff Madrick opts to disagree. He claims the politicians who claim there are inevitable limits to what we can do for our people and our land, who dismiss as unviable any attempts to improve the lot of the nonrich, are the real pessimists. Those of us who believe this nation must and can do better are the real optimists.

In this regard, the spring print MISC will be all about the “Positive/Negative and Other Opposites.” We’ve interviewed a self-help promoter about thinking your way to a better life. We’re going to interview an author-editor who wants leftists to focus more on promoting positive solutions, rather than settling for protesting and complaining. A metaphysical expert’s tentatively slated to write a piece about the “love based reality” vs. the “fear based reality.”

As usual, your contributions are also most welcome. Email your ideas now.

And the winter print MISC is just a few pages from completion and should be in subscribers’ mailboxes and at select retail outlets any week now.

One thing we’ve learned from the five-month stretch it took to make this “quarterly”: Yr. humble editor can no longer do the whole job. So we could really use more artists, designers, ad sellers and biz-side folks, not just writers. Wanna help out: Contact the email addy above.

EVERY YEAR SINCE 1949, the homeowners of NE Park Lane in Seattle’s Ravenna neighborhood have turned their curving one-block street into “Candy Cane Lane.” Every house is spectacularly decorated, many according to an annual theme.

This year’s highly appropriate theme: “Peace on Earth.” Each house’s decorative tableau was accompanied by a sign reading PEACE in a different language.

I can think of no better message to express this season.

And unlike so many things wished for, peace never goes out of style.

It is my own wish for this troubled world, and my wish for all of you.

IT’S BEEN OVER A WEEK since our last post to this site. (Sorry.) Things that have gone on during that time:

• The Chubby & Tubby hardware-variety stores were put up for sale, and simultaneously began a liquidation sale. Wanna help me buy and preserve ’em?
• The Sonics continued to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, in game after game.
• A&E reran its Cleavage documentary, an excuse to show seconds-long clips displaying 50 years’ worth of minimal attire. In true American-repressed fashion, the show censored all nipple and see-thru shots—except during icky surgery scenes.
• The two-years-in-the-making eighth issue of the literary tabloid Klang came out, with a long story by yr. obd’t web-editor about the Alasdair Gray novel Poor Things.
• I’ve continued to work tirelessly on assembling the next print MISC, which should wow and wonder you any week now.
• I viewed Scarecrow Video’s copy of the unjustly obscure Mexican film Sexo por Compasion (Compassionate Sex) Made in 1999 by director Laura Mana, it deftly applies the neopagan “sacred prostitute” legend and sets it in a lethargic little Catholic town.Our heroine Dolores (Lisabeth Margoni) is a plump, middle-aged barmaid who’s so conscientiously pious, her husband splits town rather than face her “excess of goodness.” This only prompts her to redouble her efforts at do-gooder-hood, until she overhears a male barfly complaining about his own straying wife. She offers her sympathy in the best way she can imagine. While there’s no on-screen sex in the film, we’re told the man learns from Dolores that a little sin isn’t so bad; and that he also learns how to satisfy his own wife.

  With the speed of small-town gossip, the town’s men all line up for Dolores (who’s renamed herself Lolita!). She soothes and consoles all (middle-aged virgins, widowers, the lonely, the misunderstood). She asks nothing in return but donations for the church building fund.

  Director Mana switches from b/w to color. The men are now energetic and serene. Their wives don’t like that they’ve been barred from Lolita’s bar, but adore their hubbies’ new sexual knowledge and doting tenderness.

  Everybody’s happy and well-adjusted—except the now underworked hookers from the next town and the priest who goes mad when he learns the source of the parish’s new riches. But Lolita gets their heads set straight soon enough.

  Even Lolita’s returning hubby eventually learns to stop condemning her love-sharing ways, after the town wives draft him into giving them some compassionate sex. The film ends with the happy announcement that Lolita’s going to have “our child,” the “our” referring to the whole town.

  That’s all cozy and uplifting. It’s also neatly confined somewhere in the outer provinces of Latino “magical realism.” Could anything like its premise work out in real life, in jaded urban civilization? I’ve no answers. Even the authors of New Age essays about the “sacred prostitute” archtype seldom come out and advocate reviving the practice. (They mostly ask female readers to take the legend as a lesson for individual self-esteem.)

  I do know the film’s penultimate plot twist is comparable to my own mini-essay in this space a month or so back calling for a men’s antiwar movement, which I only half-facetiously christened “Peepees for Peace.” It would refute “alternative” culture’s frequent denunciations of masculinity, instead proclaiming a positive role for yang passion in the building of a better world.

  None of the “sacred prostitute” books I’ve seen mention men providing sexual/spiritual enlightenment to women—only women healing men and women healing themselves.

  What if there were more women like this film’s Lolita—and more men like her husband at the film’s end, healing the planet one clitoris at a time?

…email me links to the same site, I know there’s a buzz goin’ on. Such is the case with DubyaDubyaDubya, a Flash animation comparing the ongoing political-military nonsense with a home-electronics breakdown.

In times of war-mongering fervor, many sadly predictable events regularly recur.

Among them: Essays, usually but not exclusively written by women, blaming essentially the whole male gender for the actions of a few (usually old and un-virile) men who promote the starting of wars. (These stories almost always invoke the phrase “testosterone poisoning” and comparisons of phalluses to guns and missiles.)

One of these, by LA sex-talk-show host Dr. Susan Block, recently appeared in the lefty newsletter CounterPunch. (The above link is to a posting of the article on Block’s own site, which includes images of dildos with Bush and Saddam caricatures drawn on them.)

Just once, I’d like to see a leftist response to war-aggression hype that DIDN’T turn into a wholesale denounciation of het-male sexuality.

For one thing, the current White House occupant isn’t, as Block calls him, a hormone-crazed “dickhead.” If anything he’s a metaphoric castrato, shrilly and obediently (albeit loudly) singing to the moneyed castes in the opera-house luxury boxes.

And as Block has herself written elsewhere on her website, sex and violence are not linked but opposed to one another. A penis is not a missile, a gun, or a torpedo, but biology. It is made to bring joy; to bring people together; to replenish the species, not deplete it. (Though its improper use can lead to heartbreak, broken homes, and STDs.) Cocks have nothing to do with the starting of wars, or at least they haven’t since Troy. (Though as we’ve seen in Kosovo, they can become abused, as weapons of abuse, once a war has commenced.)

I’d like to propose a different vision: Peepees for Peace. Men publicly proclaiming the dedication of their manhood toward “erecting” positive loving alternatives to war-fear, invoking vigor and courage to resist the calls to blind obedience, working alongside (and often-times beneath) all the wise and compassionate women.

This is a little more complicated than the old slogan “Make Love Not War,” but ultimately comes down to the same conclusion. Active love, not passivity, is the true opposite of war (or of fear, one of the key emotional underpinnings of war).

I personally plan to be a warm, firm, blood-filled, snug-fitting, well-lubed, properly-sheathed, rhythmically synchronized advocate for long-term solutions to one of the planet’s most joyless regions. I will use my capacities to help make my nation more responsive to the peace message. And as a writer and public speaker, my fingers and tongue will untiringly pursue procedures which might help lead to a long-lasting, fulfilling resolution.

…a long, scathing anti-Bush essay to the UK paper The Observer. It’s not online (which means the American masses on whose behalf he speaks won’t get to read it). But a short summary of it sez he calls for a big investigation (by whom?) into whether the administration knew about 9/11 in advance and chose to do nothing, because it would further the Bush gang’s anti-freedom domestic agenda. The summary also includes the following quotation:

“We still don’t know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta.”

(Of course, it should be noted the “popularly elected President” in Vidal’s quotation is his own distant cousin.)

…could be put in check if he had less lethal means to express it; thus the website “Buy Bush a Playstation2!”

WE’RE NOT REALLY POETRY PEOPLE HERE, but can’t help admire UW prof Richard Kenny’s versified thoughts about the “timorous Congress” acceding to war-fever.

…this past Sunday afternoon and Wednesday evening along the usual downtown-Capitol Hill routes for such marches. This is expected activity during a time of hotheaded drumbeating for organized military peurility; particularly for a would-be war in which the U.S. would be the undisguised aggressor.

Two aspects made these marches particularly significant. They were among the best-attended of many such marches held across the country this week. (At least 10,000 attended the Sunday march.) And both were remarkably intelligent, respectful, life-affirming affairs, attended by a wide cross-section of the local populace.

We need a popular uprising against the election-stealers and coup-plotters in DC. And we’ll need everybody we can get to be in it–even your parents, people who look like your parents, and men who don’t have ponytails.

(I’ve been thinking of forming a group for guys who care for progressive politics but don’t care to sport abundant hair. Call it the “Green Shaven.”)

War-aggression propaganda, particularly the type practiced by post-Reagan Republicans, is a campaign by a ruling regime to pressure its own citizens into unthinking passive-aggressive obedience. It tries to turn individuals into a dumbed-down mass. Opponents of war-aggession can best counter this tactic by welcoming and respecting humans of all backgrounds as intelligent individuals.

One lifestyle-left poster in the post-WTO era bore the slogan “Live Without Dead Time;” implying that sanctimonious personal thrills should be a movement’s true main goal. But in any serious work, including work for important social causes, there’s a lot of “dead time,” a lot of time spent on the boring details, a lot of time when it seems all for naught.

The organizers of the Sunday and Wednesday marches spent that time wisely. They ran well-organized, peaceful, on-topic gatherings that gained positive media attention and reinforced an image of antiwar activists as sane and rational–a lot more sane and rational than the war promoters.

Contrary to the image promoted by Michael Moore, the American power elite and the White House war-wanters shouldn’t be caricatured as “Stupid White Men.” They’re not stupid, even if they wish everybody else was. They’re brutishly clever and ambitious, even the ones who aren’t (or like to pretend they aren’t) book-learned. They’re not all white; and they’re certainly not all men. They’re not “The Patriarchy” or “Straight White Male Society” as some of my Olympia friends like to imagine. Their current top leaders (with a few backward exceptions) no longer discriminate (at least not overtly) on such outmoded, inaccurate criteria as race and gender.

No, today’s powermongers (heart symbol) you if you’ve got money, power, and an eagerness to play the game the right-wing way. If you lack these qualifications, they’ll treat you as a potential foot-soldier in their domestic army of dumbed-down discipline. If you decline to get with the program, you’re the enemy.

We should welcome everyone, regardless of subculture or lifestyle, who’s tired of being defamed and insulted by the talk-radio demagogues. Who’s tired of being talked down to, of being endless cajoled into living in fear. Who’s tired of the peurile influence-peddling and naked corruption. Who wants a world of real spirituality, real statesmanship, and real governance. Who’d rather see less Mideast violence rather than more.

Peace. It’s not just for hummus eaters anymore.