Who Would Murder Someone In Cold Blood For Being Different?

Lump of right-wing pig offal that talks

Do you think a talking pile of North Carolina pig offal with a wandering eye would bind the hands of the world's greatest poet and drag him out to an empty field with her right-wing comrades? Do you think she would pick up an NRA-sanctioned semi-automatic, scream "Jesus I love you; take this filthy maricón to hell," and shoot him in the back? But first make him dig his grave?

It's hard to imagine political figures doing something like that-- or even just ordering it be done. But it happens. Why?

Last night I watched a screener for the film Little Ashes, the story of the stunted romance between Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí. It was set as the far right overthrew the democratically elected government of Spain and plunged that country into a horrifying abyss where it lingered in reactionary misery for over four decades. By the end of the film I was haunted by the putrid display I had watched of the talking pile of North Carolina pig offal with the wandering eye calling the brutal torture and murder of Matthew Shepard a "hoax" on the floor of the House of Representatives last week as she prepared to vote against the kinds of hate crimes by which gay people like Matthew Shepard and Federico García Lorca come to be murdered in lonely, desolate fields by people like Virginia Foxx.

After García Lorca's execution on August 19, 1936 he was tossed into an unmarked grave, the circumstances of his death shrouded in secrecy and his work-- the work of the Spain's greatest poet-- was banned for nearly two decades and then released with all references to gay love murdered like him and hidden like his dead body-- and by the same foul, small-minded right-wing offal. García Lorca's brilliant work was resurrected with the death of a Spanish antecedent of Virginia Foxx, Francisco Franco, self-proclaimed defender of traditional values, resurrected through the efforts of Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen, Antonio Machado, Dmitri Shostakovich, The Pogues and The Clash.

Right-wing icon Jack Kemp died yesterday. He wasn't murdered for having been, at one time, gay-for-pay; he died an old man (73), of cancer, having denied "the incident" his whole life. The same way Larry Craig does. (Democrats are less likely to stay in the closet and last night former state Senator and California Democratic Party chairman Art Torres came out.) Rightists don't accept their homosexuality and can't abide anyone else accepting their own. To quote Mike Lux, in an explanation of the conservative pathology in his book, The Progressive Revolution:

We must adhere to tradition because once we tamper with tradition, society goes to hell. It’s a scary world out there, and the people who have always run things can protect us, but only if we stay with our traditions and keep things the way they have always been. People who are different from us create problems, and we don’t want our traditions or the carefully built structure of our society undermined.

Just ask Francisco Franco or Virginia Foxx.



Love Sleeps in the Poet's Heart
You'll never understand my love for you,
because you dream inside me, fast asleep.
I hide you, persecuted though you weep,
from the penetrating steel voice of truth.
Normalcy stirs both flesh and blinding star,
and pierces even my despairing heart.
Confusing reasoning has eaten out
the wings on which your spirit fiercely soared:
onlookers who gather on the garden lawn
await your body and my bitter grief,
their jumping horses made of light, green manes.
But go on sleeping now, my life, my dear.
Hear my smashed blood rebuke their violins!
See how they still must spy on us, so near!

RIP