Everything's On Hold-- Except Horsing Around

The Senate just wants to put healthcare reform on hold-- sad they can't put people dying for want of healthcare on hold while they ponder their political fates-- instead of just following E.J. Dionne's simple and straight forward, common sense advice:

The notion that they would just shelve health care after all they have put into it -- the message they have gotten across, even if that’s not exactly what they have all been saying-- paints a portrait of a party that, to say the least, lacks persistence and conviction.

...The House would pass a version of the reconciliation bill containing the various amendments and send it to the Senate. The Senate would change it slightly (in ways that the House agreed to), which would require the House to vote on it again. Only after it got the revised reconciliation bill would the House take up the Senate bill. The House could then pass both bills and send both to the president. Problem solved, health-care passes, and we move on.

Simple and straight forward-- and better: expand Medicare and then give the American people what they really want: the 21st Century equivalent of a bread-and-circus gladiatorial heyday against Wall Street, starting with a sacking of their worst agents inside the Administration-- Rahm Emanuel, Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner. But Obama may have decided to go in the other direction-- just screw the poor people so bad that if Reagan or Bush had done it, there would have been a revolution.

OK, beyond that, I'm putting politics on hold for the rest of the day. Unlike the Senate, I don't do that by passively presiding over the deaths of thousands of struggling Americans who can't afford the extravagence of the Insurance Industry, the Medical Industrial Complex and the banksters. I just lapse into revelry about the glorious past, my own. The funny thing is, I'm reading Seth Jones' excellent first-person book on Afghanistan, In the Graveyard of Empires and it's brought me right back to the late 60s/early 70s and my own sojourns through that more foreign and fascinating of countries. But we're going to save yet another re-telling of "Howie Takes The Hippie Trail To Kabul" for another time and go back a few years earlier. With my first break with shy, I ran for president of the freshman class at college.

When the campaign started I was a shoo-in. Everyone loved me and I was probably promising pizza delivery access to the dorms and popcorn makers in the common areas. But during the campaign I fell in with a bunch of beatnik types who thoroughly radicalized me. By the close of my campaign I was demanding an end to segregation in Alabama, an end to the war in Vietnam, an end to laws against drugs, and an end to any other injustice that came up. I still won... but by about one vote. Part of my radicalization was musical. I booked The Fugs for the freshman class dance.

Most people just loved The Fugs; they had never seen anything like them-- but it was what their parents had warned them about. Bob O'Connor was an upper classman, the captain of some sports team, a frat guy and the de facto leader of the conservative students on campus. He threatened to beat me up for subjecting his girlfriend to "that trash." That interact with O'Connor changed my life, although it wasn't for decades that I got fired from a radio station in San Jose for having the Sex Pistols on live. Face to face with a snotty little two-bit fascist I embarked on a crusade against fraternities and everything else that O'Connor and his people liked. The next year I was elected Chairman of the Student Activities Board and I controlled a budget-- for over two years-- that made frat rats and O'Connor types want to transfer to other schools. The Fugs were only the barest of beginnings for a concert series that brought band after band after band that did nothing if not make frat rocks and jocks cringe: Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, the Dead, Otis Redding, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe & the Fish, The Who, Muddy Waters, Pink Floyd, The Byrds... They wanted "adult" music so they could buy their girlfriends a corsage and get dressed up to see. I once even excised moleskins out of the student budget (which I think was supposed to prevent jocks who played some sport from getting blisters on their feet).

Frats weren't a big thing when I got to our campus-- and they were an even smaller thing after 4 years of yours truly. The kind of elitism they represented and perpetuated wasn't part of my world vision. Even before I realized Republicans were the enemy of Man, I knew fraternities and sororities were. Or at least I sensed they were; I didn't really know anything about them, other than that Bob O'Connor was their version of a BMOC, something I was determined to supplant (and did). But then, yesterday, I read an unlinkable story in Out magazine, "Brotherly Love," about the secret gay history of American fraternities.

It's the story of Stewart Howe, one of the country's most energetic proponents of fraternities, which he used the way Republican Congressman Mark Foley used the congressional pages dormitory. By the time he graduated from college, Howe had been a member of Kappa Sigma, helped to found Sigma Delta Chi, Phi Eta Sigma and the Skull and Crescent.

And after graduation, he hardly left brotherhood behind, creating several organizations that modernized the fraternity system: the Fraternity Management Company, College Fraternities Magazines Associated, and the Stewart Howe Alumni Service, which is still in existence today. Going from house to house, town to town, he helped fraternities with their fundraising, newsletters, alumni records, and estate planning-- his efforts largely created a framework for the web of Greek houses that own and manage about $3 billion in student housing.

Personally, Howe used that network as a kind of "procurement agency for his sexual appetite and masterminding one of the earliest, most extensive, most sophisticated gay networks in the country... what is fraternity life-- having together, bunking together, showering together, wrestling and horsing around-- other than a kind of ironic homosexuality?" Howe specialized in white boys in the Midwest and had a special fondness for military types and ROTC boys.

Howe was so much of a flagrant racist that, when one of his friends suggests a trip to Trinidad, he warned Howe to tone down his bigotry. Howe was also a cheapskate who loathed President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies... Howe died in 1973, the same year the American Psychological Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder.

Stewart Howe was the Patrick McHenry of his day, although there is no indication that Howe, unlike McHenry, was ever involved in a triple murder. See, didn't I say politics would be on hold?