Take us out, Mr. Sulu

George Takei is getting married! Yay!

Now that California Supreme Court has ruled that all Californians have the right to get married, Takei and his partner of 21 years are fulfilling their dream wedding. As you might have guessed, George Takei is one of my heroes. When I was growing up, we watched all the shows that featured Asian people, even if we didn't like them, simply because, I realize now, my mom was lonely for faces that were familiar to her. So we were regular watchers of Quincy, M.E. for Robert Ito and Star Trek for Takei. We watched that awful Shogun miniseries and Hawaii 5-0 and anything that remotely had an Asian cast. But I was always a fan of Star Trek, because I'm a big nerd, and my favorite episodes were Sulu-heavy (The Naked Time, which features a hot Takei brandishing an epee and Shore Leave, where he gets the girl. (Huh, I didn't realize that Sulu was actually haafu -- half-Japanese and half-Filipino. Go figure!) Anyway, he was always a hero of mine when I was growing up. Here was this guy who looked like me who was steering the Starship Enterprise and doing all sorts of heroic deeds. He was not a red-shirted ensign who would die in any episode, but permanent! When I was growing up, I never had any idea that the world would give people like me any shit, because there was Mr. Sulu in that spot, and if Mr. Sulu was there, if Sam from Quincey was there, hell if Margaret Cho was there, why couldn't I be there someday, too?

When Takei came out a few years ago, I was happy that he was taking that brave step to again lead people forward. And now he's getting married! He wrote about it on his blog and compared the laws that prevented GLBTs from getting married to same-gender partners to the discrimination he faced as a child in the internment camps.

As a Japanese American, I am keenly mindful of the subtle and not so subtle discrimination that the law can impose. During World War II, I grew up imprisoned behind the barbed wire fences of U.S. internment camps. Pearl Harbor had been bombed and Japanese Americans were rounded up and incarcerated simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. Fear and war hysteria swept the nation. A Presidential Executive Order directed the internment of Japanese Americans as a matter of national security. Now, with the passage of time, we look back and see it as a shameful chapter of American history. President Gerald Ford rescinded the Executive Order that imprisoned us. President Ronald Reagan formally apologized for the unjust imprisonment. President George H.W. Bush signed the redress payment checks to the survivors. It was a tragic and dark taint on American history.

With time, I know the opposition to same sex marriage, too, will be seen as an antique and discreditable part of our history. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy remarked on same sex marriage, "Times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper, in fact, serve only to oppress." (SOURCE: Takei's blog)

He was, is and always will be my hero and one of my biggest role models. Thank you, Mr. Takei, and congratulations to you and Brad. I wish you all the happiness in the world!

Review: Incognegro

I purchased Mat Johnson's Incognegro at my comic book shop yesterday and gave it a read-through between Keith Olbermann's deliciously snarky comments on on Tuesday's turnouts and reading through various postcolonial theologies for school and personal edification. That divided attention span may or may not play in to my first thoughts.

The Good: It's a gripping story, a detective story/social commentary on not only race but gender and human failings. It puts the spotlight on what has been traditionally hidden in our muddy mainstream, not just that lynchings were a regular part of American life until just a few decades ago, but also the blurred edges of identity that we would do well to wrestle with except that we're too busy trying to ignore it. Warren Pleece's art is exceptionally good for the task, as the clarity of the black-and-white drawings obscures the racial differences between the characters, which is the whole point. Even though race and gender are the two things that people allegedly notice about us when they meet us, they are not absolutes and not concrete and can be changed or developed as needed or desired. This is why passing -- either into another race, another class or another gender -- has been such a horror in a society that revels in the comfort of uniformity and categorization, even as, or especially as, it pays lip service to diversity.

The Not-So-Good: The weakness of Incognegro is in what I've called the John Grisham effect: an author writes a book (in this case, collaborates in a graphic novel) with an eye toward the silver screen. Ever noticed how much movies made off John Grisham novels stick to the book so closely? It's because Grisham writes books that are easy to turn into scripts. The pacing in Incognegro has that Hollywood feel to it, with each section a scene rather than a chapter and comic characters appear at the right time to lighten the heavy moment. The graphic novel/comic book is a medium in and of itself, with plenty of creative room for dramatic and incredible storytelling. It would have been nice to see Johnson to push the boundaries of the graphic novel format to tell his story, rather than just using it as a vehicle for his story. Also, as suitable as Pleece's art was, I think he could have gone into more graphic detail to present the violence and horror of what the protagonists were experiencing.

The main character, Zane Pinchback, the Incognegro, also suffers from what I call the Det. Bobby Goren effect (from Law & Order: CI). Like Goren, Pinchback is all-knowing, all-sure, in-control, where he notices every little detail, understands more than anyone what's going on, has the inside track. He's got enough flaws and makes enough mistakes to keep from being a Mary Sue-type character, but I think this might be part of the script-like flaw of the presentation. Once the story gets going, we no longer get a chance to see what's going on in Pinchback's interior, his thoughts, feelings, rationals or understandings of what he's experiencing, and I think the dialogue-only format robs the reader of a deeper experience.

Overall: I should come up with some sort of rating system, huh? What, four-out-of-five stars? Six-ouot-of-seven communion shot glasses? Whatever. Incognegro is a good, important book that I'd recommend to just about everyone to read. Hopefully it will spur discussion, not only about America's history that needs discussion, but also about the present issues of identity, race and gender that we call inappropriate for polite society. Fuck polite. Let's get upset for once. And if they do make a movie/TV show based on Incognegro, you can bet I'll be there to watch it.

Morality, Men and You

Great bit today on Talk of the Nation about how morality is hard-wired into our brains, and how that, if morality is part of our programming, doesn't mean that morality still isn't moral.

Of course you had a person call in and say, "Well, God decides our morality anyway." The guest, Steven Pinker, tore that argument apart with a great reply that's part of his essay that was published in the New York Times:

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not -- if his dictates are divine whims -- why should we take them seriously? Suppose that
God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others -- if a command to
torture a child was never an option -- then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

He also gets very Lakoff-ian about the moral left-right divide: libs focus on fairness, convervos focus on authority and yadda-yadda.

There's a lot about us human beings that are hard-wired into our brains and our bodies. Love, for example, is completely biological, that doesn't mean it's not romantic or meaningful. I think that we in the West, and we in religion, have let this body-spirit divide go on for far too long. We need to reclaim the body and stop regarding it as secondary or superfluous to spirit, and, in that same vein (literally) stop letting the body run the show of the mind by ignoring all the influences that it does have on how we think.

I've been considering the concept lately that we can't get to the spirit unless we go through the body. Maybe that's a reason for the Incarnation.

Also on Talk of the Nation there was a discussion about the "Child-Man" -- you know, the 26-year-old guy who lives in a ratty house with his buddies and plays X-Box all day who may or may not be employed. You usually see these guys featured prominently on Judd Apatow movies. Neil Conan talked with a woman who wrote an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News called "The Child-Man" where she takes these guys to task for not being "grown-ups." They talked a bit on the radio about how the Child-Man might be a reaction to feminism, which created new roles for women and men are reacting to those roles. They act that way, she says, because we let them. Now it's time for them to start acting like adults -- husbands, fathers, good jobs, mortgage, nice lawn.

Give me a crappin' break.

How is creating such a tightly defined role for men any different that creating tightly defined roles for women that revolved around wife, mother, good helpmeet, nice clean house, etc.? Wouldn't we feminists be all up in arms if someone tried to decide what it is to be an adult woman? What it is to be acceptable? I started leaving those ideas behind me a loooong time ago. My house is a pit, I'm opting out of motherhood, and while I love my husband and will be with him forever, I'm not really happy with the idea of "marriage." I create my own ideas of being a woman. I do this because I let me. And I'm happy about it.

Maybe the whole "Child-Man" thing is young men reacting against the very idea this author is trying to pigeonhole them into, that there is one definition of being a man, that society has a tendency to determine a man's worth by his paycheck and material goods than by his heart, his personality, his inner self. Maybe they're in the process of throwing off the old patriarchal shackles that imprisoned/imprisons and hurt them as much as it did/does us and creating a new definition of manhood. The world has changed, women have changed, but men are still pushed into these old, archaic roles. Maybe it's time for new definitions.

(Also, quite honestly, there really seems like a whole "The guy I want to marry refuses to marry me and only wants to play Wii all the time! How can I make him into what I want?" thing going on. Jeez, life's too short to try to remake a guy into what you want to marry. Here's a hint -- don't go out with that guy. Or, if you do and you love him, love all of him. Encourage him to do what he really wants to do, what will really make him happy. That'll help make him the real man that he is inside. And get real, women who have this kind of contempt for men have always considered them to be nothing more than children anyway: "He can't survive a day without me, look he can't dress himself, he'd be nothing if I weren't behind me." This "Child-Man" thing is just saying it out loud in the worst, snarkiest way.)

I think society is what needs to grow up, and not these guys. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a nice steady job, but if your guy has one and he's a good companion to you, who gives a damn if he PlayStations and drinks beer in his free time? Hell, so would I if I had the game system. Scoot over, guys, give me the Wii-mote. I'll join you.