Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

In a new translation by Theoharis C. Theoharis of the poems of Constantine Cavafy titled Before Time Could Change Them (Harcourt, $28), there's included a foreword by Gore Vidal. In it Gore writes about a run down tavern, the Nea Zoe, in a seedy part of Athens 40 years ago. It was here that the soldiers from a nearby barracks danced with one another or alone. Gore was taken there by an old Greek colonel. "Greek men performed pre-Christian dances taught them by their fathers, who in turn had learned them from their fathers, and so on all the way to the start of history, if not before." The dances celebrated the deeds of the ancient gods and heroes. The colonel told Gore that "before that movie," there had been dozens of such places in Athens. That movie was Never on Sunday, which many found charming, but which featured a scene in a tavern much like the Nea Zoe. As a result, many American tourists came, as Gore writes, "to laugh at the dancing fairies." The soldiers were at first bewildered by this odd attention. Then they figured out how insulting the American tourists were, and the soldiers would take the American tourists outside and beat them up. "Unfortunately, tourism is more important to governments than two-thousand-year-old dances; the bars were shut down."

View our poll archive

What makes this story of Gore's so poignant is its capture of American boorishness. It is seen everywhere. It is a staple of American letters. A dear friend bought a rundown townhouse years ago, put in sweat equity and made it over into a little palace, which he now runs as a bed & breakfast. He loves European guests, who often comment on the work he's done to make the building so beautiful. He hates the blond American families from the Mid-West. All they do is complain: that it's not like a Holiday Inn, where's the ice machine, don't like sharing the toilet and bath facilities, etc. What they don't like-- and don't get-- is anything other than the stupid and bland consumer culture into which they have been enticed and imprisoned. And they are characterized by all the mentalities attendant to such a condition-- attitudes towards cleanliness, personal space, sexuality and on.

I think of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, from Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, the kind of people who go through life like on a tear, indifferent, throwing things away, protected by money. You see them everywhere. They don't know how to behave, they have no culture, belong to no society. Rootless, rude, reckless, and rich. And full of themselves. Having filled up one continent with strip malls, gambling casinos, greasy fast food outlets and fat farms, prisons, prisons, and more prisons, church-strewn ugly cities and obese children, we have never paused before eagerly exporting out values elsewhere-- mostly in the form of clean-up campaigns. "Laugh at the dancing fairies." And then clean up the world and make it over so it looks just like where you came from.

Back to Gore again; on many occasions he has said the prevailing sexual mores in America are "a demented sexual code." Pick up and read any daily paper and see news holes fill with evidence of that. It is this derangement we proffer to the world as improvement.

This society in which we dwell, and which recommends itself to the world and shills itself through popular culture and government and private agencies, has increasingly become filled with police-- the sex police, the drug police, the thought police. Narcs use high-tech toys to detect light from inside a home (the legal resident might be using lamps to grow cannabis). The courts in Ohio convicted and sent to prison a young man for writing a short story the content of which they disapprove. Prisons are stuffed with all sorts of "offenders." Every day there's some new story of a "sex offender," usually a man who is accused of "sexually abusing" scores of young men or boys. These news accounts never actually tell you acts are performed. Did he blow the lads? Beat them off? Fuck them up the ass? Shouldn't it matter? Apparently not; the label "molester," as with "communist" decades back, seems to be enough to rile the solid citizenry and put you away for life.

These are nothing less than terror campaigns-- fed by bullying journalists, corrupt pols, greedy therapists, a well-greased machine that has, over years, fired gay men from work, whipped up witch hunts, spread blood libels, ruined lives, fed a culture of murder and thinks "justice" a joke. I remember back in the 50s/60s when one of the highly-respected anti-gay shrinks-- Bergler or Bieber, one of those jerks who peddled their pernicious slime-- called homosexuals "injustice collectors." Well, guess what, with so much injustice around-- which B&B produced!-- that gay gene kicked in and we collected it. Being gay, this was not going to be silent witness; this called for subterfuge and a lot of screaming.

They still don't get it. That blind, dumb look of the zombies, that strange American breed, the kind of critter that would actually seek out a working-class pub in a foreign country, watch the handsome soldiers do their ancient dances (he'd seen it in a movie!) and smirk-- like the head of our current regime who smirked at those whose death warrants he signed-- at the "dancing fairies." They should all choke to death on their hideous potato chips and slabs of colon-cancer-causing grilled beef while watching their silly TV shows and brain-dead movies. Such space, such wealth such waste.

I'll take the dancing fairies any day.

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com