by Davis

President Obama recently spoke of the necessity to “actively” seek out “information that challenges our assumptions and our beliefs” in order to “understand where the people who disagree with us are coming from.” I know that some of you run into the President at various Trilateral Commission drug parties and don’t want to be caught short when he demands to know if you’ve complied with his counsel, so you probably need to engage in some dialogue with Americans who vote Republican, go to church and don’t live in Brooklyn. Too bad you don’t know any!

You used to, of course. You grew up with them, and in some cases you were raised by and with them. We all know the story. You grew up in a suburb or small town in flyover country. Your peers and even the adults in your community never knew what to do with you, nor you with them. They cared about football/lacrosse/basketball/baseball and God and Scouting. You were artistic and/or gay. You wrote embarrassing journal entries about the suburbs being nothing but a pleasantly painted manhole cover hiding a sewer of avarice and pain. Popular kids made jokes about you and then high-fived each other. (No they didn’t, that only happens in the movies.)

In any event, you moved to New York the minute you turned 18 (okay, 23; you had to attend an expensive college first) and never looked back. You go home for Christmas and keep in touch with a few of your old friends, but you’ve learned to steer clear of politics and religion when talking with them. At this point your only interaction with the heart and mind of Real America are the email forwards you get from your aunt’s AOL account, typed in 24 pt. blue font and railing against welfare queens, illegal immigrants and Barack INSANE Obama.

As much as you want to obey the counsel of the Dear Leader, you’re hesitant to break the “We’ll Just Agree to Disagree On Politics And Only Talk About ‘American Idol’” pact it took years to establish with your family and friends from home. You’re in a little bit of a fix, aren’t you?

That’s where I come in. I’m a 32 year-old white Mormon Republican male. Although I’m more David Frum than Glenn Beck, I did vote for George W. Bush. Twice! So, yes, we have our differences, you and I. At the same time, I’m capable of speaking your language because I’ve lived in New York for a while and went to graduate school at Columbia with people who seemed to genuinely enjoy holding candlelight vigils.

Here’s how we’ll do it: Make note of these issues or events that get you so frustrated that you turn to your transgendered roommate and yell, “What are THEY (Republicans/conservative religious people/lovers of America) thinking?” In the event that I happen to be one of THEM on that particular issue, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking, and even though I won’t try or expect to convince you, we’ll see if we can’t at least understand one another. We’ll take the issues one at a time. If I’m not one of THEM on that issue I’ll still probably be able to explain what THEY’RE thinking because a lot of the people I know are THEM.

And every once in a while I won’t be able to explain what THEY’RE thinking, in which case you can go celebrate with the appropriate Wiccan ritual.

So, for next week, why not leave some questions in the comments or send them over email to askarepublican at gmail and let’s have a dialogue-lest the President, in his righteous anger, rescind your invite to the White House Muslim Swingers Ball. (Oh, and since the whole point of this exercise is to foster dialogue and understanding, and since I’m mostly done playfully stereotyping and insulting you as an icebreaker, let’s make a pact to be civil. Your President would want that!)

Davis lives in New York with his wife and their puppy. He blogs at Don’t Do Dumb Things.

Stephanie Meyer kicks Jane Austen’s ass: “Apparently thanks to the Twilight vampire series, Isabella replaced Emma as the most popular baby name for girls in 2009. Among the boys, Jacob retained its 11-year-run at the top.”

by T. J. Clarke

“You smell like peaches.”

Nan wraps her arms around my waist. Her head rests comfortably on my shoulder. Her breath is warm. I lean back into her embrace, feeling the shape of her breasts against my back.

“Peaches and black tea.”

She is standing on tiptoes now. Her lips reach for my earlobe, but her tongue gets there first. It’s my weak spot. Every time she rims her tongue along the edges of my ear, I go weak in the knees. I reach back to touch her. She slaps my hand away.

“Peaches and black tea and lychee.”

I close my eyes. Her lips trace a strange route along my shoulders, down my back, then up again, hugging close to my spine; each contact setting off tiny, watery explosions inside of me. I want to throw her on the bed. But her hands are clasped around my wrists, tighter than a crab’s grip, holding them close to my sides, commanding me to stand as I am.

From downstairs: “Mom! Your car’s here!”

“Peaches and black tea and lychee. And cumin.” She issues a final verdict, then sets me free.

After our disastrous dinner, I waited a week before deciding to call Nan again. I had convinced myself that she did the right thing. She was being a good mother by telling her child the truth about her life. I should have been grateful for her honesty. I composed, then practiced an apology to excuse my sulking. This was becoming a relationship. I researched restaurant reviews for an appropriate locale: Torrisi Italian Specialties. I wanted our conversation, my soliloquy, about openness, communication, the giving up of misguided notions to happen in a place that resembled us: charming, sophisticated but unpretentious, and sexy. We had reached a juncture. Then when I called to make a reservation-and was promptly informed that they don’t do such things-I was back on the edge of indecision.

But Nan had already beat me to the punch.

Nan Oyoung to vandthewhale 12:34 PM (2 hours ago)

V — ,

I have to go to a conference in Irvine this weekend. Devon is going to stay with our neighbors. Come by for a glass of Sancerre, say 3pm, before I fly?

NMO

Devon is standing outside by the time Nan and I get downstairs. Her suitcase is in the foyer, next to the card table on which she keeps her pocketbook and keys. Devon has headphones on. He taps out beats with his feet while playing the chords on an invisible guitar slung at the hips. When he sees us, he comes back inside to take her suitcase. Nan stops him. She cups his face in her palms and kisses his forehead. He blushes, but doesn’t say a word. As he walks to the curb, his shoulders sag momentarily, perhaps letting out a sigh, then quickly straightens again.

“He is a good boy.” Nan says with a smile on her face. “Stay and take him out to dinner tonight if you have the time. I think you two will like each other better when I am not around.”

I take Nan’s hand. “I think you are being overly optimistic.”

Devon has handed the suitcase to the taxi driver and is facing us again, looking like the same seventeen-year old boy who confronted me about my sex life.

“Three words: turkey leg sandwich.” Nan hands me two brass keys on a leather chain as she closes the front door behind her. “In case of emergencies.”

“You don’t give up easily, do you?” I pull her in for one more kiss. On the curb. In front of the taxi driver, Devon, and anyone else out here in the streets on a Friday night. Fuck the world.

Nan smiles. She hugs Devon again and gets into the taxi. I am wearing my heels. Devon and I stand shoulder to shoulder.

“So, what do you say to a turkey leg sandwich?”

T. J. Clarke is the pen name of a struggling writer. She lives in Brooklyn.

This afternoon, at around the same time Times Square was being evacuated due to a bomb scare, I was walking on 10th Street when I heard a loud explosion. It was very startling. There was some commotion and when I came to the corner of 4th Avenue, I saw that a crowd had gathered, 50 or so people staring and aiming camera phones into a fenced-in lot outside the school there. There was a man in the lot wearing plastic goggles and I noticed that above him, on the fire escape of the building, a bunch of kids-fifth graders, maybe-were hanging over the rails, looking down, also wearing plastic goggles. There were bits of clear plastic bottle scattered on the ground.

It was obviously a safe, controlled situation. A science experiment. But people were murmuring as the man took two plastic 2-liter bottles out of a cooler, and using a funnel, poured a smoking liquid out of one into the other. He moved quickly and cautiously, avoiding the smoke, and rushing to screw a top on the second bottle when it was full. That guy’s “gonna blow his face off,” a man next to me said to his girlfriend. The bottle turning white with smoke, the guy ran it gingerly over to a plastic trash can near a small soccer net. He put the bottle on the ground, and put the trash can over it upside down. Then we waited. Nothing happened for a minute or so. The kids made jokes from the fire escape (“Hey, Mr. Davecki, can we hire you for our birthday parties?”) We waited some more and people from the crowd got restless. “It’s not working,” someone shouted. Laughs. “You fail,” someone else shouted, this being in New York. I thought to myself, someone’s going to make a Faisal Shahzad joke. But no one did. Too soon, maybe.

But when that thing blew-Wow! No one was joking. What a boom it made! Yes, like a tire blow-out but louder. Everyone whooped and screamed and the trash can blasted into the air, flying three stories high past the fire escape, before falling more slowly down a little like a parachute. The kids slapped each other five. The crowd applauded. Mr. Davecki went over and picked up the can and held it up to his audience, to show off a baseball-sized hole in the bottom. Hooray! Awesome! Science!

Fifteen minutes later, when I got to my kid’s school to pick him up, one of the other parents waiting there told me the news from Times Square. But it was only water bottles, he said.

Yeah.

Limelight Marketplace, the mall that has taken over the old Limelight space in the even-older Church Of The Holy Communion, is now open for business — complete with club-kid mannequins, flip-flop kiosk, and the obligatory “oh look we’re in New York we’re so fun and kooky, ack chocolate!” cupcake outpost. [Via]

by Robert Lanham

Given the passion expressed for girl music on this site, I suppose it’s not too much an affront to my masculinity to confess my obsession with the admittedly unmanly band Girls. Their debut record “Album” is forty minutes of melancholy bliss, late night break-up songs that will make you feel like a teenager suffering from a his first encounter with heartbreak. My introduction to the band’s back-story came through Pitchfork (shut up!) whose review featured a little biographical information on the band’s leader, Christopher Owens: “Christopher Owens grew up in the Children of God. His older brother died as a baby because the cult didn’t believe in medical attention. His dad left. He and his mother lived around the world, and the cult sometimes forced his mother to prostitute herself.”

Forced his mother to prostitute herself? Christ. After reading this, the darkness of Owens’ music began to make sense. Lyrics like “I’m just crazy, I’m fucked in the head,” after all, don’t come from a happy place.

Calling the Children of God cult “one of the craziest groups that came out of sixties,” Owens acknowledges that his experience growing up among these religious extremists greatly informs his music. It shows. There’s something off-kilter and ominous to his music whose hooks are as sundrenched as they are depressing.

Obsessed with Owens’ record and with all things pertaining to weird cults I decided to read more about the Children of God, if only to find out more about Owens’ experience.

In their original incarnation, the Children of God wackos were essentially a bunch of deranged hippies who re-envisioned Jesus as a silk robe-wearing swinger in order to justify their own disturbing sexual perversions. Under the leadership of a maniacal, anti-Semitic, crazy-man named David Berg-also known to members as Moses-they set up communes all over the world, had orgies (heterosexual and girl-on-girl bisexual only though!) and basically began acting like a bunch of Jesus-loving halfwits who enjoyed freebasing aphrodisiacs.

But their Jesus wasn’t just some lady-lovin’ swinger promoting free love for his disciples. He was a pimp. The group was involved in a practice known as Flirty Fishing, where women in the cult were encouraged to meet men, bring them home, and have sex with them-proselytizing to them in the afterglow. From xfamily.org:

Flirty Fishing… involved the use of sexual attraction and intercourse to win converts and favors. Female members were told to be “God’s whores” and “hookers for Jesus”, and soon after its launch as a method of witnessing, sex was given to complete strangers in combination with a request for a “donation”, or for a required fee in line with Escort Servicing (ESing) or freelance ESing. FFing and prostitution was widely used as a way to raise money for the cult and resulted in many of the second generation births (known as “Jesus Babies”). Internal Family records from 1988 indicate that over 223,000 “fish” were loved sexually between 1978 and 1988.

Of course all this would be fine and good, people are free to make their own choices, but things get more fucked up. Berg also promoted sex-sometimes incestuous sex-with children, sometimes as young as three. Critics say that molestation was commonplace, and accepted as God’s will, within the cult. Infamously, COG published a child-rearing manual called “The Story of Davidito”-Davidito was the nickname for Ricky Rodriguez, one of Berg’s adopted children-which detailed sexual activity between adults and the book’s prepubescent victim. The shit hit the fan in 2005 when Rodriguez, then a disgruntled 29-year-old, murdered his former nanny before killing himself. The nanny had been pictured in “The Story of Davidito” engaged in sexual conduct with the underage Rodriguez. In a video taped just prior to the murder-suicide, Rodriguez claimed the cult had ruined his life.

Look up “The Story of Davido” at your own risk. It’s disturbing and definitely NSFW, or for anywhere. Only slightly more palatable is the artwork produced by the cult promoting childhood sexuality and flirty fishing. Some of it actually makes Jack Chick look like a cool, progressive dude.

Amazingly, Christopher Owens wasn’t the only celebrity who grew up among the Children of God. Rose McGowan was a member.

“Like many things, I’m sure they started out with good intentions,” McGowan told The Face. “Meanwhile they’re all having sex with each other and going out and getting men drunk and luring them into the cult. They call it Flirty Fishing. Gross. A lot of kids disappeared. I could be sweeping Ghadaffi’s doorstep right now.”

Joaquin and River Phoenix were also members. River Phoenix once told Details that he’d lost his virginity to cult members when he was four: “I’ve blocked it out. I was completely celibate from 10 to 14.”

“They’re disgusting; they’re ruining people’s lives,” he said in another interview.

I’m no shrink, but all of the aforementioned celebrities could be classified as “troubled”-which is no surprise.

Thankfully, cult leader Berg died in 1994-I’m not religious but if there’s a God he’s spending eternity being buggered by Pinhead and the rest of those dudes from “HellRaiser II.” Still, I was disturbed to find that Rodriguez’s mom, and Berg’s former wife, Karen Zerby has rebranded COG and attract new followers under the name The Family International. There’s an estimated 15,000 members worldwide today and they recently launched a revamped website where Zerby has been releasing videos with the hopes of attracting new members.

This lunatic-who looks like the mutant offspring of Stevie Nicks and Jim Carrey’s Fire Marshal Bill- is truly a piece of work. As Alternet points out: “[Zerby] likes to think of herself as a Queen, and believes she was one of Jesus’ favourite lovers in heaven before she was sent to earth to be the Endtime Prophetess.”

Zerby also believes, or at least has believed, that disciples can literally have sex with Jesus, who loves to supernaturally visit his devoted followers to bump uglies. Jesus appreciates a little dirty talk; the Family distributed a handy list of phrases to use when doing the J-man:

I’m juicy for You.
Come, Jesus! Oh please, come!
My pussy is excited for You, Jesus!
Fuck me long and hard and deep. I want to feel You in the very heart of me. Longer, harder, deeper!
You’re beautiful, Jesus, and so sexy — sexier than I ever dreamed — so handsome, so naked and so hard!
Fill me with Your seeds. Flood me with Your seeds. Explode in me!

That’s a tad different than what I learned at Baptist Vacation Bible School when I was a kid.

Today, Zerby travels under several different monikers and no one outside her immediate circle, not even other members, often know her whereabouts. Discussing her desire to reinvigorate the movement and attract new members, she came out of hiding to speak at a conference in Salt Lake City (where else?) for the Center for the Study of New Religions conference last year:

“Many desire to see innovation, professionalization and modernization,” Karen “Maria” Zerby, one of the Family’s spiritual and administrative leaders, said last week in her first-ever public address. “We must determine what elements of our theology, culture and context are rooted in the past and no longer hold relevance.”

A spokesperson for the group, Claire Borowik, who was in attendance, gave the closest thing to an apology that was to be offered: “We acknowledge that mistakes were made and that there were excesses,” said Borowik. “We’ve taken stringent measures to right those wrongs and apologized to former members… we find it disheartening for people to focus so much on the past.”

This of course, seems about as sincere as the Pope’s lame attempts at dealing with the Catholic churches’ own child-sex problem.

But back to Girls. At least Christopher Owens was able to rise above the insanity. He’s a rising star of the indie music scene and his band’s debut topped dozens of best of 2009 lists last year. He got out. Best of all, he seems to have come to terms with the lunacy of his upbringing: “They had some ideal that they could raise us and we’d be these perfect little Children of God. But it’s like horrible-it’s also beautiful, like-they meant well, I guess, even though a lot of things that they did were completely crazy.”

As for me, “Hellhole Ratrace” remains in heavy rotation on my iTunes, even if it will never quite sound the same again.

Robert Lanham is the author of the beach-towel classic The Emerald Beach Trilogy, which includes the titles Pre-Coitus, Coitus, and Afterglow. More recent works include The Hipster Handbook and The Sinner’s Guide to the Evangelical Right. He is the founder and editor of FREEwilliamsburg.com.

Oh, yes, this exists: “This video shows a mum getting her wayward youngster out of a tree at Berne Zoo in Switzerland. When bear cub Berna got stuck at the top of the tree mum Bjork wasted no time waiting for the fire brigade — she grabbed the tree and gave it a good shake to brink the cub down. When that failed she clambered up the young tree until it bent over touching the ground-allowing the curious youngster to scramble onto the ground in safety.” One last reminder: Mother’s Day is Sunday! [Via]

Some people wait a year and then beat their tormentors silly in the parking lot in retaliation for dick jokes employed within professional contexts. But if you’re as monied and powerful as Cablevision head honcho Jim Dolan, you can go the parking-lot ambush one better, and withhold your ad revenue from the media outlets that torment you — and if you’re really steamed, you can get your cronies like the megapromoter Live Nation to join in on the act. The result: “In toto, a mediocre dick joke about a media acquisition has now cost [Village Voice Media] upwards of $1M in yearly advertising revenue.” Um, yipes?

Sigh: “Babies is rated PG (Parental Guidance suggested). Breast feeding.”

Alabama Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim James set himself a pretty high bar when he released his previous campaign ad “We ain’t gonna be speakin’ no Mexican round here, y’all get me?” This spot about registered sex offenders-whom James rightly points out are coddled by the government, what with its concerns for their comfort and convenience-does not quite exceed “This is Alabama, don’t spout none of that ching-chong nonsense at me, Fu Manchu,” but it is certainly a worthy attempt. It’s almost like performance art. [Via]