Gay Chicken: Ahmadinejad Wants to Play

People probably want to know "what is gay chicken" and how fraudulently re-elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could have a "gay chicken foreign policy."

But I'm not going to go there quite yet.

First, it needs to be stressed that the "gay chicken" model is enormously important in politics and is the best way to understand the foreign policy problems the Obama administration faces with North Korea and Iran. Large numbers of heterosexual guys highly their homoerotic affectionate ties with other men despite wanting sex with women and engage in rituals to heighten the homoerotic charge in their lives. Some of those guys grow up to be Republican politicians and the Bush administration was filled homoeroticized heterosexual men whose entire approach to "rogue nations" like Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela was to play "gay chicken" with them.

And the rogue nations loved it.

In fact, Iranian and North Korean leaders liked "gay chicken" so much with Bush that they've extremely frustrated with President Obama's lack of interest.

In North Korea's case, Kim Jong Il is so (sexually) frustrated that he's threatening a nuclear attack on the U. S..

And I'm not really kidding here.

So, what's "gay chicken?"

According to the Urban Dictionary (courtesy of Chris Hamilton on facebook):

A game played with straight people to see who has more balls, metaphorically the game is played in several ways. The most simple, and weakest, is the kiss. One 'player' moves in for a sensual kiss until one of the 'players' backs off. I've seen this lead to tongues but someone will always pull away.

Another way gay chicken is played is by groping the other 'players' genitals or breasts or anything you can get your hands on. The most common form of the game is gay pillow talk in which each interaction escalates until someone laughs or just
can't respond. Lastly, 'players' can initiate dry humping sessions. Hardcore 'players' will use a combination of three tactics to win the game. Some have been known to even use all four tactics at once. This plan of attack is very tricky.

[For example,] Joshua is the King of gay chicken. I saw him pulling down Daniel's pants while he was kissing his neck. Then he proceeded to dry hump him as he tried to run away with his pants down.

But, of course, homoerotically inclined straight guys like George Bush and Dick Cheney don't have to play gay chicken by actually simulating gay sex (although I'm sure they'd want to), they can also play gay chicken by one upping each other in macho bluster. Bush includes Ahmadinejad and Kim in his "axis of evil" and speculates about nuking Iran. Then Kim responds by threatening to annihilate the United States and Ahmadinejad blusters something about bombing Tel Aviv. In the very first post for this blog, I pointed out the tremendous erotic satisfaction that Bush and Kim got from threatening each other.

My conclusion is that Bush is really engaged in an elaborate mating ritual with Kim Jong-Il, the "Dear Leader of North Korea. For the last five years, Bush has been sending a wide variety of signals that he's interested in Kim's affection--love songs for Kim Jong-Il, if you will. There's been the bellicose denunciations of Kim, the refusal to talk, and the withdrawal of aid. Kim eats this stuff up. He doesn't want food aid for his country anyway. Guantanamo? It might not be based on a North Korean model, but it was sure to get Kim excited anyway. Nothing like adding a little torture to your everyday supermax confinement to get Kim's attention.

The only difference is that I'd now call it a "gay chicken" ritual rather than a mating ritual. After one round of threats is completed, those good buddies Bush, Kim, and Ahmadinejad would start a new round of threats to show each other other how tough they were and how much they really liked each. The constant escalation of the threats produces a homoerotic sexual charge for everyone involved. After they masturbate, they even follow up with a cigarette.

"Another good day at the office."

The problem with Obama is that he doesn't want to play. Instead of threatening Iran and North Korea, he wants to "communicate." What's up with that? What kind of manly dictator wants to "communicate" or "negotiate" with anyone? Those kinds of behaviors imply equality and if dictators were interested in equality, they wouldn't be dictators in the first place.

So, when Kim Jong-Il threatens the United States with nuclear annihilation, what he's really saying is that he wants Barack Obama to come out and play a little "gay chicken," to threaten to starve Kim into submission or unleash "the fire of a thousand suns" on the North Korean homeland.

Otherwise, Kim might start a nuclear war.

Now that he's been fraudulently re-elected, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants to play a little gay chicken as well. According to a Fox News headline entitled "Ahmadinejad Seeks to Lure Obama into War of Words Amid Iran Election Turmoil":

Ahmadinejad was notorious for his heated rhetoric toward the United States during the Bush administration. He had taken a more tentative approach after Obama's election in November, but now the verbal gloves are coming off.

"You should know that if you continue, the response of the Iranian nation will be strong," Ahmadinejad said Saturday in a speech to members of Iran's judiciary, which is directly controlled by the ruling clerics. "The response of the Iranian nation will be crushing. The response will cause remorse."

In other words, Ahmadinejad is doing the rhetorical equivalent of moving his lips a little closer to Obama's. If Obama starts talking about "regime change" in Iran, then Ahmadinejad will know the game is on and he can start thinking about his strategies for rhetorically dry-humping his American counter-part.

Until then, Ahmadinejad will have to live with his disappointment that John "Bomb, bomb Iran" wasn't elected.

Obama, Iran, and Founding Mythologies

In the United States, we don't often view ourselves through analogies with other nations. This is mostly a result of American military and economic power. We make other countries respond to us. We don't respond to them. Other countries have to think about us. We don't have to think about them. It's hard for American conservatives to even recognize that the French, Greeks, or Iraqis would value their own country over ours. Given that it's often hard for progressives to get beyond reacting to the dangerous blustering of the right, American politics tends to be myopic in the extreme.

But I believe the best way to think about events in Iran is in relation to American developments. This is part of the point that Mir Hossein Moussavi's spokesperson made the other day when he stressed that Moussavi was Iran's Obama and Ahmadinejad equalled Bush. In Moussavi's view, what's happening in Iran is not a replay of the Iranian Revolution or the Velvet Revolutions in the former Soviet bloc. If anything, it is a replay of last year's American election.

As America goes, so goes Iran

I would argue that the Iranian/American analogy goes beyond our 2008 election and last week's Iranian election. The best way to understand the Iranian situation is that protesters are trying to give the Islamic Republic what Abraham Lincoln famously called a "new birth." Much of what Moussavi brought out in his statement yesterday was the inspirational role of the 1979 Revolution in the current protests.

The spontaneous movement of the people chose the color green as its symbo . . . And the generation that was accused of being far from religious roots, arrived at Takbir among its slogans and leaned against "Victory Comes from God and an Opening is Around", "O Husayn" and the name of Khomeini to prove that this fine tree brings similar fruit whenever it bears fruit. Nobody had taught them these slogans except the Innate Teacher [God].

For Moussavi, the current protests recall the Revolution of 1979 on two levels. Symbols of the current protests like the color green and the name "Khomeini" point back to the birth of the Islamic Republic which was ". . . a revolution for freedom, a revolution for the rekindling of the compassion of human beings, a revolution for truth and honesty." More importantly, the symbols are inspired directly by God. "Nobody had taught them these slogans except the "Innate Teacher." Like the 1979 Revolution, Moussavi views this movement as divinely inspired.

The protesters want a new birth of Shia Islam and a government and religious hierarchy that is responsible to the people and based in freedom. They want the freedom, compassion, truth, and honesty promised in 1979. They also want to end confrontation with the West. If successful, the protesters will have established the 1979 Revolution, Shiite Islam, and Iran's system on a new footing. The founding of modern Iran in the original revolution will then be interpreted through the lens of their own revolt against election fraud.

If Moussavi represents the rebirth of the Islamic Republic in Iran, Barack Obama should be seen in terms of the rebirth of the American Republic. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln viewed the Civil War as a "new birth of freedom" which meant that government "of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the face of the earth." But the United States had been constructed in such a way that it promised a general freedom but excluded a vast majority of the population from most if not all of the freedoms being promised. African-Americans were either enslaved or subject to harsh proscriptions, women were denied rights to vote and hold office, and new immigrants were subject to various exclusions.

The Civil War promised "a new birth of freedom," but freedom would have to be "reborn" many times in the United States before anyone could see that promise being fulfilled. The Civil Rights movement of the late 1950's and early 1960's, the opening of immigration to non-whites, the women's movement, the counter-culture, gay rights movement, and other smaller movements have all been new births of American freedom. It goes without saying that all of those rebirths have not happened without determined resistance. The conservative movement in the United States coalesced in opposition to the activism of the 60's and had been politically dominant for most of the last 40 years. But the new births of American freedom have gone forward despite a string of Republican presidents and the election of Barack Obama in 2008 is best seen as a manifestation of the new political power of all the groups that have been invested in the growth of American freedom.

In other words, Obama's election was another new birth.

In his comments yesterday on the Iranian government's violent response to the demonstrations, President Obama quoted Martin Luther King's statement that "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Because of the many rebirths of American freedom over the last fifty years, most Americans now view the founding of the American Republic, the Civil War, and keystone American events through the lens of Martin Luther King and the African-American civil rights movement. As contemporary Americans, we look at the original founding of the Republic from the perspective of the rebirth and we assign the original founding patriotic meanings that we have achieved in our lifetimes.

In the United States, we have been engaged in a fifty process of giving "new births" to the freedom we view as our "sacred" birthright. One of the reasons that the Iranians compare Mir Hossein Moussavi to Barack Obama is that they sense the momentousness of their movement as being very similar to the progressive social movements most powerfully exemplified by the Civil Rights movement. In a similar way, we can understand ourselves better and gain renewed energy for the process of expanding freedom in the United States if we reflect on the many ways in which the Iranians are like us.

Dennis Praeger Hates Europe

In his Townhall column for today, right-wing columnist Dennis Praeger continues the endless conservative rant against Europe.

Today's theme is the decline of European "greatness."

Outside of politics, sports, and popular entertainment, how many living Germans, or French, or Austrians, or even Brits can you name?

Even well-informed people who love art and literature and who follow developments in science and medicine would be hard pressed to come up with many, more often any, names. In terms of greatness in literature, art, music, the sciences, philosophy, and medical breakthroughs, Europe has virtually fallen off the radar screen.

As is usually the case with conservative claims about Europe, the United States or anything else come to think of it, this is simply not true.

Most of my training comes in the field of "social theory," an intellectual enterprise that involves an enormously wide range of theorizing about society, capitalism, psychology, power, language, gender, sexuality, literature, architecture, and other topic. Given that most social theorists have egalitarian world views, they tend to revolt against the kind of intellectual ranking that Praeger wants here. But the field has such an extensive intellectual root system with ancient sources going back to Plato and Aristotle, modern roots in Hobbes, Kant, Marx, and Nietzsche, and 20th century roots in Durkheim, Weber, Freud, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School Marxism of Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, and the Annales School of historical writing in France. So, certain comparisons can be made between contemporary social theorists and their sources even if those comparisons go against the spirit of the social theory enterprise.

Getting to the point, contemporary work in social theory stands up very well. So do European efforts. The most important dimension of social theory to consider in relation to Praeger's concerns is European post-structuralism and post-modernism. The European generation that pioneered post-structuralism and post-modernism is still passing from the scene. As someone who has read extensively in all of these authors, its sad to list those who have died, but Jacque Lacan died in 1981, Michel Foucault in 1984, Jean-Francois Lyotard in 1998, Jacque Derrida in 2004, and Jean Baudrillard in 2007. But big-time post-structuralism is far from dead. Among the pioneering European post-structuralists who are still alive are the feminists Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig.

As a generation of social theory that is still partially with us, this group of European social theorists stands up to any generation before it in terms of pioneering spirit, originality, and the profundity of its impact. I focused on Europeans here but there have been Americans like Judith Butler and Frederic Jameson who have contributed in fundamental ways to the post-structural movement as well. Ultimately, I think that the advent of post-structuralism will be seen as a bright clear marker in the development of a "global" social theory out of the various roots in "Western" social thought. At least that's the direction that post-colonialism and other developments in global social thinking are moving. Just like there was no going back from Plato and Hobbes (although many tried), there is no going back to "modern" Kantian, Marxist, and Weberian modes of thinking after forty years of post-structural critique and re-imagination.

Some other European thinkers who are "major," "great," and "big, really big" would include the German social philosopher Jurgen Habermas, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and the Italian novelist and language philosopher Umberto Eco. Habermas and Bourdieu have both been prolific authors whose work ethics would be the envy of any American conservative. Habermas' work on the public sphere from the 1960's is more influential than ever. For his part, Bourdieu writes classic books like Distinction more quickly than most people can read them.

European social theory is very much alive and well, much more so than American conservatism.

By the way, when has an American conservative ever written anything particularly great or memorable?