[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]I[/dropcap]n Florida, in certain gay circles, Gov. Rick Scott is a well known closet case.
Scott has refused to state that the motive for the murderous attack on patrons of a gay nightclub in Orlando was homophobia. Scott is a case study of a certain homophobic type i.e., the fearful and shame-ridden self-hater who hides behind a veneer of conservatism as a form of camouflage.
And the governor is not alone in his dismal subterfuge: The Orlando mass murderer, Omar Mateen, was a regular at Pulse and had a profile on a gay dating app.
Deceit. Self-deception. Let us not forget Violence – the favored hyper-masculine form of denial…. Where would the U.S. empire be without it?
Speaking of which, Trump, in a characteristically noxious display of demagogic inanity, implied Obama is a stealth Muslim and, as such, is implicated in the attack in Orlando. Rather than peddling bigoted innuendo,
if the truth, or any talent for imagination, was present in the palaver-prone con man, he would declare that U.S. presidents from Jimmy Carter, whose administration armed Saudi Arabian Jihadist factions in the late 1970s during the U.S. war by proxy against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, right up to Obama who has, despite his hollow rhetoric, presided over the bombing of seven Muslim countries and has drone murdered innocent men, women, and children of the Islamic faith on three continents (in 2015 alone, the Obama administration dropped at least 23,144 bombs on six Muslim-majority countries) set the stage for the violent attacks in Paris, Brussels and Orlando.
In the lives of closeted men and women, there are words that must not be uttered, sometimes even to oneself. Militarist empires possess a forbidden lexicon as well. One word that must not be uttered is blowback.
Image by Dan Booth. Not to be reproduced without express prior permission from the artist.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
