SOME THOUGHTS ON GAYS, KOSOVO AND THE DECLINE OF LIBERALISM
by Gloria Klein
When you are a lame duck, you’d better not walk like one.
-Anonymous White House Source
The fabric of liberal society is becoming frayed at the edges in Eastern Europe. Since the end of World War II, the forces of Western liberalism have tried to tailor Europe in the image of America’s multiethnic democracy. But like a worn-out sweater, there are now threads dangling from the hem of this garment. In an ironic play of opposites, Bill Clinton and Slobodan Malosovic are pulling at those loose threads. If they are not careful, the whole cloth may come unraveled.
How should gays in Chicago, Belgrade or Pristina respond to this unraveling when information about the plight of gays in both Yugoslavia and the refugee camps is hard to come by? Arkadija, the first gay and lesbian group in Serbia was established in 1990. In the summer of 1994 legal reforms in Yugoslavia reversed the criminal penalties attached to homosexual behavior. Prior to the reforms, gay sex was punished by at least a year in prison. Since the beginning of the war in Yugoslavia, violence against gay people has increased according to Arkadija’s Internet web page. They claim that “street gangs, mostly young people (16-25), are often choosing gay cruising areas to “kill the time” and one of the latest incidents ended with a stabbed gay man who is afraid to report it to the police.” Many incidents like this go unreported, and if they are reported, the police usual blame the victim for “making a pass” at someone. Arkadija’s long term goals include “termination of all kinds of discrimination in Yugoslavia.”
Of course, for many in the Clinton administration, such discrimination against gays never happens in America! Yet try to imagine the surprise of the gay men who pop Ecstasy and dance themselves into forgetfulness at Konfusion every weekend when in a few months ground troops suffer heavy casualties in Kosovo and the bodybags are shipped home. Imagine what the discussions will be like at the gym or on Fire Island when the Russians enter the Balkan war. Are these gay men going to take their draft notices to the healthfood store and ask for more protein supplements? What response will gay Americans make to the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo when still in the United States many gay men are oppressed by straight bigots every day? Furthermore, the ethnic cleansing of the white working class happens in America by reason of liberal affirmative action policies, downsizing and NAFTA, but it is not reported on TV or in the liberal press. Should gay people care what is happening in Kosovo when many of them don’t even care what is happening in their own city? Look, even though there is still the threat of AIDS, many gay sex advocates are talking about the joys of barebacking.
To see the events in Kosovo from a perspective different from the liberal American media, we have to expose the gap that has widened between the wishes and the realities of American life. Once this is made clear, we can understand the American effort in the Balkans as another attempt at affirmative action that neither works abroad nor at home. Once we ask what is the repressed theme in the Kosovo conflict and how do the Clinton policies produce the exact opposite of what they intend, we will be in a better position to take a practical course of action there. No matter how much the liberal, capitalist states wishes for it, economic prosperity will never become the ideal that unites the realities of diverse cultures or erases ancient grudges. Many people don’t want to be Americans, and they do not want Americans meddling in their internal affairs.
What are Americans to do then, both at home and abroad? Are we to rack our brains trying to find the absolute political truth and never act until such truth is understood by all? In political matters both in Kosovo and in Chicago it seems best now to remember what Aristotle said centuries ago. He argued that politics is a practical and not a theoretical science. The study of foreign policy and politics is not exact and there are no absolute truths here. At best, all we can know about what to do in Kosovo are informed opinions. We have to rely on those who have practical wisdom to decide what must be done, and even then the affairs of men are such that good intentions often breed their opposite. Nevertheless, we must also conceded that in matters of opinion the dominant liberal perspective endorsed by the Clinton administration is just one of many perspectives and as each day goes by it looks less and less practically wise.
Even if we disregard what is practically wise and insist that historical events proceed according to a grand dialectic of opposites, the Clinton policy in the Balkans looks no better. It is not in our interest to alienate the Serbs, if in the long run we want to preserve the values of Western Civilization. We need the Serbs because the Serbs are aligned with the Russians and we need Russia to side with us in the coming conflict between the West and China with her Islamic allies. Furthermore, the Soviet Union collapsed as it tried to make by force a homogeneous society in Eastern Europe. Why does it come as a surprise now to political analysts that the West is trying to male a multiethnic society by force and that the failure to do this portends the collapse of the West? We are told that bombing would stop the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, but from all reports it looks like it has done just the opposite as hundreds of thousands flee our support. We intended one thing and produced another.
Just stop and listen to the press briefings coming out of the Pentagon. What practical wisdom is there in these sessions with the media? Why is there always a hollow ring to the rhetoric of Pentagon spokesmen when we are in a so called war? Their words resound in an empty well where there is no water. How confidently they tell us that we are at war with the government of Yugoslavia, but not the people. Just what does that mean? Do they remember what was said in the middle ages, “Kings fight wars, but peasants die?” What if the survivalists in Montana said the same thing about the Clinton administration? They are not at war with the American people but only the Clinton White House. Why can’t workers who are laid off by IBM or Ameritech say that they are not at war with the company, but only the corporate executives who make tyrannical decisions? We can only hope that the generals in Belgrade make the same distinction between the government and the people that our Pentagon planners do. If worst comes to worst, let us hope that when Belgrade decides on acts of terrorism as revenge for the NATO bombing. they separate the government from the people and single out the pencil necked policy makers and not the working people of Chicago.
The NATO attack on Yugoslavia is symbolic of a failure of vision both nationally and internationally. These attacks demonstrate that liberal politicians have concluded that in order to get what they want they have to do the opposite of what they believe. In domestic affairs they have to deny freedom of speech and the constitutional right to bare arms because they think some minorities in America cannot help themselves and are smoking and drinking and killing one another. To stop this behavior, liberals at home propose un-liberal controls. They want to take down billboards, and ban guns and smoking. On an international level we must remember that NATO began as a defensive treaty organization but now is engaged in an aggressive war in Europe, directed for the most part by the United States. This action is just the opposite of NATO’s original defense mission. Misguided liberal domestic policies lead to misguide foreign policies. The end result of this NATO aggression can be seen by revisiting Vietnam. No amount of bombing will make the Yugoslavians surrender what they view as their “Holy Land.” Bombing commits us to the failed strategy of what one commentator called “immaculate coercion.” Eventually, ground troops and a full scale offensive that takes months to execute will be necessary in Kosovo. And all of this force will be applied to what are still muddy objectives. It is difficult to conclude, but I know of no genocide that was ever prevented except the one described in the Biblical book of Esther. It is not too long ago to recall what happened in Vietnam or to remember what was said about our military intervention in that civil war. Will we hear months from now some NATO official say, “In order to save Kosovo we had to destroy it?”
The corporate liberal establishment of the United States is desperate in its foreign policy to make Yugoslavia a multiethnic state because it recognizes that its domestic policy of making this country into the multiethnic nation is at stake. Imagine what the multinational corporate executives must think if Malosovic is not defeated. “Good Lord, if Serbia can be only for Serbians, then somebody is going to say America must be only for Americans. Goodbye to our Chinese and Mexican profits if that voice is heard.” We better now have affirmative action at home and war abroad, all directed to making people forget the abuses of the past and believe in a false notion of government enforced cultural relativism.
All parties to the conflict in the Balkans say we are at war, but we must remember that according to the United States Constitution, only the US Congress can declare war. Why is the administration reluctant to follow the Constitution in this matter? Will they dream up another Gulf of Tonkin Resolution? The fact is that the Constitution does not allow them to do what they want to do, but they will do it anyway. This insistence on having it their way reveals the inability of liberalism to reshape society in the liberal image and highlights another aspect of the gap between the wish and the real that is at the heart of the contemporary liberal dilemma.
The gap between wish and reality in American society has crated a nation of schizophrenics. We see prosperous African-American actors in ads on TV but the Red Line subway in Chicago shows a different reality. The black underclass remains immune to the American way of life. We eat tacos yet overlook the abuses of affirmation action by latinos. We hear the news daily that the economy is good, that the stock market has gone above ten thousand, but many Americans are working low paying jobs and home mortgage foreclosures are at an all time high. “Yes, there are jobs to be had in this country,” a union steel worker said, “I know, I have three of them to get by.” Gays have roles in TV sit coms, but in Arizona, they are still brutally murdered. One could go on and on listing the gap between the wish and reality that we live with every day in America. Perhaps the growing war in Kosovo will collapse the real and the wish into a great nightmare.
It is possible that we are now fighting in Kosovo the first postmodern war. It is a war of means without ends. According to Pentagon estimates, the cost of men and planes, cruise missiles, fuel, aircraft carriers and B-52s has exceeded four billion dollars. The US Congress estimates the cost will rise to five billion. For that amount of money we could have paid the Serbs and Kosovars to stop killing each other. Furthermore, if the refugee problem was inevitable, we could have spent that money on food and shelter in the beginning and made better long term plans for resettlement. But this is not the solution the Clinton administration wants. The liberal state is now also the postmodern state. The postmodern state cannot envision ends but is only interested in means. The Pentagon has all the bells and whistles of technology to turn war into an arcade game, but the planners at the White House cannot envision to what end these toys must be used. It is hard for the planners to imagine what interest America has in the Balkans because they cannot envision America as a nation with a unique destiny and objectives the way Malosovic can lead Serbia to its objectives. The multiethnic liberal postmodern state is more like fog than snow. Who ever heard of an avalanche of fog?
Certainly our country must help the refugees from Kosovo. Yet even in this assistance our motives may not be pure. The TV news crews that flock to the refugee camps to document the suffering of the sick and displaced could bring bread instead of cameras if they really cared for people instead of the story. But in fact getting the story for many of these reporters is more important than helping the sick and starving. We could also ask when appeals for aide are made if American interests are really threatened in Kosovo. An answer to this question presupposes we understand what we mean by American. We cannot have a meaningful foreign policy unless we first distinguish America from what is foreign. An America with a unique historical mission in the world is not what multiethnic cultural relativists believe anymore. Such naked patriotism is outmoded in their eyes even though they have to resort to it in order to recruit minorities to fight overseas. It is too easy to say that the Clinton administration uses smoke and fire in the Balkans to divert attention from China’s theft of our nuclear secrets. This cover-up might be part of the story, but is not all of the story. The full story must state that the Clinton administration has given up on America. It is becoming clear now that patriotic gestures from Bill Clinton seem as shallow as his respect for women.
Helping the refugees from Kosovo also means gays asking how many gay people there are among the displaced and giving those gays our special concern. On the other hand, we should also be careful of those who demand we support the KLA. We know little about the Kosovo Liberation Army and what we do know suggest they may be a band of thugs little better than the Serbian special police forces. If we help the KLA we might create another situation similar to the one we created in Afghanistan by helping the Kaliban. Certainly the feminists will have to look at this situation and agree that the KLA should be investigated before American money or aide is sent to it. In the final analysis what we are fighting over in Kosovo is in fact the nature of American society. The political right in America sees this nation as having a unique mission in the world and to keep that mission we have to be a nation with one language and one culture. The left and the postmodern capitalists who fund the Democratic Party have a different view of what America should be. There view downplays the importance of our nation in favor of the American corporation and wants multinationalism because it creates markets for their goods and increases profits.
Money and power and politics aside, is it too far fetched to look for sexual repression and aggression in our leaders and ask how this influences their policies? The President’s private behavior has been so scrutinized, that his sexual adventures and preying on women has been all but cut off. Many people also feel that the office of the Presidency and the actual Oval Office have been polluted by Clinton’s sexual escapades. He even stands now in contempt of court for his calculated testimony. Such attention and censure can create a great deal of frustration in a man who is used to getting his way. It is a common place, that this frustration can lead to aggression and one does not have to look far to see the Balkans as a place where this aggression can be vented. Slobodon Malosovic stands as the perfect foil to Bill Clinton in this conflict motivated by Eros and Thanatos.
It is ironic that the first major disappointment of the Clinton administration for gay activists was the very issue of gays in the military. His advisors fumbled this issue when Clinton first came to office, and have been fumbling the issue of the military ever since. Now things have come full circle so that today the major problem facing the Clinton administration is not gays in the military but straights in the military. Military morale is about as low as military preparedness. The United States just does not have a military force large enough to accomplish its objectives in Korea, Iraq and now Kosovo. Furthermore, because of Clinton’s moral defection during the Vietnam war, confidence in his leadership is low both among enlisted men and high ranking officers. Add to this the fact that many career officers have been dismissed from all the services for similar kinds of sexual harassment that in their eyes still leaves Clinton in office, and you have the makings of a military that could either effect a coupe or be reluctant to carry out the orders of the commander-in-chief. It should come as no surprise that many military men in the upper echelons of command feel that their comrades have been given a raw deal while Clinton and O. J. have been allowed to walk free.
The Clinton solution to the problem of gays in the military remains the bizarre policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” This stance also has many in the military perplexed. Perhaps in light of the failed policies in the Balkans the prudent thing for gay men to do is to use their sexual orientation to simply stay out of the military. When the military draft comes back, as it is bound to do if casualties mount in a ground war in the Balkans, why should gay men fight for ethnic rights in a foreign country when they cannot have civil rights in their own? Perhaps a war in the Balkans and the need for a larger military will convince conservatives that gay rights are not “special rights,” but in fact are the rights of being an American citizen. In the final analysis, the most practical thing for gay men to do is to actually come out as gay and use this stigma as a deferment if they are drafted. Being gay in this instance might save their life. The attitude of gay young men toward their possible conscription to fight in Kosovo ought to be: “Make them ask, girl, and when they ask, you tell!”
We live our daily lives in a social system that at first glance looks mysterious. We make the rounds of our life hoping that someday we will not wake up to be a victim or to be ethnically cleansed. Nevertheless, there is a fear lurking in the back of most gay men’s minds that they are outside the safety of normal society. Often we are refugees in our own city and nation. For the time being there seems to be no end to the ironies that characterize gay life in the twentieth century. I am reminded of these ironies when I remember tutoring a boy from Kosovo a few years ago. He was tall, with long smooth legs and a winning smile. He discovered basketball while at college in Chicago, and left to play on a scholarship for a team in southern California. I hope he is prospering there today. Now I have a young Vietnamese man in my class. He was one of the boat people that ended up here after the embarrassing American withdrawal from Saigon. This kid from Vietnam could be soon drafted and sent to fight in the deja vu that is Kosovo.
Outside the hotel on the corner other young men wait with their luggage for a cab. Below the stairway girders of the el a man plays his clarinet. Around the corner a car with a gay rainbow flag decal on the back window is parked by an expired meter. The bombing of Belgrade has gone on for four weeks with no change of policy in Yugoslavia. Men with guns and money make the truth for the time being. Yet look at all the anonymous people walking the streets of downtown Chicago. What do they know? They are not Pentagon planners or ivy league advisors to the President, yet they do possess a certain practical wisdom. People will tell you if you ask them: Don’t invade Russia in the winter and stay out of a war in the Balkans.
