The Arlington Street Church in Boston recently became the first church in the United States to marry a same-sex couple.  David Wilson and his husband, Rob Compton were married there on Monday May 17, 2004. 

A marriage in the Commonwealth is a substantial comfort—and a humble victory—in the midst of this day's chaos and conflict.  And yet I have to say that there is much in my little puny dot of existence which makes me scream and shake, and there is not enough sugar in a thousand pints of Haagan Dazs to make these feelings go away...  Maybe I should switch to heroin.  All the best go that way, they use that as their out, their escape from this insanity, either briefly from time to time, or forever.  But I have to remind myself, especially at the beginning of such an epistle as this—at the top, above everything else—that goodness exists. 

The ultimate control is not being on top in a fascist regime that enslaves the masses.  The ultimate control is not being able to dictate public policy from the Bourgeois offices of a multinational conglomerate.  The ultimate control is not being the Boob in Chief, assisted by thugs, social morons, and criminals, even when that sorry bunch has been given complete control of an entire nation.  The ultimate control is not even the ability to commit torture, murder and other crimes against humanity under color of authority--and get away with it.  The ability to freely commit atrocities and to debase humanity itself while convincing the masses they should want this, and should even want to do it for you—because certainly such monumental havoc can only be wrought by masses of people misled—even that is not the ultimate control. 

The ultimate control is—yep, this is it kiddies, the truth you've all been waiting for, the key to this intractable knot in the world of hatred, greed, fascism and war—now get your pens and paper ready... the ultimate control is you.  Sorry, I know it's a let-down.  Wish it was a smart bomb.  Or a laser-guided something, or some other sort of gee-whiz gadgetry which we love so much for 'solving' our problems and amazing us at the same time.  No such luck.  It's you. 

The ultimate control is you. 

You want to change the world?  Stick a gun in your mouth.  Too decisive for you?  Don't want to go just yet?  Take the long way home; a little recreational opiate abuse... or benzos, or alcohol.  Or all of them; mix 'n match.  Self abuse is the most accessible form of control.  Go to that part of town off limits to queens like you (if you are a queen, that is) and get a broken jaw and a slashed-up face by that punk—you know, the one whose cock you grabbed, in the alley where he led you, after you'd had about a thousand shots too many.  It woulda hurt lots more if it wasn't for that sweet honey you had running in your veins.  Thank God for that needle now.

You want ultimate control?  Just make it all go away.  Tired of all the politicians, liars and thieves?  Just ignore all the bullshit, just let them have whatever the fuck it is they think is so important.  Just check out with the lifestyle of your choice, chemically enhanced, if you wish. 

Or not chemically enhanced.  We don't want to exclude all the little conservatives who swallowed whole the fantasy of the 'War on Drugs', formerly young Republicans now waxing nostalgic for their granite-faced leader, Reagan, whose face they want to put in granite, by the way, on Mount Rushmore, no less.  I say a few thousand cubic feet of granite should go to Jerry Garcia long before they should ever lift a chisel to old Ray-gun's face. 

Conservative escapism can be accomplished in many drug-free ways.  Formalized racism, for example.  Join the Ku Klux Klan, or any flavor of skin-heads; there are lots, even Jewish, or gay—but not both.  Not yet anyway.  There's a lot of room for growth in the conservative escapism market. 

If perchance I have caught your attention between episodes of escape, let me interject that this is the riot in the prison yard that every social soul has feared since social orders were first instituted.  What is going on around you, largely without you, is the breakdown of humane society, and the rise of a fascist Empire.  Those 'rioters', those out of control ones whose recklessness we have feared and have historically restrained, they now are the ones in control.  This happy land, where once we quite successfully pretended to have liberty and justice for all, is now no longer ours.  We have so neglected the care of our own government, that the inmates have now been able to take over.  We are enslaved of our own device:  Journalism is a joke which we have allowed as publicists and image-makers take the places of the truth seekers—we have encouraged it because the truth hurts.  Michael Moore should get the Pulitzer Prize.  Not because Fahrenheit 9/11 is great journalism, but because he has done precisely what we have forbidden journalists to do:  Tell the truth. 

The latest propaganda is the kidnapping and torture of a Lockheed-Martin employee.  Tell me it is not a contrivance of our own intelligence agencies, the same agencies which were so scandalously disgraced at Abu Ghraib, the agencies which would now be sorely pressed to accomplish even the slightest part of their mission without a significant diversionary spectacle to inflame Arab hatred and take the heat off them for their own crimes.  The poor soul might actually be tortured, and finally killed, and all of the grisly images leaked to us Americans through a purportedly Islamist website.  And I will believe, until Michael Moore tells me otherwise, that it was all produced and executed on America's dime. 

Go to the Arlington Street Church in Boston on Sunday, and be reminded that love still abides, pure and unfettered, in the city of the Tea Party.  Then, strengthened, go on your way.  But remember: innocent young men and women the world over, of every kind and color, are dying, losing their priceless lives for the purposes of greed and power. 

Have a nice day.