TGIF: The Global Gayborhood

I felt both honored and white-privileged when Bari and Nellie tapped me on the shoulder asking if I would grace this hallowed space for a week as they brought a miraculous little person into this world. (A baby, not a dwarf.) 

New babies are hard work. The least I could do was emerge from my grubby little writing hovel, Slack Tide, to pitch in some nouns and verbs while Nellie drinks herself through postpartum, throwing bourbon empties at the manny’s head and yelling, “Will you please make that kid SHUT UP?!!!!! My stories are on!” 

So let’s get to the news, which, sadly, they keep making more of, even if we’ve all had quite enough. It was a slow news week by recent comparison. No presidential candidates got shot in the face or thrown overboard by their party in the last seven days. Though who really knows what RFK Jr. was up to? Maybe writing in his sex journal, or drafting new litigation thumping Big Pharma for trying to kill us all with Flintstones chewables. I’m gonna miss that guy when he’s totally irrelevant again, as opposed to the mostly irrelevant that he is now.

Okay, let’s get to it: 

→ Free trade: Who says Vladimir Putin is an unreasonable bloke? I mean, aside from Ukraine, and the world human rights community, and Pussy Riot, and Alexei Navalny’s bereft relatives and fellow freedom fighters in Russia. But besides them, I mean. . .  

In a multinational prisoner swap so complex that The Washington Post literally ran a flow chart, Russia finally released the unjustly imprisoned 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich—formally arrested in Moscow in March 2023—as well as former Marine and corporate security executive Paul Whelan, who had been detained since 2018. They had both been sentenced to 16 years of hard labor in a prison colony. Which usually doesn’t turn out well. 

Perusing the list of people who are being returned to their countries of origin vs. those being returned to Russia, it seems the former list largely comprises reporters, consultants, and human rights activists or dissidents. The latter is largely larded with accused assassins, cyber attackers, and spies. But maybe The Washington Post and I are biased. Still, good to see—in these inward-looking nationalist times—that free trade is alive and well. Even if it’s not quite fair trade.

→ Veepstakes so white: Kamala Harris, who now has 94 days to make up all the ground Grandpa Joe lost—which she seems to be doing—has taken a break from tossing word salads and helping her boss pack for the glue factory so that she can balance her ticket. The thinking goes that in order not to scare off flyover-country voters as a black/South Asian woman who, say, wants to empty our prisons while having unjustly imprisoned people as a prosecutor—attack ads don’t have to be consistent, and neither do the candidates they attack—it’s smart for her to do what any other presidential candidate of color would: hire a white guy. 

It’s a time-honored tradition. When Barack Hussein Obama was worried voters might not be down with pulling the lever for a black guy named “Barack” (or “Hussein,” or “Obama”), what’d he do? He hired good ol’ reliable Scranton Joe, a white guy who came with aviators. When Trump was worried the electorate might think him too orange, what’d he do? He hired Mike Pence, the whitest of all white guys. 

And so comes word that Kamala’s considering white guys of every stripe, just so long as they’re white stripes. On her short list are white guys with glasses (Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who is also Jewish), white guys from red states (Kentucky governor Andy Beshear), white guys from blue states (Minnesota governor Tim Walz), straight white guys into space travel (Arizona senator/former astronaut Mark Kelly), and gay white guys into earth travel (Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg). 

Say what you will about whether Kamala’s prepared to lead the free world, but she has her white guy bases covered. Speaking as a guy of whiteness, I’m grateful that she understands that our diversity is our strength. We raise our canned beer to you! And to play my guy of whiteness race card one more time, I was sad not to get the invite for the “White Guys for Kamala” Zoom earlier this week. Luckily, the AAHNPI one is coming up, and given that I have no idea what that means, I will be there.