MLK Day, belatedly, plus military aphrodisiac

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I did spend a certain amount of time on MLK Day thinking about race and Martin Luther King and change (and/or lack thereof) in America. Though perhaps not as much as I would have if I'd had the day off work.

Mary Anne and I were talking on Sunday about, among other things, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, and the conversation brought to mind the 1947 movie Gentleman's Agreement, starring Gregory Peck as a reporter who pretends to be Jewish to cover a story on anti-Semitism. Pretty good; worth seeing, though a bit dated. My first impulse, when I saw it at the Stanford Theatre a few years back, was to try to do a remake focusing on homosexuality instead of Judaism, but I think even that would now be a bit dated—I think it would've had to have been made in the early '90s.

Anyway, all this came to mind just now 'cause of Vardibidian's excellent MLK Day entry, focusing on King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Good stuff.

On an oddly related-yet-unrelated topic, V. also recently pointed to an amusing Reuters article headlined "Pentagon Spurned Plan to Initiate Enemy Homosexuality." It begins: "The U.S. military rejected a 1994 proposal to develop an 'aphrodisiac' to spur homosexual activity among enemy troops. . . ." Which brought to mind Norman Spinrad's 1969 story "The Entropic Gang Bang Caper":

War is any means of breaking the will of the enemy. Lust is a means of waging war. A lust-war breaks the will of the enemy through tantalization. In a lust-war, the enemy is defeated when his sexual lust for the enemy is greater than his fear of the consequences of defeat.

The problem with satirical science fiction is that it too often turns into fact.

3 Responses to “MLK Day, belatedly, plus military aphrodisiac”

  1. Vardibidan

    Spinrad! I was going to title my note with two specfic authors who might have written the story, something like Sturgeon or Rucker? but couldn’t think a funny non-Sturgeon writer to pair. I worried at it for ten minutes or more before giving up; Sturgeon or Spinrad? would have been the perfect title.
    Anyway, thanks for the flattery. I think GWCtD is a good MLK day topic, although let’s be clear here that getting ice cream at Max’s is just wrong, when Mitchell’s is just over the hill. Unless, of course, the point was a joke on egg-headed liberals who are open to anything except actually crossing Army Street, which would fit.

    Thanks,
    -V.

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  2. Jay

    MLK Comment:
    Besides MLK himself, we can thank President Reagan and my pal Steve Rhodes (among others) for the national holiday.

    Steve is a former US ambassador to Zimbabwe and is widely (in circles that care about these things) credited with personally pushing Reagan off the fence and convincing Reagan to approve MLK’s Birthday as Natn’l holiday (very controversial at the time). Steve tells a great story about the details of his conversations with Reagan on this topic.

    Two years ago, I brought Steve to a school we adopted to speak to the students. One of Steve’s props was a huge picture of Reagan in the Rose Garden signing into law MLK’s b-day as a natn’l holiday.

    At the ceremony, surrounding Reagan were Coretta Scott King, Steve, and Bush Sr. Steve asked the 8th graders who they recognized besides himself. Not one raised a hand until a girl in the front row finally correctly ID’d CSK. And even after a little prompting, *not one* of the 8th graders recognized Reagan or Bush Sr.

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  3. Jay

    Miltary Aphrodisiac comment:

    Did anyone see the stories on the US PsyOps in Iraq that used loudspeakers mounted on tanks and Bradleys blaring a voice in Arabic, spewing taunts that the Iraqi soldiers were sexually impotent and would never be able to father childen, etc.

    Turns out that the youngest and least discplined Iraqi troops would hear the taunts and jump from their hiding places to answer, whereupon the US troops would pick them off with superior weapons.

    I did not read about this in the Weekly World News or Enquirer. It was in Newsweek in 2003. The current insurgents are apparently better disciplined.

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