{"id":2578,"date":"2005-01-18T22:05:52","date_gmt":"2005-01-19T06:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2005\/01\/18\/2578.html"},"modified":"2005-01-18T22:05:52","modified_gmt":"2005-01-19T06:05:52","slug":"mlk-day-belatedly-plus-militar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2005\/01\/18\/mlk-day-belatedly-plus-militar\/","title":{"rendered":"MLK Day, belatedly, plus military aphrodisiac"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I did spend a certain amount of time on MLK Day thinking about race and Martin Luther King<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Mary Anne and I were talking on Sunday about, among other things, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?<\/a><\/cite>, and the conversation brought to mind the 1947 movie Gentleman's Agreement<\/a><\/cite>, 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> 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.<\/p>\n

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

On an oddly related-yet-unrelated topic, V. also recently pointed to an amusing Reuters article headlined \"Pentagon Spurned Plan to Initiate Enemy Homosexuality<\/a>.\" 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\":<\/p>\n

\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The problem with satirical science fiction is that it too often turns into fact.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I did spend a certain amount of time on MLK Day thinking about race and Martin Luther King and change…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2578\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}