Lions and Tigers and Bears: The Internet Strikes Back

by George Takei

  If that doesn’t stop the questioner cold, this might:

  On the topic of existential or philosophical questions, many have never gotten over the fact that their childhood dreams and innocence were shattered upon learning that Santa Claus is not in fact real. Indeed, many can divide their lives quite squarely between the pre- and post-Santa Claus eras. Siri appears well aware of this deep and abiding pain, and is more than happy to help restore our sense of wonder. (Or perhaps Siri’s programmers included parents who anticipated their children’s unauthorized use of their mobile devices—trust me, a four year old can use an iPhone better than most adults):

  Siri is also well-versed in how best to respond to tests of her professionalism, as the following fan submission demonstrates:

  Ultimate tests of her loyalty are met with appropriate, comical rebuke:

  When asked about her own life, her answers again reflect the nerdiness of her creators:

  (To those who don’t get the reference, the classic scifi series Battlestar Galactica involves the near extermination of the human race by machines of their own creation known as Cyclons. A “daggit” is the equivalent of a dog, and one of the main child characters in the show who lost his to the Cyclons had him replaced with a mechanical one. It was the one highly “cute” part of the series that many fans reviled, almost as much as Star Wars fans cringe at Jar Jar Binks and the Ewoks as playing toward the 12-and-under set.)

  Oddly, when I asked her the same above question, Siri somehow knew to amend her answer.

  A PSA for your tribble lovers out there—don’t forget to have your tribble spayed or neutered, or you will soon sing like a Beatle, “Yesterday, all my tribbles seemed so far away.”

  A good and upright assistant, Siri is careful, despite her talents, not to permit users to expect any mothering from her. Those who have sought such solace are doomed to disappointment:

  Lately, those who have confused her with Google’s newest gadget receive a decidedly frosty reception:

  Is it true, by the way, that the early adopters of Google Glass are so smug in their world behind Glass that the digerati have taken to calling them “Glassholes.”

  Finally, I should credit users for providing their own LOLs with Siri’s standard responses when she is unable to provide the precise answer they seek. This produces some memorable screenshots:

  Indeed, Siri. Indeed.

  Putin on the Ritz

  Earlier in this book, I wrote about how organized groups such as the LGBT community are able to respond rapidly to acts of bigotry or intolerance, spreading online news instantaneously and organizing powerful boycotts of certain brands such as Barilla pasta. Later in this book, I discuss how people in the developing world, specifically in the Middle East, leveraged the power of social media so effectively that they actually toppled repressive governments in that region.

  Alas, the time has come again to deploy Facebook, Twitter, YouTube other social media platforms to shine a light upon another matter of grave concern: the brutally harsh treatment of LGBTs within Russia today. So indulge me in this chapter as I “go off” on what is happening in Sarah Palin’s backyard, for under the watch of its Thug-in-Chief Putin, the situation in Russia is more than a bit alarming to those who remember what happens when the world turns a blind eye toward state-sponsored campaigns of hate and intolerance. The issue came to a head as Russia sought international recognition as host to the Sochi Winter Olympic Games.

  First, a bit of a history lesson. In 1936, Nazi Germany hosted the Summer Olympics. Many saw this as a symbolic victory for Hitler’s regime, which was seeking international legitimacy and approval, even as very dark clouds were gathering on and within Germany’s borders. Indeed, leading up to that summer, the Nazis had been escalating their persecution of Jews, including campaigns to vilify them as the cause of Germany’s economic problems, to expel and exclude them from certain trade and professions, and to keep them out of public facilities such as swimming pools. In 1935, they even passed laws to strip Jews of citizenship and forbade intermarriage and sexual relations with those of the “Aryan” race.

  With respect to the Olympics themselves, Jews were largely kept from participating by being excluded from German sports associations altogether. There were serious calls by other nations to boycott the Berlin Games, which had been awarded five years earlier largely as a gesture to welcome Germany back into the fold of civilized nations. The U.S. was at the forefront of the condemnation. The then-president of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, warned publicly that “The very foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed, or race.”

  The U.S. committee initially favored moving the Games from Germany, but Hitler’s propagandists convinced Brundage, during a hastily conceived and tightly controlled tour of facilities there, that Jewish athletes were being “treated fairly” and that the U.S. should not boycott in protest. Despite growing concern and opposition to Hitler’s overtly racist policies—including strong concerns by black athletes that they would be subject to persecution while there—the U.S. and all the other participating nations attended. Germany put its best face forward, and the world was treated to a spectacle of German hospitality and athleticism. Germany gained a much-coveted international standing, all the while masking a terrifying truth that would unfold to its true horror only a few years later.

  I reference this history because there are shades of Nazi Germany in what is happening in Putin’s Russia today—but to LGBTs instead of Jews. I say “shades” because the bullies who now run that country have not yet dared go nearly so far as the Nazis in their campaign. But as Stephen Fry has so eloquently noted, all great atrocities and genocides first begin with marginalizing then dehumanizing a specific group of people, whether Jewish, Gypsy or Rwandan. There are chilling parallels here that cannot be brushed aside.

  Under Russia’s newly passed laws, LGBTs have effectively been silenced, for it is now illegal in Russia to speak in defense of gay rights, to demonstrate or gather as an LGBT community, to distribute any material related to LGBT rights, or to even suggest that gay relationships are equal in nature to heterosexual ones. (Attempts to silence gay advocacy of course are not limited to Russia—we have our own fine mix of it here in the U.S. In 1993 Colorado added Amendment 2 to its state constitution, which prevented any municipality from passing laws to protect the rights of LGBT persons. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately struck that amendment down as unconstitutional. In 2011 a bill in the Tennessee state legislature would have imposed criminal penalties on any educator who so much as even mentioned homosexuality in class. The proposed “Don’t Say Gay” law was the genesis of my “It’s OK to Be Takei” campaign, in which I lent my name to the cause. If you can’t say gay, I urged, just say Takei! March in a Takei Pride parade, or get Takei-married. Thankfully, the bill died due to public pressure and ridicule and never came up for a vote.)

  Unfortunately for Russian LGBTs, their own silence-the-gays laws have gone into vicious effect. Gay parades in Moscow have been banned for the next 100 years, and brutal crackdowns turned bloody, with the police turning a blind eye to violent counter-demonstrators.

  A prominent national newscaster was summarily fired after coming out and voicing dissent at anti-gay legislation, and other gay activists have also been dismissed from teaching positions. According to local reports, neighbors have been encouraged to spy on each other to help ferret out “sexual deviants” among them, and attacks upon pro-gay social organizations have been steadily on the rise. Recently, roving bands of neo-Nazi skinheads, emboldened by the increasingly anti-gay climate of the nation, have been luring unsuspecting young gay men online, then kidnapping and torturing, and in some cases even murdering them, with grisly video, intended to intimidate and terrorize, released for all the world to see.

  Mutilated bodies of gay men have been found from St. Petersburg to Volgograd.

  Ther
e is no question that Russia’s anti-gay laws violate international law, which holds nations to common standards of respect for sexual minorities. In fact, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights has condemned Russia and made clear that its restrictions on LGBT civil rights violate recognized international standards. But Russia has only clamped down harder, its politicians feeding cynically upon the fear-mongering of a resurgent Orthodox Church, whose leadership apparently believes it has more to gain from conjuring up a bogeyman than delivering any Christian message of compassion and acceptance.

  Against the horrors unleashed within its borders on LGBTs, Russia has trumpeted its Sochi Winter Olympics, with familiar sounding assurances that LGBT athletes will not be persecuted, and that Russia is simply being misunderstood. Defending the anti-gay “propaganda” law, Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko explained that it is intended to protect children from being exposed to “non-traditional sexual relationships,” in the same manner they should be protected from messages promoting alcoholism and drug abuse. (Personally, I don’t understand how this specious argument “defends” the law in the slightest.) Mutko promised that LGBTs could still participate in the Sochi Games, provided they kept their sexuality secret: “An athlete of non-traditional sexual orientation isn’t banned from coming to Sochi. But if he goes out into the streets and starts to propagandize, then of course he will be held accountable.” One must wonder: What is meant by “propagandize?” Is merely stepping out into the streets hand-in-hand with your lover sending a “message”? You can see how this vaguely-worded “license” is in fact an excuse to justify greater marginalization and exclusion.

  I joined a growing chorus of LGBT voices in condemning the anti-gay laws in Russia and calling for the International Olympic Committee to hold that nation accountable. I suggested in That Blog Is So Takei that, rather than boycott the Games (which I feared would punish innocent athletes more than it would change the minds of the Russian leadership), we demand they be moved, perhaps to Vancouver where they were held four years earlier and where facilities could most easily be refurbished and restored to accommodate the participants and spectators. I reminded the International Olympic Committee that its own principles of non-discrimination must be respected:

  THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE’S FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES INCLUDE AN UNEQUIVOCAL STATEMENT: “THE PRACTICE OF SPORT IS A HUMAN RIGHT. EVERY INDIVIDUAL MUST HAVE THE POSSIBILITY OF PRACTISING SPORT, WITHOUT DISCRIMINATION OF ANY KIND AND IN THE OLYMPIC SPIRIT, WHICH REQUIRES MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING WITH A SPIRIT OF FRIENDSHIP, SOLIDARITY AND FAIR PLAY.” IN SPECIFIC RESPONSE TO THE RUSSIAN LAW, THE IOC, IN A RECENT INTERVIEW, DOUBLED DOWN: “[WE] WOULD LIKE TO REITERATE OUR LONG COMMITMENT TO NOT DISCRIMINATE AGAINST THOSE TAKING PART IN THE OLYMPIC GAMES. THE IOC IS AN OPEN ORGANIZATION AND ATHLETES OF ALL ORIENTATIONS WILL BE WELCOME AT THE GAMES.” IT APPEARS RUSSIA ISN’T LISTENING, AND INDEED NOW HAS RAISED THE STAKES BY THREATENING ARRESTS.

  Sadly, the IOC has proved itself to be as spineless and hypocritical as it was more than 75 years ago. After meeting with Russian officials who, like the Nazis, were eager to gloss over the evident abuses going on within their borders against a specific minority, the IOC concluded, based solely upon Russian assurances, that the host nation intended to respect the rights of LGBT athletes and spectators. The IOC determined that no action was needed—this, just after a group of Dutch tourists were arrested, held and charged under the new law simply for speaking about gay rights to youths in Murmansk.

  Lately the IOC has rubbed salt in the wound by reminding participants that it will not tolerate any displays of protest against Russia’s laws during the Games. Thus, those who have suggested that the West’s response should be rainbow flags, pins or emblems will be sorely disappointed; the IOC is more willing to stifle any controversy or dissent than it is to support its own principles of non-discrimination.

  Despite the IOC’s shrug of its cowardly shoulders, more principled leadership is beginning to emerge. German President Joachim Gauck was the first world leader to announce that he would not be attending the Winter Games, in response to Russia’s human rights record and the harassment of Russian opposition figures. President Obama, who confirmed he would not be attending, masterfully announced the the U.S. Olympic delegation would include prominent gay athletes, including Billie Jean King. LGBT rights groups called upon bars to boycott Russia vodka. Celebrities from Tilda Swinton to Lady Gaga have voiced public criticism of the anti-gay law, and everywhere Russian President Vladimir Putin goes in the world, LGBT rights advocates meet him in protest. In fact, when Putin visited the famously open and accepting city of Amsterdam, the mayor ordered rainbow flags to be flown at half-staff, and thousands poured into the streets to protest his presence:

  Putin himself is a curious symbol for conservative, anti-gay forces in Russia to “get behind” (so to speak). Prior to the passage of all the anti-LGBT laws, Putin was something of a gay icon for his habit of posing shirtless whilst engaged in hyper-masculinized activities:

  Now, in my experience, the most virulently hateful, homophobic acts tend to stem from the personal sexual insecurities of the perpetrators. How many times have we found politicians or religious leaders, who outwardly profess arch-conservative, anti-gay stances, in the arms of their young male lover or prostitute? Indeed, one study showed that men who identify themselves as homophobic or anti-gay tend to have the strongest sexual response when presented with gay porn. “In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves, and they are turning this internal conflict outward,” said the study’s co-author, Dr. Richard Ryan, Professor of Psychology at the University of Rochester. The desire to overcompensate and the self-loathing experienced by many who are in denial and deep in the closet are powerful motivators. If Putin and his cronies continue to beat the drum so loudly, they shouldn’t be surprised if others start to wonder what they are so anxious to drown out. And they shouldn’t be surprised if more images like these start appearing everywhere:

  Hoping to draw attention to the plight of LGBTs in Russia, my staffers and I launched a T-shirt depicting the hypocrisy of the Olympic Games being held in a defiantly intolerant Russia:

  Through sales of this shirt, we were able to donate thousands of dollars to GLAAD (The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), which is working with local Russian LGBT organizations to mobilize against the persecution. More importantly, we were able to help keep the pressure on American corporate sponsors of the Games so that the brutal treatment of LGBT persons within Russia remains front and center. In fact, I am heartened to hear that NBC, finding itself caught in a public relations nightmare, has assigned reporter and Russian political commentator David Remnick to report on anti-gay abuses in Russia during the broadcast.

  Condemnation by international celebrities, with some social media pressure from people like me, can help bring attention to the issue, but it can only go so far. It is vitally important that our political leaders continue to keep the lens of international condemnation squarely on Russian lawmakers, and to not reward that nation with a hugely successful, “LGBT-free” Olympics. The Olympics are just a few months away, and I intend to keep my own drumbeat going. This isn’t 1936, after all.

  Meanwhile, I’m going to leave you with the meme that inspired this chapter title. You’re welcome.

  Keep Calm

  In 1939, the British government released a “motivational” poster in the months leading up to World War II, in anticipation of deadly, impending bombing from the Germans over major British cities. The poster looked like this:

  Some sixty years later, the poster resurfaced and became something of a collectors’ item. The slogan, complete with crown, rapidly found its way onto shirts, mugs and decals—ah, capitalism. It didn’t take long, however, for parodies of the original to pop up, including this one:

  There’s something decidedly modern, or perhaps post-modern, about this, perhaps because we now completely expect and accept the freak-out reaction. Humans are frail i
n our eyes today, and we secretly wonder whether those with poise and stiff upper lips are merely ticking time bombs. The freak-out allows us to feel we’re not alone in our inner panic. We just choose to medicate it if it becomes too severe or common.

  The next step was for the Internet to spread these new parody memes everywhere. I suppose I’m guilty for being a part of this, sometimes a large part. I’m an Anglophile, deeply enamored of all things British, like Marmite, 1,000-year old castles and people with double (and sometimes triple) barreled names. For heaven’s sake, I’m even named after a British monarch: King George VI. Yes, I’m proud to say, the new royal infant and I share a namesake. (But I had it first.)

  Speaking of young Prince George, even his parents, William and Kate, did not escape this meme, as they themselves were frequently the target of these parodies.

  As they prepared for their vows:

  Prince Harry, too, was not spared:

  (though from what I hear, not for long).

  As they prepared for their child’s birth:

  And as the new prince was born:

  I think they chose a very suitable name, don’t you?

  An aside: During the hoopla of the birth of Prince George, there was much online debate whether the world should care about the birth of a royal. “We’re a democracy, and it’s ridiculous that we cling to the monarchy,” wrote one fan. “I can’t help it, I’m addicted to the royal family!” another remarked, breathless with excitement. Rather than take sides in this important debate, I merely wished to acknowledge that a child was being born in Londontown, that much of the world was watching, and that I wished the mother well: