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The Iraq and Afghan wars may be the best news for the gay community in years. Not that gays like war any more than straights. But the times are a-changin’ when the nation’s top military leaders endorse the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, a make-believe waffling policy that never satisfied any one.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, served a shocker when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee who said he personally believed that “allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.”

Fifteen years ago, senior officers like Mullen were fighting tooth-and-nail against gays in the service. What changed their minds? Was it the election of Barack Obama? Not likely, considering that Bill Clinton also wanted to end discrimination, and that didn’t stop the generals and admirals from voicing opposition. Could it be that cultural change – the increasing acceptance of gay rights in American society – has percolated into the Pentagon? Perhaps, but fundamentalist Christianity has solidly entrenched itself in the military, so it’s hard to believe that all the men who wears stars on their shoulders suddenly turned warm and fuzzy.

I don’t think it was love that motivated the Pentagon’s change of heart. I think it was fear. Fear that the U.S. military is overstretched, tired and scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel. Gangbangers who would have been booted out of boot camp 10 years ago are now carrying machine guns in Kabul, courtesy of a U.S. government that desperately needs boots on the ground. Somewhere, in some dusty office deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, manpower planners have to be asking themselves, “can we afford to throw away trained, skilled soldiers because of who they sleep with?”

It is true that war is awful. It is also true that the pressures of war enable changes that would never be considered in peacetime. The U.S. military was fanatical in fighting integration during World War II. African-Americans were mostly used as truck drivers and waiters. Yet by 1945, infantry casualties were running so high that General Eisenhower ordered the formation of a few integrated combat units. It wasn’t done out of conscience. It was done to win the war.

There was a reason why African-American leaders during fought so strenuously for the right to fight the Nazis. Those who are barred from defending their country will never be full citizens of it.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Even after the armed forces were officially desegregated in 1948, discrimination against black soldiers was prevalent. It took decades – and race riots between black and white soldiers in Vietnam – to eradicate it. Even if  “don’t ask, don’t tell” is repealed, gay soldiers are in for a rough time.

Let’s first dispense with the obvious geek jokes about Kevin Singer, whom the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled does not have a Constitutional right to play Dungeons & Dragons in prison: Singer failed his luck roll. His Spell of Invisibility didn’t fool the guards at the gate. His 5th Level Wizard was no match for a 50th Level Judge.

Singer turned to the courts after Wisconsin’s Waupau prison banned the game in 2004, and confiscated his D&D books as well a 96-page manuscript he had written. Prison officials told Singer that fantasy games like D&D were banned because “they promote fantasy role playing, competitive hostility, violence, addictive escape behaviors, and possible gambling.”

Singer argued that the ban violated his Constitutional rights of free speech and due process. Waupau Gang expert Bruce Muraski testified that cooperative games like D&D endanger public and prison safety because they can “mimic the development of gangs” and “foster an inmate’s obsession with escaping from the real life correctional environment.” No kidding? You mean prisoners would rather dream of something else than their next meal of prison Jello, or getting shanked in the ribs courtesy of Crazy Bubba in the next cell?

Though acknowledging evidence that D&D was harmless, the court ruled that Singer failed to demonstrate that the ban was unreasonable in light of legitimate prison concerns. As law professor Ilya Somin noted, the decision was “based on the highly deferential standard under which most prison regulations are to be upheld against constitutional challenge so long as they are ‘rationally related’ to some legitimate goal of prison administration.”

Perhaps the court was right in adhering to the letter of the law. Or perhaps the judges wouldn’t know Dungeons and Dragons if a dragon torched their robes. Prison gangs of D&D players? What are they going to do, bounce 20-sided dice off the head of Carlos the Mexican Drug Lord, famed for his sense of humor as he plays “Dunk your Enemies in a Vat of Acid”? If there is any group in this world that is harmless, it is the guys sitting around a kitchen table  munching Doritos and diet soda while they congratulate themselves for wiping out 20 goblins with a fireball spell.

Make no mistake. I have no sympathy for Kevin Singer. What he robbed from his victim can never be restored. He will spend the rest of his life in prison. He deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. Kevin Singer will never taste fresh air, or good food, or the caress of a woman. Thus the punishment fits the crime.

Yet this is not a question of physical freedom. This is a question of whether a man has a right to dream, even a man who has committed a heinous crime. We can and we should restrain a murderer’s body. But do we have a right to restrain his mind? His ability to dream of what he does not and cannot ever have?

Dungeons & Dragons may be an escape for Kevin Singer. But as anyone who has ever played D&D knows, for three hours on a Friday night, you can be a powerful wizard or a fearsome warrior. But when those three hours are up, it’s back to reality. Kevin Singer may be a king for an evening. But when he awakens in the morning, he will face a world of gray walls and gray faces. Perhaps that punishment would also fit his crime.

Rejoice, white people! You never wiped out the Native Americans, enslaved the Africans or polluted the environment.

Because you hit the reset button. You journeyed to some far-off planet whose inhabitants just happen to look like Native Americans with yellow cat’s eyes. Just as they are about to be exterminated by an evil Earth corporation, one of the humans – a white man – has a pang of remorse and sallies forth to lead the natives to victory. His conscience is our redemption. No need for us to feel guilty about the Native Americans and the Africans. Hollywood gave us a second chance to make things right. We will all feel better for it.

It took me a while to realize what Avatar was really about. It’s not meant to be an allegory of colonialism and genocide. It’s really a catharsis for white people who know that their prosperity was founded on screwing the rest of the planet. Hollywood sooths our conscience by taking us to another world where peaceful, happy natives and motherly Mother Nature triumph over the evil invaders.

But, you see, that’s not what happens in the real world. In real life, the natives lose. They perish from smallpox and are mown down by Gatling guns. They are crushed by tanks and blasted by jet fighters. When the natives do win, it’s not because they are more noble than their enemies. It’s because the Viet Cong and the Taliban are even more ruthless. In Avatar’s universe, the natives befriend the heroic white man and teach him their ways. On Earth, they would pluck his eyes out.

When I saw Avatar last weekend, the audience clapped at the end. But I felt and a little sick to my stomach. I knew that when the 3D glasses came off, my eyes would behold a world where the inhabitants walk into restaurants with bombs strapped to their stomachs, and Mother Nature is a cruel, capricious bitch who kills 100,000 of the Earth’s poorest with an earthquake.

Avatar is neither fantasy nor fable. It is a moral opiate, crack cocaine for the conscience. It’s addictive because the message is so easy to swallow. Digital 3D has become so lifelike that Avatar looks more documentary than drama. So realistic that it requires no imagination, no mental effort. It’s so much easier when someone expiates your sins for you, and does it as painlessly as the touch of an animator’s pen.

A  sad New York Times article about Army wives learning the art of striptease so they can perform a bit of slink when their husbands return home from the war.

It’s sad because these women know that they are going to have to reestablish intimacy with men who may be very different than when they left. After the initial carnal rush – which probably doesn’t need a striptease as a catalyst anyway  – these wives may be dealing with PTSD, domestic abuse, alcoholism, and mental and physical wounds.

Perhaps I’m just being the anti-romantic. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but there seems to be a little touch of the desperate in this passage from the article:

The women’s favorite move came on the line, “I can show you a good time,” when Ms. Burana spread her legs and then snapped them shut.

I’m not kidding anyone. If I came back home from a year in Afghanistan, I’d have a few things on my mind, and a cold shower wouldn’t be at the top of the list. But I wonder if this burlesque is passion denied or just a wife’s fervent hope that things can go back to the way they were.

I hate the word “blowback”. Once upon a time, it meant an action that created unintended consequences; the CIA overthrows a government, and the new regime turns out to be even more inimical to American interests. Ha, ha, the joke’s on us!

But now blowback means that if anything that anybody does has negative consequences, that person is an idiot that should have known better. It’s a great philosophy if you’re a Time Lord hopping between past and future in a magic telephone booth. But for those of us stuck in a universe of linear time, the inability to foresee consequences is called being human.

Someone should tell this to former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer, whose Guardian column claims that the roots of the current Afghan mess are not to be found in the Soviet decision to invade in 1979, but rather in Jimmy Carter’s decision to supply weapons to the Afghan guerrillas. It’s a curious argument that’s sort of like claiming that the current Iraqi mess isn’t rooted in George Bush’s decision to invade but rather Tehran’s decision to support the Shia militias.

Kinzer suggests that we should have known that supporting the mujahideen would turn Afghanistan into a magnet for zealots like Osama Bin-Laden. I suppose we should have known that just like we should have known that helping the Soviet Union defeat Nazi Germany would enable Moscow to occupy Eastern Europe. One reason I don’t like this kind of historical backbiting is that it is selective. We don’t know what would have happened had Carter and the CIA chosen not to support the Afghans. The war didn’t bring down Communism – a failing economy and a new generation of Soviet leaders did that – but quagmire did play a role in discrediting the old regime.

What really troubles me about Kinzer’s argument is that it is a call for inaction.  Any decision – whether made by Presidents or peons – runs the risk of blowback. Blowback is inevitable, because every decision has positive and negative consequences. As I type this, I’m sipping a glass of water that keeps me hydrated, yet may also contain pharmaceuticals that have contaminated the water supply. Flipping my office light switch assists my vision but consumes energy that could effect global warming (see Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” for a wonderful story of unintended consequences). What’s the only guaranteed way to avoid blowback? Never do anything.

The best we can do is do the best we can with the information that we have at the time. George Bush and his advisors were fools because they should have anticipated that dismantling Saddam’s regime would result in chaos unless a functioning government was quickly installed. But Jimmy Carter in 1979 should have anticipated Muslim terrorists flying airliners into New York skyscrapers? I’m not a hawk, but if I had been in the White House back then, I would have supplied weapons to the Afghans, and so might Mr. Kinzer. In the context of Cold War rivalry, it made sense, which is why Moscow had generously supplied weapons to North Vietnam that kept the U.S. embroiled in a bloody war for a decade. If ailing Soviet leaders had felt emboldened by a successful invasion of Afghanistan, who knows what they would have done next in other areas such as Poland, where the Solidarity movement threatened Moscow’s Eastern European empire? Who knows what would have happened when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989?

Had Carter known that Bin Laden would come along, no doubt he would have hesitated. But until we elect leaders with crystal balls implanted in their brains, the unintended consequences of blowback will always be a consequence.