Part 3 (1/2)
28 May 2001.
The New Theocrats.
June 18, 1997, proved to be yet another day that will live in infamy in the history of The Wall Street Journal, or t.w.m.i.p., ”the world's most important publication,” as it bills itself- blissfully unaware of just how unknown this cheery neofascist paper is to the majority of Americans, not to mention those many billions who dwell in darkness where the sulfurous flashes of Wall Street's little paper are no more than marsh gas from the distant marches of the loony empire. June 18 was the day that t.w.m.i.p. took an ad in the New York Times, the paper that prints only the news that will fit its not-dissimilar mind-set. The ad reprinted a t.w.m.i.p. editorial t.i.tled ”Modern Morality,” a subject I should have thought alien to the core pa.s.sions of either paper. But then for Americans morality has nothing at all to do with ethics or right action or who is stealing what money-and liberties-from whom. Morality is s.e.x. s.e.x. s.e.x.
The edit's lead is piping hot. ”In the same week that an Army general with 147 Vietnam combat missions” (remember the Really Good War, for lots of Dow Jones listings?) ”ended his career over an adulterous affair 13 years ago” (t.w.m.i.p. is on strong ground here; neither the general nor the lady nor any other warrior should be punished for adulteries not conducted while on watch during enemy attack) ”the news broke”-I love that phrase in a journal of powerful opinion and so little numberless news-”that a New Jersey girl gave birth to a baby in the bathroom at her high school prom, put it in the trash and went out to ask the deejay to play a song by Metallica-for her boyfriend. The baby is dead.”
Misled by the word ”girl, ” visualized a panicky p.u.b.escent tot. But days later, when one Melissa Drexler was indicted for murder, she was correctly identified by the Times as a ”woman, 18.” In a recently published photograph of her alongside her paramour at the prom, the couple look to be in their early thirties. But it suited t.w.m.i.p. to misrepresent Ms. Drexler as yet another innocent child corrupted by laissez-faire American liberal ”values,” so unlike laissez-faire capitalism, the great good.
All this is ”moral chaos,” keens the writer. I should say that all this is just plain old-fas.h.i.+oned American stupidity where a religion-besotted majority is cynically egged on by a ruling establishment whose most rabid voice is The Wall Street Journal.
”We have no good advice on how the country might extricate itself anytime soon from a swamp of s.e.xual confusion-” You can say that again and, of course, you will. So, rather than give bad advice, cease and desist from taking out ads to blame something called The Liberals. In a country evenly divided between political reactionaries and religious maniacs, I see hardly a liberal like a tree-or even a burning bush-walking. But the writer does make it clear that the proscribed general was treated unfairly while the ”girl” with baby is a statistic to be exploited by right-wing journalists, themselves often not too far removed from the odious Metallica-listening orders who drop babies in Johns, a bad situation that might have been prevented by the use, let us say, of a rubber when ”girl” and ”boy” had s.e.x.
But, no. We are a.s.sured that the moral chaos is the result of s.e.xual education and ”littering,” as the ad puts it, ”the swamp” with ”condoms that for about the past five years have been dispensed by adults running our high schools... or by machines located in, by coincidence, the bathroom.” Presumably, the confessional would be a better venue, if allowed. So, on the one hand, it is bad, as we all agree, for a woman to give birth and then abandon a baby; but then too, it's wrong, for some metaphysical reason, to help prevent such a birth from taking place. There is no sense of cause/effect when these geese start honking. Of course, t.w.m.i.p. has its own agendum: outside marriage, no s.e.x of any kind for the lower cla.s.ses and a policing of everyone, including generals and truly valuable people, thanks to the same liberals who now ”forbid nothing and punish anything.” This is s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p-back-of-the-comet reasoning.
The sensible code observed by all the world (except for certain fundamentalist monotheistic Jews, Christians, and Muslims) is that ”consensual” relations in s.e.xual matters are no concern of the state. The United States has always been backward in these matters, partly because of its Puritan origins and partly because of the social arrangements arrived at during several millennia of family-intensive agrarian life, rudely challenged a mere century ago by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the cities and, lately, by the postindustrial work-world of services in which ”safe” prost.i.tution should have been, by now, a bright jewel.
Although the ”screed” (a favorite right-wing word) in the Times ad is mostly rant and not to be taken seriously, the spirit behind all this blather is interestingly hypocritical. T.w.m.i.p. is not interested in morality. In fact, any company that can increase quarterly profits through the poisoning of a river is to be treasured. But the piece does reflect a certain unease that the people at large, most visibly through s.e.x, may be trying to free themselves from their masters, who grow ever more stern and exigent in their prohibitions-one strike and you're out is their dirty little secret. In mid-screed; the paper almost comes to the point: ”Very simply [sic], what we're suggesting here is that the code of s.e.xual behavior formerly set down by established religion In the U.S. more or less kept society healthy, unlike the current manifest catastrophe.” There it is. Where is Norman Lear, creator of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, now that we need him? Visualize on the screen gray clapboard, slate-colored sky, omni-ous (as Darryl Zanuck used to say) music. Then a woman's plaintive voice calling ”Hester Prynne, Hester Prynne!” as the screen fills with a pulsing scarlet ”A.”
So arriere-garde that it is often avant-garde, t.w.m.i.p. is actually on to something. Although I shouldn't think anyone on its premises has heard of the eighteenth-century Neapolitan scholar Vico, our readers will recall that Vico, working from Plato, established various organic phases in human society. First, Chaos. Then Theocracy. Then Aristocracy. Then Democracy-but as republics tend to become imperial and tyrannous, they collapse and we're back to Chaos and to its child Theocracy, and a new cycle. Currently, the United States is a mildly chaotic imperial republic headed for the exit, no bad thing unless there is a serious outbreak of Chaos, in which case a new age of religion will be upon us. Anyone who ever cared for our old Republic, no matter how flawed it always was with religious exuberance, cannot not prefer Chaos to the harsh rule of Theocrats. Today, one sees them at their savage worst in Israel and in certain Islamic countries, like Afghanistan, etc. Fortunately, thus far their social regimentation is still no match for the universal l.u.s.t for consumer goods, that brave new world at the edge of democracy. As for Americans, we can still hold the fort against our very own praying mantises-for the most part, fundamentalist Christians abetted by a fierce, decadent capitalism in thrall to totalitarianism as proclaimed so saucily in the New York Times of June 18,1997.
The battle line is now being drawn. Even as the unfortunate ”girl” in New Jersey was instructing the deejay, the Christian right was organizing itself to go after permissiveness in entertainment. On June 18 the Southern Baptists at their annual convention denounced the Disney company and its TV network, ABC, for showing a lesbian as a human being, reveling in Pulp Fiction violence, flouting Christian family values. I have not seen the entire bill of particulars (a list of more than one hundred ”properties” to be boycotted was handed out), but it all sounds like a pretrial deposition from Salem's glory days. Although I have criticized the Disney cartel for its media domination, I must now side with the challenged octopus.
This is the moment for Disney to throw the full weight of its wealth at the Baptists, who need a lesson in const.i.tutional law they will not soon forget. They should be brought to court on the usual chilling-of-First-Amendment grounds as well as for restraint of trade. Further, and now let us for once get to the root of the matter. The tax exemptions for the revenues of all the churches from the Baptists to the equally absurd-and equally mischievous-Scientologists must be removed.
The original gentlemen's agreement between Church and State was that We the People (the State) will in no way help or hinder any religion while, absently, observing that as religion is ”a good thing,” the little church on Elm Street won't have to pay a property tax. No one envisaged that the most valuable real estate at the heart of most of our old cities would be tax-exempt, as churches and temples and orgone boxes increased their holdings and portfolios. The quo for this huge quid was that religion would stay out of politics and not impose its superst.i.tions on Us the People. The agreement broke down years ago. The scandalous career of the Reverend Presidential Candidate Pat Robertson is a paradigm.
As Congress will never act, this must be a gra.s.s-roots movement to amend the Const.i.tution, even though nothing in the original First Amendment says a word about tax exemptions or any other special rights to churches, temples, orgone boxes. This is a useful war for Disney to fight, though I realize that the only thing more cowardly than a movie studio or TV network is a conglomerate forced to act in the open. But if you don't, Lord Mouse, it will be your rodentian a.s.s 15.7 million Baptists will get, not to mention the a.s.ses of all the rest of us.
The Nation.
21 July 1997.
A letter to be delivered.
I am writing this note a dozen days before the inauguration of the loser of the year 2000 presidential election. We are now faced with a j.a.panese seventeenth-century-style arrangement: a powerless Mikado ruled by a shogun vice president and his Pentagon warrior counselors. Do they dream, as did the shoguns of yore, of the conquest of China? We shall know more soon, I should think, than late. Sayonara.
11 January 2001.
[*] Congratulations, Mr. President-Elect. Like everyone else, I'm eagerly looking forward to your inaugural address. As you must know by now, we could never get enough of your speeches during the recent election in which the best man won, as he always does in what Spiro Agnew so famously called ”the greatest nation in the country.”
[* This was written for Vanity Fair before the November 7, 2000, presidential election.]
Apropos your first speech to us as president. I hope you don't mind if I make a few suggestions, much as I used to do in the sixties when I gave my regular States of the Union roundups on David Susskind's TV show of blessed memory. Right off, it strikes me that this new beginning may be a good place to admit that for the last fifty years we have been waging what the historian Charles A. Beard so neatly termed ”perpetual war for perpetual peace.”