By Phil Rockstroh
At present, the air is plagued with the scandalous tweets of a congressman’s undergarments and the predictable howling from the hectoring ghosts of U.S. Puritanism, conjured from their graves by the contrived spectacle and its promise of anonymous arousal intermingled with the blood sport of public shaming.
By finger-wagging and sneering, carnal desires can be lived out vicariously in the Puritan/Calvinist imagination. In this way, petty moralists can ogle what they claim to condemn.
To Puritans, all the problems of life can be traced to the genitals … true, but only their own problems.
How many times do the prigs, ninnies, and scolds of the U.S. have to repeat this sort of inanity before they grow up and realize that human beings have strong libidos
? Libido propels both creativity and contretemps, and it is wise to aver that “the issue of character” should best be evoked and debated, as a general rule, when the situation involves hypocrisy.
Moreover, those claiming that their own sexual desires have never rendered them vulnerable to silly misjudgments evince a more noxious form of hypocrisy.
Yet, if, in fact, their lives have been absent such misfortune, then one should withhold the scorn reserved for hypocrites, and, instead, grant these poor souls pity, for they have been afflicted with the awful circumstance of having passed through their lives without ever being seduced by life.
A more profound “character issue” here would seem to involve that of the representatives of mass media newsgathering organizations, in particular — their greed for ratings.
And what is one to make of the character of the individuals who comprise the general public and their seemingly endless avidity for these stories — their insatiable craving to revel in the tawdry — but remain engaged in the delusional worship of their own toxic innocence
?
Although, it is futile to struggle against the symp
toms not the source.
As banal as the dreams of witless bullies, the architecture and artifice of U.S. militarist/corporate imperium not only surrounds us but has colonized our thoughts and desires.
The elite of the corporate media and the U.S. public remain untroubled by Bradley Manning’s forced nudity, yet a couple a snaps of a congressmen’s crotch sends their imagination reeling.