Category: Sexual Politics

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Doris Day and the Post-Modern Era

Well, when did the world change? It changes all the time, but if you could pick a moment that defined the modern era, here’s my nomination: Doris Day turns down the role of Mrs. Robinson in “The Graduate”.

Doris Day was a famous actress who made her name playing squeaky-clean “girl-next-door” roles in sex farces. Sound contradictory? Well, I was astonished to find out that Doris Day movies were considered quite racy in their day. Doris usually played an independent career woman who had a nice job and got into fights with a nice man, played by Cary Grant or Rock Hudson, who would eventually kiss her while she struggled for a second or two until she realized that she really loved the “big lug”. Then they got married.

Doris really looked squeaky clean. She must have bathed and scrubbed her face before every shot. I hated her.

I thought her movies were phony because they wanted to titillate the viewer, while pretending that everything was as innocent as a Tupperware party. Hollywood thought that putting Doris Day through a car wash in a convertible with the roof open was titillating. But then, they also thought Elvis was convincing as a doctor and Mary Tyler Moore as a nun. More recently, Meg Ryan played a heart surgeon. Tom Hanks as an astronaut? Demi Moore as Hester Prynne??

I thought she was boring. She and Rock or Cary would squabble and fight and argue and then wind up kissing on the couch. You were supposed to figure out that they had sex, sooner or later, but they weren’t going to actually show you anything. That would be immoral. Decent people assumed nothing happened afterwards, at least, not until they got married. Hip New Yorkers assumed that something did happen, because of the way she held her cigarette or something.

You know, you never hear the Republicans say something like, “Bill Clinton and John Kennedy are both disgusting because they cheated on their wives.” John Kennedy had sex with Judith Exner, the girl-friend of a mobster, and Marilyn Monroe, among others. But the Republicans never try to publicly draw your attention to the parallels between the two men. Why not? Maybe because John Kennedy only had sex when you weren’t looking. It wasn’t reported in the papers or used as grounds for impeachment, though a lot of reporters knew about it. And John Kennedy is still very popular. Many Americans still feel cheated by his assassination. Old films and video clips show a young, vigorous, smart man. Like Bill Clinton.

Doris Day movies were always brightly lit up, in the Hollywood manner, filmed on a sound-stage in a big warehouse on a studio lot with big phony backdrops. No shadows or natural earth tones here: everything was hard and plastic.

They’re driving down the coastal highway and he’s hardly even looking at the road. He’s arguing with Doris. I always wished he would suddenly panic and spin the wheel and — pfffttt– gone. End of the movie. The owner of the theatre would have to come out and explain to the audience: “Sorry folks– I don’t know what happened. We thought the movie would be two hours. What a tragedy. Well, go home, we’ll have someone else for you next week.”

Well, by the mid-sixties, squeaky-clean Doris was dying at the box office. Her films didn’t seem very exciting or daring anymore. This was about the time, you may recall, that Faye Dunaway made her very conspicuous debut in Bonnie and Clyde. Compare Doris and Faye.  Life Magazine published a picture of Ali McGraw, braless, lying in the grass in tight jeans with her legs apart.  You can see that one of them is completely out of sync with the times.

And then Mike Nichols asked her if she would like to play the part of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Mrs. Robinson is the wife of Benjamin Braddock’s father’s business partner. She smokes. She drinks too much. She gets Benjamin to drive her home one night and then flashes him. She later seduces him and they carry on a tawdry affair for several months. When Benjamin, sick with disgust for himself, falls in love with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter Elaine, she tries everything she can to destroy the relationship, even to the point of confessing the affair to her husband, and to Benjamin’s parents, and to Elaine. Bill Clinton did that too, eventually. But Benjamin pursues Elaine anyway and eventually wins her.

Mike Nichols liked Doris Day. He wanted to save her career. He was convinced that this part would make her a star once again. But Doris didn’t like the part. She thought it was vulgar.

She had no idea of what an actress was supposed to be. She thought she was supposed to be a star, a personality, a celebrity, who did toothpaste commercials and appeared on Hollywood Squares and encouraged bored suburban housewives to immerse themselves in her little titillating– but never vulgar– dream world.

She was, by all accounts, a thoroughly nice, decent person, who let an idiot husband mismanage her career until he messed it all up and lost all her money. [Debbie Reynolds, and so many others, suffered the same fate.]

Mrs. Robinson was not her “type”.

So Ann Bancroft, whose career was also in the doldrums, got the part instead. And, of course, it saved her career. She was suddenly in demand again. She made lots of money and people remember her as a decent, if not outstanding, actress.

And Doris went on to obscurity, except for the occasional radio play of “Que Sera, Sera” — it had been recorded originally for the Hitchcock film “The Man Who Knew Too Much” in 1956. It means, “whatever will be, will be” which is about as dumb a lyric as you can imagine. Well, there’s nothing you can sing that can’t be sung.

On a personal note, I have occasionally confused this song with “Is That All There is?” written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and performed by Peggy Lee (1969), and a much better song. The German title is “Wenn das alles ist”, which sounds even more world-weary to me.

Doris went  into obscurity. I don’t know what happened to her. Is she dead? I’ll bet she became a recluse, like Mary Pickford and Marlene Dietrich and Carroll Baker… [She is a recluse, wandering Carmel, CA, apparently looking after stray animals.]

A&E’s biography was going to follow her special with one on Dinah Shore. If that’s not a bad sign, I don’t know what is.

[Updated 2011]

For the record: there is no such thing as a “post-modern” era. We are the modern era. I think some people like this phrase because it implies that there is something after progress that is not progress itself. [2011-02]

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Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend

DeBeer’s runs these ads– you’ve seen them. A lovely woman and a lovely man frolicking on a beach. The woman is lithe and lithesome, dancing… the man takes her hand and leads her up to the cottage. We understand this immediately. We know what he is going to give her: a diamond.

“How else can two month’s salary last a life-time?”

So says DeBeer’s.

“There’s a sucker born every minute.”

So says P.T. Barnum.

You’ve got this young couple. They are both just starting their careers. They have no money. They rent a small apartment. They drive a seven-year-old car that needs a lot of fixin’. They borrowed from mom and dad to buy a fridge and a stove and still do their laundry at the Laundromat. They are thinking of having a baby. They decide to get married. Yeah, that’s the order it happens in nowadays. So some stranger in a very slick suit, looking oh-so-much better off than they are, driving a leased Buick, wearing a Rolex watch, impeccably coiffured, as they say, comes up to them and says: “You should give me two months of your salary for a worthless piece of spackle.” And the girl looks into her lover’s eyes and becomes a little dewy and smiles and touches his hand and says, “Wow? You’d do that for me?”

He says, are you nuts? I’m going to give that money to an orphanage.

No, of course he doesn’t. Because the man in the leased Buick has convinced his girlfriend that he is not worth it, if he doesn’t turn over two months of his salary and accept the spackle.

Why doesn’t he just throw himself in front of a car? It makes as much sense. I’ll bet the hospital bill would also be about two months salary. And, really, she should be even more impressed– that hurt!

I’d like to see those ads on tv. A couple frolicking on the road– you only see their shadows. She goes up on her tippy toes to kiss him, then mischievously runs away across the road, while Vivaldi whines on the sound track. He runs after her but before he can get across the road, you see the shadow of a Mack Truck, and hear the screeching of brakes.

Then you see a shadow of a hospital bed, the leg up in the air, and she’s holding his hand and bending down. “St. Michael’s Hospital– where else would two month’s salary last a life-time?”

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She’s a Femme Fatale: Raging Hypocrites

It was sort of inevitable, don’t you think?

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Henry Hyde’s “indiscretion”.

It has just been revealed that the Republican Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Henry Hyde, had an affair with a woman named Cherie Snodgrass, about thirty years ago. She was married, and so was he. We have also been informed that Dan Burton, one of Clinton’s harshest critics, fessed up that he has fathered a child in an extramarital affair. And Representative Helen Chenoweth of Idaho has also confessed to an illicit liaison. Well, let’s not be disingenuous here: they didn’t voluntarily fess up– they were caught. Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole, of course, are not with their first spouses anymore. Any details, Newt? Come one, Bob, let’s get this out into the open.

Ah, you say. But isn’t the issue perjury?

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The trouble is, for the Republicans, that they have had to justify Kenneth Starr’s report on the basis of the argument that Clinton’s personal sexual behaviour is relevant. And whenever these clowns appear on TV to argue for impeachment, they don’t talk much about legalities: they talk about trust and morality and values and leadership. Besides, Clinton’s perjury occurred during testimony which was eventually ruled “immaterial” by a judge in the Paula Jones case. That’s a pretty thin case for impeachment. But you understand the two-track strategy of the Republicans. They know that the public will not be outraged by the perjury which gives them the legal pretense to impeach, but they think the public might be outraged by the sexual relationship, which, however, cannot be the basis for an impeachment. So they are trying to blur the distinction. You are supposed to be so outraged at Clinton’s personal conduct, that you will consent to impeach him on a trivial legal issue Well, that’s how they got Al Capone. The well-known gang-meister was finally indicted for…. yes, tax evasion!

There is only one solution: Henry Hyde, Dan Burton, Helen Chenoweth, Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, and whoever else comes out of hiding soon enough, should all be impeached.

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If I were Henry Hyde, who is in charge of the committee for impeaching adulterers, I’d do the honorable thing and impeach myself first, just to show the American Public that the judicial system doesn’t play politics, and that the Clinton thing is not just a partisan Republican pogrom against a Democratic President, but a reflection of the Republican Party’s earnest devotion to purity and decency in government. So long Henry. Nice knowing you Dan. May you find healing and fulfillment Helen. I hope something comes along for you Newt.

The Republicans, by the way, have demanded that the FBI investigate whether the White House had a hand in getting these stories to the public. Think about this. The Republicans, who have just insisted on publishing extremely intimate details about the President’s sexual liaison with a 21-year-old intern, are outraged, I say, outraged, that someone should expose, with no detail whatsoever, the adulteries of some of their own. Who do they think is buying this? It’s too much! It’s insane! It’s a crazy world!

One last piece of craziness: the Republicans are arguing that the public needs to know these details, and that the impeachment proceedings should hear the evidence in public, and that all the information Kenneth Starr has gathered should be released, because it is important that justice been seen to be done publicly.

All of these decisions were made in a closed session of the Judiciary Committee Meeting.

* * *

While the Republicans were busy rationalizing themselves, Lou Reed, former leader of the Velvet Underground, was putting on a performance of his own. Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground was quite possibly the most aesthetically progressive rock band of the 1960’s. Listen to their stuff: you can’t believe it was recorded thirty years ago. It has a visceral rawness to it, the kind of edgy authenticity so-called alternative bands would die for. Nico, the lead singer on some of their most haunting ballads, is now dead, destroyed by years of drug abuse… not. She died in a bicycle accident. Lou Reed has found a second career walking the border between revision and nostalgia.

So where do you think they performed? At some dark night-club in New York? No, in the White House. President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia was Bill Clinton’s guest this weekend. I wonder if Reed performed one of his better tunes, “Femme Fatale”:

Cause everybody knows (she’s a femme fatale)
The things she does to please (she’s a femme fatale)
She’s just a little tease (she’s a femme fatale)

If you would have told me, thirty years ago, that some day the Velvet Underground would be playing the White House!

Well, … actually, that is kind of what I thought thirty years ago. After all, we knew that we were all going to be fifty some day, and none of us really believed we were going to start listening to Frank Sinatra or Perry Como after we turned 40.

Now if you would have told me that Congress, in solemn session, would be listening in rapt devotion to intimate details about the President’s affair with a young intern– I would have thought you were mad.

Anyway, it’s happened. The most anti-establishment rock artist of the 60’s has played the White House. This has cosmic significance. As soon as I can think of what that is, I’ll try to write about it.

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Pity the Republicans

Let’s see. There was an election for President in 1992. George Bush ran against Bill Clinton and lost. Then there was another election in 1996. The Republicans trotted out Bob Dole and once again, Clinton was victorious. The Republican’s had a majority in Congress though, so they tried to thwart Mr. Clinton at every opportunity. Still, the nation, in poll after poll, told everyone that they liked Clinton, they thought he was doing a great job, and Newt Gingrich should go suck a lemon.

Kenneth Starr, you might not remember, was appointed to investigate Whitewater. He spared no effort or expense, but found nothing. He asked for permission, from a judge, to investigate other things, while he was at it. Again sparing no effort or expense, he could find nothing. Clinton may well, to that point, have been the cleanest President the U.S. has had in 90 years. As friends and acquaintances of the Clintons have been saying, consistently, for years, the Clinton’s really don’t care much about money.

Finally, Kenneth Starr stumbled into Monica Lewinsky, through the good offices of the despicable Linda Tripp.

Monica Lewinsky was a young, naïve, White House intern. Starr had the FBI seize her, without necessarily following correct legal procedure, and threatened to lock her and her mother up if they didn’t come clean. Lewinsky was terrified. Finally, she agreed to testify in exchange for immunity. It is now obvious that Starr asked her incredibly intrusive and mostly legally irrelevant questions about the details of the sexual encounters. And now he has made them public for everyone to drool over.

Let’s keep this straight so that no one has an excuse for not knowing this:  Kenneth Starr arrested and bullied the victim (allegedly) of a politicians sexual “abuse”.  Because otherwise, he knew that she would not play the role he needed her to play to justify the Republican Inquisition into Bill Clinton’s sex life.

I don’t know if Starr really thinks what Monica and Bill did is an impeachable offense. They had consensual sex and lied to prevent people from finding out about it. If he does, he is a fool. More likely, he, like the rest of the Republicans, despises Bill Clinton for political and cultural reasons, and finally found something he thought could make a lot of trouble for him. Unlike the members of Congress, Starr is virtually answerable to no one. With impunity, he is able to dig up the most intimate details about this sexual relationship and make them public. When Clinton attacked Starr’s tactics, the Republicans rose up as one, an enormous repressed Greek Chorus, and screamed bloody murder. They have the advantage of not being personally accountable for the disclosures, while hoping to cash in the on the political fall-out. The general public is not fooled: given a choice between impeaching Starr or Clinton, there is no doubt, at this point, that they’d rather impeach Starr.

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Lies and More Lies

Everyone seems very upset because Bill Clinton hasn’t apologized for ….

Well, what? For his affair with Monica Lewinsky? He owes her an apology, not me. For breaking his marital vows? He owes that one to Hillary. For lying under oath in the Paula Jones case? A judge decided that his testimony on Lewinsky was immaterial, so that offence doesn’t legally exist. But if it did exist, he did try to conceal a sexual relationship from a grand jury investigating a frivolous lawsuit brought about by a disgruntled employee and funded by a right-wing hate tank. So, maybe he should apologize to the right wing hate-tank for helping them waste their money.

Well, he shouldn’t apologize to the public. His relationship with Monica Lewinsky, so long as they were both consenting adults, is not now nor ever was the nation’s business. Kenneth Starr is a Republican flunkey out to destroy the Democratic Administration. When people say stupid things like “Clinton should have admitted it months ago and spared the nation this long ordeal…” they don’t seem to realize that it is Kenneth Starr and his Republican Henchmen in Congress who have decided that all the affairs of state and the general interest of the public is secondary to their own devious political agenda.

I wish Clinton had admitted it sooner. Are we a nation of adults? He could have said, “Yes, I’ve had affairs. And I might have other affairs, if I meet someone I like. But it’s none of your business, so buzz off.” Then the Republicans could have gone around making grim faces and talking about the moral decline of American presidents and all that bs and we could have been spared, at least, Kenneth Starr.

For the record, what is moral decline? America abides by this paradox: sexual sins represent moral decline, even though the people affected are consenting adults. On the other hand, actions that cause death and destruction and misery to millions of people as a side effect of ruthless materialism and greed are representative of moral progress. We get all lathered and upset and teary-eyed because the President had consenting sex with a 21-year-old gold-digger, but we all yawn when we hear about thousands of children and young women slaving away in sub-human sweat-shops to produce running shoes or sports wear for fat American arm-chair athletes to wear while they cheer millionaire athletes on television playing baseball or basketball in some far away city.

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The Anacam

Privacy and Personality

If you check out this website–

http://www.anacam.com/anaframesg.html

[Or maybe not.  More information on Ana Voog.]

you will see real live pictures of Ana Voog, an artist in Minnesota, living her life. This is the Anacam. A camera takes pictures every 240 seconds or so and then feeds it to the Internet.

When I grew up, you would sometimes see a documentary on tv that claimed to show you someone’s real life. They followed him or her around at home, showed them eating, drinking, chatting with friends… and it was all completely phony. Even a child knew that this was all staged. For one thing, you couldn’t pick up these images with a television camera without a huge bank of lights taking up most of the living room. Everybody in the room certainly knew they were on tv. For another thing, you never saw anybody get undressed or go to the bathroom or pick his nose. Of course, that’s what you really wanted to see. More importantly, the program was never live. It was always taped or filmed first and then edited.

Last year, “The Truman Show” claimed to be about a man whose entire life is broadcast on tv, without his knowledge. But this movie didn’t show any of those real, personal activities that you think about when you think about the idea of watching a person live his life without him knowing about it.

The Anacam does. Well, it’s still selective, because you only see what Ana wants to show you, but Ana is far more willing to let you see everything than Truman was. And the Anacam exists in real time: no editing, no condensation, no cheating. I haven’t seen it myself, but I know that she has even taken her webcam into the shower. Is this pornography? I don’t think so. I’m not sure. I don’t think she’s out to titillate the viewer, but, on the other hand, she probably wants to attract as much attention as possible. Ana is an “artist”.

This is something to think about. How valuable is your privacy? We used to think that privacy was extremely valuable. But that was largely because privacy was so hard to violate. People you hardly knew wouldn’t let you come into their bathrooms to watch them go pee and pop a pimple. Well, at least not for the past 100 years. I have a feeling that there was a lot less privacy in the Middle Ages. For one thing, when you went to a hotel in the Middle Ages, everybody slept in the same big bed. I kid you not. You can look it up. And people tossed their garbage right out the window onto the street. People did not have bathrooms or even outhouses. So I don’t think there was very much privacy. Read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Why did this change? Think of the Victorian era in England. Suddenly, everybody wanted to hide anything to do with sexual identity. Women wore big, billowing skirts, with layers of undergarments. Bathing suits were big enough to camp in. Men wore long pants, jackets, and hats. Why did people suddenly become obsessed with keeping their privates private? A wave of piety and religion? No. How about this: privacy was valuable because it was rare.

Then more and more people acquired their own homes, with outhouses. They lived separately, as families, rather than communally with the entire clan. Clothes became cheaper to make. More and more people could afford to wear different clothes on different days. The hardworking bourgeoisie developed habits of thrift and restraint, and one of the things they wanted to restrain was their bodily functions.

Let’s jump into the mid 20th century: everybody’s moving out of apartments (at least, in North America) into private bungalows in the suburbs. At last they’ve got it: privacy. Nobody can even hear you through the walls.

Today, privacy is no longer valuable. What is the value of something that everybody has? Zilch. Why are the social and sexual values of the “third world” so much more conservative than those in Europe and North America? Because their “social economy”, the balance of scarcity and abundance of social values, favours privacy. Privacy hardly exists, so it is very valuable to them.

So why does Ana Voog let the world into her living room, her kitchen, her bathroom? Because privacy is so easy to obtain, that it’s no longer as valuable to her as other things, like, say, her desire to succeed as an artist.

Perhaps that’s also why fashions have changed so much. It’s the economy of sexual relationships. Until the 1950’s, it was in the woman’s best interest to be married to one man, who would provide everything for her until the day she died. A prospective husband would want to make sure that the woman he married would be loyal to him for life. So any indications that she could be available to other men would doom her. She could become a poor spinster, or be forced into prostitution to make a living. Thus, it was not economical for her to appear to be available, even if only for visual ravishment, to a large number of males.

It used to be uneconomical for a woman to be available for visual ravishment by a large number of males. Marriage was different, because social conditions were different. People were less mobile, less prosperous, less flexible. Marriage was for life as much for economic reasons as for moral reasons.

What happened? Why did the mini-skirt appear? Why so many people “shack-up” nowadays, rather than get married first?

What has happened to our society is prosperity. What has happened is that women now are able to earn a living independent of men. What has happened is that our society has adjusted. With the abundance of wealth, privacy, health, and mobility, people are probably actually behaving pretty well the way they’ve always wanted to behave, seeking some kind of emotional fulfillment in relationships, and leaving the relationship if it isn’t there.

We are going to know more and more about ourselves. We are going to watch people live their lives (just wait until the Internet improves to the point where we can have efficient, live streaming video and audio!). It will be a strange knowledge for many of us because we will have never seen these things before. We are going to realize how similar we all are. We all fart, belch, pick our noses, scratch where it itches… we’re just not used to not pretending that we don’t. Once we know that everybody does it, we may have a healthier knowledge of ourselves, and greater acceptance of our own fleshy existences.

Of course, many fundamentalists Christians have a different explanation for all this new behaviour. They call it moral decay. I have never bought that. I have just never believed that we are behaving a whole lot worse than our ancestors behaved, or wanted to behave.

I also have a broader definition of what is “moral”. The fundamentalists, and the American people in general, seem to consider sexual sin to be way, way more important than greed, materialism, or exploitation. What gets you more upset? A man and woman having a consensual sexual relationship outside of marriage, or a society that decides that we are going to turf welfare mothers and their babies so we can all afford a second VCR? Condoms or military aircraft? Swearing or forcing governments in Africa and Central America to close their hospitals before they receive aid from the IMF?

Sorry, James Dobson. I think it’s way more important to save human lives and prevent physical suffering than it is to stop sex between consenting adults. Why don’t you take your $185 million a year and feed the hungry, instead of lobbying against same-sex benefits at the Disney Corporation?

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What a Karacter!

Robert Sibley, a columnist with the Ottawa Citizen, tries, as many Republican and conservative Christian leaders have tried, to argue that President Clinton has significant character flaws that make him unfit to govern.

Aside from this rather brazen snub of the electoral process– the voters have consistently indicated that they approve of his job performance– his argument is seriously flawed in one other significant respect: the greatest presidents of the 20th century all possessed character flaws similar to those of Bill Clinton. If you asked most American voters, and most American historians, who the most effective presidents of the 20th century were, they would almost certainly include Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy (though his term was cut short). They might also include Ronald Reagan, though he left the office after quadrupling the deficit, and Lyndon Johnson, who, in spite of his unpopularity in 1968, had the most aggressive and successful legislative agenda since FDR. All of these five are known to have been unfaithful to their wives.

Who were the worst presidents? Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and George Bush. Unfortunately for Mr. Sibley’s argument, these four were probably, by his definition, the ones with the most “character”, and are believed to have honored their marital vows. Too bad they couldn’t lead.

Sibley goes on to blame Clinton for the nightly news reports on stained dresses and adulterous liaisons. The fact is that the media in Canada rightly regard such activities by Canadian politicians as outside of the public interest and do not report them. It is Kenneth Starr who has decided that the President’s private life should be invaded, and the U.S. media, especially CNN, dutifully– and gleefully– report the salacious details. The Canadian media, rightly and honorably, respects the fact that even politicians are entitled to private lives.

And by the way, isn’t righteous CNN host Larry King working on wife #5?

Neither Newt Gingrich nor Bob Dole, the leaders of the Republican Party, are married to their first wives. But hey, Mr. Sibley, Dan Quayle is! And he is reportedly optimistic that a Republican candidate can defeat Bill Clinton in the year 2000. That would be remarkable indeed, since Bill Clinton can’t run in 2000, having already served two terms.

Nobody likes what Clinton did, but most Americans at least have the good sense to tell pollsters over and over again that they don’t believe they need to hear about it. Maybe they believe that real character includes other attributes, such as respect for privacy, concern for the environment, sound fiscal management (Clinton has the deficit under control), and respect for the expressed wishes of the electorate. Rome is burning while Starr and his Republican satyrs play their twisted fiddles, hoping and praying that what they could not achieve in a fair election or honest discourse can be won with devious snitches and brazen hypocrisy.

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CNN

I saw something really cool today. In the World Cup soccer match between the Netherlands and Korea: a Korean player was given a yellow card for taking too long to take a penalty kick.

Just think: someone made a rule for this incredibly popular sport that requires players to hurry up and put the ball back into play. And this is a game which never stops for a commercial. If you watch only North American team sports and never watched soccer, I need to repeat that to you: they never stop for a commercial.

TSN, of course, does stop. So what do they do? They split the screen into two ugly boxes, one large one on top, and one tiny one on the bottom. They show a commercial, of course, in the large one, and boost the sound way up over the game.

May you never get used to such outrages. The owners and managers of TSN stink. They are pigs. They are greedy and despicable. There is a special place in Hell for them, where they will be strapped in chairs, their eyelids held open with steel clamps, and they are forced to watch 6,778,569 Tidy Bowl commercials over and over again.

***

I tried watching Larry King on CNN the other day. They had four guests on to discuss the Southern Baptist’s Convention’s decision that women should submit to their husbands. Larry King, by the way, has been married about five times. His latest wife is 14 years old. No, I’m kidding. I think she is 28. Larry King looks like he is about 60.

The theologian who tried to defend the statement was a liar. He said it doesn’t mean what we think it means: husbands have the greater responsibility because they are servants and must be responsible for Christ for the family. Really. Women should be happy that men have gladly undertaken this terribly painful, heavy responsibility.  In other words, it means exactly what it appears to mean: men are the boss.  Saying that being the boss is a burden doesn’t change that fact one iota.

As I said, the man is a liar. He has poor ethics. He knows very well that “submit” is exactly what the men of the Southern Baptist Convention mean. It is also, probably, what the women of the Southern Baptist Convention mean. They really believe that the immorality of our day and age is largely the result of women living independent little lives without any men around to make them submit to their leadership. Why don’t these people shows some guts and admit that it means exactly what we think it means?

CNN was more appalling than the Baptist. It cut for commercials about every 30 seconds. You might think there is a legal limit to commercials on U.S. television, but that’s not true. U.S. networks can broadcast as many commercials as they want. And if Larry King or any other broadcaster wants to keep his job, he better resist the temptation to look over to his director, drop his jaw, and say something like, “What? Another commercial already? We just had a whole pile of them?”

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Beware of Young Girls

We’re all familiar by now with the Woody Allen scandal. Woody Allen, the 56-year-old director, was caught having an affair with his adoptive step-daughter, Soon Yi. Mia divorced Woody and sought custody of the children– excluding Soon Yi, presumably.

Our society is so confused about sex. We don’t know what the rules are anymore. The various governments now award survivor benefits to gay spouses; couples bicker in court over frozen embryos; a woman sues the company that makes Viagra because the drug enabled her newly potent husband to leave her and find a new lover; an “independent” (read “Republican Toady”) investigator spends $30 million to discover whether or not sex between consenting adults took place in the White House; a 30-year-old grade school teacher has an affair–and a child–with a 13-year-old male student, and is sent to jail for seven years.

The one thing we do know about sex is that our society has a hysterical obsession with it. Freud would have observed that this hysterical obsession is due to a profound discomfort with the subject, and, indeed, with our own bodies.

The truth is, our society is grossly immature and childish about sex. We want it more than anything else and we get upset and envious when we think someone else is getting more than we are.

Why do you suppose preachers preach more about promiscuous sex than any other sin, including materialism, greed, and racism? Because sex is private. Everybody in the congregation can sit there comfortably and pretend to feel righteous indignation because they know that nobody knows what sexual sins lurk in their own hearts. If, on the other hand, the minister points out that our ruthless greed and materialism and conspicuous consumption is driving one third of world into abject poverty and starvation… well, gee… hope nobody notices my Cadillac or my Hummer in the parking lot, or my three tv sets, or my Rolex watch.

So Woody Allen has sex with his adoptive step-daughter. Some clarity here: apparently Soon Yi is the adoptive/foster daughter of Mia Farrow. After Woody and her became an item, he sort of became Soon Yi’s “step-foster” father. So when Woody has sex with Soon Yi, is this incest?

Well, not really. Incest is sex between a man and his biological daughter. I think our society is relatively straight on that: not allowed. Ever.

So, what is wrong with Woody having an affair with Soon Li? Well, he is in a position of trust over her, and she is a vulnerable young woman, half his age (or less). We frown upon that. We make it downright illegal in many cases, say, for example, a teacher and a fifteen-year-old student.

But wait, Soon Yi is 20-years-old. So she is the age of consent. So is Woody Allen, we think. Did Soon Li have a choice or was she pressured? It’s hard to believe she is not able to walk away whenever she wants. All right. Consensual. Like Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. In both cases, powerful, famous men had consensual adulterous relationships with young, naïve, but awe-struck women. I don’t know of any law against that, because, in our society, adultery is not illegal. It is grounds for a nasty divorce settlement, but not a criminal offense.

Well, let’s look at one more little aspect of this case. I’ll bet a lot of those tabloid readers don’t remember that Mia Farrow was once involved in a little scandal of her own. Mia, you see, is the daughter of John Farrow and Margaret O’Sullivan. Frank Sinatra was a friend of the family, more than twice her age back in 1965. And guess what? Mia and Frank had an affair. Indeed, they were briefly married, until, I think, Frank realized she was a Beatles fan. Since Frank was a friend of the family and more than twice Mia’s age, it might be fair to ask if he wasn’t sort of a father figure (or step-father figure) who took advantage of a position of trust to have a sexual relationship with a vulnerable young woman.

Then we get the kicker.  Mia Farrow, while living with composer Andre Previn and his wife Dory, had an affair with Previn– who was 39 in 1968 (Farrow was 23).  Dory had a nervous breakdown when she found out Mia was pregnant with Andre’s child.  After she recovered, she recorded an album that featured the song “Beware of Young Girls“.  Amazing.  (The song also predicted the fate of that relationship: “one day she’ll go away”.)

One last weird note. Frank Sinatra used to sing a song called “My Way”, which is the anthem of macho egocentric self-sufficiency, but which Frank, insufficient as he was, was not able to write himself. Canadian Paul Anka wrote the song, along with many others like the immortally offensive “Having My Baby”. Paul Anka broke into the business with a fabulously successful single called “Diana”, which, we were told, was a love song about his baby-sitter.

Just imagine a party at some Hollywood mansion. You show up with your wife and your daughters and Jerry Falwell, and circulate among these guests: Frank Sinatra, Mia Farrow, Woody Allen, Jimmy & Tammy Faye Baker, Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton, Paul Anka, Princess Diana and the other Diana, Prince Charles, Camilla Parker-Bowles, Charlton Heston (with his gun), and, just for fun, Dr. Ruth. The leading lights of Western Civilization.

Hey everybody… let’s play twister….

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Instant Insanity

These are just a few of the items that convince me that our society is going insane at an increasingly rapid pace.

1. The Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky/Whoever-else-you-want-to-add scandal in the U.S. The self-proclaimed most powerful nation in the world allows its leader to be handcuffed by the most idiotic court case in the history of the U.S. Right now, they are arguing over whether or not Clinton looked “sternly” at Paula Jones, and may have held the door shut for a “split second” after making sexual advances to her. These people– Kenneth Starr, the Senate Judiciary Committee, Orrin Hatch, the media, are INSANE. Hatch in particular should get an Oscar. There he sits, with a straight face, shamelessly wringing his hands about how tragic and awful that the president had sexual urges— while knowing full well that the entire scandal has become nothing more than a conservative putsch. The media collaborates in a black comedy of farcical proportions, pretending that this is all serious, important stuff. What do these men say privately after the camera is turned off? They must cover their faces and laugh like banshees… “I can’t believe they’re still swallowing this stuff.”

2. Kevin Weber, who stole–let me get this right– FOUR chocolate chip cookies from a restaurant in California, will serve 26 Years to Life in prison for the offense. I am not kidding. 26 years to Life!! At a cost of at least $35K a year, California taxpayers are going to put out about $1 million dollars to convince themselves that they’re really a lot safer now that Kevin Weber is off the streets. This is INSANE.

The first time I read Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, I thought he was exaggerating. He wasn’t. He lived in California at the time he wrote it. Weber is 34. The judge in the case had a chance to review the sentence after the Supreme Court ruled that judges still had some discretion in sentencing under a 3 strikes law. The judge insisted that society is served by this monumentally stupid decision. Yes, MONUMENTALLY STUPID. It makes you want to throw yourself off a cliff. Especially since the media is far more interested in whether or not Bill Clinton looked “sternly” or merely “firmly” at Paula Jones, before opening the door for her to leave his hotel room, than whether some people’s lives are pointlessly destroyed by idiotic laws..

3. A lot of research has been done on Repressed Memory Syndrome lately. It is now very apparent to any reasonable person that no such thing exists. We don’t know for sure if some of the alleged sexual abuse that people claim to have “recovered” memories of really occurred. But where we do know that such abuse (or other trauma) took place, researchers can’t seem to find anybody who can’t remember it. In other words, there are no scientific, rational grounds for believing that such a thing as repressed memory exists, and there never have been such grounds. Nevertheless, dozens of innocent people continue to rot in jail because some prosecutors and police forces refuse to admit they were wrong. [added July 2004] In other words, where there is relatively indisputable evidence that sexual abuse did take place, you would think that a percentage of these victims would have no memory of the events. That is not the case. In every case that we know about, the victims do have a continuously existing memory of it. I’m very interested in reading about it if someone has evidence otherwise.

4. After Mary Kay Letourneau got sentenced to seven years in jail for having sex with a minor (her student, in grade school), and bearing his child, she went and did it again. And now, once again, she is pregnant with his child.

5. Latrell Sprewell, a basketball player, physically attacks his coach, twice. An arbitrator has just ruled that he shouldn’t lose his job, or his $17 million salary, because of his modest indiscretion. Meanwhile, Mo Vaughn, a ball player for the Boston Red Sox, gets off after refusing a breathalyzer test. And don’t you think for one minute that you will get treated differently just because you’re not a rich famous ballplayer!

6. The last time trouble started with the Serbs, the Europeans kind of stood around and talked and talked while tens of thousands of Bosnians were “cleansed”, tortured, raped, and murdered. So trouble starts with these same Serbs in Kosovo, which is 90% populated by Albanians. What does the EU do? Wring it’s hands some more, talk, and talk, and talk, and hope that nothing awful happens. After Bosnia, it is hard to believe that anyone is going to do anything to stop the slaughter.

7. A woman in Hamilton Ontario is suing the hospital that safely delivered her twin babies because it failed to provide a “pain-free” birth. At one point, in between deliveries, she demanded that the doctor stop the process unless she could eliminate the pain she was feeling. Why are taxpayers subsidizing this insanity? Why didn’t the judge toss this one out on it’s ear within the first five minutes? [July 2004: The judge did eventually toss it out.]