DEGENERACY AND WHY I WOULD RATHER READ A GOOD BOOK
Recently a musical (?) group called Two Live Crew purveyed songs that were one-half profanity. To some reviewers, this is art. Also recently, the art world extolled a photograph of a cross in a bottle of urine; it was entitled "Piss Christ." According to "discerning" critics, this has deep meaning. On the other hand, Conservatives say neither one is not art but offensive garbage.
I go with the conservatives. It is degenerate; no two ways about it. Two Live Crew are the equivalent of little boys spurting milk out of their noses. Both Two Live and this photo have found something that will get a rise out of people and their proponents are determined to do it ad infinitum. Two Live should be given to their mothers to be spanked. A fitting revenge for the photo would be to put a Picasso in a bottle of urine; you would hear laments from 'modern' artists that nothing was sacred.
How about the mass media. If it isn't sex, drugs and rock and roll, it certainly is sex, violence and flying saucers. (You know of course that Area 51 really contains a Macy's.) When someone protests, the media moguls say that it is merely giving the public what it wants. Nonsense, it is giving the public what a bunch of degenerates thinks it wants. The Rap Singer M.C. Hammer, I hear, preached decency, hard work, thrift, prayer. And no drugs. His albums were million sellers. But after a while he couldn't find a big company to produce his records. Ultimately, he went bankrupt. The critics, by the way, hated him for being "superficial."
I have a third example of degeneracy. I once told a woman who had a set of illegitimate children that it would be better if there was a man about the house. She was morally indignant about this. I was one of those narrowminded prudes! Her morality was better than mine! In short, not only was she degenerate but she did not even bother to compliment virtue with hypocrisy. (Oh, by the way, she had a decent man around the house at the time who was kind to her kids, and she loved it.)
Should we have censorship? Should there be a law? Here I agree with my kneejerk liberal friends. The answer is no. Two reasons. First, the lesser reason. Censorship usually doesn't center on what's actually dangerous. It centers on the lacunae of oral sex or the degree to which a human can be mashed to a pulp. In short, it deals with what is offensive. What do you usually do with offensive people? Censor them? No, you shun them. You inch away from them at parties. You remain silent when they spout off and hope they get the message. You don't send for law enforcement officials unless they are keeping you awake at night or defiling your tulips.
The second reason not to censor is the big kahuna: that censorship itself is part of the problem. I must be the only one in seven States who believes that both the Sodom of Hollywood and Victorian Repression are the menace. Let me explain. We're a bunch of degenerates, degeneratus americanus, because we believe there is a paradise beyond conventional bounds. That over there we will find true pleasure. The money making moguls beckon us with a Siren Song. But the censors drive us with curiosity: what do we have to be protected from? What Eden lies in adultery, crack and cocaine, in May-December marriage, in hardcore porn, in softcore relationships, in Madonna ville. We suspect it is so pleasureful that once we get on the horse of such pleasures we won't be able to get off it.
But the people who are obsessed with drugs, sex, porn, outrages to common decency and other so-called pleasures look miserable. Dope addicts, in particular, look like something the cat dragged in. Women who surrender to sexual passion once too often have hard looks; the minuses of it have taken their toll. The men who are obsessed with it, on the other hand, seem like they have been cloistered in a monastery for ten years. No matter how often they get 'it,' they can never be satisfied.
You might say that this is on the outside. On the inside, they are happy as clams. Or are they? My experience with surrendering to pleasure is that it is not all it is cracked up to be. Sometimes it's just plain painful. When it isn't, far too often it is more pleasure for me to curl up with a good book. Certainly that is the case with boogying till dawn. Not at my age.
No one is saying sex is not pleasureful, or gambling or drugs. I am sure that the women's romance novels are right and sex WITH THE RIGHT MAN is like fireworks and walks on the beach. And the act is between a golden triangle and stiff rod, as the books say. But to leave it at that underestimates the ability of humans to turn pleasure into pain. Even in the midst of a thousand heavens with Seraphim all about, people can see the hole and not the doughnut. Often if everything is not perfect, if a hair is out of place or someone burps, the sex act is ruined completely.
I know a woman who all her life was trying to get away from pain. She would sit for hours stewing about her pain. When she found the slightest pain, she would try to annihilate it root and branch. Nonetheless, by stewing, everything in life ultimately became a pain. Driving so she gave up her license. Cooking and cleaning so she gave that to her husband. Shopping so she stayed in the house. Ultimately, getting up in the morning was a problem so she stayed in bed for six months.
Nothing worked; she was still miserable. Her husband was a laggard, her daughter was ungrateful. Her bed offered a 1,001 discomforts. Of course, the mere act of staying in bed has its problems: like the danger of heart failure: but that's another story.
Another way pleasure can be transmuted into pain is this. The pleasure in the first place is escaping to some oasis unassociated with our problems. Over time that pitstop becomes associated with our problems; so we seek out some new South Sea island, some new sanctuary. But ultimately our problems catch up with us there too. A bathroom scene no longer counts as sexy as it did in the '40s and '50s. You can get no pleasure out of reading that someone is peeing or sitting on the john. If I wrote a bathroom scene, I would be a laughingstock. It might even puzzle some people. Or take another example from the '50s, the line that made The Amboy Dukes a dirty novel: "she glanced at him saucily." It sates no palate anymore. These days if a sex scene doesn't reveal every last bit of cellulite, it gets rejected. And that's in the children's books.
Are drugs like alcohol, marijuana or LSD intrinsically pleasurable or do we take them because they bring us to a place different from our painful bourgeois existence? Because marijuana takes us out of space and time, and LSD takes us out of sanity. Of course, just like inner cities, the drugged state gets gentrified. All our pains come back to haunt us. So some take more and more in the vain hope they will achieve a permanently happy state, but no matter the amount their problems soon catch up with them.
A third way we humans transmute pleasure into pain is familiarity breeding contempt. Our pleasures become our normal boring state. For instance, the stereotyped aristocrat of pre-revolutionary France who is jaded with being waited on hand and foot, of playing baccarat 'round the clock, of Versailles and the Tuileries, of his Rembrandts and his Rubens. Even being spanked has lost its elan.
But we don't have to go to pre-revolutionary France to savor this. How many execs with multi million dollar accounts and secretaries making the coffee think: is this all? The same thing seems to be true of heroin takers. Heroin kills pain directly but the heroin state soon becomes a new model of misery.
There is a species of "pleasure," where we do not have to worry about pleasure; it was not pleasurable to begin with. Its intrinsic virtues were all hype. One night in my professional student days I noticed how miserable I was getting stunk-o drunk. It was really not a pleasure getting plastered, blacking out and vomiting next morning. Yet all my colleagues advertised it as a great experience to be looked forward to and treasured.
Then there was the pleasure of shooting ice water into your veins; something I remember being hyped in '60s Hippy circles. I never did it myself; but from the way various 'freaks' extolled it, I realized how painful it must be.
During the '50s, TV extolled the virtue of taking a beautiful woman to a nightclub, smoking, and drinking cocktails throughout the night. While there may be something pleasurable about this, the pleasure hyped was the envy everyone about you must be having. Recently, Madonna, the sex goddess, had sex with Dennis Rodman, the hunk with the chartreuse hair. One would think that the trumpets would have sounded and the cupids flying so much has the sexual potency of these people been hyped. However, both reported that the sex was not great.
Then there is the pleasure of looking at the photo of Piss Christ or the photographer with a broom appropriately placed. (Any sane person would be humiliated to be seen in that position.) The pleasure, of course, is thumbing your nose at the establishment. To me, it is thumbing your nose at a dead horse. Similarly, it is both pleasure and scholarship now to read the Marquis de Sade. I once tried to read him and found him to be an impossible bore. His catalogs of cruelty disgusted me at first, but after a while the whole experience was numbing. Ultimately, I figured I got more fun reading Black Beauty.
In the end, our pleasure is more elastic than people admit. It is a fact that some cultures have lots of drunkeness and others next to none. Some have lots of dope addiction and others next to none. Sometimes, like in Japan or Singapore, these low rates are because anyone caught with a reefer gets lined up against the wall and shot. But other times, like in Sweden or England 20 years ago, it is because the natives could be less interested.
I have been told that the inhabitants of Denmark and Sweden are not in the least interested in porn and only make it for foreign consumption. I once saw a depressing porn flick from Sweden; if I hadn't shut it off, I would have been impotent for a week. I wonder if that was because the film maker hadn't gotten the idea behind pornography? He had the prerequisite number of sex acts, but the low baleful voices and the funeral dirge left something to be desired.
Does what I am saying sound too much like oriental mysticism, the type you will hear from advocates of the New Age (too often appropriately rhyming with sewage)? I do not deny it. That more and more does not bring us happiness is the crux of Hinduism and Buddhism. It was also the crux of Western philosophy before the 17th Century, of early Christianity, and of the Classical tradition derived from the Stoics and the Epicureans. All old civilizations building on ancient wisdom realized this bit of wisdom: sometimes you have to sit back and forget the bumps.
At the beginning I said we should not make vice per se illegal. In fact, I go farther: we should experience vice periodically but under the magnifying glass of wisdom so it should be seen for the low, deadend pursuit it really is. We should wallow in it from time to time, like hippos and pigs in mud, to relieve ourselves of parasitic notions. Maybe we should even teach vice in elementary school. That would turn school kids off it for life. ("Teacher, do I have to drink this stuff, I don't like the taste of it?")