lunadelcorvo | America's core strength? Moralizing about sex.

A very funny, witty, and spot on post from Daily Kos.

If there is one thing America is still very, very good at, it is moralizing about sex. Long after the manufacturing jobs have all left America, and after we have drilled out the last drop of oil, and after we've abandoned Arizona to either climate change or some new mutant form of racist old people, we'll still have at least two major industries. The first is the fast food industry, which will never die. The second is the omnipresent industry of deciding who should have sex, when they are allowed to have it, and how much they should be punished for it.

So this was a good week in America. We were able to have lots and lots of conversations about Our Great Defining Issue, the only one that really seems to motivate us anymore. No jobs? Yeah, Congress might get around to that someday. Economy sucks? Meh. Hey, I think we're still at war, right? I think? Hmm, hard to tell. But start talking about penises and vaginas, and everyone in political discourse immediately wants in on that. That's right in our wheelhouse. We're good at moralizing about other people having sex.

Read the rest here at Daily Kos.

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I saw that one! It is funny, except for the disturbing idea that these people want to run our Nation and force their narrow beliefs into the law of the Land.

Knowing as much as I know about 17th century colonial America, I can't say I'm surprised, but why did we back here manage to stop thinking like sidekicks of Oliver Cromwell a century and more ago?

Maybe we exported all the real nutbars in the 1620's and 1630's? :os

I don't know. Somehow the idea of 'America' has becomes synonymous with having an enemy, with fighting some injustice. I call it the Big Bad Wolf Syndrome. When we have a war to fight, an external enemy to focus on, we do OK internally. People grow, freedoms flourish, we progress. When the enemy outside gives way, we turn on ourselves.

For decades, the threat of communism in the form of the Cold War kept us occupied. In the 50s we had the post-war advent of women in the workplace and the Civil Rights movement. We had the 60s with individualism, women's rights, and the Pill. We had the 70s with our leaps in science, space exploration, conservation and environmental awareness. Even the 80s, despite the unbridled consumerism and greed of the 'me generation' saw advances in personal freedoms and progressive causes. Then the wall came down, and as one scholar out it (paraphrasing from memory), "having lost the barbarian at the gates, we turned out fear and hate on the fairy in the garden."

Even Iraq & Afghanistan have been couched as a war against the enemy within as much as without. 9/11 has been explicitly linked to gays, feminists, blacks, Muslims here at home. Lacking any other opponent against with to measure our childish and testosterone fueled worth, we must have an evil against which to do so. We are very dualistic, this young and foolish country, and we have to have our cosmic struggle. I just hope we last long enough to grow up...

You should appreciate this poem by the Greek poet C P Cavafy :o)

Waiting for the Barbarians
By Constantine Cavafy (1864-1933), translated by Edmund Keeley

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Love it! And so very, very apt!

Is it not just? :o)

Cute. Very funny. I never heard of the Daily Kos, but thanks for the link. We end up moralizing about sex because it's interesting. I've yet to meet one human being whose ears don't prick up at the mention of sex. The economy sure isn't. All those numbers....

Sure, there is a certain vicariousness to it, but it's more than that. Regulation/oppression/stigmatization of sex & sexuality has been a core tool of power from time immemorial, and it's a very basic method of control.

This is only aggravated by the misogynistic nature of 'American' (and, sorry to say, Christian) moral codes. Keep women oppressed, silenced, and unable to control their own fertility (and thereby their own lives) and you have half-mastered a totalitarian society. As my buddy (Foucault) in the icon says, it's all about discourse and power....

P.S. I highly recommend KOS - it's generally a pretty solid progressive blog, with a somewhat lower percent of kooks than most....

Seconded.

America's core strength? Moralizing about sex.

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