Dec. 15, 2008

Here's a tiding of comfort and joy: enlightenment is possible even in the most godawful slough of superstition in the advanced world: the White House. Interviewed by ABC's "Nightline," the president of the United States -- who, save for his legion of faithful in America, is recognized as incapable of lifting himself to an intellectual level beyond that of the witchhunters of 17th-century Salem -- said recently that he's NOT a Biblical literalist.

More, he says he DOES believe in evolution. He hastened to add, absurdly, that it's not incompatible with creationism. For present purposes, let that go. (I argued for my own theory of "comedic design" here.) He added, "You're getting me way out of my lane here. I'm just a simple president. But it's, I think that God created the earth, created the world. . . . All I can just tell you is that I got back into religion and I quit drinking shortly thereafter and I asked for help. . . ."

Soon WE were asking for help. Save us from such saviors and their saved. I'm reminded of Churchill's comment about Clement Atlee: "a modest man with much to be modest about." Also of Lincoln's response to allegations that Gen. Grant drank too much: whatever he's drinking, let's spread it around. Given the policies enacted in his name, I have to wonder whether Bush's decision-making might have improved a bit with a few beers. Could it have gotten worse?

My guess is that the real reason he quit drinking had less to do with Jesus, who, after all, esteemed wine, than that he got "stranded between two stools." He wanted less heaviness in his beer, yet REFUSED to compromise on taste. It may be the only principled stand he ever took. Finally, dying of the thirst caused by his indecision, he fled to Snapple, and America has been paying for it ever since.

Here's another brief summary of the Bushies' amazing war on science, unimaginable in any other advanced nation. Still, at the moment, surrendering to the holiday spirit, I'm thunderstruck by the one thing I may agree with the religious right on, but first let me stress this: echoing Jefferson, I couldn't care less about anyone's views on the afterlife or the origin of reality. T.J. put it something like this: whatever you believe in those respects, "it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

That's why I call them the "Nanny Right." Why care what they believe? The problem is not that they want us to believe as they do, but that they try to force us to DO as they do, knowing that their powers of persuasion are, at best, puny.

I do care about their beliefs to this extent: if you believe such stuff as that reality was created in six days, with God taking off the seventh to watch the NFL -- and close to half of Americans believe similar if not worse nuttiness -- it won't increase my respect for your cerebral powers, as limited as mine may be. (If you do believe the likes of that, you're not likely to care about winning my respect, and would likely feel slandered by it.)

Back to my one point of agreement with the Nanny Right. Like a stopped clock that's right twice a day, they may actually be right, however cuckoo their reasons, that Sex Is Bad. At least MOST sex. (Murphy's Law: "90 percent of everything is crap.") They oppose sex outside marriage, and sometimes even within marriage if not intended for procreation. Thus they also oppose not only abortion but often even sex education and birth control, their opposition rooted in the psychopathologies of Puritanism, which I discussed (among other places) here.

As primitive as their delusions are, it seems to me they're not much worse than the delusion that flowered in the '60s -- in large part, to be sure, in reaction against the Puritan oppressiveness of the '50s -- and has since been mainstream outside Nanny Right fever swamps: that the ultimate disgrace, to borrow a Joseph Epstein line, is to be caught with your pants UP.

This is the era not only of moralistic bullies but also of insta-grat hedonists and vidiots who've debased love, whatever it is, to infatuation with beauty and sensation. Always and everywhere, beauty tyrannizes. Hence the mania for cosmetic surgery. I'm no better. I've mellowed since graduating from my 20s, but in those days, if beautiful ENOUGH, you could have been an illiterate Nazi for all I cared.

Even now I sometimes awaken with chills and fever wondering if the only thing that deterred me from actually proposing to at least a couple of insanely ravishing puffs of fluff was well-founded fear of rejection. I also wonder if I'd ever have any luck with women at all had I not popped the big bucks for a face lift, nose job, ear job, and gastric-bypass surgery. (Know anyone who does great feet?) To borrow the title of a Ronald Reagan autobiography, "Where's the rest of me?" -- what of the REAL me? They probably care NOTHING for it!

Here we get to one of the chief "normal insanities" of Western civilization: marriage, though in most countries it has shed much of the oppressiveness that still blights it in America. More on this in due course. Suffice for now to note that I've long wondered what percentage of the half of marriages that don't end in divorce are happy. The wonder is that any are even tolerable, given the incredibly fatuous premises they're based on. For example: that the hormone-driven infatuation you felt for the cheerleader at 18 or 24 is somehow grounds for concluding you can't be happy, or even sane [band cue], without living with her day after weary day -- that without her you, too, would be wailing "I Who Have Nothing." (Not my moves, hair or clothes; wish it were my voice.)

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How can we not help but be disappointed with sex when we are taught from a younger age to 'make it meaningful.' That's difficult to do when sex is no more 'meaningful' than life itself, which is to say, not much. And if it's so meaningful, how come one can go to that party all by oneself and have just as much fun? The irony is that females seem to have won the monogamy battle (our marriage-based society is terrified of anything that 'threatens' it), but lost the happiness war. I think our society should be constructed differently. Monogamy is not good for women, and definitely not suited to men. The elephants -- arguably the smartest land mammals other than humans (and that could be debated) -- do it well: a matriarchal system of mutual support and child-rearing, visited by males at the appropriate times. Women are so better at taking care of and supporting each other, rather than relying on men. And that would definitely make men more lovable.

I'm sure you'd agree, Rose, that we need BOTH women's lib and men's lib. Hard to say which gender is more enslaved. Men have always been driven to be workaholic money machines by focusing obsessively on warpingly narrow and soul-withering specialties. That's why 40 years ago the feminist Germaine Greer ("The Female Eunuch") warned that all would be lost if women's lib turned out to mean little more than women's assuming traditional male roles. Well, damn near all has indeed been lost.

I do think you go off the rails a bit by comparing humans to elephants. No, elephants aren't perfect, Rose, but let's stop short of slander.