It's the Sex, Stupid
by Elinor Hoefs

Over the years I have created a short list of activities, some quite seductive, to be avoided at all costs because extended exposure, I learned, results in near-suicidal depression:

1. Listening to Russian or Bulgarian male choruses singing medieval Eastern Orthodox music in highly reverberant cathedral spaces.
2. Reading a lot of Kafka in a short time.
3. Contemplating the plague of SUV's.
4. Thinking at all about the existence of 40,000 weapons.

Recently it became necessary to add a fifth item, to the top of the list in fact: Watching a House Judiciary Committee controlled by Republicans undertaking the impeachment of a Democratic president.

But watch I did. My reactions will no doubt be familiar to you. Denial (can these people be for real?), mockery (clowns are to be laughed at, right?), scorn (a spectacle of unenlightened stupidity), anxiety (these are elected leaders), and finally the beginnings of unplumbable despair.

Then, satori. The moment came unbidden and unexpected, but that's how the old books say it comes. Like this:

In her appearance on behalf of the President, former Representative Elizabeth Holtzman was going through a short list of past, unpunished presidential lies: Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin, Eisenhower and the U-2, Nixon and the bombing of Cambodia, Reagan/Bush and Iran-Contra.
Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.) asked her if she felt that President Clinton's duplicitous behavior did not warrant impeachment, which produced the following exchange:

Sensenbrenner: Could you tell us, is there not a major difference between historical falsehood as opposed to lies before a Federal court proceeding or a grand jury?

Holtzman: I hate to answer a question with a question, but don't you think there's an enormous difference between keeping a dual set of books about bombing of a foreign country without the authorization of Congress and not telling the truth about private sexual conduct?

Sensenbrenner: I think there is--there should be no difference.

In other words, these incomprehensible minds see no difference between bombing Cambodia and lying about it and fucking Monica and lying about it.

So there it was, the chasm between me and them, clearly defined.

Was the lying the problem, as the Republicans kept insisting? No. Clearly not. Think how many presidents have gotten away scot-free with all kinds of horrendous military attacks resulting in unnumbered deaths, then lied about it in various ways, and wound up being lauded as great patriots.

The problem is sex, stupid.

Sex. It's so bad you can't talk about it in Congress. Sex was the elephant in the hearing room. First the Republican committee strewed the Starr report around the world, but then come hearing time, how many of those salacious details were, uh, probed? Nary a one. Even the adjective "sexual" was avoided (one spoke of "intimate" relations, or "sensual"--Jesus!--relations). As if "intimate" and "sensual" were pejoratives.

C.P. Snow was certainly right in his perception that the two cultures of science and the humanities are separated by a vast gulf. My little moment of Sensenbrenner satori seems to indicate there's another fairly wide gap in the world today, that concerning the importance and role of sex.

On one side is a growing generation, educated, worldly, hip to both drugs and sex, that realizes 1) sex is great but, given the range of creative lives we live, it is not the be-all and end-all, and 2) after orgasm, life goes on.

On the other side you have the old (ancient, in fact) farmer-gatherer, Industrial Age, fear-religion culture where sex = guilt = (in extreme cases) death, as Leslie Fiedler pointed out long ago (See Love and Death in the American Novel). It's the mindset which is so extreme that it will not even consider abortion in cases of rape and incest. The mindset so extreme that a simple encounter in a bar can lead to frozen death on a Wyoming barbed wire fence. So extreme that the only proper punishment for a revealed presidential affair is impeachment (a sort of political expulsion from Eden, I suppose).

There is no talking across this gap because it arises from the living of such vastly different lives. Can you imagine Bob Barr (R-Ga.) and Maxine Waters (D-Cal.) sitting down some evening for a rewarding one-on-one chat? Inconceivable. Waters of course would be easily able to listen and actually hear what Barr was saying. But Barr could not, because Waters's very words would be pushing all of his fear buttons.

Because he comes from, and still inhabits, a culture, a very old culture, in which the powerful pleasure of sex is so threatening that it has to be guarded against at all times, at all costs. Eternal vigilance is the price of repression. In such a culture, the highest rule, always unstated, is this:

It is only the unexamined life that is worth living. If you don’t understand a) Republicans or b) Fundamentalist Christians, just remember that that’s the invisible bumpersticker on all their a) SUV’s or b) pickups.

At the impeachment hearings, on one side of the chairman's seat, we had an array of such people, not necessarily unintelligent, who got to where they are by adamantly refusing to question authority, external and internal. On the other side, an array of people who have created lives out of the struggle toward freedom. The iron curtain may be gone. In its place--and of course not just in America--we have a far older, more impermeable barrier: mommy's and daddy's closed bedroom door.

END

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