The Enemy At Home (19 page)

Moreover, the most passionate advocates of cultural and moral decadence are on the left. “Indecency is part of an American birthright,” writes Frank Rich, the culture columnist of the
New York Times
and one of the most influential liberal critics in the country. Rich is reviewing a play that he describes as “featuring incest, bestiality and almost every conceivable bodily function.” Predictably, he loves it. One should not assume from his praise of obscenity that Rich is incapable of moral indignation. He is indignant about what he terms “the indecency crusade,” about those who oppose obscenity. And what do these nefarious people seek? According to Rich, they seek a “repressive cultural environment” in which movie, theater, and music producers may actually restrain themselves. “Our new Puritans,” Rich darkly warns, seek to “stamp out…everything that is joyously vulgar in American culture.”
¹⁶

Several years ago the social critic Henry Louis Gates, who is the chairman of the Black Studies Department at Harvard University, offered a highbrow apologia for the rap lyrics of the group 2 Live Crew. At first glance, the group’s music might seem difficult to defend. The songs hail the pleasures of forced intercourse: “I’ll break you down and dick you long,” “So we try real hard just to break the walls,” “I’ll bust your pussy, then break your backbone,” and so on. Much of the content is simply grotesque.

Suck my dick, bitch, and make it puke

Lick my ass up and down

Lick it till your tongue turn doo-doo brown.

Gates argued that 2 Live Crew’s music was “brilliant…astonishing and refreshing…exuberant hyperbole.” For Gates, the group’s “so-called obscenity” was comparable to Shakespeare’s lyrics. “Many of the greatest classics of Western literature contain quote-unquote lewd words,” Gates declared, adding that 2 Live Crew’s lyrics were “part of a venerable Western tradition.”
¹⁷

Admittedly most American liberals and leftists are not partial to such vulgar fare as the songs of 2 Live Crew. Many liberals speak condescendingly about Jerry Springer, Howard Stern, and even
Will
&
Grace.
Their objection is not that these shows feature moral depravity, but that the moral depravity is not highbrow enough for their taste. Sophisticated liberals prefer plays like
The Mistress Cycle,
described by
New York Times
reviewer Miriam Horn as featuring “four women from remote places and times, all of whom have slept with men not their husbands.” Here one finds just the right mix of obscurity and depravity that liberals love. Horn has nothing but praise for these women. “These are mysterious, original, daring women.” In one of her essays, philosopher Martha Nussbaum gives the example of the Athenian thinker Crates and his lover, Hipparchia, who “copulated in public and went off together to dinner parties.” For Nussbaum this couple demonstrates “the life of the cosmopolitan” at its best.
¹⁸

When photographer Robert Mapplethorpe was criticized for some of his offensive subjects, such as his portrait of himself with a bullwhip protruding from his anus, liberals rushed to celebrate Mapplethorpe’s genius and to bullwhip his critics. Social critic Susan Sontag wrote a fawning introduction to a book of Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Another liberal hero of recent years was Andres Serrano, who came to public attention for his work
Piss Christ,
featuring a crucifix suspended in a jar of the artist’s own urine. Liberals did not merely defend these artists’ right to produce their work; they defended their right to receive grants from the federal government through the National Endowment for the Arts. Many liberals denounced Mapplethorpe and Serrano’s critics as advocates of “censorship.” Here censorship was defined not as government suppression of a work of art but rather as government refusal to subsidize the kinds of art that liberals like.

I am not suggesting that, in their personal behavior, liberals act any worse than conservatives or anyone else. Some years ago, liberal congressman Barney Frank answered a personal ad in the
Washington Blade
in which a male prostitute, Stephen Gobie, drew public attention to his “hot bottom” and “large endowment.” Frank began to pay Gobie for sex and even invited Gobie to move in with him. When the arrangement soured, Gobie revealed to the press that he had been running a full-service prostitution ring out of Frank’s Capitol Hill apartment.
¹⁹
Conservatives savored the Frank story, but as they know—and as left-wing writer Joe Conason gleefully details in his book
Big Lies
—there have been numerous cases of misbehavior involving outstanding conservative members. During the period when Clinton was sharing his cigar with Monica Lewinsky, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was cheating on his second wife with a congressional committee staffer. Congressman Robert Livingstone was forced to withdraw his name for Speaker shortly after his extramarital dalliances with female lobbyists became public. When the press reported conservative congressman Henry Hyde’s adulterous affair with Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth, Hyde dismissed it as a “youthful indiscretion” even though he was forty years old at the time.

Divorce rates are high in red America as well as blue America, and some liberal states, like Massachusetts, have lower divorce rates than conservative states like Wyoming.
²⁰
Moreover, in its habits of cultural consumption, red America is quite similar to blue America. Shortly after the 2004 election the
New York Times
ran a front-page article, “Many Who Voted for Values Still Like Their Television Sin.” The article revealed that shows like
Sex and the City
and
Desperate Housewives
are equally popular on the liberal coasts and in the conservative heartland.
²¹
So the contrast that some on the right draw between a decadent liberal coastline and a virtuous conservative heartland seems to be invalid. Liberal values have penetrated the heartland. In this sense liberals are the dominant side in the “culture war.”

The real difference between liberals and conservatives is not over the practice of vice or even its cultural consumption. The real difference is over the advocacy of vice. Conservatives, even while they divorce or engage in homosexual conduct, will not generally praise divorce or homosexuality. Many on the right will concede that vulgarity and excess are popular, but they do not share liberal enthusiasm over this. Conservatives are hardly immune to the vicarious thrills provided by sexual infidelity on television, but they are not likely to champion infidelity as an esthetic or social value, or to attack traditional morality.

Recently the executive producer of
Desperate Housewives
revealed that “at its core, our show is about what it means to be a wife and mother. It’s about the millions of women leading lives of quiet desperation.” This notion that marriage is an iron cage and infidelity is the escape from the cage is the voice of social liberalism. Caryn James of the
New York Times
praises shows like
Desperate Housewives
for recognizing that “monogamy has come to seem an impossible goal,” so that “the new ideal is honesty about infidelity.”
²²
Not all liberals feel this way, of course. But only in the liberal community does monogamy seem an impossible goal; only among liberals does a confession of infidelity become a hallmark of virtue.

ANOTHER AREA WHERE
liberals are active promoters and apologists for cultural depravity is pornography. The topic is relevant to a discussion of American culture because the culture has become increasingly pornographic. Pornographic themes have entered advertising and movies in a way that would have seemed unthinkable even a decade ago. Smut virtually thrusts itself upon us, most notably through e-mails and Web pop-ups that are more persistent than any other form of online advertising. Liberals, of course, have not caused the porn revolution. But they are, along with pornographers, its biggest promoters and defenders.

Pornography is, of course, an ancient vice. There is very little that our contemporary pornographers depict that was unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Even child pornography—showing, say, men having sex with young boys—would not have surprised the Greeks, who did after all practice pederasty. What is new, and what would have amazed our Greek forebears, is the mainstreaming of pornography and the kinds of arguments that some liberals make in defense of it.

Pornography is now big business in America. You no longer have to go places to find it; it now finds you. Once confined to “dirty old men” and seedy areas of town, pornography has now penetrated the hotel room and home. The Internet and cell phone have made pornography accessible everywhere, all the time. The spread of porn is not surprising, and neither is its popularity. It is not the appeal of sex, but the appeal of voyeurism. After all, the actors in porn films seek to gratify not themselves but the viewer. The spectator finds himself in an unnatural position of being witness to a sexual act that is conducted fully for his benefit. While it is customary to refer to pornography as “adult material,” there is in fact nothing “adult” about pornography. Rather, pornography provides the juvenile fantasy of the ever-willing and ever-horny female who wants to have sex with every man she sees. Traditionally porn has been considered debasing and immoral because it reduces sexual love to bodily functions. Pornography promotes a trivialization and dishonesty about sex that is unhealthy for human development.

In a manner that the older generation of Americans finds scandalous, porn has become socially acceptable and lost its moral stigma. A good example of this cultural cachet is that today a porn star like Jenna Jameson appears on billboards and on the cover of magazines like
Vanity Fair.
In some liberal intellectual circles, the advocacy of porn is now viewed as a mark of sophistication. Recently
The New Yorker
reported on an event held at the Mary Boone Gallery in Manhattan where “artists, collectors, literati, and other art world regulars mingled seamlessly with adult-movie producers and directors and quite a few of the performers themselves.” The purpose of the event was to celebrate the publication of the book
XXX: Porn Star Portraits.
The pictures in the book are accompanied by appreciative essays by leading figures on the left like Gore Vidal, John Waters, and Salman Rushdie.
²³

The liberal defense of obscenity and pornography began many decades ago as a defense of great works of literature and of free speech. It began, in other words, as a noble cause. Pressured by philistines, ignorant prosecutors brought obscenity charges against works like James Joyce’s
Ulysses,
Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary,
and D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. These are not works of equivalent value: Lawrence, for instance, is markedly inferior to Joyce and Flaubert, and literary culture would not suffer greatly if any of his books had been suppressed. The liberal claim that artistic flourishing requires the widest possible freedom of expression seems dubious: historically art has fared better under conditions of moderate repression (Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England) than it has under complete freedom. Even so, I’m glad that liberals fought to defend Joyce, Nabokov, and Picasso from efforts at unreasonable censorship. Some traditional Muslims may want to censor all books and artworks that portray immorality or explicit sexuality, but such works may have genuine merit, and so this is too suffocating a standard for a healthy and vibrant culture.

The fanaticism of contemporary liberalism can be seen in the insistence that all forms of obscenity are equally deserving of legal protection and that no restriction of pornography should be allowed. This is the position urged in former ACLU president Nadine Strossen’s book
Defending Pornography.
As liberal pundit Wendy Kaminer puts it, in her foreword to the book, “You don’t need to know anything about art—you don’t even need to know what you like—in order to defend speech deemed hateful, sick or pornographic.” Kaminer even takes the view that child pornography should be permitted because “fantasies about children having sex are repellent to most of us, but the First Amendment is designed to protect repellent imaginings.”
²⁴
This should not be taken to reflect what the First Amendment actually says—the framers were concerned to protect political speech and not depictions of pedophilia—but it is a good reflection of how some liberals would like to interpret it.

Groups like the ACLU have taken the approach that pornography rights, like the rights of accused criminals, are best protected at their outermost extreme. This means that the more foul the obscenity, the harder liberals must fight to allow it. By protecting expression at its furthest reach, these activists believe they are fully securing the free speech rights of the rest of us. It is a long way, for instance, from James Joyce to a loathsome character like Larry Flynt, the publisher of
Hustler
magazine. There would seem to be an obvious distinction between fighting to include Joyce in a high school library and insisting that the same library maintain its subscription to
Hustler.
For the ACLU, however, the two causes are part of the same free speech crusade. In a sense, the ACLU considers the campaign for
Hustler
a more worthy cause because if
Hustler
is permitted, anything is permitted, and therefore free speech has been more vigorously defended.

In recent years, leading liberals have gone from defending Flynt as a despicable man who nevertheless has First Amendment rights to defending Flynt as a delightful man who is valiantly fighting against the forces of darkness and repression. “What I find refreshing about Larry Flynt is that he doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a scumbag,” Frank Rich says. “At least Flynt’s honest about what he’s doing.”
²⁵
These liberal virtues—honesty and openness about being a scumbag—are on full display in Milos Forman’s film
The People vs. Larry Flynt.
The movie sanitizes Flynt in order to make him a likable, even heroic figure. In reality Flynt is short and ugly; in the movie he is tall and handsome, played by Woody Harrelson. In life Flynt was married five times. One of his daughters has publicly accused him of sexually abusing her, a charge Flynt denies. All of this is suppressed in the movie, where Flynt has one wife and is portrayed as an adoring and supportive husband.
Hustler
features a good deal of gross and repellent material, such as its parody of Jerry Falwell having sex with his grandmother, or its picture of a woman being processed through a meat grinder. The movie, by contrast, features mostly tasteful erotica; if Flynt goes over the line, it is always presented as mischievous fun. If there is anyone who is despicable in the movie, it is Flynt’s critics, who are unfailingly shown as smug, hypocritical, vicious, and stupid.