Skipping Towards Gomorrah (2 page)

Our founding fathers had ample chance to distance themselves from or completely disavow the pursuit of happiness when they gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft the United States Constitution. They didn't seem to slouch into Philadelphia heavy with regret about the happiness line in the Declaration of Independence. In fact, they seemed pretty pleased with themselves, gathering in Philadelphia, as they wrote, “in order to form a more perfect union.” (
More
perfect?) I'm no Constitutional scholar, I admit, nor have I had the honor of being nominated to the Supreme Court; I didn't serve my country as the first in a long line of wildly ineffective drug czars; and I've also never hosted a do-as-I-say call-in radio advice program that obsessed about sexual morality while at the same time nude pictures of me taken by a premarital sex partner were circulated on the Web. And I haven't, like Bennett, “served two presidents.” (I did, however, serve Prince Edward and Joan Collins when I was living in London and supporting myself by waiting tables.) Nevertheless, it seems to me that if “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” were such a big, fat, fucking mistake, then our wise founding fathers would have realized it in the eleven years that passed between the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the first meeting of the Constitutional Congress. If they felt “the pursuit of Happiness” was a mistake, they surely would have done something to correct it when they gathered to make our union just a little more perfect. (Our founding fathers failed, of course. It was their “original intent” to allow slavery to flourish and to deny women the right to vote. Talk about your imperfect unions.)

Many of my fellow Americans are deeply annoyed at the self-appointed virtuecrats and preening moralists who clog our airwaves and best-seller lists, and have warped our political conversation to the point that simple honesty and truth-telling about sex or drugs disqualifies someone from public office. (Dr. Joycelyn Elders, RIP.) I, for one, am sick of being told that I live in an immoral wasteland. Robert Bork is a best-selling author, former federal judge, and failed Supreme Court nominee who looks at the United States and sees Gomorrah, the biblical city-state destroyed by God (along with Sodom, a neighboring bedroom community). William J. Bennett is the Jesse Jackson of the right, the omnipresent former education secretary and federal drug “czar,” who, like Jackson on the left, is the ass his party feels obliged to kiss. The author of
The Book of Virtues,
Bennett pops up on television whenever a Democrat ejaculates on an intern. (Bennett was somewhat less prominent when Newt Gingrich divorced his second wife and married a congressional aide.) Pat Buchanan is the conservative television pundit, Hitler-admiring two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and the Reform Party's candidate in 2000.

Bork's
Slouching Towards Gomorrah
was published in 1996, and in it Bork made the case for censorship (of rap albums, video games, and violent films), the rollback of reproductive rights, and the enforcement of sodomy laws, among other things. It's a thrilling read, and it set a new standard for conservative commentary. In books, magazines, speeches, and on television, Bork and other right-wing “scolds,” as Andrew Sullivan has dubbed them, argue that the United States of America is in a state of moral collapse—Bennett says as much in the title of his latest book,
The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family
. Buchanan paints a picture of the United States in
The Death of the West
that reads like a translation of an Osama bin Laden video. The United States is “a moral sewer and a cultural wasteland that is not worth living in and not worth fighting for,” according to Buchanan. (Buchanan seems anxious to be president of this moral sewer, however.) “To look at America today,” writes Ralph Reed, former director of the Christian Coalition, in his book
Active Faith
, “is to witness a nation struggling against forces as dangerous as any military foe it has ever faced. The threats, however, come not from without but from within.” Those threats? Abortion, drugs, and single moms. “Bill O'Reilly is even madder today than when he wrote his last book,
The O'Reilly Factor
,” reads the dust jacket to Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly's latest book,
The No Spin Zone
. “He's mad because things have gone from bad to worse, in politics, in Hollywood, in every social stratum of the nation.”

In this seemingly endless flow of America-the-moral-sewer books and op-eds, scolds argue that our nation is shot through with moral rot, weakened by the demands of the ACLU, feminists, immigrants, secular humanists, and gays and lesbians. The moral-rotters, according to conservatives, are aided and abetted at every step by the liberal media elite. (The same media elite that can't turn over a rock without offering a book deal and a show on Fox News to whatever is found crawling underneath.) As we learned on September 11, 2001, our moral rot can have deadly consequences with supernatural causes. According to Rev. Jerry Falwell, it was the presence of feminists, ACLU members, homos, and federal judges that prompted God to “lift the curtain” of protection from the United States, “and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve [on September 11].”

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, some people predicted that social conservatives would have to shut the fuck up. Writing in
The New Republic
after the attacks, Andrew Sullivan pointed out that the reaction of the American people to the attacks on our country by Islamo-fascists proved that the scolds—the Borks, Buchanans, Bennetts, Falwells, Robertsons, et alia—had been wrong about America all along:

Shortly after Sullivan wrote those words, Pat Buchanan's
Death of the West
—“. . . [the United States is] a moral sewer and a cultural wasteland that is not worth living in and not worth fighting for. . . .”—shot up the
New York Times
best-selling list.

Curiously, after spending three hundred pages making the United States sound like Calcutta, Buchanan wraps up his book with a one-sentence paragraph about what a beautiful country this is. Speakers at the Republican National Convention do the same thing: Once they've finished telling us that the United States is a shithole, they wrap up their speeches with claims that the United States of America is unique in the world, a shining example to other nations, and the greatest country on earth. Oh, and God bless America.

It's difficult to square this circle: America speeds towards hell in a handbasket, year in, year out, through both Democratic and Republican administrations; things get progressively worse, never better; and yet the United States remains the greatest country on earth, year in, year out. How is this possible? How can we be the stinking moral sewer and the shining city on the hill at the same time? Gomorrah and God's country? Are all the other countries on earth so irredeemably awful, so squalid, so beyond hope that no matter how fast America falls we can't pass a single one on the way down? This explanation might cut it if the rest of the world were Syria, Sudan, and Serbia. But how do the Buchanans, Bennetts, and O'Reillys account for perfectly pleasant little countries like Sweden? Or the Netherlands? Or Canada? (By the way, someone needs to alert Pat Buchanan that Canada is not in Europe. On page 200 of
The Death of the West
, he writes, “Europe has begun to resemble the United States. Between 1960 and 2000, out-of-wedlock births soared in Canada from 4 percent to 31 percent, in the U.K. from 5 percent to 38 percent, in France from . . .”)

The carping goes on year after year, book deal after book deal, with the Republican National Convention serving as a sort of quadrennial national checkup, during which we're invariably told that we're headed downhill fast. Watching the Republican National Convention is like going to the doctor every four years and being told your body is riddled with some horrible, disfiguring, fast-spreading, terminal cancer. We've been getting that same diagnosis from the same doctors every four years for—what? Twenty years? Longer? Am I the only one who sits through our national chemotherapy sessions with former drug czars and radio talk-show hosts and is not convinced we're so ill that we require such an annoying and toxic course of treatment?

Can't we get a second opinion?

Sometimes we do, but it's not all that helpful either. Americans are sinning, wimpy liberals meekly respond, but we're not sinning quite so much as Bill Bennett would lead us to believe. Americans may cheat on their spouses and smoke a lot of pot, but we don't cheat or smoke pot at the rate one might expect. If only a few more Americans would have Just Said No, liberals and conservatives agree, we could reverse our moral collapse and avoid the ignominious prospect of being a slightly less glorious nation than Canada, the sick man of Europe.

For anyone interested in genuine political arguments, the second opinion offered by liberals is deeply frustrating: it buys into the same values espoused by the people who gave us that faulty first opinion—namely, that “sin” is always bad. Terrified of being the pro-pot party or the pro-adultery party or the pro-sodomy party, the Democrats opt for virtue-lite politics and send junior varsity scolds like Sen. Joe Lieberman out to lecture Hollywood. Where is the politician who will look Bennett in the eye on television and say, “Some of the nicest, most virtuous, morally
uncollapsed
people I know smoke pot and commit adultery (with their spouses' permission)—it's how they pursue happiness, and so long as they're not hurting anyone else, why should they be made to feel guilty? Or any less virtuous than you, Bill Bennett?”

Bennett, like every moral scold who has ever compiled a big book on virtue, goes on and on about the deep sense of happiness and fulfillment he has derived from marriage and traditional family life. There's something deeply problematic about praising Bill Bennett—an activity that eats up an awful lot of Bill Bennett's time—for pursuing those things that make Bill Bennett happy (heterosexuality, sobriety, monogamy) while condemning someone else for pursuing the things that make him happy (say, homosexuality, pot, and the occasional three-way). Refraining from having sex with men and with women who aren't his wife makes Bill Bennett
happy
. And I'm all for Bill Bennett being just as happy a Bill Bennett as Bill Bennett can possibly be. But everyone should have the same right to happiness. Should the law coerce all of us into pursuing Bill Bennett's brand of happiness? Bill Bennett thinks so, and so do Bork and Buchanan. These men, so far as we know, derive happiness from things that have been labeled virtues, and hence they are praised for their pursuit of happiness. For others, the things that make us happy have been labeled sinful, and we're condemned for our pursuit of happiness. But if I'm not hurting anyone, my pursuit of happiness is no less virtuous than Bennett's.

To be fair, for some of the high-profile virtuous, living an upright life may not make them all that happy. In fact, it may make some of them miserable. There may be conservative pundits out there who desire to smoke dope or sleep around but deny themselves these pleasures, and their public calls for virtue are simply an externalization of their own inner struggle to be good. “Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised,” wrote La Rochefoucauld in his Maxims (1665), a point driven home by former television evangelist Rev. Jimmy Swaggart. Swaggart, you'll recall, condemned pornography and prostitution for years, and then was caught visiting prostitutes and “consuming” pornography. Swaggart had deeply conflicted feelings about pornography and prostitution, and he called for the more restrictive laws against both in hopes that the state might help keep him right with God. But those of us who enjoy pornography and prostitutes without conflict shouldn't have to go without to protect Swaggart from himself.

Whether virtue comes easy or the virtuecrat has to do battle with his desires, the virtuous all conspire to force their virtues on us sinners, which is not something sinners do. The existence of the virtuous is not regarded by sinners as a personal threat, nor do sinners attempt to stamp out virtue wherever we find it. No urban music lover has ever, to give one example, placed a gun to Robert Bork's head and forced him to buy a rap CD. Nevertheless, in
Slouching Towards Gomorrah
, Bork argues that no one should be
allowed
to buy rap CDs. “Is censorship really as unthinkable as we all seem to assume?” Bork asks in a chapter titled “The Case for Censorship.” “I [suggest] that censorship be considered for the most violent and sexually explicit material now on offer [including] the more degenerate lyrics of rap music.”

Personally, I never wanted to buy a rap CD until I read Bork's book, which is the strange—and strangely predictable—thing about censorship: It creates a demand for the very things the censors want to stamp out. Even if it were possible to scuttle the First Amendment—so much for original intent!—and ban rap music, the effort would fail. The Soviet Union, a police state with unlimited powers and spies in every workplace and apartment building, attempted to ban rock and roll music. It failed. It's hard to imagine how our government could enforce a ban on rap music in a country whose citizens own almost as many CD burners as they do guns. Not that I would put it past John Ashcroft. Social conservatives will sometimes argue that rap music or violent movies or drugs need to be banned to protect the weak and vulnerable from taking up a life of sinful indulgence. It would be easier to take these arguments more seriously if the same social conservatives weren't opposed to laws that protect the weak and vulnerable from unsafe workplaces, flammable children's pajamas, and arsenic in our drinking water.