Skipping Towards Gomorrah (43 page)

Randy Cohen writes the weekly column “The Ethicist” for
The New York Times Magazine:
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Dan Savage did his darnedest to give Gary Bauer the flu; I don't think this is so terrible. (Full disclosure: I may be influenced by the piece Mr. Savage contributed to my own book, and by my admiration for his column, but I've never even met the guy, and so I feel it's not out of line to offer a defense of his tactics.)

Were we perfect, we'd all make a real effort not to give colds to one another and would, for instance, don surgical masks at the first cough to keep our viruses to ourselves, like many people do in Japan and China but few of us do here in America. If we are not harried from cough-drop counter to Kleenex shelf for our heedlessness, why assail Dan Savage? Savage was striving to pass on only a minor malady. (And as an ethical matter, it is essential that he was absolutely certain that a building constructed in 1891. “[Dubuque] joined with the Mesquake [sic] Indians to exploit the rich lead mines of the area. In 1833, [the area] was opened for American settlement, and the resulting lead rush created a boomtown.” I know enough about American history to be deeply mistrustful of historic markers, especially ones in lily white parts of the country that speak of whites “joining with” local Indian tribes. While Julien Dubuque may have been a nice guy who was soliticious of the Mesquake Indians in the extreme, I didn't see any Indians during the weeks I spent in Dubuque. I did see a lot of white people, though, and no one seemed to know what had happened to the Mesquakes. And who the hell ever heard of a lead rush?

it was a minor malady and not a more serious illness.) He had the flu, not malaria. Had he been an
Anopheles
mosquito, I'd have urged him not to bite Gary Bauer on the behind. Had he been a plague-infested flea riding around on the back of a rat, I'd have persuaded him with what eloquence I could muster (using single syllable words that his flea-brain could comprehend) not to nestle down in Gary Bauer's hair. But he was only a scribbler with a bad cold. True, his tactics did risk inflicting collateral damage on other doorknob or stapler users in Bauer's office. And his is not a form of political protest I'd want to encourage, but the thrashing he came in for seemed out of proportion to any harm he did or could have done.

The spectacle of someone licking not only a doorknob but an alarming array of office supplies is disgusting. However, I don't defend it as an aesthetic act but as a political one. Savage practiced—invented—bio-satire. His was the outrage of someone personally affronted by the hate speech of a political extremist, and he found a fitting—and in my view, very funny—way to express his indignation. It was as if Jonathan Swift hadn't merely written about eating the babies of the poor, but actually sprinkled one infant with salt—unattractive, perhaps, but hardly fatal.

What if everyone did it? Unfortunate, but unlikely. A better way to apply the test of the categorical imperative would be to ask, What if during every presidential campaign one irate journalist tried to give one fringe candidate a bad cold? The Republic might tremble (vomit, grow feverish and exhausted, and take to its bed), but if it rests and drinks plenty of fluids, it will endure.

Can you imagine the howls from right-wing nutcases had Bill Clinton spent the entire month of August on vacation and then terrorists attacked the United States in early September? Especially if Clinton had been warned
during
that vacation that Osama bin Laden was planning to hijak American planes inside the United States. Far from rallying around “our president,” right wingers would've seized on the tragedy as another chance to force Clinton from office. Clinton would've been accused of goofing off when he clearly should've been hunkered down in the Oval Office. And if Clinton made the missteps Bush did in the days immediately after the attack (running, hiding, mumbling, stumbling, sending his press secretary out to lie about “credible threats” directed against Air Force One), Ann Coulter would've spontaneously combusted—boom!—right there on
Politically Incorrect.

Maybe George W. Bush thinks he's the president of France?

Footnotes are fun, aren't they?

In 2000, the number of Americans arrested for pot-related charges was 734,498; most were arrested for possession, not dealing. Canada and Great Britain, meanwhile, are well on their way to decriminalizing marijuana use, medical and otherwise. A sane person might think that, in the wake of September 11, the federal government would have better things to do than go after pot smokers. After all, we have a real war on our hands now, against a real enemy. Maybe it was time to call off the fake war against American citizens who smoke pot? The Bush administration, however, began cracking down on pot smokers the month
after
September 11, raiding the suppliers of medical marijuana in states that passed medical marijuana initiatives. Didn't George W. Bush run partly on a state's rights platform?

Hey, another footnote: I used cocaine, acid, and mushrooms in college, more than a decade
before
I smoked pot for the first time. So much for that “stepping stone” theory, huh? Pot was the last drug I got around to trying.

A brief footnote about butt plugs: A butt plug is a perfectly pleasant little sex toy with a perfectly dreadful image. Thanks to the name, many straight people and naive young gay people assume that butt plugs are used by men who've lost control of their bowels as a consequence of too much anal sex. People hear “plug” and think “cork.” Nothing could be further from the truth. A butt plug is merely an anal insertion toy with a wide body, a narrow neck, and a flared base. (Picture a small Lava lamp.) While a dildo will quickly fall out of someone's butt if it isn't held in place, a butt plug is held in place by the anal sphincters themselves, which grip the narrow neck of the butt plug, while the flared base prevents it from disappearing into the anus. The body of the butt plug fills the rectum, where it presses against the prostate. During orgasm, as the anal sphincters contract and release, the butt plug is moved against and stimulates the prostate, which greatly intensifies orgasm.

Popular among gay men, butt plugs are also an ideal sex toy for straight men curious about anal stimulation. Unlike dildos, butt plugs do not resemble penises, and therefore do not necessarily provoke gay panic. A straight male who is secure enough in his sexuality to insert a butt plug before engaging in vigorous vaginal intercourse with his girlfriend or his wife will be treated to a mind-blowing orgasm. FYI.

Here's my brother Bill on the title: The source for Bork's title is probably as much Joan Did-ion's
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
as it is Didion's course, W. B. Yeats's poem “The Second Coming,” which includes this line: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Didion's book of essays on the cultural revolutions of the sixties uses this phrase because of the sense people had that the world was changing, and Bork, by shifting the tile to another less happy city, implies that America is changing for the worse.

But all of this imagery is profoundly un-American if you look at its roots. Yeats believed things were going to hell in a handbasket because he thought history was cyclical, and at the end of our current 2,000-year-cycle we'd be plunged into a new dark age. His evidence for this coming dark age was the decline of the aristocratic order of the world, particularly his Anglo-Irish ascendancy, as Irish Catholics ousted the British. So when this phrase gets used by folks who claim to be all-American, they're really showing up their inborn elitism. Just as the Borks of the world seem not to have read the Sodom and Gomorrah story, they haven't read the poem they're alluding to either.