Sexual Puritanism and Empire: Sex, Shame, and Military Might

At present, the air is plagued with the scandalous tweets of a congressman’s undergarments and the predictable howling from the hectoring ghosts of U.S. Puritanism, conjured from their graves by the contrived spectacle and its promise of anonymous arousal intermingled with the blood sport of public shaming.

By finger-wagging and sneering, carnal desires can be lived out vicariously in the Puritan/Calvinist imagination. In this way, petty moralists can ogle what they claim to condemn.

To Puritans, all the problems of life can be traced to the genitals … true, but only their own problems.

How many times do the prigs, ninnies, and scolds of the U.S. have to repeat this sort of inanity before they grow up and realize that human beings have strong libidos? Libido propels both creativity and contretemps, and it is wise to aver that “the issue of character” should best be evoked and debated, as a general rule, when the situation involves hypocrisy.

Moreover, those claiming that their own sexual desires have never rendered them vulnerable to silly misjudgments evince a more noxious form of hypocrisy.

Yet, if, in fact, their lives have been absent such misfortune, then one should withhold the scorn reserved for hypocrites, and, instead, grant these poor souls pity, for they have been afflicted with the awful circumstance of having passed through their lives without ever being seduced by life.

A more profound “character issue” here would seem to involve that of the representatives of mass media newsgathering organizations, in particular — their greed for ratings.

And what is one to make of the character of the individuals who comprise the general public and their seemingly endless avidity for these stories — their insatiable craving to revel in the tawdry — but remain engaged in the delusional worship of their own toxic innocence?

Although, it is futile to struggle against the symptoms not the source. As banal as the dreams of witless bullies, the architecture and artifice of U.S. militarist/corporate imperium not only surrounds us but has colonized our thoughts and desires. The elite of the corporate media and the U.S. public remain untroubled by Bradley Manning’s forced nudity, yet a couple a snaps of a congressmen’s crotch sends their imagination reeling.

Since U.S. Empire is maintained by militarism — a de facto strong-arm racket shaking down the people of the world to sustain the endless cupidity of its elite and proffer just enough bribes to keep its populace overweight, arrogant, and oblivious — what “character issues” come into play involving an individual’s complicity in the maintenance of blood-fueled imperium? 

Perhaps as a reminder, fleets of U.S. aircraft carriers should be christened with names such as, the USS Entitlement, the USS Displaced Resentment and the USS Willful Ignorance — all armed and ready to patrol the oceans of the world, poised to attack and subdue those who would deny us our birthright to consume the world like a bag of Cheetos.

Because facing folly is difficult, both powerful and pawn have embraced the most airless of aspirations … that greed run riot is a viable means to move in the world, even the sole means of establishing a social order.

As was the case with any imperium throughout history, the present order is maintained by state-sanctified homicide. To exist in empire, one is induced to deaden ones heart.

The act of having internalized (albeit inadvertently) the propaganda of the militaristic/corporate state and thereby cling to its provisional comforts … is to clutch a handful of dust. And what is the mode of being to which so many cling: 

Shuffling the floors of some suburban turdbox … within a gated “community” where one rarely sees, much less speaks to one’s neighbors; spending hours at a time, anxious and irritated (if not outright enraged) in soul-grinding commuter traffic, listening to the observations and pronouncements of inspired souls such as Morning Zoo Crews and deep thinkers like Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing talk-radio, hate merchants; then languishing all day in a cubicle … just to turn around and do it all again.