At present, in contrast, the dismal air is signed with the scandalous tweets of a congressman’s undergarments and the concomitant, 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.
A more profound ‘character issue’ here would seem to involve that of the representatives of mass media news gathering organizations, in particular — their greed for ratings.