Sexual Puritanism and Empire

[marmar]

from Consortium News:



Sexual Puritanism and Empire

As the ice caps melt and wars continue to kill, the U.S. news media remains obsessed with sex scandals, such as Rep. Anthony Weiner tweeting lewd photos of himself. But this persistent moral outrage is its own strange voyeurism, not just a distraction from true crises but a crisis of American hypocrisy, as poet Phil Rockstroh observes. By Phil Rockstroh

June 13, 2011


Late last month, poet, musician, and self-termed “bluesologist,” Gil Scott-Heron exited the hologram and returned to the source … to begin chanting, eternity will not be televised. (He was 62.)

In an earlier era, Stephen Spender feted the following tribute to those who fell resisting Francisco Franco’s fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War. His lines of verse serve as an apt epitaph to all those souls who devoted their art and labor to the ceaseless struggle against the perennially risen, death-besotted forces of coercive power:

“The names of those who in their lives fought for life,/Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center./Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun,/And left the vivid air signed with their honor.”

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. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2011/06/13/sexual-puritanism-and-empire/

[LadyHawkAZ]

1. Fantastic. K&R

Control the sexuality of the masses and you control their entire lives.

[Uncle Joe]

2. Outstanding!

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.

Ergo, 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.

Thanks for the thread, marmar.:thumbsup: