Skipping Towards Gomorrah Read online

  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.

  Rap versus show tunes; monogamy versus variety; pot versus Bud Light—different things make different people happy. It’s such a simple concept, so—what’s the phrase? Oh, yeah. It’s so self-evident . Why, then, do so many conservatives have such a hard time wrapping their heads around it?

  Like a room full of Victorian spinsters with the vapors, virtuecrats would have us believe that the mere knowledge that sinners are out there having fun keeps them up nights; indeed, knowing that someone, somewhere, might be pursuing happiness in ways they disapprove of is a profound psychological torment to them. Therefore, they argue, it’s in the best interest of society—and by society they mean, “me and everyone who agrees with me”—for the law to come between sinners and their vices. Not only will it save the sinners from themselves, but it will also make it easier for the virtuous to get their nine hours every night. Need it be said? Bork doesn’t have to listen to rap music if he doesn’t care for it; Dr. Laura doesn’t have to engage in premarital sex (anymore) if she’s opposed to it (now); Jerry Falwell doesn’t have to join the ACLU; Bill Bennett doesn’t have to have a same-sex marriage if he disapproves. Law-abiding Americans who listen to rap music, indulge in premarital sex, feminism, and agitate for gay marriage do no harm to those who don’t enjoy these activities or share these goals. Bennett’s marriage, for instance, doesn’t appear to have been harmed by legal gay marriages in the Netherlands. (If straight marriage in the United States is such a delicate institution that even a national conversation about gay marriage can destroy it, as Bennett argues in The Broken Hearth, then the institution of straight marriage isn’t long for this world. The next light breeze should blow the thing away.)

  What the moaners and groaners at the Republican National Convention, Fox News, and on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal refuse to accept is that freedom isn’t a one-way street. It’s not even a two-way street. Freedom is space, weightlessness, room to maneuver, to go your own way. It’s people blasting off in all directions. We should agree to disagree about certain things like, say, drug use or premarital sex, and, when n
ecessary, establish reasonable rules to prevent people from slamming into each other—such as laws against assault, rape, and murder, laws that set an age of consent for sexual activity, laws against drinking and driving. Beyond these simple rules, however, the freedom to pursue happiness must be regarded just as Thomas Jefferson described it—an inalienable right, God-given—or all our rhetoric about freedom is meaningless.

  Do some people get harmed in the pursuit of happiness? Aren’t people—and neighborhoods and whole cities—harmed by, say, the drug trade? Aren’t prostitutes frequently harmed by violent clients? Doesn’t adultery destroy homes? Yes, yes, and yes. But much of the harm done by drugs, prostitution, and adultery should be laid at the feet of the virtuous. It’s their meddling that often creates the harm, not the sins in and of themselves. There would be no money, and therefore no gangs or violence, in the drug trade if drugs were legalized and their sale taxed and regulated. When was the last time beer distributors killed each other? Oh, yeah: prohibition. If prostitution were legalized, an American prostitute with a violent client or abusive pimp could turn to the police for protection, just as prostitutes do in the Netherlands. If every couple were encouraged to have a realistic, rational conversation about the near-inevitability of infidelity in long-term relationships, fewer homes would be destroyed by adultery. But the political right wing doesn’t allow for realistic, rational conversation about anything—tune into Fox News anytime to see irrational, unrealistic nonconversation twenty-four hours a day. Furthermore, the law shouldn’t be concerned with preventing people from harming themselves. Our bodies and minds and souls are our own, and we should be free to use and abuse and dispose of them as we see fit.

  Not all sinners lack virtue, and not everyone who’s technically virtuous is ethical. A woman who commits adultery with her husband’s permission—or in her husband’s presence—has to be viewed as more virtuous than a faithful man who’s married to a woman he emotionally abuses. Yet adulterers are universally condemned by the virtuecrats, without any regard for their particular circumstances. Similarly, all users of illegal drugs are condemned. Yet a man who smokes a small amount of pot every day in his own home is doing himself and society less harm than a man who drinks himself drunk every night in public. The man who goes to a prostitute doesn’t seek to harm the man who doesn’t go to a prostitute; the man who goes to a gay pride parade in a lime-green thong doesn’t seek to harm the man who goes to church fully clothed.

  Indeed, it has long been my belief that the “bad” are frequently more virtuous in their private pursuit of vice than the good are in the public pursuit of compulsory virtue. Sinners, unlike the virtuous, do not attempt to impose their definition of happiness on others. I’ve never met an adult dope smoker who wanted to force a non-dope-smoking adult to smoke dope against his will. Yet our nation crawls with non-dope-smoking adults who want to force dope-smoking adults to stop smoking dope. Likewise, I’ve never met a homosexual who wanted to make a straight person into a gay person, but straight church groups take out full-page ads in newspapers trying to convince gay people to become straight people. Prostitutes don’t force anyone to patronize them; the virtuous, however, seek to throw prostitutes in jail for tending to the needs of their clients.

  There are millions of ethical, fully moral sinners in America, and I’ve grown sick of listening to the right wing bitch and moan about them while the left wing refuses to defend them. No one sticks up for the sinners—not even the sinners themselves. Some of the best Americans I know are sinners, but they lack the necessary conviction to defend themselves, their sins, and their right to be sinners. Meanwhile, the worst—the Bennetts, Borks, and Buchanans—are filled with a passionate intensity. Some sinners are no doubt scared. They worry that speaking up for themselves will prompt Bill Bennett to call them names in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal . Sinners are bullied and coerced into remaining silent, and as a result, only the self-proclaimed “virtuous” are heard from in public. How much longer can American sinners sit by and say nothing while the vices we enjoy and know to be perfectly harmless are maligned?

  To explore the lives of virtuous sinners, I decided to leave home and walk up and down in the United States, committing in turn all the seven deadly sins, except one, which, try as I might, I simply couldn’t do. I wanted to meet and sin with other virtuous sinners. I write in praise and defense of the American sinner—those wonderful, freedom-loving, fun-seeking adulterers, gamblers, and gluttons I met during my travels through the moral sewers of the United States of America: through the Gomorrahs of Los Angeles; New York; San Francisco; Seattle; Dubuque, Iowa; Plano, Texas; and Buffalo Grove, Illinois. Part travelogue, part memoir, part Bork-and-Bennett bitch slap, this book is a love letter to Thomas Jefferson, American freedom, and American sinners.

  A Quick Note on the Seven Deadly Sins

  Why the seven deadly sins?

  Well, why not the seven deadlies? The sins themselves—greed, lust, sloth, gluttony, anger, pride, and envy—are conveniently vague, which afforded me a wide variety of representative sins from which to choose. I might have focused on the Ten Commandments, I suppose, but, Christ, who hasn’t taken the Lord’s name in vain? Or dishonored their stupid parents? (Dr. Laura doesn’t even speak to her mother!) And there are ten of them, which would’ve meant more work for me, and I’m a slothful kind of guy. What’s more, I wanted to commit the sins I was writing about, and while bearing false witness is something I’d happily do (“Yes, your honor, I saw Robert Bork smoke dope with a male prostitute in a casino before he ate a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts. . . .”), I couldn’t see killing someone to sell a few books, as I don’t wish physical harm on anyone. I’d even brake for Bill O’Reilly.

  Interestingly, the seven deadly sins aren’t mentioned anywhere in the Bible, which may come as a surprise to some readers—it certainly came as a surprise to me. While I’d never run across the seven deadly sins while reading the Bible, I nevertheless assumed that the seven deadlies were in the Bible somewhere, perhaps in a psalm I’d somehow missed or the directors’ cut of the Sermon on the Mount. But the collective idea of the seven deadly sins, as it turns out, has its roots in the pre-Judeo-Christian era, and the sources for the tradition are not at all clear-cut. Most scholars believe the roots of the seven deadly sins lie in a conflation of Babylonian astronomy, which argued that the cosmos was a series of seven spheres with earth at the center, and the Greek belief that the soul descends from heaven, acquiring sin as it takes on a mortal body.

  The earliest list of seven sins appears in the Greek Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs: Testament of Reuben, supposedly written by Reuben, one of the twelve patriarchs of the tribes of Israel, around 106 B.C. Another list of deadly sins was drawn up by Horace, the Roman poet (65-8 B.C.), who ticked off eight mortal crimes or passions: avarice, desire, vanity, envy, wrath, sloth, drunkenness, and sensuality. It wasn’t until Evagrius of Pontus (d. ca. 400), an early Christian monk who lived in Egypt, made his list of eight cardinal sins that a list of non-biblical sins entered the Christian tradition. Evagrius served for a time as archdeacon of Constantinople before traveling to Jerusalem and then into the Nitrian Desert to become a hermit. It was a more gregarious monk, John Cassian (d. ca. 435), who brought Evagrius’s list from Egypt to Europe. In his De Institutos Coenobiorum (ca. 420), Cassian listed Evagrius’s eight sins: gluttony, lust, avarice, wrath, sadness, sloth, vainglory, and pride. (Fun fact: Cassian considered the first two sins, lust and gluttony, “natural,” since the existence of humanity depends, to some extent, on eating and fucking.)

  It was Saint Gregory the Great (Pope Gregory I, d. 604) who cut Evagrius’s eight cardinal sins down to seven, as he added envy to the list, eliminated vainglory, and merged sadness with sloth. But Gregory’s list of seven deadly sins—pride, anger, greed, envy, sloth, gluttony, and lust—was unknown outside of monastic circles until the Catholic Church made confession mandatory in the early part of the thirteenth century. Parish priests in En
gland were instructed to teach their parishioners about the seven deadly sins after 1231, in the hopes that their parishioners would have less to confess if they knew what to avoid. That was what transformed the seven deadly sins from a Dark Ages obscurity to pop culture phenomenon, insofar as pop culture existed in the thirteenth century.

  Got all that? Good. Now let’s do some sinnin’.

  The Thrill of Losing Money

  Affluence brings with it boredom. Of itself, it offers little but the ability to consume, and a life centered on consumption will appear, and be, devoid of meaning. Persons so afflicted will seek sensation as a palliative, and that today’s culture offers in abundance.

  —Robert Bork

  Consumption, sensation, meaninglessness—Robert Bork wasn’t writing about Las Vegas when he wrote those words, but he sure nailed the place.

  Before I ever set foot in Las Vegas—before I sipped my first foot-long margarita—I despised the place as much as or more than I assume Bork does. To me, Las Vegas was a place where cocktail waitresses went to die, where swag lamps swung, and where gangsters were gunned down midmassage. Elvis and Frank and Liberace may have left the building, but Vegas was still their cheesy town, not mine. Las Vegas was strip clubs and slot machines, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Robert Urich. Las Vegas was for people who lead lives centered on consumption, devoid of meaning. It was a place where topless showgirls in smoky showrooms paraded before fat businessmen, their unhappy wives stewing at their sides. Glued together by greed, tarted up with acres of tinted mirrors, Las Vegas was a throbbing neonscape powered by the Hoover Dam, its acres of grass watered by what’s left of the Colorado River.