The Manchurian Masturbate

I am dismayed but not surprised at recent revelations that Congressional Republican leaders looked the other way while a colleague sexually harrassed (one or more) underage boy(s). If this isn't completely symptomatic of the direction in which this country is headed...Our young people can't even apprentice in Washington and learn the business of government without being subjected to crude and inappropriate perversity from our elected officials. I say this without hyperbole - we are being led right now by the absolute worst men of their generation. The good, resopnsible individuals of my parents' age went into the private sector and left the job of governing to the irreponsible, the vacant, the prejudiced, the incurious and the corrupt.

Pier Pasolini's controversial film Salo reinterprets a Marquis de Sade story, a satire of the aristocracy, as a critique of Italian fascism. It tells the story of a group of privileged, elite men - a President, a Magistrate, a Duke and a Bishop - who kidnap a large group of poor chidlren, take them to a remote country manor and spend several weeks torturing and sodomizing them, subjecting the kids to every disgusting cruelty they can devise. It's literally sadistic. Literally.

The film's almost impossible to watch - let's not even discuss the banquet scene - but it does have a lot to say about the nature of power. Because so much of their wealth and privilege has been inherited rather than earned over the course of their lifetime, Pasolini implies that these men have not neccessarily been corrupted by power. Instead, they are endlessly seeking power in order to realize their depraved impulses.

In other words, it's not that a normal man finds himself suddenly empowered over others and then wants to start raping and murdering children. Obviously, giving one man power over another creates a psychological response, as in the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. But does it lead neccessarily to gross perversions (like, say, sexually harrassing teenage boys who are in your employ)? Or is it that the people who get off on power, who seek it out by, say, running for Congress in league with a corrupt, theocratic majority party, are also frequently perverts.

I'm inclined to believe the latter. I think men like Rep. Mark Foley (R-NEVERLAND) crave power, both in their personal and professional lives. Just as he wanted to boss people around via legislation (particularly anti-gay legislation) in the public sphere, he wanted to have sex with submissive children whom he could dominate completely. I mean, we're talking about a Congressman hitting crudely on his 16 year old interns! This is not merely a disgusting, illegal and inappropriate fetish. (Although it is all those things.) This is a serious psychological disorder.

As for the fact that all the other Republicans who knew about it covered it up, for fear of losing the seat and their majority, I'd say they should be ashamed of themselves...But who am I kidding? These men are incapable of shame. They are also perfectly willing to steal an election, which I'm becoming convinced will be mandatory if they want to retain their power for much longer. Americans don't seem to care very much about torture or civil rights or wars or floods, but they do love a nice, disgusting sex scandal.

So this will probably be in the news for a while, which is significant not just because it makes Republicans look like the perverts that they are, but because it eats up valuable time they'd be using the slam Democrats. This was the week they were hoping to hit hard on national security, the victory lap after John McCain's Grand Torture Compromise, which allows Bush to define torture and then decide who will be tortured and how they will be tortured. It was quite a compromise.

Instead, they'll have to spend the whole week lying about when they first found out their colleague Mark sometimes asked young boys about their favored masturbatory techniques. Hey, he liked to rap with the kids! Isn't connecting with the young people on the issues that matter to them what being an elected Representative is all about? It's less than ideal one month before an election.

It's just strange to me that authoritarian assholism and twisted sex offenderism always go together like this. If only we could isolate the exact factors that cause a person to become power-mad, sanctimonious, narcissitic, attracted to kids and gleefully immoral all at once, there might be a way to devise a cure! Now that they've mapped the Human Genome, can such solutions really be that far off?