Sex and the City
Just got back from an amazing weekend in New York, spent almost entirely catching up with old friends. The weather was a bit sticky but generally beautiful. Saturday was as close to perfect as could be imagined, with crystal clear skies and temperatures in the high seventies with no humidity. Such weather can make even ugly places bearable; for New York, it was like seeing a masterpiece through polished glass. Americans are often obnoxiously proud of insignificant things about themselves and their country, but New York is, without question, the greatest city on earth and the crowning achievement – for good and ill – of American ambition, freedom, power and diversity.
I think this would be a far better country if everyone were required to spend four years of their late youth in New York, kind of like military service. Prejudices that can survive the occasional visit would be obliterated by an extended stay. New York’s energy and cosmopolitan spirit, its invitation to explore endless possibilities, and its requirement to confront the outlandish on a daily basis are the perfect antidote to the kind of mean-spirited provincialism and intellectual laziness that currently threaten us from within and without. I did my stint back in the 80s, when it was a lot more Taxi Driver and Do the Right Thing than Seinfeld and Sex in the City. Eventually, even I had to flee, but every time I go back, it take me about 12 hours to wonder why I’m not living there anymore.
While I was visiting, I picked up a copy of one of New York’s free alternative weeklies, the New York Press. The cover story – “Spite the Vote,” by Mark Ames – was one of the most interesting and insightful pieces of political analysis I’ve read this year. Here’s the key idea:
…Tens of millions of people choose to watch FoxNews not simply because Americans are credulous idiots or at the behest of some right-wing corporate cabal, but because average Americans respect viciousness. They are attracted to viciousness for a lot of reasons. In part, it reminds them of their bosses, whom they secretly adore. Americans hate themselves for the way they behave in public, always smiling and nodding their heads with accompanying really?s and uh-huhs to show that they're listening to the other person, never having the guts to say what they really feel. So they vicariously scream and bully others into submission through right-wing surrogate-brutes.
…
And this leads to another truth that the left still has trouble understanding: Millions of Americans, particularly white males, don't vote for what's in their so-called best interests.
Ames, however, seems to have no trouble understanding. His explanation for this paradox is spite, driven by profound frustration and unhappiness of an explicitly sexual nature:
Put your ear to the ground in this country, and you'll hear the toxic spite churning. It's partly the result of commercial propaganda and sexual desperation—a desperation far more common than is admitted. If you didn't know anything about how America's propaganda worked, you'd think that every citizen here experienced four-dimensional multiple orgasms with beautiful, creative, equally satisfied partners, morning, noon and night.
The wretched truth is that America is an erogenous no man's land. Most white males here (at least the straight ones) have either dismal sex lives or no sex lives at all. As bad as this hurts, the pain is compounded every time you expose yourself to the cultural lies that await you at every turn—that is, every waking hour and during deep REM sleep, when the subliminal messages kick in. This wretchedness leads to a desire for vengeance, to externalize the inner famine—it leads directly to the Republican camp.
This spite manifests itself in a seething hatred of the coastal elites – not for their wealth, but for their conspicuous manifestation of pleasure. And the politics of happiness are, interesting and not accidentally, liberal. This particular point really struck home. People who know me often ask why, considering how comfortable, prosperous and relatively uncomplicated my life is, that I’m so strongly invested in a politics of social justice, “big government” and other policies that appear to work against my economic class interest. I could tell you, but I’ll let Ames say it:
Rich, beautiful, coastal types are liberal precisely because their lives are so wonderful. They want to preserve their lives exactly as they are. If I were a rich movie star, I'd vote for peace and poverty relief. War and domestic insurrection are the greatest threats to their already-perfect lives—why mess with it? This rational fear of the peasantry is frequently misinterpreted as rich guilt, but that's not the case. They just want to pay off all the have-nots to keep them from storming their manors and impaling them on stakes.
I’m not a rich movie star, but I’m a hell of a lot closer to that lifestyle than I’d ever thought I’d be, and this is almost precisely my mindset. My heart doesn’t bleed for the masses. I respect human dignity and rights as ideals, but also see my own self interest as much better served by a society where people’s basic needs are met and people feel they have a chance to move forward, than one where the odds are stacked so heavily against those at the bottom that fear, frustration and violence (against folks like me) become the only outlet.
Your average American understands that far better than is commonly acknowledged. And, limited by what they can do to make their own lives better, they do the next best thing: they use their franchise very deliberately to make the lives of everyone worse, because they know that the happy will suffer more than those who are already miserable. Read the whole article – it’s fascinating.
All of this brings me back to my original point about New York. Most Americans reflexively hate New York City – not as much as the French hate Paris, but that’s only because New York isn’t also the seat of government. They say they hate the noise, the crowds, the pollution, the crime, the corruption of ethnic politics gone wild, but those are only pretexts. What they hate about New York is precisely what makes the place tick. New York is the sexiest place on earth, possibly the sexiest place in human history. And if you’re not getting any, it can be about the most depressing.
New York in late spring is not for the faint-hearted. The City is throbbing with lust, hanging on the vine like a sweet ripe melon glistening with morning dew. The streets are packed, a round-the-clock museum of humanity in all its rich variety, advertising and consuming each other with disarming frankness. The sense of possibilities manifest in the endless range of activities, neighborhoods, spectacles and cultures is intoxicating. It permeates the senses from every direction, inviting, suggesting, seducing with languid charm.
Resisting this siren call is beyond the abilities of most living creatures, and if you live in New York, you know better than to try. When the warm sun sinks beyond the Hudson, New York blooms into a garden of erotic activity. Ubiquitous bars, restaurants and public spaces become the venues for a million acts of seduction. People embrace desperately in the streets, paw each other in the back seats of taxi cabs, mate feverishly on sweat-stained sheets behind the windows of countless walk-up apartments above shop fronts, then calmly shower, dress and be about their business the next morning, infused not with guilt but with a warm glow of contentment.
If you’re on the outside of this cauldron of activity, trapped in a life of quiet desperation somewhere out in the provinces, how else to react but in blind fury? Extinguish this unwholesome fire, scatter its ashes along the riverbanks! Undo the wicked sorcery that brought this place into being, lay low its arrogant monuments by raining death from the skies.
In America, we have pretenses to a politics of reason, and occasionally we even live up to them. But only a fool fails to see that most politics, like most of everything else, starts from a region somewhat south of the head. Our Declaration of Independence promises us “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Pursuit, yes. But God help you if you ever get there.
In September, the Republicans will hold their national convention in New York City. It should be extremely interesting.
8:20:35 AM 
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