Just last night we were having some family discussion about the tribulations of Rep. Weiner. We were talking mostly about God’s sense of humor. Here was a man who wanted the smart set to run the whole stinking economy, and he can’t even run his own Twitter account. Not only was he not able to run his own Twitter account, he did not seem to have any control over what is appropriate to do with digital images of one’s own briefs, never mind the propriety of how those images came into existence in the first place. All this was risible enough, okay, but look at how long God took to set this whole story up. This is the ultimate shaggy dog story — it went on and on, until it cultimated in the exposure of one Weiner.
And so we also concluded, back in this family discussion of ours, that God can be pretty tasteless. Doesn’t God know that there are children down here?
But my takeaway conclusion from our discussion was — how can Christopher Hitchens still maintain that there is no God? I resolved to do something in the morning to chide Christopher. “Do you really believe that this sketch had no writer?” Thus far last night.
Then I wake up this morning and run across this. Now a word of caution before you click. This is a witty atheist writing on a bawdy subject, and so beware. Okay, now you can click if you want.
Hitchens asks how it came about that Edwards and Weiner lost control of their private parts. Contra his answer, the real answer is that these men are products of our civilization, and our whole civilization has lost control of their private parts. This has happened because we have listened to men like Hitchens, allowing them to reassure us that we can dispense with God and still have honesty and integrity, whatever the hell those are. But that thin veneer argument is for public consumption, so that the dullards and rubes might be satisfied, while the bright students, who understand the real implications of “no God” choose one of two paths. As Muggeridge once noted somewhere, the two alternatives are the raised fist or the raised phallus. If there is no God, it is either rutting or revolution.
Moreover, our incoherent absolutizing of the secular/sacred divide has resulted in a downstream hardening of the private/public divide, as exemplified in Weiner’s tearful mea culpa yesterday. He wants the voters to know that when it comes to this public sphere over here, he is a man of integrity, who would never knowingly violate a House rule, or an oath of office, whatever, but who, when it comes to the private sphere over there, and the private parts contained therein, he is a liar, skunk, and inept Twitterer. But who would buy an arbitrary division like that? Well, a lot of people. This technique doesn’t work all the time, but it works way more than it ought to.
But then the relativists rush in to tell us, as they did in the Clinton affair, that it is about sex, and that everyone lies about sex. But wasn’t the new rule that brought in this flood of promiscuity and dissapation a rule predicated upon the assumption that this kind of approach was natural, healthy, honest, and free? Isn’t that what undergirds the open discussion of all sex ed classes? Well, not exactly. After a generation or two of open, natural, and honest communication about sex, we now have a generation of liars, skulking around the subject in such a way as to make it proverbial among the liberals — everyone lies about sex. So, I might say to them, you are admitting the failure of your program then? No, they won’t do that either.
This is because the issue with them is control and power always, and they will use whatever argument is close enough to be convenient — whether it is the attractiveness of honesty or the inevitability of dishonesty. They don’t use arguments because they believe them to be true. They use arguments because they believe them to be useful at the time.
In sum, then, what should our response be? It should not be to try to take the punch line away from God, prosecuting Weiner for talking dirty on a congressional office phone. Rather it should be to laugh when God has finished telling this story, and to let Him start telling the next one.