The Libertine and the Socialist

by: david bozeman | published: 07 06, 2009

Later this month, HBO will premiere its newest series, detailing the travails of an extraordinarily well-endowed high school basketball coach. He is divorced and struggling to provide for his kids and finally decides to use his -- ahem, gift to his advantage. With the help of an ex-lover acting as his business partner (i.e., pimp), he rents himself out, providing the fodder for a show that, according to its creators "started out as a joke but became an incredibly hot property." Predictably, the critics are all a-swoon, with the New York Times calling it HBO's "best new comedy."

Clearly, a surefire way to critical praise is to offend conventional sensibilities: Big Love stars Bill Paxton as a polygamist; Weeds is about a suburban pot dealer; and Nip/Tuck, a plastic surgery drama, concerns anatomical reconstruction plotlines too shocking to mention in a web site accessible to children.

Granted, serious drama has always challenged convention, but at some point society must ask if prostitution is a worthy premise for a comedy, even a thought-provoking one and if this is really a step forward from Goodbye Mr. Chips, about the trials and triumphs of another fictional schoolteacher, this one in England over a hundred years ago. The Oscar-winning tale is rich in poignancy and nuance and relates the ultimate triumph of its shy, reserved hero without four-letter words and a campaign on an official web site soliciting viewer ideas for a 'Pimp Mr. Chips' campaign (as is the case with HBO's 'adult' comedy).

A common lament against conservatives, particularly by libertarians, is that, 'I agree with you that government is too big, but you need to stay out of people's bedrooms.' Conservatives instinctively know, without always articulating, that a society that drops its guard against licentiousness either soon or simultaneously loses its resistance to social experimentation, socialism, statism, etc. It is not by mere coincidence that Europe's descents into sexual permissiveness and socialism paralleled neatly, along with its fall from world dominance to declining empire. France, touted by liberals as the final word in sexual sophistication, is now equally renowned for its government mandated health care and vacation policies. Indeed, once the cradle of civilization, noted for its cathedrals and philosophers, the continent is now an outpost of radical Islam (though traditional Europe is staging a mild but growing resistance to the encroachment of its culture and history).

Here in America, as well, syndicated columnist Diana West noted in her Death of the Grownup (2007) that a society enmeshed in political correctness and moral relativism lacks the resolve to fight radical Islam, though the same principle applies to fighting the ever-expanding state. If out-of-wedlock birth and unmarried cohabitation no longer bear a stigma, if fatherhood is marginalized, if teen sex, oral sex and masturbation are comic fodder in what used to be televisions's Family Hour, if adult entertainment (according to West, a euphemism for entertainment that is anything but) is no longer confined to fringes of society but is celebrated in Oscar-nominated films (The People Versus Larry Flynt) and the New York Times Bestseller lists (Jenna Jameson, author of How to Make Love Like a Porn Star), then the moral fortitude to counter, say, government-run health care has been seriously compromised.

Public stigma and close knit families, imperfect though they are, used to protect the most vulnerable from excess and neglect. Liberalism has eroded the former and is working on the latter, trying to leave itself the dominant institution in daily life. It encroaches incrementally (i.e., the 'drip drip' effect) and does not insist on all-or-nothing legislation to advance its agenda. It banks on the weak resolve of traditional Americans -- witness the water-cooler attitude toward health care reform. Most are skeptical of government control, but the common refrain, 'We gotta do something' is just the wide opening big-government types take full advantage of.

No one is suggesting that the mere preponderance of racy TV fare signals the end of America as we know it, but too many citizens fear that to even question the propriety of a comedy about a teacher and his huge package is to make one a prude. As the cultural relativists have taught us, 'who are we to judge?' Those words could well become freedom's epitaph. The shows creators no doubt consider themselves bold and irreverent. Likewise, the architects of government-run health care no doubt consider themselves bold and original, when their plans are far from either. Our inner libertines and inner socialists both tout themselves as brave, novel and liberating. In truth, the libertine and the socialist are not just cousins, they are the same person. In the words of G. k. Chesterton, when you throw out moral precepts handed down from God, "it's not that you believe in nothing, you believe in anything."

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