The Baby Boomer-led Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and '70s has had a deeply permeating, catastrophically debilitating impact on nearly all aspects of modern Western culture. Evidence of the societal detritus is everywhere, from the ever-escalating divorce rate, to the proliferation of condom-wearing instruction classes for preteens, to the ubiquity of ridiculously tawdry pop songs like the Black Eyed Peas’ “My Humps” or Lady Gaga’s “Disco Stick” on the radio.

Even cultural conservatives, intent on sloughing off the egregious sleaze and slime that followed in the wake of the hippie era, are more often than not subsumed in its wretched and malodorous ejaculate ooze. A case-in-point of such ironic ideological influence can be discerned in the rhetoric of numerous well-meaning religious groups who have chosen to fixate on pornography, and to expose the supposedly devastating effects that porn-viewage allegedly has on the male psyche.

Indeed, to judge from these groups’ shrilly alarmist and hectoring tone, the very act of scrutinizing a sexy centerfold in Playboy, or thrilling to titular Debbie’s unique adventures in Dallas, is akin to taking a hit from a crystal meth pipe, or worse. Drugs only kill the body, after all; smut murders the soul. Eerily echoing the claims of various scoldy Dworkin-style feminists, neo-Fundamentalist seminar leaders insist that sexually-explicit material turns decent men into misogynistic beasts, causing them to view women as nothing more than objectified prey, fit for no activity more exalted than—ahem—stuffing and mounting.

For example, Catholic author Steve Wood of www.familylifecenter.net ominously warns of the “trigger effect” that results when guys become inveterate smuthounds. In short, they begin to feel that their lives should be one non-stop orgy: women exist only to satisfy their animal lusts. This mindset, in turn, proves to be “ruinous” to marriages—in some cases before they even begin! Wood goes so far as to recommend that young women find out early on if a potential mate has a porn addiction, in order to prevent future heartbreak. And ladies unfortunate enough to be saddled with smut-smitten husbands already have painful months and years of therapy ahead.

While often taken for a nihilist, I am no atheist. And even if I were inclined towards upholding theological nullification, I would hold no candle for the likes of Richard Dawkins, who, in his non-scientific writings, strikes me not as a thoughtful doubter but a smug, arrogant egotist more concerned with self-promotion and the attainment of cult-of-personality status than the disinterested pursuit of truth for its own sake.

Given his unlikeable personality, and some generally loathsome propensities, I find myself thoroughly surprised at my current desire to defend Dawkins against those of his own camp who have turned against him in an ideologically-driven snit recently. But then, an overarching concern with opposing the Zeitgeist’s smelly little orthodoxies at every turn can make for strange bedfellows sometimes.

I suppose, however, that it isn’t really Dawkins with whom I sympathize in this silly little controversy involving a silly little feminist blogger and her hapless, dorky would-be elevator-wooer in the aftermath of what was certainly a silly little atheist conference filled with hapless and dorky attendees in Dublin last month. I’ll certainly roll my eyes if Dawkins bows to pressure and perpetrates a Tracy Morgan-esque craven apology for being such a wretched “sexist,” or whatever they’re saying he is. But ultimately, it’s none of my concern what Dawkins does, or doesn’t do. However he elects to respond, verily, he has his reward.

No, for me the truly galling aspect of the “elevator-gate” pseudo-scandal only becomes apparent when one reads between the lines, and considers what is being said and left unsaid in the reportage of what should have been a non-event.

As we all know by now, “Skepchick,” a young, bespectacled, sour-faced female-supremacist, was invited to speak at the World Atheist Convention, a godless gathering at a hotel in Dublin, Ireland. (Goddess only knows why she was invited, and I’m frankly uninterested in speculating; I’ve never claimed to understand the rhetorical tastes of atheists, feminists, or atheist-feminists.) After her speech, at 4 a.m., whilst taking the elevator up to her room, Skeptical-chicky was awkwardly propositioned by a man she apparently regarded as an unappealing nerd. She turned down his advances, and he meekly relented, in good beta-male fashion, exited the elevator, and slunk away to his room for a heavy date with his right hand.

Spoiled, bitchy womanist princess puts horny, harmless dork in his place.

End of story, right?

Wrong.

So, Anthony Weiner has resigned… I usually don’t find much use in discussing scandals like this, but I’ve noted that Pat Buchanan has suggested that a blow was struck for the “old morality” by the public’s expressed disgust and the political class’s unanimous condemnation of the Congressman:

The national reaction to Anthony Weiner, the clamor that he get out of the House now, to which the Democratic Party is yielding, testifies to the enduring moral health of the nation.

The culture war is not yet wholly lost.

The truly remarkable thing that the Weiner episode—along with countless other leaked photos and accounts of DC sexual escapades—reveals is the large percentage of lying, sociopathic perverts who are currently governing the country. This strikes me as far more significant than the fact that Debbie Wasserman Schultz washed her hands of a congressman who was no longer useful.

In the ‘90s, Buchanan and the Religious Right defined the “culture war” as one primarily over morality (or, more accurately, over moral hot-button issues that could be voted on). Yet one wonders whether this is the battlefield on which the real war was and still is being fought. First-generation Latino immigrants are overwhelmingly Catholic, and according to a Pew study, 75 percent of them self-identify as “Pro-Life.” One can thus easily imagine a United States that is “virtuous” (as the conservative movement (mis-)defines the word) as well as poor, non-Western, and brown.

To be more blunt, if America’s historic majority is to be dispossessed on this continent, then who really cares if the public gets grossed out by a Cognressman’s Twitter feed?

And now for some good news!

From "Tyler Durden":

Strauss-Kahn Does Not Have Diplomatic Immunity

To all those who thought, himself probably included, that DSK would get away scott free from his most recent rape incident (as opposed to the metaphorical rape that the IMF has exercised over the decades over insolvent creditor nations), the Telegraph has one word: wrong. "Dominique Strauss-Kahn was told he does not have diplomatic immunity from prosecution against charges including alleged rape, said Paul Browne, an NYPD spokesman."

Here's why:

According to the IMF's Articles of Agreement, officials have immunity "with respect to acts performed by them in their official capacity except when the Fund waives this".

The organisation demands that member countries notify it when officials are arrested, so that it can assess whether this applies. It is unclear what Mr Strauss-Kahn was doing in New York.

Under normal circumstances it is the managing director – Mr Strauss-Kahn – who decides whether immunity applies, provided the IMF's executive board does not veto his decision.

In a short statement, the IMF did not mention immunity and referred enquiries to Mr Strauss-Kahn's "personal lawyer and to the local authorities" It also appears that Nicolas Sarkozy's government is not making any attempt to protect Mr Strauss-Kahn.

One unnamed aide has told Le Monde: "To me, there is no immunity. It is a matter for the IMF and the host country, the United States. His Frenchness is not at stake."

Interesting development at the International Monetary Fund, is it not?

Over the past few days we have seen news reports about IMF head, 62-year-old Dr. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, having been embroiled in sex crime allegations. Yesterday we found that he had been charged by the New York police of ‘criminal sex act, unlawful imprisonment, and attempted rape’. The criminal sex act, apparently, consisted of forcing a hotel maid to give him oral sex.

Formerly an academic, Left-wing politician, and French finance minister, he was regarded as a possible Socialist candidate for the French presidency, a position for which he was expected to announce his intention to run soon. He hoped to replace Nicolas Sarkozy as the French head of state.

Now, as per the tradition in Anglo-Saxon countries, a man is innocent until proven guilty (unless, that is, he is facing the tax authorities, in which case he is everywhere and always guilty until proven innocent, and even then he remains under suspicion and kept secretly under the microscope). Yet, when we consider that this gentleman, who is married, was already criticised in 2008 for a steamy affair with Piroska Nagy, a married economist and subordinate member of staff; that the IMF board acknowledged at the time that many female members of staff were unhappy with his behaviour, even after being cleared following an investigation into his role in Mrs. Nagy’s departure and severance package; that around this time the press carried reports about his having acted ‘like a gorilla’ after inviting an unnamed actress to his Paris flat; that in 2007, Tristane Banon, a then 27-year-old French journalist and writer, accused him of attempting to rape her in 2002, an accusation against which he pressed no charges and but which she has now decided to pursue; and that he had to fight charges of corruption in two financial scandals in 1999, related to Elf Aquitaine and a student mutual insurance—when we consider this past history, things do not look very good.

Unless there is a spectacularly rapid denouement in his favour, we can safely consider him finished in French politics. This is the verdict of not only his opponents on the Right, including Marine Le Pen of the Front National, but also those on the Left, who have spontaneously effervesced with theories of a Right-wing conspiracy (Americans who lived through the sordid revelations of Clinton presidency will find this has a familiar ring).

In Europe voters tend to be slightly more forgiving of politicians’ ‘amorous peccadillos’, which I would rather call gross personal betrayals. In the United States, at least until the advent of the Bill and Monica affair, the suggestion of marital infidelity resulted automatically in political fulmination. At least, that is how it was traditionally seen from Europe. But in Europe, a politician could survive revelations of marital infidelity, the latter being regarded, perhaps self-servingly, as a personal matter, unconnected with ability to do the job.

Technically that may be the case in some cases. But my view is that if someone in a position of responsibility cannot at the very least remain faithful to his spouse, despite having sworn eternal honour and fealty in front of family and friends and the law, if that person is capable of this level of betrayal, motivated by nothing more than base instinct and momentary pleasure, how can we expect him to remain faithful to his principles, to put base temptations for the sake of moral rectitude? Irrespective of whether or not he is found innocent now, a man in Strauss-Kahn’s position, one of immense responsibility, involving and affecting thousands of millions of people, would be expected by those of us with a traditional outlook to be of far, far better character than the average man—almost a Hyperborean. Not, in other words, a servant of the Demiurge.

New York Police Department spokesman, Paul Browne,

said the allegations had been made by a 32-year-old woman who worked at the hotel, which has been identified as the Sofitel near Times Square. His accommodation there was described by the New York Times as a luxury suite costing $3,000 per night (£1,900).

"We received a call that a chambermaid in a hotel in midtown Manhattan had been sexually assaulted by the occupant of a luxury suite at that hotel, and that that individual had fled," Mr Browne told the BBC.

"The maid described being forcibly attacked, locked in the room and sexually assaulted," he said.

Speaking to Reuters, Mr Browne gave more details on the allegations against Mr Strauss-Kahn.

"She told detectives he came out of the bathroom naked, ran down a hallway to the [suite] foyer where she was, pulled her into a bedroom and began to sexually assault her, according to her account."

"She pulled away from him and he dragged her down a hallway into the bathroom where he engaged in a criminal sexual act, according to her account to detectives. He tried to lock her into the hotel room."

Mr Strauss-Kahn then made his way to the airport but left his mobile phone and other items behind, Mr Brown said.

"It looked like he got out of there in a hurry."

By the time police established that the occupant of the room was Mr Strauss-Kahn, the IMF chief was on board an Air France plane at John F Kennedy airport, about to depart for Paris.

"Our detectives requested of the airport authorities that they stop the plane from leaving, went to the airport and took him into custody," Mr Browne said.

"If our officers had been 10 minutes later he would have been in the air and on their way to France."

The woman has been treated at hospital for minor injuries, said Mr Browne.

Plato—he who argued for eugenics to breed a better race of leaders—would have stroked his beard and thought, ‘I told you so.’

What strikes me about the BBC’s news reports their sensitivity. In the midst of all the bloodcurdling allegations, we find that they still have time to think about Dr. Strauss-Kahn’s emotional state, and report his lawyer stating that he was ‘tired but fine’. In fact, the reports I have looked at have been extremely temperate and punctiliously balanced, even obscurely sympathetic, given the nature of the allegations and past behaviour.

Who is Dominique Strauss-Kahn?

Of Sephardic and Azhkenazic Jewish origin, he was born in 1949 in a wealthy Paris neighbourhood, son of a legal tax lawyer and member of the Masonic order Grand Orient de France and of a Russo-Tunisian journalist. During the 1970s, Dr. Strauss-Kahn was an academic, having obtained a degree in public law and a PhD and an agrégation in economics.

In his youth he joined the Union of Communist Students (Union des étudiants communistes, UEC), which is part of the Mouvement Jeunes Communistes de France (MJCF, Movement of Young Communists of France), and which is close to the French Communist Party. He subsequently joined the Centre d'études, de recherches et d'éducation socialiste (Center on Socialist Education Studies and Research, CERES), and later became involved with the Socialist Party, led by his friend Lionel Jospin, also founding Socialisme et judaïsme.

He became an elected deputy in 1986, then Chairman of the National Assembly Committee on Finances, and then again Minister for Industry and Foreign trade. Defeated in the elections of 1993, he was appointed Chairman of the Groupe des experts du PS (Group of Experts of the Socialist Party), founded a law firm (DSK Consultants), and worked as a business lawyer.

But not for long. The following year, Raymond Lévy, director of Renault, invited him to join the Cercle de l’Industrie, a Brussels-based industry lobby. Billionaire Vincent Bolloré and Louis Schweitzer entered his circle of friends. Bolloré is a well-known corporate raider and industrialist with media interests and substantial positions in the economies of Ivory Coast, Gabon, Cameroon, and Congo, and also a long-standing friend of Nicolas Sarkozy. Schweitzer was Lévy’s successor at Renault, of which he was CEO until 2005, and also Chairman of AstraZeneca, and non-executive director of BNP Paribas, Electricité de France, Volvo AB, and L’Oréal.

As Minister of Economics he implemented a wide privatisation and a partial deregulation programme, despite this running against the Socialist Party’s official ideology. An increase in GDP and reduction of public debt resulted in personal popularity. In the late 1990s he joined, as finance minister, Lionel Jospin’s socialist government, ‘responsible for steering France towards the era of the Euro’.

He supported the infamous European Constitution of 2005, so arrogantly promoted by bureaucrats and politicians at the time (there was no real examination, just promotion, despite its wide-ranging powers). Said constitution incorporated the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which banned eugenics, prohibited collective expulsions, guaranteed the right to asylum, and adopted totalitarian equality and humanism as a core principle.

As head of the IMF, Dr. Strauss-Kahn proposed giving Special Drawing Rights a stronger role as a method of stabilising the global monetary system, and as a possible replacement for the U.S. dollar as world reserve currency. Some have seen this as a move towards a world currency, consistent with Dr. Strauss-Kahn’s earlier championing of the Euro.

The BBC profiles him as a man of ‘easy charm’ who ‘seduce[s] with words’.

No doubt Kevin MacDonald would find Dr. Strauss-Kahn a case worthy of his attention, but, that aside, the picture that emerges here is clearly that of a typical ‘champagne socialist’: a globalist, former communist, who nevertheless stays in luxury hotels; rubs shoulders with powerful industrialists, billionaires, and heads of state; and lives a fabulously privileged and rarefied lifestyle, out of the public purse—a suave, elegant, smooth-talking philanderer, aligned with a political party whose policy is to take from the talented and hard-working in order to give to the talentless and the indolent, who all the same draws a six-figure salary (plus an opaque pension scheme), in a nearly all-powerful position obtained through presidential favour.

I doubt any of my readers will be surprised by any of this. All the same, it bears highlighting, for the fact that a man with such obvious character flaws, with such glaring contradictions between stated ideology and real-world behaviour, has been so handsomely rewarded by the system, funded out of our collective and individual pockets, is symptomatic of the system’s level of corruption. In a non-corrupt system, where character was as important as ability, such a person would not have been able to talk his way undetected into the highest echelons of international finance; such a person would have been weeded out long before. Champaigne socialists—Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are famous examples—are but one of the various miasmic bacteria that contaminate the Western body politic in our Iron Age. Indeed, the French establishment now worry about the effect this this affair could have at a time of unprecedented distrust for politicians.

Whatever the outcome of this specific crisis, I will not be shedding tears for the political death of this champagne socialist.

When popular culture is relentlessly permissive and debauched, the only true rebellion is to exhibit self-denial and fearsome wholesomeness. In spite of these undeniable contemporary circumstances, most kids today still choose to “rebel” by being utterly conformist in mindset and behavior; they show their supposed “individuality” and freedom from society’s constraints, that is, by doing exactly what the culture instructs them to do. Inter alia, they wear tight-fitting clothes, get pierced in various unseemly bodily regions, and consent to have their lower backs plastered with tacky tattoos; they drink, take drugs, and engage in numerous, random sexual encounters called “hook-ups.”

Perhaps such behavior was provocative at one time, in the pricklier clime of a more conservative Zeitgeist. Today, however, it is truly yawn-worthy, more of the same ol’ same ol’. To use the parlance of the times, it is simply “lame,” and not in the least bold, to engage in such ubiquitous activities. There is nothing exciting about these presumed “transgressions” anymore. The only truly transgress-ive act is one that rejects the notion of such pathetic faux-defiance with steely contempt, which opts instead for that which the sheep-like majority now commonly shuns as “reactionary.” Put succinctly, licentiousness is now utterly boring and bourgeois, while chastity is the sexy new taboo.

Given this fact, why have we yet to see a lustily defiant alternative culture of chastity emerge? Much as this trend begs to be born, it still remains largely unseen in today’s sea of tiresomely depraved bawdiness. There is, of course, the “contemporary Christian” scene, but it is an all-too-brittle and toothless cultural phenomenon, marked more by absence than anything else; it is, more often than not, a supremely sanitized aesthetic affair; relentlessly and determinedly bland, cleansed of bad words and racy content, the fare favored by this crowd is usually harmless, shorn of all rough edges. But the choice to reject the idols of the age, and to embrace what is traditionally known as “virtue” ought not be construed as a mere retreat into the safety and security of the goody-good-hood. The decision to pursue virtue and eschew vice is, in fact, the exact opposite of this depiction. One does not truly court danger until one opts to scorn the principalities and powers of the times, along with the debased hedonism these authorities relentlessly champion as the essence of “cool.”

We live, after all, in a time when it is often more debilitating to one’s reputation to be labeled a “virgin” than a “slut,” where to exhibit undue “intolerance” for sexual immorality is a far worse crime than indulging in such behavior, where a “prig” is denounced to an infinitely greater extent than a confirmed rake. Surely, then, deciding to be chaste takes courage and gumption, as well as self-discipline. When a young person refrains from premarital sex, an activity his body aches to take part in, he in effect doubles his calamity; not only does his society throw the alluring prospect in his face constantly, but he also invites the ridicule of his peers, who think him a “freak” and a “loser.” If he responds that he thinks it best to remain chaste until marriage, he is in return held in contempt as “prudish” and “judgmental.”

Being willing to countenance all of these epithets automatically thrown his way—to hang a defy one’s own hormones, as well as one’s peers and rulers simultaneously, takes a special kind of nonconforming spirit. The extent of gleeful defiance necessary for such an endeavor could almost be called “punk” in a way. And indeed, there is one subspecies of the burgeoning punk scene called “straight edge,” which makes clean living—no booze, no drugs, no sex—a kind of mandatory creed. But it’s one thing to subscribe to a fad, and quite another to positively embrace a way of life.

Both the contemporary Christians and the punked-out straight-edgers, then, fail to hit the mark. The former have an overarching transcendental mindset, which is greatly needed, but their approach to engaging the culture is altogether too wimpy, smiley, and hippy-dippyish; they are easily dismissed as lightweights. The straight-edge adherents, for their part, bring a needed sharp and pointed aesthetic to defend their creed of choice, but they generally lack a metaphysical orientation for all of their behavioral prescriptions.

What is needed is a movement which combines the spiritual rootedness of the contemporary Christian milieu with the hard-nosed approach of the straight-edge scene. But just where can we find such practitioners of idealistic Realpolitik? In my second installment of this treatise, I will explore an intriguing possibility, one that has taken shape in the last few years and whose momentum still appears to be gathering.

Flannery O'Connor was an unapologetic, unreconstructed Southerner of staunchly Catholic and profoundly conservative orientation who wrote unsparingly dark, bleak, and violent stories. This disconcerted many readers, who couldn't understand why an author who believed in God and adhered to Christian precepts would so often dwell on such disagreeable subject matter.

Miss O'Connor gave reply in a 1957 essay titled "The Fiction Writer and His Country." It was precisely secular modernity's deadening effect on the individual conscience, she asserted, that necessitated her thematic emphasis on the sordid, the depraved, and the grotesque; people needed to be shocked, shaken up, and reminded of what was important. "To the hard of hearing you shout," she wrote, "and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling pictures."

O'Connor died in 1964, before the sexual revolution kicked into high gear, before the legalization of abortion, or the promotion of adolescent sexuality in public schools, or the enforced sanctification of buggery by an ascendant legal and academic elite openly hostile to traditional morality; before the preference to retain one's European-derived heritage and identity was rendered as "hate" for one's fellow man, before mass immigration and multiculturalism and the promulgation of totalitarian hate-speech laws, before the relentless shaming of whiteness, maleness, and "heterosexism" became an obligatory ritual on college campuses across the Western world.

From a conservative's perspective, things have certainly gotten worse since O'Connor's time, yet Christian social conservatives have, if anything, grown into even bigger ninnies. Witness a site like Plugged-In Online, a kind of encyclopedic collection of reviews of recent movies, TV shows, and music albums -- all of which are critiqued from an ostensibly Christian perspective. I say "ostensibly" not because I doubt the sincere religious convictions of the site's writers, but because their collective aesthetic notions leave much to be desired. Indeed, their habitual tendency is to equate sanitization with sanctification and G-rated-ness with holiness.

Peruse Plugged In's movie review pages, and you'll soon find yourself immersed in a virtual galaxy of hectoring, scolding platitudes repeated ad nasuseum. When a character in a film makes a bad choice, the incident is usually filed under the heading of "Objectionable Material." And when there is sex, violence, or profanity -- whatever the context, no matter how the viewer is meant to think about the behavior depicted -- the Plugged Inn-ers are automatically "out" on it, without deliberation or discussion.

Thus, to use a Biblical metaphor, is the wheat commonly thrown out with the chaff. Smutty, exploitative, irresponsible, and immoral junk gets lustily condemned, of course, but so does fare that, while irreverent and "adult," is actually in many ways sympathetic to traditionalism, or at the very least gives the ever-looming Zeitgeist a good, square kick in the crotch. Comedies like Juno and Knocked Up, both of which contain a scandalously pro-life message, are dismissed out of hand due to their nonstop racy and vulgar dialogue. The 40-Year Old Virgin, which, if you pay attention, actually promotes abstinence before marriage, also gets greeted with prissy exhalations of exasperation and contempt for its raucous and ribald content. Fight Club, a profound meditation on the spiritual emasculation of the modern male in a world bereft of belief or hope, is simplistically condemned for promoting violent nihilism. And on it goes...

No one would ever claim that the representative sample of movies discussed above were "family-friendly." Still, a conservative critic with even a scrap of subtlety of mind and aesthetic discernment can see that, even if they fall short in certain crucial ways, there is, indeed, much to appreciate in these films. But the good, churchgoin', God-fearin' Plugged-In folks seem almost willfully clueless to such a possibility, smarmily set as they are on maintaining their lofty perch of sanctimonious disapproval.

But even more irritating than the proclivity to reflexively dismiss and sniff at every non-Veggie Tales movie ever made, is the way the Plugged-In-style critic tends to react when challenged.

"After all (one says to him), what about the acknowledged literary greats?

Aren't Shakespeare's plays full of violence, mayhem, and sexual innuendo? Isn't Dante's vision of Hell just a bit gory and gnarly? What about all of those shocking stories from the Bible itself? Adam and Eve are naked without shame, Cain murders Abel, Lot has sex with his daughters during a drunken cave orgy, Onan spills his seed on the ground, David commits adultery with Beersheba and sends Uriah to his death, and the Isrealities wipe out just about everyone in sight over and over again... and all of that's just in the Old Testament! Yet the Bible is a holy book -- THE holy book. If it, Dante, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Homer, Milton, Poe, Joyce, O'Connor, and all the other faithful recorders of human vice, folly, perversity and corruption throughout the ages are allowed to tread in such waters, then why do you immediately look upon movies of recent years with suspicion and consternation if they deal with challenging material?"

To this, the self-satisfied Christian critic of the Plugged-In variety smiles blandly. "You're comparing Shakespeare to Pulp Fiction? I'm sorry... that just doesn't work!" While declaiming any qualitative equivalency between the Bard and Tarantino, you reply, why can't this question be asked? To this, he scoffs at first, taking the answer to be self-evident, but when you persist, he stammers that Shakespeare and everyone else who wrote a long time ago always wrote with a moral framework in mind, while contemporary writers are in almost all cases just scurrilous schlock-meisters whose only agenda is to mock all things decent. Suggest that your interlocutor is painting with the broadest of brushes and, moreover, speaking from pure ignorance, and you'll again be favored with a patronizing smirk, much like Dana Carvey's "Church Lady" character once fixed upon his guest before snarkily observing, "Well... we have our little opinions, don't we?"

Take another tack: Point out that content doesn't necessarily determine form, that even an NC-17 rated movie like Abel Ferrara's The Bad Lieutenant can be a quite moving story of faith and redemption. You may get a grudging semi-acknowledgement, followed by a hurried recapitulation of ad priori asethetic notions, which he wills to cancel out any prior ground previously ceded: "I suppose it may be argued that the message is a positive one," he'll aver, "but... when the way of relating this message is so incredibly negative it really doesn't matter what the flimmaker intended..." Again, the only way art can be legitimately Christian is if it's squeaky-clean, antiseptic, devoid of blemish or grit.

The only way to be profound, it seems, is to be boring.

There are, of course, certain exceptions to this rule, the most prominent being Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. With this film, the Plugged-Inner and all of his ilk suddenly discovered that it's permissible to shake up the audience, O'Connor-style, through the brazen, unflinching depiction of nonstop, horrifying cruelty and torture, provided the story concerns the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus.

Self-important Spielbergian historical gorefests like Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan are likewise exempt from the In-Plugged scribblers' knee-jerk condemnations, due, I suppose, to their shameless pushing of buttons that send jolts into the heart of they typical American evangelical believer: 1) the conviction of the inherent goodness of the American military and the greatness of the cause of the "good war" that was WWII, and 2) the lurid depiction of persecution of Jews under Hitler, giving rise to the modern state of Israel, which (again, in the evangelical mind) can do no wrong.

But the exceptions, as always, prove the rule, and the rule, in turn, underlines an undeniable problem among “red-state” Americans today. Cultural leftists control Hollywood and most outlets of the entertainment media, at least in part due to the fact that leftists in general, at this point in history, simply see more value in the fine arts, while right-leaning Americans' tastes typically run more towards the philistine sentimentalism of country-western songs, grocery-store romance novels, and Fox News/talk radio inspired displays of drippy, mawkish patriotism.

But we shouldn't be fooled that everyone who thinks or votes along leftist lines maintains rigidly ideological standards to an obnoxious and humorless extreme. In fact, there is clearly quite a bit of dissent among the ranks of the Lefty cultural elite, as evidenced by the not infrequent, spasmodic outbursts of brazen political incorrectness indulged in by "hip" comedians like Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle and others, and lapped up voraciously by their predominantly "blue-state" audiences.

It would be a grave mistake to ghettoize radical traditionalism, or to expect only the worst from our opponents at all times, just as it would be small-minded and shortsighted to maintain that art must be "safe," bland, and shorn of edges. Life is very difficult, and art should be true to life. If the cultural transformation we struggle to achieve is worthwhile, then it demands more than lip service or crass propaganda in its support.

In the coming years of struggle, hopefully more true cultural conservatives, be they of Christian affiliation or not, will plug out of the "Plugged In" mentality, and will begin to entertain more independent and adventuresome aesthetic principles. Whatever your faith, it's not a sin to be provocative; indeed, extreme times call for extreme art. To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling pictures.

I know little, and care even less, about party politics. This is partly due to the fact that the subject is a bore, but mostly because I find it appallingly, unbearably irritating to reflect upon. I readily cop to being determinedly cynical about nearly everyone who wants to win my approval to gain power over me, and this (admittedly) broad brush of all-inclusive misanthropy extends to most politicians and the mass movements they instigate or manipulate to their advantage.

Thus, I really have no idea if Christine O'Donnell -- the honey from Delaware who's currently sweetening the Delaware Tea Party's teapot, but leaving a bitter taste in the mouths of many others -- is fit for the Senate. She may well be a loopy and flaky chick who's hopelessly out of her depth, as her critics on both the Right and the Left have alleged, or at least implied.

What I do find bizarre, however, is that the primary issue O'Donnell's critics are using against her so far is her declared status as a non-masturbator.

In case you hadn't heard by now, it seems that this now 41-year old bachelorette was once featured in an MTV mini-documentary in the mid-90s, in which she spoke on behalf of a group of twentysomething evangelical Christians promoting abstinence and sexual purity. In this feature, the young O'Donnell -- a big-haired, perpetually smiling girl, swaying to contemporary praise music and exuding an oddly conspicuous sensuality -- discusses the notion of "lust in your heart," forbidden in the Gospel, and applies it towards self-stimulation, reaching certain conclusions. "You can't masturbate without lust," she half-giggles, a reasonable enough inference to draw.

The untutored or perhaps commonsense view is that there's something out of order about certain sexual acts. They're "unnatural," as people once said, or "intrinsically disordered," as the Church says today.

Nowadays of course educated people think that's all ridiculous. After all, no one says sodomy or whatnot is miraculous, so it evidently complies with the order of nature. And all intentional actions are unnatural in some sense, since they change what would happen if we let things go their own way.

So to discuss sexual conduct with people today it seems you have to go with the flow and start with the assumption that there's no natural or unnatural in human affairs. Still, there's less to the change than meets the eye. "Free to be you and me" is not the sum of all wisdom. There's still the question how choice should be exercised.

I recently took part in a "males only" workshop at a local private high school. It was an unlikely opportunity for an advocate of traditional masculine ideals, especially given the fact that the workshop was part of this fairly liberal school's yearly "Diversity Conference." I was thankful for the chance to get across some countering viewpoints. I shared the floor with a veteran leader of men's groups, and I knew we had different aims from the get-go, but I had the first hour.

To begin, I played the guys my favorite scene from The Outlaw Josey Wales -- the part where Wales rides up to the Comanche chief Ten Bears and bargains for peace.

There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see. And so, there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men.

There is iron in your words of death.

This is how civilization happened.

Agreements between men, backed by the threat of violence.

This is how men made this world.