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| Picasso: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon |
FreeThinke’s post, On Love, Death, Smut, Sex, Violence, Exploitation, Exaltation And Cheap Sensationalism In Western Culture and Politics really got me thinking.
He began by talking about experiencing the graphic violence and unseemly sex scenes in the movie Bonnie and Clyde over 40 years ago…
... Porn Nation, Under God...
Our culture has pornified everything, even the non-sexual. The mystery is gone, the pleasure drained. We are a gray, dessicated husk. I don’t know what kind of adult I would have become had I grown up in this generation my children are growing up in. Everything has been stripped of its mystery. A boy, or girl, can now see anything in the world on the internet. That’s got to take the wonder out of life.
In his post, FreeThinke describes scenes from Strauss’s opera, Salome:
I remember when she first posed nude, and I also remember sadly wondering aloud how soon it would be before she entered the porn business. It always has to come to this nowadays, doesn’t it? The celebrity without a sex tape is the exception. What’s wrong with us?
“I remember too being genuinely shocked, and hurt at what I saw on the screen. I felt like throwing up –– I was literally stunned.”We are bombarded with multimedia images and memes that ricochet around our pop culture. They leech into our consciousness, cauterizing our souls, searing our imaginations and rotting our souls. Sex, violence and stupid, brutish behavior that diminishes our humanity. But unlike the young FreeThinke, we are no longer self-aware, or perhaps all of this has coarsened us and fundamentally changed our society and changed each one of us as well, to the point that we are desensitized.
... Porn Nation, Under God...
Our culture has pornified everything, even the non-sexual. The mystery is gone, the pleasure drained. We are a gray, dessicated husk. I don’t know what kind of adult I would have become had I grown up in this generation my children are growing up in. Everything has been stripped of its mystery. A boy, or girl, can now see anything in the world on the internet. That’s got to take the wonder out of life.
In his post, FreeThinke describes scenes from Strauss’s opera, Salome:
“Richard Strauss's Salome portrays a young pagan princess in the court of King Herod who becomes obsessed with lust for John the Baptist –– a prisoner at Herod's palace. Her behavior in attempting to seduce John the Baptist, who is locked up and therefore helpless to escape her unwanted attentions, starts out as that of a young girl who is experiencing her first crush, but soon becomes openly lewd as the captive male shows more and more resistance to her attempts to woo him. Towards the climax Salome moves beyond lewd, sheds every semblance of self-control, and in a frankly obscene, frenzied display of desire and fury at his rejection removes all her garments (during the famous Dance of the Seven Veils) and stands before him naked.
His horror and loathing at this spectacle causes her to demand his head to be brought to her on a platter. When finally this grisly deed is accomplished, she kisses his dead lips and sings one of the most oddly moving passages of vocal and orchestral music ever written. Gruesome and depraved as this scene may be it is also heartbreaking for she realizes that her victory is bitter, and that she has lost herself forever.”I couldn’t help but recall the teaser I saw over at Mediaite about the trailer for Octomom Nadya Suleman’s sex video.
I remember when she first posed nude, and I also remember sadly wondering aloud how soon it would be before she entered the porn business. It always has to come to this nowadays, doesn’t it? The celebrity without a sex tape is the exception. What’s wrong with us?
I say this not as a prude, but as a sinful, lustful man who enjoyed a long, wild bachelorhood before marriage. A few years after getting married, a found shoebox of old pictures coupled with gossipy encounters with women who knew me back in my single days sparked my wife to tell me that if she had known all those details about my past, she never would have married me. That hit me hard, and I thanked God that she believed in the sanctity of marriage.
We all need redemption, and we also need forgiveness, not just from God, but from those around us. It takes fellow human beings raising one another up, and also doing the right thing and standing up for all that is good. For ourselves and just as importantly, for one another. We are monkey-see, monkey-do; not just in a negative way, but in a positive way as well.
Reductio ad Nauseum
Nadya Suleman is channeling Salome, only following today’s trend, her dance doesn’t have seven veils. That takes too long. Alas for her and for us all, there are a scant number of John the Baptists, men who forcefully reject such grotesque derogations of femininity and sexuality. No one is there to break her fall; our society is a burgeoning market for stomach-turning human degradation. Not too many years ago, I would have eagerly sought out the pictures and the video, but now, even as it does titillate a part of me (I’m a man after all), things like this turn my stomach and sadden me.
The Preacher in Ecclesiastes was right, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
We all need redemption, and we also need forgiveness, not just from God, but from those around us. It takes fellow human beings raising one another up, and also doing the right thing and standing up for all that is good. For ourselves and just as importantly, for one another. We are monkey-see, monkey-do; not just in a negative way, but in a positive way as well.
Reductio ad Nauseum
Nadya Suleman is channeling Salome, only following today’s trend, her dance doesn’t have seven veils. That takes too long. Alas for her and for us all, there are a scant number of John the Baptists, men who forcefully reject such grotesque derogations of femininity and sexuality. No one is there to break her fall; our society is a burgeoning market for stomach-turning human degradation. Not too many years ago, I would have eagerly sought out the pictures and the video, but now, even as it does titillate a part of me (I’m a man after all), things like this turn my stomach and sadden me.
The Preacher in Ecclesiastes was right, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
The difference is that acts formerly done in private dens of iniquity are now brazenly conducted in the broad light of day, and we cheer them on.
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