VOICE FROM AMERICA
Sacred and profane love in the Republican allegory
It is not hard to see how the Republicans stumbled upon their campaign pledge to increase sexual conformity and improve family values. The communists are gone, the liberals are in hiding, the Japanese are in recession, the black criminals are safely queued up outside the gas chambers. Yet there remains the widespread perception that the nation under Republican rule is falling apart. So the rulers panicked. And in their panic they fingered all those whose sexual behaviour fails to satisfy hoary notions of rectitude. This was a blunder, in part because sexual morals are far down the list of pressing national concerns, but also because there really is no longer a sex- ual norm in America. Fewer Americans than ever before — only about one quarter — live with the Republicans' idea of a fam- ily. As many voters live alone as with hus- bands or wives, and no poll can say what they do after they turn out their lights.
So one can imagine the relief of the sexu- al moralists when the cover of every news- paper and magazine in the country fea- tured a story about a quixotic 56-year-old New York Jewish film-maker who had left his appropriately aged lover of 12 years for his lover's 21-year-old adopted daughter. In Woody Allen, the Republicans quickly dis- covered the genuine article, a sexual heretic. The lack of public sympathy for the film-maker has allowed them to moralise without any danger of losing votes or being called to account. At their convention in Houston, one saw men fresh from cheating on their wives waving signs reading: Woody Allen is Clinton's Family Values Advisor. More recently Congressman Newt Gingrich — who once married a schoolteacher 17 years his senior, only to leave her on her deathbed for a younger woman — rose in his home state of Georgia to call the love affair 'a weird situation [that] fits the Democratic Party platform perfectly. Woody Allen had nonincest with his non- daughter because they were a nonfamily.' Even the libertarians at the Wall Street Journal, whose editor recently retired to help spend the royalties from his wife's books about sexual fantasies, joined in:
Perhaps the people angry at Mr Allen have had their fill of the principle that has shaped our current culture. This principle can be summed up, briefly, as the do-whatever- makes-you-feel-good ethos, the notion that we all have our different needs — and who's to say what's good or what's bad? In life, as often in his art, Woody Allen comes to us as the perfect exemplar of this school of morali- ty. It is also the principle that has helped bring about our current uncontrolled explo- sion of sleaze and pornography, and the tol- eration of amorality on a grand scale unequalled in history.
One wonders what could possibly be the point of these endless sermons, since every sinner in America already disapproves of Woody Allen. The film-maker has become the lone exception to the American rule that no matter how heinous the crime there is always someone willing to defend the criminal as a victim of society; feminists, televangelists, single mothers, cultural elites, rednecks, bigamists and the unem- ployed have all roundly damned him. His lover's plea (`The heart wants what it wants,' he has said) has gone widely disbe- lieved. The photographs he once took of the lithesome Soon-Yi wearing no clothes are now waved by lawyers and journalists as proof that the artist does not grasp the dif- ference between love and lust. The moral ambiguities in his films are now exhumed to show he could not possibly know the mean- ing of love. 'He's a complete narcissist,' someone called Midge Dector explained to the writer Rhoda Koenig, 'so that if he says he loves somebody, it makes you laugh to think what that emotion might be.'
It is worth examining this lack of faith in a people normally so credulous about everything. The real importance of the affair is its revelation of how little sympathy even the most libertine American has for unconventional love. Stendhal was the first to suggest that all higher feeling in America is suspect unless its motives are transpar- ently commercial. 'It is as if the source of sensitiveness were dried up in them,' he wrote of Americans in his treatise on love. `Their whole attention seems to be taken up with ordering their lives in a rational way and in avoiding discomfort; when at last they reach the moment of gathering the fruit of so much care and of such long sus- tained habits of orderliness they have no life left for enjoyment ... they lack the passions that make one enjoy life.'
Of course it is absurd to suggest that Americans do not approve of love. They do, with the same highly trained enthusi- asm with which they approve of a sense of humour. Their desire to preserve this infan- tile attitude is what makes them so fright- ened of feeling sympathy for Woody Allen. They do not wish to acknowledge that true love might also be socially disruptive, so they insist that the socially disruptive is not true love. That is why it is so crucial that Woody Allen be thought not only immoral, but insincere.
The corollary to this naive rule of exclu- sion is that the love that happens to pass the American entrance test is not very closely scrutinised. Thus the condemnation of Woody Allen and Soon-Yi makes pos- sible the celebration of the love between James Carville and Mary Matalin. Mr Carville is the manager for the Democrats' campaign; Ms Matalin is the deputy manag- er for the Republicans'. Mr Carville is in charge of spreading sleaze about George Bush; Ms Matalin is in charge of spreading sleaze about Bill Clinton. So foul are they in public that one fairly shudders at the thought of what they might say to each other in private. Yet not long ago Miss Matalin told the New York Times that 'If James asks me to marry him, I'll say yes'. Theirs is the storybook American love affair. The flattering articles have been written; the Hollywood interest has been expressed; and no one has been so churlish as to suggest that it is perverse for a man and a woman whose disagreements are meant to determine the nation's future to hop into bed together at the end of each day.
The Republican strategists were on to something when they attempted to divide human passion into the normal and the abnormal. Their mistake was not in their theme but in their broad treatment of it. Had they focused their official anger on homosexuals, or single mothers, or spin- sters who love their cats, they might have rallied the mob against the unseen evil one more time. Now, just as the moment seems to have passed, they have right under their noses a love that exposes, far more perfect- ly than Woody Allen ever could, the deca- dence in the political culture. Perhaps the love police will nip this affair in the bud, as an example to us all.
The Wasp
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