NOTHING IS THE NEW EVERYTHING

Americans do not believe that there can be too much of a good thing. We are, despite this belief, still subject to Newton’s third law. For the time being, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. But our best scientists are busy liberating our actions from the chains of their equal and opposite reactions. Progress to this end is proceeding apace, as evidenced by the emergence of three meticulously engineered products on the market in recent years. Low-carb beer, hybrid SUV’s and Viagra are here to empower the American consumer to get drunk, burn rubber, get laid and still wake up with rock hard abs, a clean conscious, and a rock hard (if not clean) cock. Americans are through paying the piper. But as the story goes, the spurned Pied Piper of Hamelin reacted to the people’s failure to pay for his rat-removal services by subsequently escorting the children of Hamelin to an early demise. Americans would do well to note this cautionary tale before chugging too much of the Budweiser Select. I have a feeling Sir Isaac has a thing or two on the brewmaster down at Anheuser-Busch.

Isaac Newton may have founded modern physics, but the wisdom expressed in his third law, that everything comes with a price, is, to quote the immortal John Denver, “older than the trees”. America’s beef with the wisdom contained in Newton’s third law is really a rejection of something much older than physics, namely the concept of sin.

America, for better or worse, has been soaked in religion since the day the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock. By and large, we are still a church-going people, and most of us still voice a belief in God. But the bridle of religion has never rested easily on this prodigal folk, and almost 400 years post-Pilgrim we finally have secretly spit out the bit, gambling that our master at the reigns won’t notice. We still believe in God, and are interested in remaining in His good graces. What we have lost interest in are all the tedious rules handed down from on high. Ever practical, and always ingenious, Americans have solved the problem by remaking their relationship to the Almighty in the image of Diet Coke; all of God’s love and forgiveness but none of his rules. Just as Diet Coke replaced sugar with Nutrasweet, America has replaced sin with low-carb beer, hybrid SUV’s, and Viagra. Each of these three products flushes one of the seven deadly sins down the toilet. Surely, four more products shall emerge that will complete the purging. For now it will suffice to review the extant elimination, keeping in mind that everything, even and especially the end of sin, comes at a price.

Low-carb beer, first introduced to the public in the form of Michelob Ultra and now joined in the Anheuser-Busch stable of beers by Budweiser Select, is the ultimate expression of the low-carb diet. Low-carb beer stands at the pinnacle of the low-carb lifestyle as the only available low-carb intoxicant, at least until someone cooks up some low-carb pot brownies. Low-carb beer not only gives you a buzz, it enhances that buzz with the frisson of getting away with it scot-free. Perhaps, liberated from its homely partner the beer belly, the beer belch could even prove seductive. With low-carb beer, the possibilities beckon, in a way that even the comeliest plate of low-carb fare can never approach. There is too much history to a plate of filet mignon and caviar, it is too wrapped up in the human drama of power and prestige to ever serve as a capable instrument in the American war on sin. Certainly, a plate of salisbury steak, scrambled eggs and Velveeta isn’t up to the task.

No, it is the newly crowned King of Low-Carb Beers, Budweiser Select, that must lead the charge to topple the signature American deadly sin, gluttony. The size of people shopping at Super-Walmart grows out of our super-sized fries and Super-Big Gulps. We are a land of Super-Gluttons. Budweiser Select, as champion of all that is low-carb, is here to tell America one thing: you do not need to change. Continue consuming mass quantities. Despite all the Michelob Ultra ads featuring sculpted twentysomethings slavishly pursuing physical fitness, raising a glass of low-carb beer is to reject the very discipline these ads so deceitfully glamorize. A finely tuned athlete may occasionally indulge in the odd pint of lager, but it is an indulgence precisely because beer is the opposite of physical fitness. Linking beer to physical fitness is like linking marijuana to studying for your final exam (there is a theory that if you study for an exam on a drug you will do better if you also use the drug during the exam- this may apply to caffeine, but until someone volunteers to take their organic chemistry final stoned I stand by my argument).

And yet, Anheuser-Busch profits surged the year they introduced Michelob Ultra. Kudos to Anheuser-Busch for tapping into America’s rejection of gluttony as sin by tapping a keg of Michelob Ultra. Through its portrayal of low-carb beer drinkers as quasi ancient Olympians, Anheuser-Busch has enabled a turning point in the war on gluttony as sin. For the sin of gluttony, the introduction of Michelob Ultra was like Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg. The die is now cast. The sin of gluttony will continue to fight the good fight as it always has, offering the lesson for those who listen that overindulgence has its price. But Appomatox, the time when sin must surrender its old ally gluttony, looms. Like the southern warrior turning in his guns at Lee’s request, gluttony’s footsoldiers, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, must soon lay down their arms in the face of Budweiser Select’s overwhelming force.

Tucked in a pocket just below the expanding American waistline rests the expanding American wallet. Our gluttony is matched by its kindred spirit among the seven deadly sins, greed. You pay a stiff price for telling the truth in America, and in 1986 Ivan Boesky told the truth of America’s relationship to greed in an infamous speech at the commencement ceremony of the University of California, Berkeley (of all places!): “Greed is all right by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” Later that year Boesky paid a 100 million dollar fine to the SEC, purportedly for the misdeed of insider trading. Boesky was really paying for his speech. The second Boesky made the speech, he had to pay, and the insider trading stuff was just the mechanism facilitating a public flogging of Boesky for blowing America’s cover.

But Boesky’s ultimate penalty came in the 1987 Hollywood film Wall Street. Hollywood, whose mythmakers exist to provide cover for America (the greatest example is 1986’s Top Gun, in which Tom Cruise, with lockstep cooperation from the United States Navy, glamorized America’s cold war campaign so brilliantly that Navy recruitment numbers immediately spiked. Six years later Hollywood, with uncanny foresight, cast Cruise in A Few Good Men, in which Cruise establishes that the military court system is more than capable of meting out justice should any instances of abuse arise in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Clearly more is at stake when Cruise wears a uniform than just ticket sales; when cruise plays soldier, or cop, as he did in 2002’s Minority Report, prepare to read the tea leaves. Minority Report, in which psychics predict crime so that it can be stopped before it happens, endorses the twin post-9/11 American tactics of profiling and pre-emptive war to stop terrorism before it happens.) cast Michael Douglas to play the Boesky role in Wall Street as a villain. We were so eager to embrace the idea of Boesky as villain that we thanked Douglas with an Oscar for so skillfully enabling us to do so. I don’t know Ivan Boesky, and he may be a greedy bastard, but all he did when he gave his speech was tell it like it is in America. In fact, until he slipped up by giving that speech, Ivan Boesky was a real American hero precisely because he was a greedy bastard.

So, as Douglas put it in his version of the speech in Wall Street, greed is good. Which brings us to the SUV. By now the SUV needs no introduction. We have even had an SUV backlash, but it has had only marginal impact on sales of the ubiquitous thirsty behemoths. The SUV’s bulletproof popularity is firmly rooted in its role as proud, if coded symbol of American greed. The code reads that Americans are rugged individuals who like big, rugged trucks for our big, rugged lives. The secret decoder comes in the form of a popular bumper sticker which depicts a Calvin-from-Calvin&Hobbes look-alike wearing a Ford logo and pissing on a Chevy logo (or vice versa). This bumper sticker sells partly because of its adolescent vulgarity, but largely because it understands that to be on top in America is to piss on those beneath you. SUV’s are just the translation of this bumper sticker into Detroit (and Asian, and European) iron. When the Worldwatch Institute website reports the fact that “the United States, with less than 5% of the global population, uses about a quarter of the world’s fossil fuel resources-burning up nearly 25% of the coal, 26% of the oil, and 27% of the world’s natural gas,” it is just as much a fact that to drive an SUV is to piss on the rest of the world. SUV sales remain solid in the face of rising prices at the pump precisely because spending 100 bucks to fill up your tank only to get 12 miles to the gallon is like stomping your boot into the chest of the guy you’re pissing on, i.e. it feels really, really good.

The problem with all of this, like Boesky’s speech, is that it threatens to blow our cover. Greed is good in America, as long as it is covered in a veneer of, if not generosity, at least innovative entrepreneurship. SUV’s are too obvious; America has been caught urinating in public when we are usually content to flush our waste into the river and let the currents carry it downstream, safely past our borders (see the American export of acid rain to Canada). Enter the hybrid SUV. Hybrids are a new class of vehicle that combine a traditional gas-burning engine with an electric engine, with the effect of cleaner emissions and improved fuel efficiency. Hybrids have been available on the US market in car form since 1999, expanding the significant, if niche segment of the car market devoted to extreme fuel efficiency (automakers, while obviously not devoted to extreme fuel efficiency as a rule, do recognize the potential profits of catering to a real niche market). But the kind of person who would buy a hybrid car would never buy a hybrid SUV, because SUV’s, regardless of the engine underneath the hood, stand for everything that a hybrid car buyer loathes. It would be like a vegan wearing a leather jacket because the leather was tanned with natural products that had never been tested on animals. Vegans and leather do not mix, and neither do tree huggers and SUV’s.

Hybrid SUV’s, then, are on about something other than clean air and sustainable growth. To understand their purpose one need look no further than the advertising for the three hybrid SUV’s currently on the market, the Ford Escape Hybrid, the Toyota Highlander Hybrid, and the Toyota-built Lexus RX 400 Hybrid. Ford’s website boasts of “the no compromise Escape Hybrid.” Lexus television ads intone “you can drive two cars, or one without compromise,” the RX 400 Hybrid, natch. Compromise, apparently, is an indignity the American consumer must no longer bear (the Budweiser Select slogan is “Expect Everything”). Compromise is born of a world where you can not have your cake and eat it too. Hybrid SUV’s have performed gene therapy on the world’s DNA, evidenced by the Toyota Highlander website which announces that “now you can have your SUV and MPG too.”

Toyota’s ad wizards are really saying you can be greedy and virtuous at the same time. Which is exactly what Ivan Boesky said. Boesky had the misfortune of being ahead of his time, a prophet of 21st Century America, a time and place when “you can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.” Boesky symbolically met the fate of most prophets, although in America to forfeit $100 million is a fate worse than death.

The sin of greed can be understood as an overdose of yes, for which the antidote is a healthy diet of no. Human morality as it relates to greed exists on the continuum between yes and no. Too much yes swerves off towards greed, and too much no veers towards asceticism. As the Buddha discovered, extreme greed and extreme asceticism are equal in folly, leading him down his Middle Path. The Buddha’s wisdom obtains as long as the human dimension is bounded by both yes and no. Hybrid SUV’s present a world that says yes and yes.

Our relationship to greed and gluttony is rather simple and is captured by an SUV at a fast-food drive-thru, where we simultaneously consume food and oil as fast as we can. Our relationship to the third deadly sin in question, lust, is more complex. This complexity is evident in our commingling of sexual repression and lust. On the surface, the two conditions seem contradictory. At first glance it feels odd to maintain that a people who spend anywhere from three to ten billion dollars annually on porn (porn revenues are notoriously fuzzy) can still be called sexually repressed. It is tempting to accept that Jon Holmes long since pounded the sexual repression out of America. Odd as it may seem, however, our addiction to porn is but a symptom of our ongoing sexual repression.

This is all rooted in very basic Freudian stuff, and begins with the fundamental importance of the human sex drive, which, along with aggression, comprises much of that primal force, the Id. The Id must be tamed by civilizing factors, internalized as the Superego, for the individual to join human society. This is all covered in the first week of Freud 101, which is to say that it does not take ten years of psychoanalytical training to grasp that there is something amiss in our culture’s version of this process. The American sex drive is like a horse only half broken to the saddle. Americans mount their sex drives (pardon the pun) only to get bucked off unceremoniously. Unable to ride their sex drives into the sunset, Americans retire to porn, which, at best, is like riding the animatronic bull in a country-western bar, and is more often akin to shoveling out the horse’s stall.

Americans are as close to being comfortable with our sexuality as porn is to being a celebration of human sexuality. Porn is what is left of American sexuality after it bursts forth from the American unconscious like steam from a cracked pressure cooker. Being American I do not know what the cultural landscape of a people with a well integrated sexuality would look like. But I know that the pinnacle of their sexuality would not resemble the sexual act that stands as ours, as documented by porn. This act’s status is authenticated by its title, the “money shot”, as our almighty sexual act is linked to the almighty dollar. Although porn sex scenes do not vary greatly in content, in America every hetero porn scene must end with a “money shot”, because a facial cumshot, which when its aim is true is a shot of jiz in the eye, is the only sexual act that captures the twisted dynamics undergirding all straight American sex. The facial cumshot closes every hetero porn scene with a warning: Attend to your repressed sexuality, or it will assuredly blind you.

Like this figurative blindness, literal impotence is a byproduct of American sexual repression. When repressed sexuality erupts as lust, Nature has its mechanisms to stem the flow. As body and mind are one, the dysfunctional psychology of American sexuality is matched by 30 million dysfunctional American genitals (according to Wrongdiagnosis.com). One out of every nine Americans struggles with impotence. Porn is the open wound of sexual repression, and impotent loins are the scars. Lust, like gluttony, is written across the body. While obesity, gluttony’s pound of flesh, sits out in the open, impotence has long been lust’s dirty little secret. At least it was until the pharmaceutical industry realized the gold mine idling in America’s pants.

Viagra, and its siblings Levitra and Cialis, are strip mining American impotency to the tune of $2 billion annually. Viagra comes to the party dressed as the redeemer of American sexuality. The consummate wolf in sheep’s clothing, Viagra profits are in fact dependent on the very sexual repression Viagra purports to overcome. The day when Americans heal the wounds of sexual repression is the day the American cock will rise again. The day of this resurrection is also the day that Viagra goes out of business. For now, Viagra is doing everything it can to maintain the sexual status quo. This is most evident in the porn industry, the engine room of American sexual repression. Theage.com reports that porn industry “insiders say up to 90% of new actors now use (Viagra) to perform.” Viagra inflates the loins of the porn industry to gird up its own loins for the job of Prison Warden. Viagra is now the Warden who keeps American sexuality repressed under lock and key, and porn is its prison guard.

Viagra’s black magic is its ability to mine already scarred land. Encrypted in this black magic is the code of a new logic. This new logic, in the form of Viagra, declares that one can be concurrently impotent and virile. Much like Viagra, low-carb beer mines the scars of obesity, casting a spell that conjoins gluttony and health. And hybrid SUV’s mine our scarred land: Presto-Change-O, you are now greedy and green.

Americans consume this black magic because it promises the quick fix. But, like the viewer of porn, the more we consume the more we grow blind to the consequences. Which brings us back to the Pied Piper of Hamelin. It may have been momentarily convenient for the adults of Hamelin to stiff the Piper on his rat-removal bill. But the eventual toll, the lives of Hamelin’s children, was a grim reminder of the logic found in Newton’s third law: Everything has a price. As America increasingly buys into its new logic in the hopes of stiffing the Piper, we are, ironically, running up an inestimable tab with said Piper.

The surge of this new logic delivers the collapse of meaning. I am not interested in sin in a fire-and brimstone, you-will-burn-in-hell kind of way. Instead, I am interested in sin as the guarantor of meaning. Sin draws boundaries around human experience. Encountering these boundaries, as gluttons do through obesity, as the greedy do in their loneliness and isolation, and as the lascivious do when their equipment no longer works, can be quite painful. It is this pain that Americans wish to cancel, but it is also this pain that steers us, like the Buddha, to the Middle Path. Sin, when attended to, delivers us to that place where health is occasionally spiced by indulgence, where wealth is equaled by generosity, and where sex is matched by love. Ignored, sin startles you with obesity, loneliness, and impotence. These are sin’s gifts, and their price.

No longer willing to pay this price, America has raised the stakes. Sin will not just be ignored, it will be erased. We attempt to erase sin with every sip of Budweiser Select, every mile driven behind the wheel of a Ford Escape Hybrid, and every swallow of Viagra. But with every sip, mile, and swallow we expand our existential vacuum. It means something, perhaps everything, to be healthy but occasionally indulgent, to receive but to know how to give, to touch and to care. And, while unpleasant, it means something to be fat, greedy, and limp. It means absolutely nothing to be simultaneously gluttonous and healthy, greedy and gracious, impotent and virile. To attempt to be both at once is to succeed at being neither. Americans want everything, thus we get nothing. In fact, we get nothing-plus. We pay all of sin’s price, and get none of its gifts. The depth of our self-delusion is bottomless; we really believe that Budweiser Select will vanquish obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. But sin’s muscle is here to stay. All of our machinations have estranged us from only one of sin’s muscles, its heart. But if prodigal America comes back home from its far-flung madness, sin will throw open the doors to the Middle Path’s banquet hall and have a celebration on the spot.