When Love Is Soon Hot, Soon Cold
Sisk, John P.
"When Love Is Soon Hot, Soon Cold" The Communist-led C.G.T. unions are harassing the country with short strikes to warn it of what may happen if the election does not go their way; while Edmund Maire, the leader of the main...
...after which, to be frank about it, the issue of television's Evil Eye on the body politic began to pall, in inverse ratio to the rising systolic-diastolic readings of my middle years...
...Even for humanist-intellectuals quantity has a capacity to assert quality...
...Certainly, one might have expected a statement that demonstrated some continuity with that distinguished band of humanists who, as Castiglione represents them in The Courtier, gathered at the court at Urbino early in the sixteenth century to talk about love and related matters...
...The more extreme members of the hoarding Party of Stability are convinced that the difference between themselves and the Party of Growth is the difference between morality and immorality...
...This does not mean that people did not grow and become fulfilled in those hoarding times...
...Of course, it has never been easy for an American to be a sybarite, regardless of the intensity of his rebellion against what he imagines his Puritan past to have been...
...What dominates and structures this Party of Growth, then, is a vegetable metaphor...
...Eliot in Four Quartets: Except for the point, the still point There would be no dance, and there is only the dance...
...Paul had said pretty much the same thing to the Corinthians: "There is nothing love cannot face...
...Just this: First, to set the record straight for members of the under-40 generation, let me point out that the medium has not declined in the way Chayefsky would have you believe...
...They are more likely to read Playboy or Esquire than the Humanist...
...One looking up the quarterback's molars as he calls signals...
...Thomas Aquinas, medieval chivalry „the Puritan work ethic, romanticism, Victorianism—to say nothing of such latter-day exponents of the old love as Marabel Morgan, author of Total Joy, and George F. Gilder, author of Sexual Suicide...
...They, after all, are what most distinguishes television news from print news...
...The ruling conviction of the "New Bill" is that "the boundaries of human sexuality need to be expanded" in the full realization that "until now our bodies have been in bondage to church and The American Spectator March 1978 11 state," and that in order to achieve "our full potential for joyful expression, we need to adopt the doctrine that actualizing pleasures are among the highest moral goods...
...Roone knows that in the world of televent coverage, the Whoo is more important than the What...
...Howard Cosell brings meaning to a simple game...
...threatens serious social conflict, no matter who wins, if major changes in the economy are not made...
...The "New Bill" has such an act of redefinition in mind when it The American Spectator March 1978 13 ranks the self-actualization of pleasures among the highest moral goods...
...It is clear enough that in recent years Malory's stability has been identified by many as a prescription for an erotic straitjacket, desirable only insofar as it increases by one the number of available options...
...Chatter and shifting images: No one does it better than Roone Arledge...
...The Party of Stability, following St...
...Ostrow and Peck, in fact, suggest a secularized affinity with the Manichees of the early Christian centuries, for whom fornication and adultery were-less serious sins than the production of children, since the latter tended to perpetuate the human race's enslavement to matter and history and its estrangement from spirit...
...Yet another at the blimp...
...And back to the pom-pom girl...
...The Associated Press, in its dull, laconic way, can tell us what is happening...
...This is not true, however, of Steve Ostrow, proprietor-philosopher of New York's fabulous Continental Baths, who came to national attention by way of Tom Burke's piece about him last year in Rolling Stone...
...Just as well...
...Steve Ostrow depicts his Continental as a soft utopia—"food, drink, laundry, pool, endless dancing, endless sensuality, no strings or obligations, just endless feeling"—and so might seem to belong in Hugh Hefner's camp rather than in that of the ethically austere Party of Growth...
...The Francoeurs hope to make the pleasure bond the basis of a pro-sex ethic...
...Both books give the same kind of comfort to the Party of Stability that Michael Novak and Karen Lamb-Novak do when they state in Creative Living that the family "is a political statement standing in the way of a coming tussle between the lonely individual and the omnivorous state...
...For such a program the Francoeurs' term "sexual apocalypse" is the right one, especially when the expectation of apocalypse is linked with improved techniques for contraception and abortion and with what appears to be a propitious collapse in the value system of the Party of Stability...
...True lovers, like the stoic Marcus Aurelius' wise man, are not whirled about...
...For Casler there is a close connection between personal growth and "pleasant sexual variety...
...But not entirely without effect, as scholars such as Eric Voegelin, Norman Cohn, and Karl LOwith have pointed out...
...His position is close to that of Della and Rustum Roy, who argue in Honest Sex that it is illogical to consider it a sign of great love to be willing to lay down one's life for a friend while refusing to share one's spouse with him...
...True love, "the marriage of true minds," as Shakespeare puts it in his great one-hundred and sixteenth sonnet, "alters not when it alteration finds...
...Hence its tendency to bring sexual liberation in under the esthetic umbrella...
...Personal growth, the full realization of the human potential, got top priority at Sandstone no less than at Esalen...
...Stanton's swingers also grow—how could they not with their "sense of wonder about sex and love" ? The Francoeurs want an esthetic and ethic "based on communication, pleasure, friendship, enjoyment, variety and individual growth...
...The "New Bill," in fact, suggests the great romances, for what is at stake is that greater self one may securely become if the imperatives of personal growth and creativity successfully oppose the stereotyping taboos of church and state...
...Apparently, however, he cannot think of his enterprise apart from his obligation to strive for the political clout that will make it the launching pad for a worldwide salvational program...
...Caligula's horse of Monday-night commentary...
...According to Robert Rimmer, Robert Francoeur was instrumental in crystalizing the philosophy that went into the Sandstone experience, an experiment in nonhoarding, honest, nonexclusive, and nonromantic sex that not so long ago was located in the Malibu mountains of California—a state, so it is rumored, in which hoarding of any kind is not in favor...
...Why does this fellow have to be'so duty-obsessed, so nervous, about his pleasure...
...loose ends about war, politics, crime, and the economy, to be tied into so many compressed packages, like football quarters, halves, and two-minute warnings...
...King knows that there are still lots of places in America where a woman "can't easily carry on a full affair without risking gossipy neighbors or even community outrage...
...But that extra dimension is needed to bring the audience to your channel...
...Who can afford to have kids...
...And let's not forget the superstars...
...Ellen Peck agrees with Alex Comfort that the best modern sex is nonreproductive to the end of fulfillment and growth...
...more importantly, however, "it has grown full with love...
...which is why Roone gave this sports-manic nation the Vic Gold's latest book is PR as in President...
...So what is there to add...
...When the doomed King Duncan tells Macbeth that "I have begun to plant thee and will labour/To make thee full of growing," the implication is that this can happen only if the relation between themremains stable...
...The dance implies not only the incorporation of the dancers, each subordinated to the ordered movement, but stability...
...Joachim saw the history of human salvation as an inevitable progress through three stages, or "reichs," in the third of which the clerical, proscriptive, and sacramental Church—the Church of the "letter"—would have withered away and there would have been left that plentitude of spirit in which a knowledge of God by direct vision and contemplation would have been possible...
...Like Robert Rimmer, who favors erotic combines of two or three couples who have had the advantage of a Harrad or Premar education, most of them want some version of it as a basis of human bonding...
...They call it "dead air...
...Casler favors, therefore, permissive matrimony, convinced as he is that "the individual should have the right to unlimited sexual expression, provided only that his behavior does not infringe upon the rights of others...
...He said, "Wh000...
...But if the current situation is altered only slightly, whether to M. Mitterrand's advantage or not, it is a safe bet that the country will continue along its frustrated and frustrating course...
...He is clearly opposed to the over-sacramentalization of sex, which for him is "monaga-mystic" sex...
...The "New Bill," for instance, prefers to speak of its aims in terms of "psychic growth and ego-enhancement with others...
...Such expectations would have been badly wide of the mark...
...Rimmer' s Harrad and Premar educational programs, like the Sandstone and Esalen experiments, are couched in terms of creativity and esthetic transcendence...
...The Francoeurs as teachers and writers are generally known for their commitment to a sexual revolution in which the traditional anti-sex ethic will be reversed...
...In 1789, the Royalists sat on the right, the Republicans on the left...
...This leads one to believe that they would have about as much faith in the sexual apocalypse as St...
...It should be noted that Sir Thomas, having made the wrong political choices, was probably in jail when he wrote this, hence inclined to pessimism, and that his story featured that fated adulterous pair, Lancelot and Guinevere...
...thus the likely thing is that most of them missed, as I did, "The New Bill of Sexual Rights and Responsibilities" when it appeared in the Humanist early in 1976...
...Another opponent of the hoarding Party of Stability who did not sign the "New Bill" is Lawrence Casler, author of Is Marriage Necessary...
...Thus Sir Thomas Malory, writing in the fag end of the Middle Ages with the great time of King Arthur already legendary leagues behind him, begins his "Knight of the Cart" with the regret that "in many persons there is no stability...
...The Francoeurs even enlist Christ on their side when they suggest that His famous indictment—"He who lusts after a woman in his heart has already committed adultery"—is aimed not at adultery as such but at lustful adultery...
...Nor is it without historical precedent, strongly reminiscent as it is of the late 12th-century visionary, Joachim of Floris...
...Everybody, it seems, is fighting the television news monster these days, to the extent that Koestler may be proven wrong: Will the last battle be between the Communists and the ex-Communists, or between CBS-TV and former employees of CBS-TV...
...Yet, as the incarcerated Sir Thomas Malory might glumly wonder, what human enterprise made up of men and women soon hot, soon cold, ever managed to avoid being taken over by a novus dux possessed by the imperatives of his own grand story...
...The sexual pleasure along the way is, like the pleasure the young man gets from his cigarette, a trivial thing unless it can be seen as serving some grand and even apocalyptic end...
...In fact, at times its rhetoric is pitched almost as high as that of the old love: At this point in our history, we human beings are embarking on a wondrous adventure...
...and it is in fact considered deadly, the assumption being that the viewer, left to his own inner resources, will doze off between, say, the moment the astronaut's foot touches moondust and the upcoming commercial...
...Thus Alex Comfort believes that he has the recipe for de-alienating society, while the promoters of Sandstone had the "transcendental purpose of working to improve society by developing new group styles and communities...
...For three thousand years," they write, "people in western society have been nervous about things sexual...
...One can see therefore how necessary it is for the Party of Growth to favor cool, under-sacramentalized, and nonromantic sex, lest it end up as much a captive of the paradox of passion as our culture has always been...
...perfect girl, Randi Oakes...
...Though not a signer of the "New Bill," he most likely would have signed it, agreeing with it as he does that our bodies have for too long been in bondage to church and state and about the human need for what the "New Bill" calls "guilt-free, reciprocal pleasure...
...On this score he is in agreement with Ellen Peck, founder of the National Organization of Non Parents, who warns in Viva that children inhibit freedom, happiness, fulfillment, and spontaneity...
...For 3,000 years at least western society has been nervous about everything, and one of the consequences is that our condition is not that of the Marquesan Islanders, whose purely recreational value system the Francoeurs admire...
...This is true enough, but it would be truer if the last word were omitted...
...Paul, prefers the metaphor of the body (two in one flesh) and the metaphor of music (the component notes are committed to one another in a unity that is greater than their sum), or its close relation, the metaphor of the dance, with which the last book of Dante's epic ends...
...the expected messianic leader—the novus dux—did not appear, and the grand dream dribbled away into underground heresies...
...Nor does anyone better understand how the superstar system works...
...In fact, it was so honored in a Cosmopolitan article, "Love Is Back In Town" by Walter Meade, that recommends the old-fashioned kind of exclusive commitment to those who are up to John P. Sisk is professor of English at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington...
...Perhaps he was not asked to sign, or perhaps he was put off by the high-minded rhetoric, which has its own capacity to suggest a romantic, and therefore un-Comfortable, stand against the storms of fortune...
...Not even personal growth is more important than that...
...In its heart it is too anarchistic, too equalitarian, too committed to self-actualization, too afraid of the elite-forming impulses of the oldhoarding, mystifying, and taboo-structured love, to encourage the appearance, let alone the acceptance, of a novus dux...
...At this point one may remember Erica Jong' s Isadora Wing and her famous fantasy of unzippered, spontaneous sex with improper strangers, according to which any place is a good place and any way a good way...
...One might have expected in them the respect for the past, and therefore for the old love, that characterized the original humanists...
...Also among the nonsigners, but amply present in spirit, is the late Wilhelm Reich, who like Sir Thomas Malory ended up in prison, but not before his orgone energy accumulator had made him the Thomas Edison of the sexual revolution...
...It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken...
...Television news, served up by any of the networks, has always been treated like a game...
...The inconstancy of lovers has therefore been a handy symbol for writers who wish to convey their sense that the times are bad times, or that the center of things is coming unglued...
...But they clearly aspire to more than that no less than Shelley himself did, as if they realized that in the long run no one remembers the lovers apart from the romance, that so far as lovers are moved by their own pleasure they move toward anonymity, and that their only chance against time, therefore, is to become stabilized in a good story...
...Apart from any personal ennui about the subject, it has become a veritable cafeteria of sociopolitical bitching, an area of critical commentary so crowded that one has to stand in line to get a hearing...
...There's a story behind that young man, Frank, how he...
...And the story (it is hard to miss this in the sacred texts of the Party of Growth) is more political than erotic in its ultimate aims, however much it may be cherished by people who have lost confidence in politics as a means to the truly liberated society...
...Understand, I was venting spleen about television's distorted news values when Spiro Agnew was a struggling lawyer just out of Baltimore night school...
...Finally, there were the Agnew wars...
...but first, a break for our ABC stations around the country, after which we'll return for a between-rounds interview with that wonderful lady, a dear personal friend with whom I had the privilege of having dinner last evening, Ethel Kennedy, the wife of the late...
...Surprisingly, the "New Bill" does not use the word "creative" ; nevertheless, it is suffused throughout with the spirit of creativity...
...Nothing is clearer than the moral intensity with which Casler attacks the brainwashing that makes it impossible for so many "to adjust to a life in which nonmarital sex is readily available...
...He adds dimension: And there is David, the fine young lad I was speaking to just before we came on the air...
...Yearning forstability in passion, then, we employ the language of love's hyperbole, so that when the most frivolous sensualists are asked to verbalize their experience they are likely to sound as if, in the words of Shakespeare's sonnet, they are determined to bear it out even to the edge of doom...
...It would be a mistake to say, however, that the opponents of the Party of Stability are against marriage in any shape or form...
...nevertheless, for those determined to fulfill their needs a place and a way can be found...
...The Party of Growth does not appear to have escaped this endemic nervousness...
...and it is nervous, one suspects, not simply because of the possibility that it might fall short of its ideal of self-actualizing sexual liberation, but because of the possibility that the forms of liberation will prove in the end to have served no serious purpose—to have added up only to pleasure...
...It is not possible to read this basically epicurean document without being struck by its high-mindedness (it should be noted that there was no lack of high-mindedness among the ancient Epicureans...
...But then one does not hope to find Malory's "old love" in the swinging world of Cosmopolitan, where men and women together expect to be "soon hot, soon cold" since the alternative is to be soon bored...
...Their presence among the signers of the "New Bill" might have helped to call attention to its latent discontent not simply with the old love but with the human condition itself...
...Nothing could be further from the truth...
...A s a veteran of the Agnew wars against network news I took an oath some years ago never to write another serious word about the small-screen monster...
...For the first time we realize that we own our own bodies...
...Thus T.S...
...Then, a few years later, John F. Kennedy made his mediagenic mark sitting beside John McClellan during the Senate's anti-laborracketeering hearings, so-called...
...It is hard, of course, to evoke the image of the work of art without evoking an image of stability, art traditionally being a way of significantly resisting the flow, not going comfortably with it...
...Growth," which suggests the opposite of hoarding and stability, is the key word here...
...As expressed in traditional marriage, says Casler in the Humanist, this kind of sex is responsible "for today's prevailing neurotic climate, with its pervasive insecurity...
...King takes into account the "ambience of freedom and autonomy that's, frankly, conducive to the casual adventure, provided one is not so hung up on guilt, so compulsive a hoarder, that she instinctively cheats herself out of a perfectly marvellous experience...
...Much more attuned to the Cosmopolitan ethos, however, was Florence King's article, "Brief Encounters...
...This is nowhere more apparent than on the level of celebrity romance as it appears in the tabloids, particularly in the National Enquirer—which has little to say about growth and creativity but which is never so happy as when it can depict happy lovers on its front page: actor Peter Lawford, for instance, admitting that the gorgeous legal secretary, Maxine Yates, is the love of his life...
...Indeed, say the Francoeurs, "In their Victorian reactionary conservatism, Masters and Johnson argue that a healthy committed marriage cannot exist without sexual exclusivity...
...When the vegetable metaphor is used in the dispensation of the old love it is likely to be in a context biased for stability...
...All of which might lead one to wonder if this is not the case with the champions of growth and creativity as well: that it is the story they are really interested in, not the sexually liberated characters who serve its needs in their brief time and then pass on...
...The O'Neills' brand of open marriage may, as Rimmer claims, be lacking in structure, but there is no question of its commitment to growth...
...And here, if indeed it is in the Joachite tradition, the Party of Growth has a real problem...
...It has no charismatic leader to gather together and direct its energies in what Joachim saw as the indispensable climactic battle between the forces of good and evil...
...Noteworthy too are the credentials of the 32 signers of the "New Bill...
...Our overriding objective," it states in a key passage, "should be to help individuals live balanced and self-actualizing lives...
...The juggling for position in this campaign strongly suggeststhat the French, with their common-sensical habits and their vicious little bigotries, are a resolutely centrist nation, and that only the accidents of their history and the dogmas of their collective mythology place so many of them at so alarming a distance from the center...
...To the networks that focus the camera's eye on those events which alter and illuminate our times, silence is anything but golden...
...Given such expectations, it is not too much to say, as the Francoeurs do: "In the area of values, we believe our American culture has achieved the stratosphere, if not yet escape velocity...
...Remember Cronkite yammering at the very instant of the first moon landing...
...True, assaulting television hardly seems worth the effort anymore...
...Joachim, to use the language of the "New Bill," saw humankind "embarking on a most wondrous adventure...
...For Casler, marriage as we have known it is rapidly falling out of favor, since it is widely perceived to have outlived its usefulness and to be doing more harm than good...
...If the denizens of his planned sybaritic environment, as Tom Burke sees them, appear less like ecstatic sybarites than repetitions of Tennyson's "mild-eyed melancholy Lotus-eaters," it may be because they are oppressed with the moral burden of their pleasures...
...In this reversal—writing in the Futurist, the Francoeurs do not hesitate to call it a sexual apocalypse—" the old intimate network of blood kinships with its incest and adulterous taboos is already being replaced by the pleasure bond of non- or comarital, non-reproductive relationships...
...Unfortunately, it is possible to be so overawed by Cosmopolitan's vital statistics (nearly two million subscribers and God knows how many more actual readers) that one fails to pay sufficient attention to significant correlative developments in less conspicuous publications...
...he asks, and it is clear that he is thinking less about money than about the cost in personal pleasure...
...His was the most apocalyptic of salvation stories, one in which, within two generations, the historical limitations of the human condition were to be utterly overcome...
...But there were better times long ago, "when the old love was not so, for men and women could love together seven years, and no lecherous lust was betwixt them, and then was love truth and faithfulness...
...That is why we never get a 50-yard line seat at a televised football game, but a dozen seats...
...At a time when marriage is under attack on all sides, she says, "swingers have no desire to attack it at all—only expand it and make it better...
...Oddly enough, Alex Comfort, the master gourmet of erotic practice, did not sign, and God knows that he is no advocate of compulsive hoarding...
...A cigarette owes him enjoyment, he says, and "I owe it to myself to get all the enjoyment I can get...
...JERUSALEM, April 14 (AP)—The Second Coming occurred today, according to...
...Long before, St...
...Sir Thomas Malory would have been among the first to recognize that in the celebrity world there is no more stability than there was in the personal love life of Shelley...
...Love must quite literally conquer all...
...It is interesting—even startling—to note that the sex researchers Masters and Johnson are not only not among thesigners but that, despite their emphasis on the pleasure bond, they do not get the Francoeurs' approval...
...Anna and Robert Francoeur, coauthors of Hot and Cool Sex, are among them, as are Lester A. Kirkendall, author of The New Sexual Revolution, Helen Colton of the Los Angeles Family Forum, Elizabeth Canfield of the UCLA Student Health and Counseling Services, James W. Prescott of HEW, Robert Rimmer of the Harrad and Premar experiments, and Della and Rustum Roy, coauthors of Honest Sex...
...The achievement of this objective demands the replacement of archaic and mystery-shrouding taboos with a new objective view of sexuality that will make it possible to see masturbation and premarital, extramarital, and homosexual sex in a new perspective, the determining value of which is the potential for human fulfillment...
...while Edmund Maire, the leader of the main non-Communist union federation (the C.f.d.t...
...Nevertheless, his conviction that true love has stability, and by implication, exclusivity, has been a commonplace of our culture, no less fundamental to Dante's Divine Comedy than to the text of Hallmark greeting cards...
...In the end, then, his experiment in total joy is no less a moral effort than Marabel Morgan's...
...and again a hell of a lot of good it did...
...Why the Francoeurs signed the "New Bill" is no mystery...
...The Francoeurs point to an answer...
...The opposition to this revolution, the historical and traditional Party of Stability, is formidable but by no means insurmountable: Platonic dualism, the Judaic Covenant, the Gnostics, St...
...It is not likely that the Novaks would be put off if their opponents called this the politics of exclusivity and possessiveness, nor is it likely that they would have been asked to sign the "New Bill...
...The work of art, especially as understood in modernism with its principled hostility to the established and traditional, is the ruling metaphor here, so that one gets the image of the self as an autonomous enclave indefatigably molded of the pleasured flesh...
...Our passions press for instant and total satisfaction, promising life fulfilled and time transcended, but in the meantime we never cease to be afraid of the instabilities of passion...
...He is no less convinced than the Francoeurs that we are in the midst of a true sexual revolution and that his own pleasure-actualizing establishment is now revolutionary headquarters...
...Ostrow thinks of his Continental as a sexual melting pot, an image which by itself may suggest only escape from ego and a dull homogeneity...
...But some fires, I find, are not easily stoked...
...It must believe that the forces of change and growth are on its side, as if directed by a hidden hand, so that its wondrous adventure is safe from those hazards that in the past have turned world-altering romance into tragedy or farce...
...Alex Comfort's books, with their joking implication that they are domestic and culinary but in another key, can be read as marriage manuals provided one accepts his ideal of marriage, which is interestingly close to the group bonding exemplified by the Charles Manson clan...
...Indeed, there is little place in the thought of Dante, Sir Thomas Malory, and Shakespeare for personal growth and fulfillment...
...Roone knows this first principle of successful news and special-event production...
...Another looking up a pom-pom girl's miniskirt as she does her aerial splits...
...or if they are quite literally whirled about, as Paolo and Francesca are in the third circle of Dante's hell, they still remain constant...
...there is no limit to its faith, its hope, and its endurance...
...or Jaclyn Smith of "Charlie's Angels" confessing that she is "in Seventh Heaven with actor Dennis Cole...
...There appears to be no more stability in this "New Bill" than there is in Cosmopolitan, or in Playboy or Hustler, for that matter...
...There is, then, in the Party of Growth a tense orientation to the future, a necessary assumption that time is not cyclic but linear and upward-moving...
...Augustine, various Church Fathers, St...
...1-1 he anti-Stability Party tends to be a bit uneasy T with the word "love," perhaps out of a feeling that it has become overidentified with our Judaic, Christian, and romantic past...
...Jerome or Cotton Mather, and that they would be as out of place among the signers as Jimmy Carter...
...The Francoeurs even assimilate masturbation to the Socratic injunction "know thyself '—so that one might be led to suspect a causeand-effect connection between that philosopher's preeminence in self-knowledge and a creatively resolute and prolonged self-pleasuring...
...David and Goliath is a good match, a little extra riding on the outcome, winner-take-all...
...The latter is a serious publication whose editors surely dwell light years away from the anti-hoarding universe of Helen Gurley Brown...
...And again I vented spleen...
...Lovers traditionally have not only tended to agree L with old-fashioned metaphysicians and theologians that love makes the world go round, but to feel (such is their passionate fallacy) that their particular love is responsible for the larger cosmic harmonies...
...Against them is the fact that they do not see the married couple as "needing outside support and enrichment...
...So he talks...
...Since the Party of Growth looks with suspicion upon sexual activities ruled by repressive taboos (a term that in its context covers most of the restrictions associated with the nuclear, monogamous marriage), and since it thinks of taboos as prime factors in the production of stereotyped actions and personalities, it might also be called the Party of Creativity...
...Why can't he simply relax and enjoy his cigarette...
...The salvational Joachite paradigm remained imprinted on the western imagination, in time to be filled out in somewhat altered form by medieval Spiritual Libertines and early 17th-century English Ranters, and eventually, in 14 The American Spectator March 1978 thoroughly secularized terms, by Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and the German fascists—the latter of whom had no difficulty supplying a novus dux to preside over their Third and (as they fondly believed) final Reich...
...Rather impressive evidence to the contrary has been presented by the Lionel Tiger and Joseph Shepher study, Women in the Kibbutz, and more recently by Mary Jo Bane in Here To Stay, in which "here" refers to the nuclear monogamous family pretty much as we have known it...
...It is simply that, not yet having had to shoulder the burdens of self-actualization, they got nervous about other things: for instance, about the cultural and political consequences when too many people are soon hot, soon cold...
...But it remains for television to give the event meaning, which, in the jargon of the trade, they call color commentary...
...Casler, like Cosmopolitan, the Francoeurs, and George and Nena O'Neill of Open Marriage, is willing to allow old-style stable marital commitment the status of an option, contaminated though it is by exclusivity and possessiveness...
...What the Party of Stability does not see, wedded as it is to the sin-guilt-confession-new start sequence, is the possibility of doing away with the second term by redefining sin as virtue...
...Apparently there is love abundant in the Continental, at least on a rock-bottom biological level ("enough semen has been excreted here," Ostrow claims, "to populate the world to infinity"), but there is little stability, 12 The American Spectator March 1978 especially if it is measured by a traditional stability test in our culture—the concern for children...
...Unfortunately, history with its usual perversity refused to cooperate in its own demise...
...Even swingers are pro-marriage, as Elaine Stanton points out in the Humanist...
...He understands the importance of keeping the viewer awake not only by incessant sound, but by the incessant shifting video imagery...
...All publicists of the Party of Growth are substantially in agreement here—and most of them would surely understand the late Anais Nin's remark about the erotica she found it economically necessary to write early in her career: that ultimately it became "a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery...
...Or compare the poet Shelley as he speaks in "Epipsychidion" of that stability of lovers that resists all the forces of envious time: In one another's substance finding food, Like flames too pure and light and unimbued To nourish their bright lives with baser prey, Which point to heaven and cannot pass away...
...I remember his phrase exactly...
...Perhaps this election will be most interesting for the emergence of a strong center...
...Compare Shakespeare's sonnet as it employs the same ship-at-sea metaphor to define true love: ...it is an ever fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken...
...instead, "it looks on tempests and is never shaken...
...Hence the apparent indiscriminateness of the "New Bill": love, or at least fulfilling sexual relationships, must be made available not only to those who already enjoy it abundantly but to incarcerated criminals, to the inmates of senior citizens' homes, and to the physically and mentally handicapped...
...Now Paddy Chayefsky, who broke in with the network during the putative "Golden Age" of the medium, wins awards writing screenplays ridiculing television news in terms even Agnew didn't risk...
...There were, in 1951, the Kefauver anti-crime hearings, so-called, one of the medium's first special events, Estes the Cleanjean Country Boy versus the Mob: a six-week travesty, the primary purpose of which was to launch Cleanjean's 1952 presidential campaign...
...Nowadays, he says, "men cannot love seven nights but that they must have all their desires" and their love is "soon hot, soon cold...
...Ostrow's own term is "promiscuity without guilt," though how promiscuity detached from guilt can remain itself, or even be much fun, is not clear...
...Joe Namath discovered to be "the happiest man on earth" because he is in love with the...
...Indeed, it tends to reinforce the sexual ethic of such publications, and for this reason alone deserves close attention...
...Masturbation, fornication, homoand bisexuality can now be as creative as divorce...
...John P. Sisk When Love Is Soon Hot, Soon Cold The signers of the "New Bill of Sexual Rights" are as nervous about sexual matters as were our Puritan Fathers, apparently because they fear that in the end liberation will prove to have served no serious purpose—to have added up only to pleasure...
...What is implied here is a romance in which the hero is humankind striving to throw off not only the shackling taboos of Church and State but the leaden weights of history itself...
...Vic Gold In the Season of Our Roone Roone Arledge, who has been running the Ameri- can Broadcasting Company's television sports division since the afternoon Goliath whipped David—with Roone's productions, you see, it's sometimes hard to follow the action—anyway, Roone has now extended his empire to include ABC television news...
...Television was supposed to give us more than radio, but as it developed, TV, no less than radio, abhors a sound vacuum...
...It is not hard, for instance, to see that in the thinking of Steve Ostrow there is a close connection between the pleasures of opera, in which he once hoped to distinguish himself, and the polymorphous release of semen...
...At any rate, it is no less morally intense about sexual matters than were the Fathers of the Church or our own Puritan Fathers...
...Theirs is an effort to reclaim the somewhat discredited myth of progress by transposing it into erotic terms...
...Here, if anywhere, lovers are soon hot, soon cold...
...Walter's forte, understand, is his ability to give dimension to the immeasurable...
...And Daniel Schorr, an erstwhile network demisuperstar, lays into the CBS brass like a convert who learned his catechism from Pat Buchanan...
...because, in truth, The American Spectator March 1978 15...
...In our passions we are at war with time no less than with the memory of past failures in which, reaching for the stars, we have ended up whirled about between hot and cold...
...in fact, inevitable...
...One thinks of the familiar advertisement for Salem cigarettes, which features a handsome, clear-eyed young man—the very image of resolute, honest, and creative self-actualization...
...In "To His Coy Mistress" Andrew Marvell speaks of his "vegetable love" growing "Vaster than empires and more slow," but he implies an erotic constancy that would scandalize the variety-pursuing denizens of the Continental Baths and is not at all what the "New Bill" has in mind...
Vol. 11 • March 1978 • No. 5
