New Delhi, India - The generation that gave the world free love and the pill in the 1960s and fed its collapsing libido with Viagra thirty years later has a curious hangover: Intrusive morality.
Americans, it seems to me, are more obsessed with what is wrong with sex than with what is right with it. An extramarital affair, or even a child out of wedlock, does not hurt a politician in India. It does not help him either. People are indifferent, as they should be. But an American politician has to follow a code fashioned by Moses and vetted by Joshua. These days, however, social mores are more compatible with Solomon and David.
Is there a central commonality between sex and politics in America? Are both, perhaps, diminished by fear?
During his five-speech campaign to revive Republican fortunes, George Bush resurrected fear as usual; but at his most sincere oratorical moment he said that the War on Terror was between Islam and "infidelity". Was this the kind of Freudian slip that would have terrified Freud himself?
Please e-mail PostGlobal if you'd like to receive an email notification when PostGlobal sends out a new question.
