End of the Dream

by Wylie, Philip;

  There has long been fear, much justified, that America has been and is drifting into such a nightmare. But up to the year Orwell set for the world he foresaw, the many efforts to infringe on most freedoms in USA have been resisted, if proposed, and outlawed, if briefly on the books. Ours is still a democracy.

  It is in the larger areas of menace that we have failed to grasp the perils and failed almost absolutely to devise remedies, let alone put them in action. The seas stand even more painfully than the air in our North Temperate Zone as proof of a defection that outweighs the advances we take such pride in.

  The Gulf of Mexico is a dead sea. So is the Gulf Stream, now a river in the Atlantic that is barren, relatively, of life. The Baltic became dead long ago and the Caspian and Black Seas followed. Our coasts, Atlantic and Pacific, no longer serve as the breeding ground of many fishes we once caught commercially or for sport. Who would stick a foot in Lake Erie, Ontario or Michigan and most of Huron, for fun, today? The lumbering and other industrial enterprise so recently launched in the Amazon basin, and so extensively, are “helping Latin America out of poverty” and they are poisoning the South Atlantic also.

  Our long-time fear and hatred of Russia and its Reds, and of China, too, has been lessened owing to world-wide contaminations that recently drove us together to seek means to end the ultimate death of the ecosphere. But the means in being are, still, not a fraction of those required and agreed on. All parties in this debate blame one another and none is willing to appropriate the essential money. But the rapprochement was a great social gain, for it served, and serves increasingly, to bring all men together in a common attempt to survive. The dread of Communism that once paralyzed USA, even though few of the folks could say what Communism was, is not the old lever for whatever military, political or other group could be mustered to attack anything they called “Communist.”

  The two great but different political systems, theirs and ours, stand at odds still. But both systems have, almost without using the term, adopted many principles from one another.

  So the long effort to be ready for nuclear war, which, if it had occurred, would have erased the North Temperate Zone, from the middle sixties on, is now known for what it then was and will remain: nothing any nation is going to start. There can never be a “most powerful nation” again, where arms are the measure.

  But even with such stresses relieved, we Americans, no more than any other nation, have not as yet come to grips with the issue of our perishing planet. Fly across the Atlantic or a stretch of the Pacific, and the oceans below will still seem blue and clear and clean. Cross by boat and you will find your ship often plows for hours through masses of floating debris, junk, some items identifiable such as plastic containers, most of the rubble oil-soaked and unrecognizable, flotsam that some human being or beings dumped there, or dumped where the rains and wind and waterways would carry it out there. Close to the oceanic surface on sunny days you will see in the clearest areas an opalescent coating, petroleum and its products, mainly, that has changed many characteristics of the oceans, from light-reflecting capacities to surface tension. Look a bit closer and you can discover, if you have the technical ability, that the former minute life forms on and near the sunshine of surface water are now rare, in most places, and absent in many.

  Like the sky itself, which we know is never quite as blue as it used to be at its clearest and bluest, like the increased cloud cover our satellites and space vehicles report, like the ever greater stretches of land worn out by man in this century, our biosphere is contaminated, scummed over, dustier, more toxic and killing the tiny life forms that support the food chain. We and nearly all nations agree this grim danger must be halted and must be reversed. But we cannot agree on who pays what proportion for what measures that will have to be undertaken.

  America was once a nation that courted challenge and boasted of its giant technical successes. Russia, too, England, Germany, Italy, and many more. But an anxious and subdued America isn’t rising to this scale of challenge as it should. Its very way of life is shrunken and its concerns are local, largely commercial and acquisitive. What happened to New York City is going to happen to the whole earth if we retain the present, ingrown, blame-rejecting state of mind.

  What happened to New York, indeed, should serve as a final lesson, for all who still needed the instruction. And the lesson is elementary. It asserts that you (and I, of course) are the agents of that slaughter. And it states that whatever is to happen to man today, tomorrow and as long as man endures is the result of what you (and I) do, whether its net is to improve or poison us. The laws of nature are absolute, inviolable and, when disobeyed, unforgiving. If there should be a God, then He made those laws. He would be a fool to permit their violation, let alone condone the act and then shatter His principles in order to salvage a species that imagined it could thrive by lawlessness.

  Raymond Bainter’s article in the North Atlantic contained an overview that expressed the “aura” of the period. And what was true of USA was true elsewhere. The many disasters of the past dozen years had created a drive in civilized men to make their machines work, to create prosperity by an act of will, and that intent did not include massive expenditures for environmental benefits. All that filled the public brain was a ravening desire to convert to goods production on a scale surpassing prewar records.

  Was everybody so blind? Didn’t anybody foresee what was certain, that the time was at hand when Nature would strike back on a far vaster scale?

  Of course many did!

  Many had foreseen very clearly not just outlines of what lay ahead but the precise kinds of calamities that would be the fate of billions. Miles Smythe was one of them. But their voices were faint cries in the wilderness of greed and fear, as vested interests fought for an ever larger share of the ever diminishing profits, and the private citizen, uncomprehending and terrified, willfully shut his eyes to the doom to come.

  4. The Sexual Redemption

  Readers once revoltingly called “pre-teeners,” a term only commerce could coin, will already have looked at the index of this tome—if tome it becomes and index it has—then turned right to this chapter.

  At ten or twelve I would have.

  No young person ever can find out enough about human sex.

  There are reasons for that, though not as many now as there were.

  In the past, a major adult effort was to prevent young people from learning anything at all about sex. Even in the seventies, the period where this text begins, there was no “sex education” in most public schools and great controversy about whether or not it should be added to the curriculum anywhere. Most parents of that era either passionately believed or, at least, publicly supported what was still the majority’s ideal for sex behavior: a girl should enter marriage a virgin (never having fucked), and a boy, too, though virginity on marriage was not as firmly expected of him as of his bride; married couples should never have sexual relations with others; homosexuality was, to the majority, all but unspeakable (though it appeared more and more in movies and as a discussion item in mass media) and even incest was seen as more “understandable” (though deserving of the death penalty) than sex relations between two men. Similar relations of women were widely unknown to occur and, when known of, judged by millions as less evil than the male counterpart. Relations with animals were regarded with horror except in rural areas where they were ignored, if possible.

  Common law sustained this basic Christian (Protestant-Catholic) posture. Sexual relations were allowed between married pairs, of at least the age of consent, when performed in one position, woman on her back, man atop, and people permitted this much sex could be “married” by the civil authorities, though some churches refused to accept civil ceremonies as genuine or adequate. This is all that the churches sanctioned and many states backed up that sum with laws carrying exceedingly harsh punishments. The limitations can be clearly seen to approach closely that point at which further strictures would interfere
with population growth. Of course, at the time these needle-eye permissions were made dogma and became the basis of civil law, population “growth,” or reproductive fecundity, was essential as only a large batch of babes could provide enough survival material to keep a nation or a congregation increasing at even a minor rate.

  All sexual acts not allowed by the above mandate were, of course, ungood, sin and evil. But inasmuch as most other sins—thieving, murder, mugging, embezzling and the lot—are felt as such by normal people, and inasmuch as normal people tend to commit such sins (crimes) only under tremendous pressure, or with great temptation, and only when they hope they won’t get caught, the church had a different problem when it undertook to grasp the total management of human sex behavior as a way to get hold of the soul entire. For sexual or erotic antics proscribed by the church (and federal and state laws) didn’t quite seem, in all cases, to parallel the more clearly criminal acts.

  Yet the effort to make them seem parallel was undertaken ferociously and with effect. Sins got crime names. Masturbation was self-abuse, self-defilement. Bedding a neighbor’s wife was “stealing” the woman. Her spouse was robbed. And of course both gamesters were defiled. Every erotic act not condoned by the church degraded, defiled, polluted, contaminated and befouled the dirty bastards. All sex was made bestial and filthy except this narrow minimum and even it was pretty dirty, if essential, a fact some sects drove home by creating castes of men and women, priests, monks, nuns, et al., sworn to celibacy—which oath elevated them above the rest by several magnitudes of sanctity. This, of course, was to make the folks feel cheap, the folks who reached the age of consent, wed and screwed face to face, the gal on her back, as allowed, and with none of your foreplay or positional experiment—jail was ready to clamp you in, for that sort of thing, lewd, lascivious and unnatural crime.

  The finest human way of life was sexless. Failing that, the least sex procreation demanded was the most a person should engage in and, even then, he and she knew they were dirty married weaklings and needed shriving for every orgasm, if any females managed them at all, or even for “doing it,” no matter about fun. Indeed a woman had to assent when her husband demanded it, as she was his property.

  The effort of the godly to prevent any flouting of the basic and God-given Least-Possible Code, by dirtying and criminalizing infractions, was probably the most intense, continuous and effective public relations campaign in the history of propaganda. It had to be to achieve the goal or even approach it.

  It would be interesting to reproduce Jiggermeter’s catalogue of terms for sexual behavior having derogatory intent and effect. It might be, for some, a way to show what human beings at the opening of the twentieth century were up against when they made any effort to think or feel about sex and sexuality in any but the ordained one way. Unfortunately, the list occupies three hundred and eighty-seven pages of fine print.

  Consider this, however:

  There were no words for sexual acts and organs that were socially allowable in correct company. Medicine, obliged to acknowledge sexual anatomy, stuck to Latin. Parents, either unfamiliar with Latin, or feeling it a bit embarrassing as too explicit, had thousands of euphemisms. A girl might learn her opening was her “place.” Children did not micturate, urinate or even void, they “piddled,” “tinkled” or “made wee-wee.” A nice boy had no idea what to call his penis till he got to school or church. A romantic adult pair with a specific mutual desire would find its spell shattered if he or she were to suggest “cunnilingus,” but what else could they say? Cunt-lapping? Muff-diving? Eating hair pie? Going down?

  Let that suffice. By 1970, when some effort was afoot to give sexual “education” in public schools, there was still no vocabulary for the courses. That is like proposing to teach arithmetic without having a numbers system. What people failed to see, there, was that a proper vocabulary wouldn’t be acceptable if designed. For sex is an emotion-loaded subject and education in it, to be sane, should not try to evade the charged reality by teaching the anatomy and operations involved as if the process were automobile mechanics. Education aimed at helping young people toward a sexual life of a normal and a contenting sort would have to use words for sex that had at least a pleasure connotation if not one of ecstasy. But any school program for sex education would have had to avoid any “pro” words and provide a very different connotation, whatever terms were used.

  American society and, indeed, Western civilization was anti-sexual, brutally, bitterly, overtly, violently, legally, and with God’s cruel heel stamping offenders. Nothing quite so a-natural or vicious had been managed culturally thitherto. But for a long time this power of the churches to administer sex by issuing minimal permits and by seeing that civil courts carried out its barbarous penalties for infractions did work because it did give the churches a grip on man and woman so fierce, basic and unyielding that it could face down Darwin for millions to the end.

  Of course, other instinctual needs of man were limited by the church in so far as was possible or bearable. Pissing and shitting could not be prohibited or even restricted to special days. But they could be boothed and confined and made nasty if done before others. People had to eat, but here was a somewhat delayable drive so it could be church-throttled, or the opposite, to a degree, as by fasting and feasting. Little can be done to regulate breathing, but you can make breathing incense a periodic compulsion.

  The entire process evolved slowly. It was wholly designed to concentrate power over masses in the hands of the ruling few. Vestiges of some old religions remain in which the temple used sex as a reward, providing for the righteous (and the heavily contributing men in the sect) a string of Vestal Virgins, priestesses, temple dancers and the like, for sport of the virtuous. Some temples still supply stone gods with large and convenient phalluses wherewith widows and perhaps other females with rights unguessable can and do “console” themselves.

  But it soon proved that fear, terror, guilty conscience, a self-debasing assurance of sinning, along with the most fiendish punishments currently permissible by the tribe, not to mention others relating to the afterlife (heaven missed and hell assured), were vastly more effective techniques for mass subornment than mere rewards. Of course, a few interspersed rewards, heaven as a hope, or a promotion in the church peckery, could be added—in which case, the system was exactly that of brainwashing and as infallible.

  However, a sexual tide rose against this situation as it existed in USA. The first surge was for suffrage and started before this century. In the twenties, the movement became broader. Women’s sexual emancipation was a goal, free love an effort and aim, “companionate marriage” or “trial marriage” a suggestion, and many other projects for a less demon-throttled state of man and sexuality were given public airing. Unfortunately, with the end of the twenties in the crash and the Depression that followed, few persons had time, energy, spirit, money or even the gall to promulgate better sex living, since people were going hungry for food and to mention sexual appetite at all was, clearly, not apt.

  The amount of progress made by those early rebels has never been given suitable credit. They changed a great deal of the unconscious bigotry of the masses. They undid some of the churchly investiture of sex with horse shit, pus, bacteria, the road to idiocy and ruin, so that, as the “sex revolution” in the late sixties got going, it had a better ground to seed. The rebels in the twenties were well aware that their crusade would be met by the armies of Christ. Those of the later period weren’t all that pressed or endangered as the churches had lost a good deal of mileage and authority between 1929 and 1969.

  Too many discoveries had been of sorts that showed the clerical dogmas were unsound, untenable, nothing for sensible people to fool with. Darwin and Freud put out at least one papal eye. Medicine began to show Christians needn’t accept a “lot” of agony and early demise as tests of faith. Worse, for the church grip, good prophylactics were burgeoning and better ones sure to appear, but even in 1970 a girl with a few dolla
rs and a little care could screw fraternities in series and not fear she’d get knocked up, as the church made folks say. Miracle drugs took care of VD, if people took care. These two bastions of church chastity fell: you’ll get a bun in your oven, clap or syph, the terms the godly allowed us.

  And so in this era people, led by students and those under thirty, launched a crusade for sex revolution, and older people joined in millions, to the best of their ability. Actually, this second sex revolt, thinking it was first, followed the going system of all the countless revolutions then in progress—drives against the establishment, the system, war, the Vietnam war, everything in America, pollution, education, educators, and other institutions, ideas or what not. The basic philosophy of these revolutionaries was simple, contagious and inane: whatever the over-thirties do, refuse to do; what they don’t do, do it.

  The over-thirties, members of the establishment and system, were, in 1970, not living in their totality by the standards set forth here as those basic to our national sex morality (and legal code) in the past of the nation. In fact, by the time the late-sixties student-sex rebels got really on the march, they attacked a lot of targets that were already torn to ribbons and flattened. Homosexuality was being discussed and openly, and it was under lessening demonic persecution than before. Cadres of perfectly nice American couples, in the system, establishment and church, had been increasingly practicing a thing called “wife swapping” and they now numbered many millions, though the census of the seventies didn’t try to determine the exact figure.