"Men and their penises"

As my wife was leaving the house this morning, the news carried a story about the NY gov's resignation after being caught in the call girl sting. "Men and their penises," she grumbled.

I think this comment hits the heart of a gigantic cultural misunderstanding and problem. The gov's problem, and the serial killer's, and your next door neighbor's, is at root a failure of the imagination, just as Norman O. Brown has it in his classic and brilliant work, Love's Body. The disease is literalness. The gov's problem is not that he feels he must stick his dick into a woman, or whatever the hell he's up to (one never knows!); it is that he believes the only way to do this is literally to do it. He misses what Brown calls "the true war," the mental war, "the Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought." In other words, he's playing out his frustrations on the wrong battlefield. This cultural addiction to literal events over imaginative events is everywhere (I recently blogged about the "true story" bias in Hollywood). The culture has lost its imagination, it's ability to experience real, true events imaginatively. Once you learn how to do this, of course, literal action not only is unnecessary but less satisfying. "Doing nothing, if properly understood, is the supreme action," writes Brown. In this frantic, noisy culture, nothing could sound more un-American.