Dickheads

Let me define a dickhead as a male who thinks with his penis, who lets his loins make decisions he would not make if he were, well, castrated. This said, an unusual string of famous dickheads has made headlines lately, governors and football heroes, and it would be surprising how much they risk for a good lay, let us assume, if dickheads didn't have such a long and even noble tradition, going back at least to the Trojan War. This is a very old story and a very long tradition.

It is yet another example of the failure of the life of the imagination in our culture. In other words, there is no doubt something "natural" about a 36-year-old married man with four kids lusting after a 20-year-old waitress -- it happens too often to be "unnatural" -- so the lust isn't the problem. As Norman Brown says in another context, modern war is war perverted, and the problem isn't war but the perversion. The cultural problem is that lust gets wedded to literal behavior rather than imaginative behavior. That is, we've lost an appreciation for the fine art of masturbation and other behaviors driven by fantasy. We've lost the best use of our imagination, which is to make literal behavior unnecessary.

I like to repeat the story told by Kilton Steward in his study Pygmies and Dream Giants. Here's how I retell it in my play The Half-Life Conspiracy:

OLSON: There's a book that's a favorite of mine. Pygmies and Dream Giants by Kilton Stewart. Stewart lived with a tribe on some island, in the South Pacific as I recall, and the tribe had never experienced war in their society. Besides being an anthropologist, Stewart was something of an amateur shrink, so he tried to find out just what it was about their society that negated war. To make a long story short, he discovered that these pygmies believed their dreams.
ANN: I'm not sure I follow.
OLSON: Literally. If they dreamed it, it happened. It literally happened. Dreams were just as real as action. Dreams were an action. For example, if one pygmy dreamed of seducing another pygmy's wife, it was as real as committing adultery. It was adultery. So he'd wake up feeling guilty as hell, and get his ass over to the other pygmy's hut and say, Look, man, last night I made it with your old lady, and I'm sorry as hell about that, so here's my fattest pig and three chickens and a couple gallons of home brew, so let's call it even, okay? In their dreams they did any damn thing they wanted but always woke up guilty as hell, so instead of war you had all these pigs and possessions being passed around all over hell, and nobody blew anybody away.

Modern lust is lust made literal and the problem isn't the lust but the literality.