Gary Poster, with essential assists from Galyn Norwood, Phiroon Phihakendr, Jose Quijada, Pavandeep Kalra. A study released in October reported that Americans have less sex than everyone thought they did. In 1994 they were probably too busy moralizing. Americans, in other words, found themselves torn between enjoying filthy pleasures guaranteed by the First Amendment and wistfully admiring the Singapore caning. By such almost unconscious dialectics, the people worked at sifting out the rules for a society paganized by sheer information and searching for a moral grid.
Moral processing is now the chief American art form and preoccupation.
Or anyway the two were fighting it out like cats in a gunnysack. A torrent of casual, brutal obscenity flows through discussions marked by a strange, scholastic nicety. The Nicole Brown Simpson murder was merely the most riveting segment. The dialectic is disorienting. On the one hand, the present time seems dramatically immoral, one of the sleazier, stupider, more violent periods of American history.