Rafael Palmeiro has ED.  How do I know?  He told me.  He told you, too.  Heck, he told the whole country about 15 years ago.  He went on national television (while intermittently swinging a big bat—Freudian subtlety is lost on the Madison Avenue types) to say that he was having a bit of trouble with his slugging percentage, and that Viagra had helped him pull out of the slump.

After recovering from the initial shock of seeing one of my boyhood heroes reduced to hocking aphrodisiacs, I began to reflect on the jarring juxtaposition, in television advertising, of impotency in the confessional mode, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the rivers of smut being used to sell every other product under the sun.  How odd, I thought.  How sad.  The urge to abandon sober reason and carry the thyrsus in the Retail Mysteries is pumped through our libidos in all directions, such that we can scarcely buy antacids or bug spray without indexing the purchase to our relative state of arousal.  Stud bulls have more in the way of dispassionate cogitation than does the average consumer in the eyes of the advertising elite.

But there is something altogether apt about the need for Viagra paralleling the surfeit of bimbos in bikinis telling us all what we should and should not buy.  Shopping via the sex drive would be enough to exhaust the most virile in our midst.  Worn out from mapping obscene consumerism onto the psychosexual underbelly of the self, even the mustachioed infielder I had so looked up to as a paragon of poise in the diamond needed a little help getting back into the game.

Could it not be the case, I began to think, that erectile dysfunction and the continuous use of sex to drive consumption and prop up the Keynesian economy actually fed off of each other?  Needed one another?  Were understandable only as a distorted set?  Was there some kind of strange underground gravity drawing the poles together, locking them in a danse macabre of license and libertinism in this, our post-Puritan, posthuman, post-Dadaist republic?

I can’t help thinking of Rafael Palmeiro and the Hefnerization of commerce whenever I watch the little Bolsheviks of Antifa square off against “white supremacists” in venues around the country.  Like the yin and yang of Viagra and sex-sells advertising blitzes, aren’t Antifa and the “fascists” made for each other, impossible to understand in isolation?

Of course, the cheap symbiosis of left and faux-right in this country is never brought up on the network news shows.  We are always told that the brouhaha of the hour is about racism, but because both Antifa and their human piñatas are the perfect products of the public school system, this hypothesis is untenable.  Both sides are so utterly ignorant of history that race—the ostensible sticking point over which tattooed hooligans beat one another until the news media conclude that only the “fascists” and “white supremacists” are incorrigibly violent—cannot possibly have anything to do with their antipathies.

Nor can any other substantial disagreement.  No, the reasons given for the slow-motion meltdown of our crippled republic are largely ornamental.  It is the fight itself that we all crave.  The script never changes.  Leftists claim complete moral superiority in every aspect of human existence, and then throw a shrieking, spittle-flecked tantrum when denied the righteousness with which they had grown accustomed to crowning themselves.  “I’m better than you are.”  “No you’re not.”  Melee ensues.  It’s the oldest story in the book.

Now, while it produces a queer kind of glee to witness one’s beloved civilization evaporating before one’s eyes—akin, perhaps, to huffing gasoline under an overpass—one must nevertheless search for some deeper key to unlock the secrets of Maoists in yoga pants throwing bottles of urine at police officers.  Surely some deep significance waits to blossom forth from this shameful muck.

The answer, surprisingly, may come from Buddhism, and in particular the Buddhist idea of the bodhisattva.  In both Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism, a bo d hisattva is a kind of self-denying saint.  The bodhisattva, out of pure compassion for others, delays his or her (bodhisattvas were the original transgenders) own entry into nirvana until all other sentient beings have also been saved.  Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva to beat the band, realized that two arms and one head just weren’t going to cut the soteriological mustard, so s/he now has 11 heads and 1,000 arms, all so that more and more sentient beings might be reached and allowed to escape the endless cycle of death and rebirth, thus to be reborn into the release from all suffering.  (After five minutes’ conversation with a modern graduate student, this kind of release begins to seem very attractive.)

In their own way, members of the Robespierrean left see themselves as bo dhisattvas, too.  They are trying to save us all from our own backwardness, to lead us lotus-like out of the mud of our insensitivity and cause us to blossom into our full potential as SJW arhats.  But here is where the difference lies: Buddhist bo dhisattvas save others out of self-abnegation.  Your friendly neighborhood professor of Whiteness Studies, by contrast, doesn’t give a rip about others—for him, it’s all about getting his picture in the papers and his pet riot on the evening news.  Buddhist bo dhisattvas try to snuff out the flame of desire.  Bernie Bro bodhisattvas torch buildings and throw Molotov cocktails at the peacefully assembled.

In other words, the left has about as much compassion as Kathy Griffin has comic talent.  Out-of-work white guy, are you?  May you rot, sir.  (Funny how closely the Antifa position resembles that of National Review.  But I digress.)  Our leftist betters “save” others—“save” all of us poor schmucks—out of sheer self-righteousness.  They are not, therefore, bodhisattvas at all.  They are butthead-sattvas—the guy who would pull a drowning child out of a raging river only if the TV cameras were rolling, or only if he could take the child hostage as a way to get a university president to capitulate to demands for segregated dormitories and free sanitary napkins for cross-dressers.  Later, the butthead-sattva would sue the child for endangerment and use the settlement money to send Shining Path rebels to the Bill Ayers Center for Civilian Bombing at the University of Illinois.

But let us not be too hard on the left.  Truth be told, the kind of garish hypocrisy on view during every fatuous protest is America’s favorite form of entertainment.  We simply cannot get enough of it.  There is nothing we enjoy more than the snarling clash of interdependent contrarieties.  This explains why we are unable to translate our indignation into effective action.  We don’t really want the psychedelic idiocy to stop.  Lena Dunham is just too gratifyingly annoying to let slip off to Canada.

Think about it.  Wouldn’t a sane society have long since put Nancy Pelosi out to pasture, far from the halls of government?  Wouldn’t a moral society have long since stopped buying movie tickets from Hollywood and thus underwriting the most misogynistic sexual-abuse syndicate outside of the Caliphate?  Wouldn’t a “woke” society have long since awoken to the fact that the opioid crisis is the Chinese’s revenge for the Opium Wars?  But no dice.  For, if we ever solved the problems we yelp over, we would have nothing left to amuse us.

Take Antifa, for instance.  Antifa are civilization-hating anarchists whose lobbying wing, By Any Means Necessary (heavily staffed by public-school teachers and deeply intertwined with the North American Man-Boy Love Association), openly calls for armed revolution in the United States.  The FBI is on Antifa like white on rice because, if Antifa is not a terrorist organization, then Al Qaeda is a Middle Eastern offshoot of the Girl Scouts.  And yet, the punks with the black handkerchiefs and the tight jeans are still walking the streets and terrorizing the population.  Instead of contenting ourselves with watching numbskulls confront Antifa in limited engagements with maximum televisibility, why do we not act sanely and form posses to end the scourge once and for all, so that decent people can live unmolested in their own country again?

Alas, we do not do this.  We do not solve the problems at the root of their endless manifestations, because we are all—let us admit it—morbidly fascinated.  We like to see the depths of human depravity go toe to toe on our street corners.  We like to cringe while watching Rafael Palmeiro humiliate himself for money.  I, for one, love seeing just how low our national capital full of sociopaths is going to go in pushing the envelope of human depravity.  (Adam Schiff alone is enough to make a convinced Calvinist out of anyone.)  The Hindenburg is crashing, the Reichstag is on fire, and I cannot wait to see what happens next.

Deep down, in places I don’t like to talk about at dinner parties, I need Hil lary Clinton on the TV, giving me the heebie-jeebies and reminding me of a cross between Eva Braun and Marie Laveau.  I need to see her husband, too, working the crowd like Ron Jeremy at a cotillion ball and looking quizzically into the cameras as if asking, “How far are you going to let me go in deflowering your homeland?”  I am intoxicatingly, morbidly fascinated by the shimmering waves of rot and stench effervescing from our putrid experiment in democracy.  Long may the spectacle continue.

Think of the absurdities of our liberal overlords, how endlessly mesmerizing they are.  They worship adolescence and seek the fountains of eternal youth in kale smoothies and low-carb diet routines, but they have also aborted 60 million young people.  They attend Singularity conferences and look forward to the day when we can all upload our consciences onto hard drives, but they are nevertheless terrified that automation at work might leave them with too much free time.  They hate the United States, but they want every ragamuffin from Aleppo to Kinshasa to the Baja Peninsula to move here and be suckled at the taxpayer teat.  They praise feminism to the skies, but they now also find, after five decades of women’s liberation, that men prefer the company of robots to that of actual female human beings.  We are—I am—morbidly fascinated by all of this.  I understand now about fiddling while Rome burns.  I like to make a bowl of microwave popcorn and watch the sucker implode on CNN.

Who will one day write the history of these sordid times?  Imagine, for instance, a future Edward Gibbon penning a Harlequin romance about Trump and Stormy Daniels.  The Decline and Fall of the President’s Trousers?  But who would believe it?  Who would believe that the lawyer in the leisure suit funneled cash to the adult film star while the FBI fed fake dossiers to the Department of Justice about micturating Russian streetwalkers?  What Caligula ever wallowed in such filth?  We desperately need a Juvenal to satirize the follies of an entire civilization given over to the booboisie, but all we get is Anderson Cooper, looking either somber or flatulent, hard to tell which.  There’s James Comey, our version of Cardinal Richelieu, with his weaselly smile and his ambition perched on his shoulder like a parrot on Blackbeard.  Comey is our greatest statesman, it turns out.  After John Kerry, of course, which is what one gets when one goes to the plastic surgeon and asks for gravitas.  But won’t we always have religion to help us?  Maybe.  When Cardinal Dolan and the Vatican get back the vestments they lent to Kim Kardashian for the Sacrilege Soiree at the Met, perhaps some priest somewhere will say a requiem for the good old U.S. of A.

Long ago, René Descartes upended real philosophy by grounding the proof of his existence in the workings of his own mind.  Today, one so-called Enlightenment later, we have come to scrape the bottom of the Cartesian self’s moldy barrel.  Everything is innerspace now.  This is why anything goes.  This is why everything is so morbidly fascinating.  Depravity has no horizon.  What fun.

Go to any college campus if you don’t believe me.  “Be all that you can be” used to be a challenge to sweat out one’s laziness in boot camp.  Today, it’s a literal injunction to swallow metaphysics and mimic Proteus.  The University of Arizona, for example, recently extended an invitation to a certain Florentin Félix Morin to be a visiting scholar in gender and women’s studies.  Morin, as one might expect, identifies as a hippopotamus.  Yes, a hippopotamus.  I remember the days when delusions of being an amphibious herbivore would be something one would keep to oneself.  How times have changed.  Now, one gets job offers for thinking one is a giant ungulate floating in an African stream.  Surely the hippo prof will be granted tenure in no time.  Why?  Morin is just a run-of-the-mill Cartesian.  He is whatever he thinks he is.  Bodies are for Babbitts, silly.  There is no end to the morbidly fascinating.

Lurking in the soft mood lighting of all of the transcendental Thoreauvian high liberalism bandied about on college campuses is a phantasmagoria of ogreish nightmares straight out of Flannery O’Connor.  We cannot coast on the fumes of Christendom forever.  Antifa, Dolan, and Anderson Cooper are all living proof that ideas really do have consequences.  Somehow, the Cultural Marxism of the ivory tower doesn’t feel like much of an academic exercise anymore.

I was once in the camp that believes that it is enough to stand athwart history and yell, “Stop!”  How morbidly fascinating that naïveté is to me now.  It is no longer sufficient, and never was, to shout at the devils in our midst.  They must be driven out.  Quick.  The Deep State is the least of our problems.  What this continent needs is a buggy-whipping and an exorcism.  Left unchecked, in ten years’ time the current rounds of nihilistic smackdowns will look like episodes of the I Love Lucy show in comparison with the coming cultural morbidity with which we—I—have grown endlessly fascinated.