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them "gestures of an indefinite revolt"), but if Amory Blaine is dead
wrong about nearly everything- and never more so than in his final
line about "knowing himself"-he is dead right about the way that
years in the modern world seem to race ahead more quickly than do
centuries.
Adams understood that timelessness was inextricably connected
with the Virgin's power and that the dynamo offered up quite another
emblem of force - mechanistic and ultimately masculine. "An Ameri–
can Virgin," Adams proclaimed, without his usual self-deprecating
ironies, "could never dare command; an American Venus would never
dare exist." Adams felt this because, for better or worse, America
retains elements of a Puritan sensibility, not only in its no-nonsense
assumptions about "educational toys" (an oxymoron of the first
water), but also in the heated debates that revolve around pornogra–
phy. Here, the Monica Lewinsky affair can stand as Exhibit A. Pundits
divided themselves between those who deplored the feeding frenzy
that led to an impeachment hearing and those who gleefully partici–
pated in it. Roughly the same thing might be said of the American cit–
izenry as a whole: even those who did not number themselves in
Geraldo Rivera's nighttime TV audience could not escape the video
footage of Ms. Lewinsky hugging a president who, later, denied cate–
gorically that he had ever had sex with "that woman, Ms. Lewinsky."
At stake were the rights of privacy and the obligations of character, a
sense that morality still mattered or that what consenting adults did
was nobody else's business. That positions pro and con soon took on
a heavy political coloration was as sad as it was predictable.
We are still reckoning the costs of this sordid, unseemly mess. Surely
one of them will be the realization that there is often less than a dime's
worth of difference between (formerly) responsible journalists and
tabloid rumor-mongers. Another, potentially more serious result is that
we will (at last) be forced to confront sexuality in ways that go well
beyond the pragmatic lobbying of feminists or the juvenile attitudes of
those males who associate fast cars with the female body. It is high time
that, as a nation, we grew up - but that is not quite the same thing as
saying I agree with those European journalists who pointed out that
presidential mistresses are taken for granted in sophisticated countries
such as France, Italy, and Greece. Only in America could there be such
hand-wringing and finger-pointing about behavior that every school–
child in Europe understands as commonplace.
Adams, I hasten to point out, took an entirely different tack on Amer–
ica's wide, prudish streak.
It
was, for him, evidence of a refusal to take
