Much ado about not much

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Much ado about not much				February 25, 2004

In the Smithsonian American Art Museum sits a statue of George Washington, sculpted by Horatio Greenough and dedicated in 1842. The seated Washington is bare-chested and wearing a toga without the customary tunic underneath. In other words, he has no underwear.

Despite the obvious metaphorical strength the statue embodies, it was not without its detractors. Not unexpectedly, it was a Virginia legislator who thundered that “The man does not live, and never did live, who saw Washington without his shirt.”

Whether Washington ever bathed or changed his clothes in front of another man is hard to say, but you can bet that if he did, some Virginia legislator probably rose up to fulminate against his lasciviousness.

And that tradition lives on. In fact, just recently the General Assembly wasted precious time debating a bill that would have prohibited parents from sending their offspring to nudist nature camps. Can’t have that, clucked Del. John Reid (R-72^nd), who obviously considers the naked human body to be about the most sinfully and singularly repulsive thing God ever created. And his fellow moralists, like some Greek chorus, hummed in unison their agreement, though they amended his bill to allow kids to run around naked if their parents accompanied them to the camp. Whether their parents could parade around in the altogether was apparently not discussed.

But the best was yet to come. Despite the fact that the wheels are about to come off the state’s economic cart and that the legislature has precious little time to deal with that crisis, the brain-challenged boobs up in Richmond’s Foggy Bottom want us to know that they’re keeping abreast of current events. To this end, they actually spent time they didn’t have debating a proposal by Del. Albert Pollard (D-99^th) to censure – guess who? – Janet Jackson!

That’s right. The Virginia legislature wants Janet to know that they were not titillated by her mammary maneuvers. The fact that Jackson probably doesn’t give two twits about what the Virginia legislature thinks about her performance fazes these people not a bit. Nor did it apparently occur to Del. Pollard and his choir of angels that Jackson revealed no more than the Roman goddess Virtus (Virtue), who, with one breast fully exposed, stands astride the great seal of Virginia.

Not to be outdone by the state legislature, our own representative to Congress, Jo Ann Davis (R-1^st), recently emerged from her cocoon of ghost ships and garbage to extract the politically succulent nectar out of this rosy row. In a February 16^th letter to the press, Davis contended that there was a conspiracy on the part of CBS, MTV, Janet Jackson and the whole music/film industry to infiltrate the minds of kids and lead them down the sensuous path of fornication and debauchery.

The entertainment industry “preys on their vulnerability,” said Davis, and “targets children because that is where the money is.” She concluded by indicating that her heart goes out to the fathers and sons who sat down to watch the Super Bowl and got an eyeful of Jackson’s breast instead.

Davis’ heart notwithstanding, I daresay that few of us know what most fathers and sons were thinking when the Jackson/Timberlake pirouette ended with an exposed body part. Some were probably highly amused by the whole thing, while others may have found it crude. I suspect, however, that not nearly so many fathers and sons found it to be the soul-sliming event that Davis did.

Indeed, one can conclude only that it is because of the sexually repressed society in which we live that we go totally boobistic when some euphemistically-labeled private parts are revealed.

What is most troubling, however, is that our legislators and representatives seem so inordinately and pathologically transfixed by matters sexual. They absolutely drool over the prospect of discussing sex in public parks, and whether homosexual park sex is worse than heterosexual park sex. Or whether 18 is the proper age for someone to engage in sex. Or whether unmarried couples can have sex and what kind of sex they can have. And certainly let’s clamp filters on the Internet, lest some vision of naked loveliness show up there.

One wonders whether Davis or our Virginia legislators have ever been to the Sistine Chapel or the Vatican Museum, where unclothed statues abound. There, in a museum run by the Catholic Church, stands the Hellenistic statue of Diana of Ephesus, resplendent in her beauty and possessed of a whole bevy of breasts, all exposed.

Let’s face it. The human body in its prime is an object of beauty and desire. To prudishly and puritanically deny its real and artistic appeal is just as harsh a crime against nature as sticking a fig leaf on the statue of David is a crime against art.

It is high time that our elected representatives got over their cockeyed legislative preoccupation with sex. Certainly let us teach our young people to honor sex for the love it should represent, but let us also deliver ourselves from the clucking curators of cupidity who moralistically slobber all over themselves in their rush to install perversity and shame as the comrades of sex and enshrine forever the sophomoric stunt of a two-bit dancer.