What is there to say?

A United States senator arrested for lewd behavior in an airport men’s room. The arresting officer’s report describes the conduct in detail. It’s creepy, bizarre, from the lower depths. Outside any frame of reference one can relate to. From the U.S. Senate to tapping a strange man’s foot in a bathroom stall? What do you say about something like this?

The feeling of some nameless disaster, that it’s impossible to relate to or do anything about, reminds me of the last verse of Bob Dylan’s and Jacques Levy’s “Black Diamond Bay”:

I was sitting home alone one night
In L.A. watching old Cronkeit
On the seven o’clock news.
Seems there was an earthquake that
Left nothing but a Panama hat
And a pair of old Greek shoes.
Didn’t seem like much was happenin’
So I turned it off and went to grab another beer.
Seems like every time you turn around
There’s another hard-luck story that you’re gonna hear.
And there’s really nothing anyone can say.
And I never did plan to go anyway
To Black Diamond Bay.

- end of initial entry -

Charles T. writes:

This is so disappointing and I must admit I was stunned when I first saw the news reports. I am immediately reminded of the fact—which many of my fellow beings want to dismiss—that we humans are a fallen race of people.

I am glad the police in this situation are taking a hard stance against homosexual solicitations in public places. This incident highlights the divide in our society about homosexuality. On the one hand, we have those who call for unrestrained homosexual behavior in private and public. On the other hand, we have police departments who are enforcing laws against public solicitations of homosexuality.

Posters at other sites have mentioned that Mr. Craig should have resigned a long time ago and sought help for his emotional and spiritual wounds. I completely agree. If he had done this he would have avoided disgracing the senate, his family, and eventually—himself.

LA replies:

Enforcement by police departments is not necessarily due to any principled position but to the sheer necessity of preventing intolerable disorder. A few weeks ago I stepped into a restaurant in my neighborhood to use the men’s room. On the door was a rather surprising sign saying that two people must not occupy the rest room at the same time. I had never seen anything like this. Looking around the place on my way out, I realized it was probably a homosexually oriented restaurant, and that the use by customers of the small men’s room for “encounters” had become such a problem that that the restaurant simply had to clamp down, even to the point of warning all their customers not to use the men’s room for sexual purposes. It wasn’t that the restaurant was opposed to private or public homosexual activity, it was that the restaurant, as a matter of unavoidable necessity, was forced to maintain some degree of orderly behavior so as not to disturb its non-misbehaving customers.

And that’s the way it is with liberalism. To the extent that liberals have laws and enforce laws governing behavior, it is not out of a belief in order, but out of the sheer necessity of preventing intolerable disorder. In other words, the unprincipled exception.

Mike B. writes:

This incident reminds me more of “Ballad of a Thin Man.”

LA writes:

Sen. Craig’s office’s initial response to his arrest was so amazingly inappropriate that even Jonah Goldberg gets a solid hit out of it.

Paul Cella writes:

Adducing that Dylan song may be more apropos that you realize. Consider the song’s fifth verse:

“I’ve got to talk to someone quick!”
But the Greek said, “Go away,” and he kicked
The chair to the floor.
He hung there from the chandelier.
She cried, “Help, there’s danger near.
Please open up the door!”
Then the volcano erupted
And the lava flowed down from the mountain high above.
The soldier and the tiny man
Were crouched in the corner thinking of forbidden love.
But the desk clerk said, “It happens every day,”
As the stars fell down and the fields burned away
On Black Diamond Bay.

Suicide and “forbidden love”—the curses of our age.

LA to Paul Cella:

Good, I’ve posted it.

Paul Cella replies:

Thanks. You have a real knack for applying Dylan lyrics to current events. I love “Black Diamond Bay”—the jumble of chaotic calamity, followed by that quintessential detachment engendered by the modern mass media, is just masterful—but it would never have occurred to me to note it in the context of Sen. Craig. Similarly your citation of “Obviously Five Believers” in the context of those British sailors being released by the Iranians—great stuff.

LA replies:

Well, what connected the Craig story to “Black Diamond Bay” in my mind was the thought, “What do you say about something like this,” and that reminded me of the line from the song, “There’s really nothing anyone can say,” when the singer is watching this disaster on television.

But I don’t think that last verse is just about the detachment brought on by modern media. There’s something more. It’s about the nature of human reality. We live in this world, and terrible things are happening all the time, and they really don’t have anything to do with us and there’s nothing we can do about them. And that’s the brilliance of that last verse. It’s the cosmic reality of human consciousness he’s conveying, each of us a separate body and consciousness living in a world with all these other people, it’s not just a criticism of alienated modern life and so forth. It’s not indifference and detachment, it’s (this will sound weird) the joy of existence. Which is in his voice when he sings,

And I never did plan to go anyway
To Black Diamond Bay.

Just as “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” is not about cruelty and racial oppression and an unjust death, it’s about the beauty of existence, “eternal beauty wandering on her way,” as Yeats put it. That’s what Dylan conveys, as when he sings,

Hattie Carroll was a maid in the kitchen

and that’s what he can’t help conveying, whether it’s about a black maid being gratuitously killed in a hotel (which by the way is not what actually happened), or about a hurricane destroying a tropical island, or about the breakup of a marriage, or about hatred for a treasonous friend..

Allen Ginsberg, of whom I’m not a fan, wrote the liner notes of Desire which are truly excellent and the best thing of his I’ve read. I don’t have the album at hand but what he says about “Black Diamond Bay” is something along the lines of what I said above.

Mr. Cella replies:

You’re right. It’s not pure cynicism. It is human nature. And I’ve often thought there is a kind of rebuke to liberalism in there: “I turned it off and went to grab another beer.” The liberals want us to feel a close personal attachment of some kind to distant tragedy visited on distant people who are little more than abstractions. Sometimes we can achieve that sort of imaginative leap; but most times we cannot. Jesus told us to love our neighbors, which is at the same time harder and easier than that vague love of “mankind” so dear to liberalism. If that makes any sense…

I need to look at those liner notes again. When I saw that it was Allen Ginsberg, I sort of blew them off.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 28, 2007 08:00 AM | Send