>After all, Murdoch, who's made a good deal of his fortune on trash sex,
>is a rather keen moralist as well. It's not hypocritical if one takes a
>purely insturmantalist view of ideas and ideology. In which case,
>"hypocrisy" is just one more weapon to deploy.
Trash sex and keen moralism aren't such strange bedfellows - they define and depend each other. A culture like the U.S., which is so publicly moralistic, has a terrible time integrating pleasure; the only approved pleasure in the U.S. seems to be shopping. So, we have a war on drugs and the heaviest drug consumption in the world; a public sanctification of marriage, with among the highest incidences of births to single mothers; public piety coexisting with extreme violence and callousness. It's like Adorno's analysis of superstition; the degradation of reason into a mere instrument of accumulation gives birth to its distorted opposite, New Age blather.
Doug