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The Noblest Profession
Whoremongers of the World, Unite!
Pierre Tristam / Candide’s Notebooks, May 1, 2007
It’s a terrible shame that the thousands of high-powered clients the so-called DC Madam promises to name as she faces charges of running a $300-an-hour prostitution service inside the nation’s beltway don’t band up together (bander, in French) and wear the branding of whoremonger with pride: it would honor the whores, who are least to blame and most to revere. Between politics and prostitution, there’s only one truly noble profession, and it isn’t politics. The story of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the madam in question, reminds me of something Bertrand Russell wrote in “Marriage and Morals,” in 1929 (it was the sort of thing that got him banned from CCNY and other places then rich in Babbittry):
The prostitute has the advantage, not only that she is available at a moment’s notice, but that, having no life outside her profession, she can remain hidden without difficulty, and the man who has been with her can return to his wife, his family and his church, with unimpaired dignity. She, however, poor woman, in spite of the undoubted service she performs, in spite of the fact that she safeguards the virtues of wives and daughters and the apparent virtue of churchwardens, is universally despised, thought to be an outcast, and not allowed to associate with ordinary people except in the way of business. This blazing injustice began with the victory of the Christian religion and has been continued ever since. The real offense of the prostitute is that she shows up the hollowness of moralistic professions.
Like, for instance, the media. AFP reports that “On Friday, the head of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Randall Tobias, resigned for personal reasons, but ABC news said he stepped down after the network contacted him about using the service. ‘Deputy Secretary of State Randall L Tobias was a customer of my previous business, Pamela Martin & Associates,’ Palfrey confirmed today. ‘Allow me to say how genuinely sorry I am for Mr Tobias, his family and his friends.’” USAID, of course, with its different kind of whoremongering and fellating corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan, isn’t exactly the sort of place that evokes pity. To conclude with Russell: “… the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.”
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| THE DAILY JOURNAL |
VANPOEM |
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As One Put Naked Into a Cigarette Boat
Continue chiding, since it's part of the new aesthetic,
and parcel to our coming home, as if
we'd disappeared into the burning bush
that calls to those who sit vacantly in parlors
awaiting a fate freighted with song and dance.
I stroll while staring and raging
with difficulty at the stubborn sky.
On my honor I step a little distance
from behind the curtain, only to disappear
the moment no birds sing, which occurs frequently.
Leaves dustier than furniture, the sound
of sleeping grating through the cosmos,
my footstool, my only talisman.
It's been real, arguing on your behalf.
Gray cobweb shadow, falling, floundering,
finding a place to not be shy and think
boldly about the oldness of beauty, a place
to rest its weary insubstantial head.
It may be that I stand on the threshold
of the checkout line, unsure of what
to be impulsive about, which momentous emptiness
to spontaneously identify my alienation with,
what kind of languor to slide into
before being reduced to grubbing for credentials,
locked in that tumid late-afternoon skin,
effervescing in its sea of dreams.
And all the things hearkening back to it,
the boat ride to breaker beach
there at the end of one world
where it paid to rage at the stammering waves
that kicked and screamed solely for my benefit,
staged objections to the inexorable fact of me.
Look: I've installed a turnstile in my kitchen,
so your picture-postcard of desolation has no power over me.
In this doggy-dog world land is made motionless
and the broads are standing on the wharves
with some of that sipping whisky on those silver trays,
which we'd be a bear to pass up. You speak
of the old gods who've washed up on shore,
but I don't see them, don't hear their hue and cry,
though their maze awaits us, will amaze us.
Here, let me get this little rock out of my damn shoe.
Then we can talk about paddling off to parts unknown. |
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—Van Foreman |
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