You Can't Make Mistakes.

It always comes in the most unlikely packages.

WARNING:This blog post acknowledges the existence of pornography, free-speech and, well, sex between people older than 25.

This morning, I read this article about Larry Flynt’s appeal to the U.S. Congress for a bailout of the porn industry. At first, I laughed. Then, on further consideration, I decided that this was more than a prank.

Larry Flint—while maybe not the most savory of characters in the minds of most—is always ready to bring us down a peg in our conceit as a nation. Some would call him a smut-peddling, degenerate lowlife. I would refer to him as the 20th century’s champion of free-speech. Some might say that he corrupts the minds of American children. I would say that anyone who thinks that American kids aren’t going to find their way to porn one way or another is an idiot.

Besides, Americans are prudes, right? Puritannical on the outside, and all sublimated rage, lust and envy on the inside. We must keep up appearances, just don’t look between the mattresses, on the top shelf of the closet, or in the nightstand.

Honestly, if Americans were a bit more open about sex, people would probably have lower blood pressure, or at least be a little less cranky.

I was in Germany for Christmas—more to come on that topic as well—and stayed with a friend’s family. We were in a guest room which apparently was also used as a laundry sorting/ironing facility because it contained an ironing-board adorned by a rather large picture of a nude male model. The matron of the family just laughed and said that her daughter had gotten it for her years ago. Apparently, he used to have underwear on that disappeared as you ironed.

There was no embarrassed silence, no blushing, and the ironing board did not suddenly disappear. It was just not a big deal, because sex is just a thing, and nudity is nudity. Shrug.

In a typical American household, this scene would have ended in blushing embarrassment and the swift removal of such an object. Not to mention that if child services ever got hold of this information…

Why are we such prudes in the States?

Well, for one, we are unrealistic. Ask any of your American friends if they think that their parents have a healthy sex life. Do it, right now. Whoever is around. They don’t even have to be a friend.

If you can even bring yourself to ask that, it probably means that you weren’t just crippled by mental cinema of our parents having sex, and that makes you different. If you got an answer other than groans of disgust, nausea, or a slap in the face, then you were probably not talking to an American born between 1975 and the present. In my anecdotal experience, the Americans of my generation typically never conceive of their parents as sexual beings. Never. To do so brings on the aforementioned nausea, mental images, and so forth.

But you know what? Your parents did have sex. Probably lots of it. That’s why you are here. That’s how it works. Grow up.

If we were a little more realistic about sex, we might tend to be more realistic about other things as well. Sex is one of those things that we can’t talk about, right? What does this silence breed? Well, ignorance, for one. Then there is repression, and its inevitable partner in crime, neurosis. None of those are very good things. That is how it is in the States though: if everyone is not talking about something, then everyone had better not talk about it.

Unfortunately, no one has been talking about this last act of our president to bail various industries out with nonexistent government funds either. Perhaps if we had been, the Senate wouldn’t have been so zealous in their padding of the original bill to bail out the bank giants. Perhaps the auto industry would be forced to make changes in the structure of their enterprise which would save the industry rather than just placing a bandage on a severed arm. Maybe.

The point is, we don’t know. We don’t know because no one talks. This is not unlike: “We had no idea that Jimmy was a rapist. We didn’t know.” Granted, we also didn’t talk to little Jimmy about sex, and we told him that it was dirty, but you never get to hear that in the tearful interviews of parents after the FBI excavates their basement to find the bodies of all of little Jimmy’s girlfriends.

So I say “Bravo!” to Larry Flynt. Larry is the one guy who is not going to lie about what he and others in the industry are going to use their bailout money for. You can’t say that for the automakers, because they are going to use their bailout money for the same thing that Larry would, they would just have you think otherwise.