The Liberal Mind

Since childhood I have loved the detective story. From the Hardy Boys to Ellery Queen to Dashiell Hammett to Nero Wolfe to Spenser.

I discovered Robert B. Parker’s books over twenty years ago and have been a regular reader since.

While the books have gotten shorter and more trite over time, Spenser and now Jesse Stone have become old friends of a sort and I always enjoy checking in on their latest exploits.

Of late I have fallen a bit behind and thus I just finished last year’s new Jesse Stone book Sea Change. It is a book positively drenched in sex. The plot revolves around a couple of yacht owning playboys who have no morals and no interests beyond their next conquest.

An early clue is gleaned when a video tape is found showing the murdered woman involved in activities not properly done before an audience.

A subplot is the revulsion Chief Jesse Stone feels when he views the video tape and a dozen or so others that he finds on one of the yachts. This revulsion is central to the plot, and to the continuing storyline that follows from one Stone book to the next. In short, Stone and his ex-wife are trying to put their relationship back together but he has a hard time accepting and dealing with her, ah, former slut-hood.

Robert B. Parker is a liberal. Any sentient human being would need to read only one of his books to make that deduction. True, he is not an especially annoying liberal and one can imagine that he is a liberal more due to peer pressure and inertia than out of a great dedication to the cause, but a liberal he is.

Over the years a few of the Spenser books have featured a homosexual cop as an occasional character. Then in 2000’s Hugger Mugger he introduced Teddy Sapp, a homosexual bartender/tough guy who lives in Georgia of all places.

I had assumed this “inclusiveness” was all just part of the liberal mind at work, but when I recently learned that BOTH of Parker’s two sons are homosexuals, it suggested to me that perhaps more was involved.

Parker is a guy who clearly has based Spenser largely on what he (Parker) is or wants to be. Until recently as age has made it rather more difficult to pull off, the cover photos of Parker had gotten progressively more Spenser-like over the years.

While he is tough, clever, resourceful, and very much a heterosexual, Spenser is also “tolerant” toward homosexuals in the best liberal party-line sense. He may not “understand” male to male attraction, but by golly he tolerates it and would never let another guy’s homosexuality come between them. So to speak.

Chief Jesse Stone is much like Spenser in his broad-minded approach to life, which brings us back to Sea Change.

The most interesting and the most ridiculous line in the entire book is this one on page 56:

“Jesse had always thought that heterosexual anal sex verged on gross”.

This whole situation is unremarkable when viewed as just a piece of fiction, but becomes vastly amusing when considered in a political context.

Parker has painted Stone and himself into an impossible corner. Putting aside anyone’s opinion of anal sex of any variety, is it likely that there is a straight man alive in the entire World who would classify heterosexual anal sex as “gross” or “verging on gross" while at the same time considering homosexual anal sex as “non-gross” ?

This scenario is so absurd that I have to wonder how it ever got by the editors not to mention Parker's own common sense.

To make it clearer for anyone who has not read the book, the line quoted above is a 100% throw-away. It did not have to be there. It serves no greater purpose. There were plenty of other aspects of the case for Stone to be repelled by (underage girls being preyed on by old men for instance).

While I have to view the line as a Freudian slip of the first order, it is more than that. It is a damning indictment of liberal "thinking” in general. Parker would never have DARED to suggest that homosexual anal sex “verged on gross” but it is fine to say heterosexual anal sex does. The former would be terribly intolerant while the latter is just, well, an opinion.

Sigmund Freud himself would have probably enjoyed dissecting Parker’s apparent need to say somewhere, in some fashion, that anal sex is gross. Since his sons are homosexuals, and since Parker is a good liberal, it would NEVER do to utter a negative directed toward the sacred cow of glorious homosexual sex. So Parker lamely has a character take a dim view of “heterosexual anal sex”.

I could go on but frankly I tire of this nonsense rather quickly. You either get it or you don’t and if you don’t then 10,000 more words of explanation would not assist you.