Sexual Pull-By Dates, And The Libido Of The American Male

God’s cruelest irony was that he enabled male sexual potency, watched its sad and inevitable decline, but assured that men would nevertheless think of women all the time – in their dotage, in their wheelchairs, in the nursing home, and on their deathbeds.  

Bob Larkin like most men had been obsessed with sex since adolescence.  In his case well before, although when precocious Nancy Brierley had held his hand, walked with him into the woods behind the Country Club, and pulled his shorts down, he had no idea what was what, what to do, or what was up; and just stood there listening to the mocking birds and blue jays and wondering whether or not a ball hit off the fifth tee could make it this far into the pines.
 
Nancy Brierley was  his first lover, if you can count the fumbling and groping that she initiated in the dry leaves; but despite his surprise, his innocence, and his wonder, he never forgot it or her.

When he turned forty, he first began to think of age, longevity and sexual potency. “How many more years do I have?”, he asked himself before women would cease being attracted to him, when he would become background or wallpaper.  At the end of each decade he asked himself the same question – even though as he turned fifty he had an Angolan lover; and in his mid-sixties was still very sexually active.

Yet inevitably and assuredly by the time he had reached his seventieth birthday, he found himself alone, without sexual companionship, and with little likelihood of promise.  Although he had not lost interest in women, they had somehow lost interest in him.  Although all he could think of when he sat at the bar alongside the twenty-, thirty-, forty-, and even fifty-somethings sipping their margaritas, martinis and Scotch sours was sex, they never even noticed him, let alone acknowledged his presence.

He had finally passed the threshold he had dreaded all his life – the point of no sexual return, the abyss of sexual nothingness, the final and irrevocable passage.

“Are you sexually active?”, asked Bob’s physician during his annual physical.

“Depends”, answered Bob, now well into his seventies.

“Erection, libido?”, pursued the doctor.

“Both”, replied Bob. “Overboard, incessant, painful”.

Bob Larkin was one of tens of millions of men who whose sexual pull-by date in physical terms was far from past, but de facto – i.e. potential mates attracted to him – it was long overdue.

“Perhaps your wife could arrange a concubine”, the doctor said, a still virile and sexually attractive man whose bedside manner, calm, reassuring demeanor, and Old World Brooklyn menscheit, led many patients to his bed.  There was an irresistible draw to this Orthodox Jew who had long ago put secular ethics aside and went were the will of God took him.   Sex, particularly for the older man, was never to be a matter of geriatric longing,, but an existential necessity.

“If you are potent, and your libido is fine, then why should you stop here?”

‘Here’, Dr. Schwartz meant, was Bob’s wife, Helen, a woman of rectitude, right behavior, and propriety  who had rescued Bob, saved him from drug abuse, philandering, and irresponsibility,; but who, after two children and three grandchildren was in no mood or physical desire to be a complaisant lover to Bob’s nouveau adolescence.  She in her late middle-aged maturity had long ago given up any sexual intentions.  She had aged well, but had given up sexual interest let alone sexual allure decades ago – no Tina Turner, Helen Mirren, or Sigourney Weaver she.



Bob, never hidebound or slavish to his early moralistic upbringing, found easy solace and satisfaction in the arms of 30-something lovers who were attracted to his success, his confidence, his sexual allure and his promise of a better life.  While Betty from Accounting might not have been his romantic ideal, she was an anodyne to age, offering sexually curing waters which salved and staved off advancing age.

In other words, he kept his sexual fires burning, sometimes banked but always ready to flame.  There was Sally, a fellow consultant in the time of the Angola famine, married but under no compunction to be faithful.  Icelandic fire and unquenchable appetites. Or Lisa, the seeker, the itinerant, who said she  longed for the solitude of the high Himalaya, but only wanted comfort; and spent many happy nights with Bob in Lhasa.  Or Mary Beth, the feminist queen from New Orleans, an octoroon, proud of her heritage bur dismissive of the new identity politics which demanded that she take sides.

Yet time and tide wait not for no one's emotional completion let alone satisfaction, and before he knew it, Bob Larkin found himself approaching his sexual pull-by date – not the date after which he ceased his interest in women; but the date when women ceased being interested in him.

The problem was that he never planned ahead. Had he solved the quadratic equations that described sexual desire as a function of age, he would have earned more, banked more, exhibited more.  Arm candy is possible at any age provided the price is right. Disappointingly, he overvalued his youth, his physical attractiveness, and his sexuality.   Greco-Roman features, washboard abs, and a lithe, athletic body hold little interest for the woman over forty, divorced or despairingly single.  She wants promise, promotion, and a better life.



Bob played all of these sexual dynamics perfectly.  He was attuned to women and their ambitions and understood that sexual attentiveness, respect, and promise went a long way; but he was no ignoramus when it came to the dynamics of age. There was indeed such a thing as a pull-by date although it was financially mediated.  Really old alte kockers could still attract sweet young things well into their late 80s because of money. Not a few kewpie 30-somethings were willing to put up with a few minutes of withered, half-masted sex per week in exchange  for yachts, resorts, ski lodges, and fast cars.

Bob Larkin, however, had no such limitless resources.  His carefully-curated wealth was well-invested in mutual funds and trusts; and although he had the money to spend liberally, he didn’t reek of easy money and therefore was never a target for the young and hungry. So, if he couldn’t attract the young nor find the right opportunity to buy them, he was stuck within his cohort – late middle-aged women looking for companionship in their later years, but only partners for the retirement community and not a late-life paramour.

So after Lisa from Human Resources there had been no one.  As ashamed as Bob was to admit to his physician that he was sexually potent but with no partners, it was the bloody truth.

“You’re not inventive enough”, said a close friend.  “Women are, by and large, unhappy with their sex lives”.

There was Raisa, a desperately unhappy fortyish Russian émigré, married to a layabout, faux intellectual lover of Tolstoy and Pushkin, who was too lazy to look for work and whose indolence transformed whatever sexual allure he might have had into duty. “Thursday nights”, Raisa told Bob. “That’s when we do it.”.



Yet that confession never seemed enough to get him off the mark.  The almost forty year difference in age was one thing, but the idea of this delightful young, soft, smooth, warm thing next to his slack, spent body - as much as he desired it – was somehow unseemly.

Resting on one’s laurels – few men of Bob’s age had had or even dreamed of such wildly sexual May-December relationships as he had had – was not enough.  No matter how he thrived in his sixties, his seventies were a lean period indeed; and no romantic stories of love in the Graham Greene Suite of the Oloffson, the Comoros, Bucharest, or Rawalpindi could compensate for the dry period he was enduring – the soudure, the dry, infertile season.

The point was what, exactly? Start early and put as many sexual adventures as possible in the bank? Hardly. There is no drawing down on that type of accumulated wealth.  Moving on? Dealing with advanced age and death? Ugh, never, not as long as there were hard-ons in the morning, and wet dreams at night.  Acceptance? Buddhist resolve? Joy at Jesus’ Second Coming?

What’s done is done; although Bob did actually consider his doctor’s suggestion about concubines.  He could no sooner go to his prim Miss Mary for such an arrangement than the man in the moon; but high-class hookers at the Mayflower?  Why not?  If the former Governor of New York could spend a few thousand for a few hours with DC’s best prostitutes, why shouldn’t he?

A non-starter.  It wasn’t sex he was after, although he had to admit that alignment with the soft, lithe, young body of a young woman was appealing.  It was emotional engagement; and this no tart could provide.

So he went home from the doctor’s feeling depressed.  The internist had hit the nail on the head but unlike his professional advice about heart and prostate health,  he could not even begin to resolve Bob’s existential crisis. 

D.H. Lawrence understood that sexual intercourse was the existential event of human life.  If a couple was lucky, they would have a mutually climactic psycho-physical moment – a spiritual union which was the perfect expression of human nature.  Everyone looked for this experience and few would find it; and yet the romantic idealism of the age and those following persisted; and Bob Larkin felt its legacy.  He must, even at his late age, find his true sexual partner.

A vain hope, alas.  Bob spent his last years like most men his age – reclining, accommodating, relaxing.  The end of life should be reflective, never anxious.

He often thought of what he would inscribe on his tombstone, but always fell short.  In the scope of things he might had had more adventures than most, and more fun.  He had not built bridges or monuments; had never been published; and was never of public renown or repute.  A good father, a passable husband, a good but irresponsible lover, a traveler, a polyglot and connoisseur of food and wines? Yes, but so what? The existential had failed him – or he had failed to to find it.  He would die alone, unrecognized, with little to show.

So how was he to live out his years?  He hesitated before dialing the escort service, but not for long.

Telling It Like It Isn’t–The Beautiful Art Of Deceit

Everyone knows that truth is a valued commodity, especially because it is so hard to find. We all fib, exaggerate, embellish, invent, and out-and-out lie; and today more than ever we get away with our deceit.  Politicians lie through their teeth and deny wrongdoing.  Preachers philander and filch until they are caught.  Husbands look their wives straight in the eye and tell the most outrageous, outlandish, barefaced lies. Children lie about their whereabouts, CEO’s lie about mergers, buy-outs, and downsizing.

Richard Nixon would baldly lie to hide is crimes and political dirty tricks, never flinch before the cameras, and never admit to any wrongdoing.

Bill Clinton used his particularly gifted intelligence to do everything to admit the truth but never actually lie.  His testimonies during the Monica Lewinsky scandal were examples of linguistic parsing, philosophical needle-threading, and balletic moves, all devised to hide the truth.

Politicians, preachers, and priests all seem to be in the business of hiding the truth for personal gain or to cover up moral failings.

The rest of us, common American citizens, are no different.  We like, fib, distort the truth to suit our needs, and do anything to conceal our infidelity, waywardness, or financial irresponsibility.  The truth is there when it is unavoidable and absolutely necessary, but not before.

Eyewitnesses think they are telling the truth, but they are so deceived by their own perceptual apparatus that they swear up and down that they saw X do Y to Z, all of which has nothing whatever to do with what really happened.
The Internet is an ideal breeding ground for deceit and deception. The easier it is to click-and-share, the more immediately sensational and compelling the graphic images, the easier it is to assume the truth.

There is plenty of residual guilt to go around.  Men do indeed have their moments after crawling into bed, showered, powdered, and mint-fresh beside their sleeping wives. They look over at their wives and watch their sweet, untroubled, and innocent sleep; and feel pangs of inconsolable guilt.

“How was your business meeting, darling”, the wife asks, stretching and putting her arms around her husband’s neck, kissing him on the cheek.

“What have I done?”, the husband thinks to himself. “How could I have been such a deceitful cad?”; but of course, having gotten away with his adultery, and surprised at how easy it was, any resolve made at first light dissipates at the first martini of the evening and goes away entirely after the third.

Moralists like Immanuel Kant wrote that lying was morally reprehensible:

Lies are morally wrong, then, for two reasons. First, lying corrupts the most important quality of my being human: my ability to make free, rational choices. Each lie I tell contradicts the part of me that gives me moral worth. Second, my lies rob others of their freedom to choose rationally. When my lie leads people to decide other than they would had they known the truth, I have harmed their human dignity and autonomy. Kant believed that to value ourselves and others as ends instead of means, we have perfect duties (i.e., no exceptions) to avoid damaging, interfering with, or misusing the ability to make free decisions; in other words - no lying. (Tim Mazur, Santa Clara University)

Yet why is lying – the most persistent, durable human trait – criticized rather than admired? Lying is not only as common as a winter cold, at its best it is an art, and the bald-faced lie, told with no expression of deceit, no anxiety or guilt, is shamelessly perfect.  In the face of such universal, daily, unrepentant deceit, moral censure seems sanctimonious at best.

John Malcolm was such a perfect liar.  He chose his roles carefully and never repeated a performance.  He avoided trivial lies – why he was late for an appointment or why he forgot to return a call – and saved his stage time for the more serious deceptions. He could lie thoroughly, convincingly, and empathetically when it came to professional advantage. No one doubted his sincerity and good intentions.  His words were reassuring, his body language was sympathetic, patient, and accommodating.  His handshake firm and gaze clear and untroubled.  He had so concealed his real intentions and purpose that not only did his clients, associates, and rivals believe him, but they raised him to a higher moral standard.   Malcolm was better than Jean-Louis Barrault, Sarah Bernhardt, and John Barrymore all rolled into one.

The lies he told his wife about his unfaithfulness were persuasive, compelling, and brilliant.  They were masterfully-crafted, artful denials couched in sincere apology, expressed with  loving concern and compassion, and expressed with a practiced physical intimacy that no woman could refuse.  To his lovers he was equally passionate about love and caring; his growing dissatisfaction with his wife, his intention to be free of her yoke and finally able to live the life he deserved.  At the same time, he was convincing in his demurrals when it came time to break off his affairs.  No one could have framed such escape more poignantly and attuned to his lovers’ concern.  He was not right for them, he argued, a flawed, immature, deluded man who should never inflict his pain and uncertainty on others, let alone those who loved him.  No, they were better off without him.

Liars come in many forms.  The elegantly persuasive like John Malcolm are of one type, the bombastic liars like Donald Trump are another.  Trump, his opponents claim,  is an inveterate liar, a shameless huckster with no respect for the truth.  He tells barefaced lies, distortions, and exaggerations but, to his critics' surprise, his partisans are unconcerned.  They can easily extract the main messages from his hyperbole, melodrama, and Las Vegas showmanship.  They have no interest in the ‘truth’ and could care less about statistical accuracy.  They want no carefully-worded statements of policy, no considered on-the-one-hand-on-the-other economic reasoning.  They want the meat and care little about the gravy.

 

Everyone knows that for Trump there is no such thing as truth, only the theatrical semblance of it.  It could be true is the essence of the bombastic liar.  Democrats are corroding the country from within, intent on destroying our free market system, promoting welfare for the indolent, creating a politburo of American Trotskyites, a socialist elite whose goal is nothing less than a complete remake of democratic institutions.  Whether any of these claims are true or not makes little difference.  They could be true, and that’s all that counts.  Trump is a master of guilt by inference, innuendo, and suggestion.  Yet he does not insinuate.  He shouts, he declaims, he demands.  His oratory is inflammatory.  He is enraged.   His fustian performances are believable and persuasive, confident as he is of his base, and as disdainful of his opponents. 

As a son of Hollywood and Las Vegas; a performer, vaudevillian, and big tent revivalist in the old American tradition, Trump doesn’t mean what he says.  He says what he means.  His is a political circus act with a semiotic foundation.  Crazy as a fox and as smart as a whip, he speaks a firestorm but is as rational – more rational in fact – than his opponents who speak in platitudes, shopworn nostrums, and old-fashioned appeals to ‘experience’. No one but unreconstructed liberal elite take him at face value.

Americans never loved Jimmy Carter.  His moralism, his cardigan sweaters, pleas to turn down the thermostat and to embrace brotherhood fell on deaf ears.   As a nation of liars, it was not surprising that we turned against someone who arrogantly claimed some God-given insight into ‘truth’

Perhaps ‘a nation of liars’ is too harsh.  After all, capitalism is based on selling a bill of goods.  Snake oil salesmen have been around since the beginning of the Republic.  The sub-prime mortgage bankers were no less hawkers of snake oil than the original.  Advertising is based on dressing up the most flimsy product to look like a million dollars.  Marketing is another term for purposeful persuasion.  No matter how much government may wish to temper caveat emptor and protect the consumer from fallacious claims, he always falls for the newest and latest chicanery.  Of course he turns right around and lies to his boss, his wife, his children, and his girlfriend to feather his own nest.

The Clios are awards given to the best advertisements – the ones that are catchy, memorable, and persuasive; and get people to buy what they are selling.  The Super Bowl is one of the most popular shows on television only indirectly because of the football.  Most viewers tune in to watch the ads.  We may admire the truth, but we love getting around it.

So we have to admire the great liars of the world – those that lie with confidence, persuasion, and elegance.  If lying is endemic, part and parcel of the human experience and the human character, practiced daily, incessantly, and repeatedly; then why is the truth so revered?  Platonic ideals are all well and good to read about, but what do they mean in actuality?  It is the artful liar who gets ahead, gets what he wants, and gets satisfied. 

Will Rogers said that “Diplomacy is saying, ‘Nice Doggie’ until you can find a rock”.  Diplomats are skilled in saying nothing in a persuasive way; telling untruths as though they were Biblical injunctions; and telling truths to seem more attractive and alluring than they really are.   Lying – or at least the art of subterfuge – is at the heart of international relations.  We admire the skilled diplomat for his artistry, not for his recitation of facts.

John Malcolm was a consummate liar – perfect at his craft, a theatrical master, a genius.  A quiet, unassuming, undiscovered standout in a competitive world.  He was brilliant and an expression of what, if not the best of America, certainly the most telling.

The Liberal Disassembly Of Donald Trump - How Boring Life Would Be Without Rumor, Exaggeration, And Innuendo

“Oh, my God”, said Marcie Bloom when she heard the news.  “It couldn’t be.  It just couldn’t be; but then again, maybe it could”.  Suspension of disbelief is the age-old complicity of writers and their readers.  We know that Phillip couldn’t possibly have been that stupid, falling in love with his Cousin Rachel (My Cousin Rachel, Daphne Du Maurier) when every sign pointed to her evil designs on his wealth, his manor, and his jewels.  We know  either that he will pay for his stupidity, or she for her wicked ways; but we read on until the end.

Phillip finally comes to his senses, realizes that Rachel has killed his cousin and has been poisoning him,sees that she has duped him into bequeathing all his land, property, and wealth to her, and in a moment of clarity, surprising resolve and will, arranges for her death.  Not quite murder - our complicity would not permit such immoral treachery on the part of the simpleton Phillip – but an arranged end in any case, seeing to it that she crosses an unstable bridge and plunges to her death.



So there is a place in our lives for the impossible which is why Donald Trump is so popular a President.  His opponents, having been whipped by a man who to them was smarm, evil, and ignorance incarnate, all wrapped up in a fat, balding, boasting, snake-oil salesman, cannot take their foot off the pedal.  No matter what he says or how logical the foundation underlying his statements, he can only be seen as a lying, duplicitous, charlatan.  In other words, the progressive Left prefers the caricature of Donald Trump rather than the man himself.

The media shills – MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, and The Guardian among them – care little for the temperate, insistent investigative journalism which can unearth the truth or as close to it as an assortment of assembled facts can come; and jump on the allegation-as-fact, innuendo-as-truth, and sanctimony-as-logic juggernaut.  Exaggeration sells.  The rationale behind trade negotiations, armament and disarmament, treaties and military threat, budget cuts and deficits is irrelevant.  The man – a clown, a cheap, low-life burlesque vaudevillian couldn’t possibly have a brain in his head, is all bombast and crude glitz, glamour, and tarts.



erybody gains from Donald Trump.  His conservative base is delighted to finally have a President who refuses to kowtow to the sanctimony, correctness, and thuddingly boring presumptuousness of the Left; and progressives are delighted because they finally have someone to hate – really hate from the gut and from the soul.  The Bushes were too familiar to hate.  Who could despise Bush I, the patrician heir to a noble American family, a man who embodied noblesse oblige, giving back to his country, a war hero, chief spy, ambassador, and quiet, respectful Vice-President? And despite Bush II’s swagger and machismo, who could deny him at least some legitimacy for leading the country after 9/11? But Trump? A blow-up, arm-waving balloon figure on a used car lot; the essence of white supremacy, racism, misogyny, and homophobia.

Which is why the international betting markets have Trump as a 52 percent favorite.  America was fed up with Jimmy Carter, a man of religion, moral rectitude, and temperate reasonability.  “Put on a sweater”, said Carter before logs burning in a fireplace.  We are an irresponsibly greedy nation, he said, intent only on personal gain while the world’s resources are being exploited, sucked up, and burned with no thought of future generations.  “Turn down your thermostats”.

Of course the downbeat, evangelist Carter was soundly defeated in the next election; and an upbeat, positive, can-do, real American, Ronald Reagan, took the White House.  Carter was intent on telling the truth, however unpleasant, and asking people to face it.  Reagan asked nothing of the American people other than hope, optimism, patriotism, and loyalty.  His ‘Shining City on a Hill’, America as Biblical heir, leader of the free world, champion of all, and defender of democracy, free enterprise, and religion was all that voters needed to hear. 

 

There is nothing more American than supposition and hearsay.  Who is interested in Derrida’s deconstruction of text?  His defrocking of ‘meaning’, intent, and purpose? Literature, art, and history are only subjective distortions – poor representations of race, gender, ethnicity, and class struggle.  Derrida and Lacan may still have salience at Duke, perhaps the last redoubt of pure post-modernism in America, but nowhere else.  The rest of us are children of Hollywood, Las Vegas, the Strip and the Silver Screen. We want only semblance, never disassembled , taken-apart chassis.  Who cares about the components of whole?  Only metaphysicians at Yale.   The rest of us want what seems to be, what could be, and what might be.

An older woman, birder, environmentalist, and lover of Thoreau, could not get enough of swamps, marshes, wading birds, tidal pools, and flourishing gorse, reeds, and sea grass.  When pressed as to why, she stumbled.  No one had asked her such a question.  Who could doubt nature’s beauty and metaphysical importance?  The skeptic who walked with her on the tidal flats of Skaket Beach was unimpressed.  There was nothing particularly impressive, mystical, or that beautiful about the Cape Cod seashore – nothing certainly that could be compared to the interpretive, creative visions of Bacon, Hockney; or even Braque and Picasso.  When pressed even more, she referred to their ‘importance’.  Yes, they were beautiful,she said, but they meant something.  They signified something.

Ah yes, ‘importance’, the prerogative of the intellectually woke, heirs – wittingly or unknowingly – of Lacan and Derrida.  A thing could never be a thing but of relevance and ‘essence’ only if it meant something.  Historicity trumps beauty every time.

She, of course, was of an insular minority of those who continued to value meaning – absolute meaning and revealed truth – despite the Trump juggernaut.  She railed against him, accused him of the same ills ascribed to him by her liberal cohorts.  He was not only a misogynist, racist, homophobe; not only a greedy capitalist and friend of illicitly wealthy elites, but an enemy of the plover, the osprey, and the hooded merganser.  These birds which had only subjective value before Donald Trump, now had substance.  They, in their pristine Cape Cod seashore beauty,  which before were only mystical, now symbolized Trump’s arrogant despoiling of the environment.

This is the marvel of conflation – everything can be coopted, used, and transformed irrespective of relevance.  Piling on.  It’s not enough that Donald Trump is an evil, malingering, racist; he is one of the Furies:

Furies, Greek Erinyes, also called Eumenides, in Greco-Roman mythology, the chthonic goddesses of vengeance. They were probably personified curses, but possibly they were originally conceived of as ghosts of the murdered. According to the Greek poet Hesiod, they were the daughters of Gaea (Earth) and sprang from the blood of her mutilated spouse Uranus. In the plays of Aeschylus, they were the daughters of Nyx; in those of Sophocles, they were the daughters of Darkness and of Gaea. Euripides was the first to speak of them as three in number. Later writers named them Allecto (“Unceasing in Anger”), Tisiphone (“Avenger of Murder”), and Megaera (“Jealous”). They lived in the underworld and ascended to earth to pursue the wicked. (Wiki)

The rumor at a prominent New England prep school a number of years ago was that the headmaster, a lugubrious, dour, unfortunately Puritanical-looking man, had a dog’s jaw.  His own had been shot off in the war and replaced with that of a German Shepherd of the Third Canine Corps, sacrificed for the cause of liberty.   No student at Lefferts could look at Mr. Grissom without thinking of the dog, the jaw, and the horrendous incident of the dislodged grenade.  Grissom was not a handsome man, and perhaps because of his plainness and intimidating rectitude and thanks to the influence of his father, a pastor at the local, Brewster (MA) Presbyterian Church, had chosen education as a profession.   His jaw, while sharply canine in angle, was an ordinary, common feature of any New England face; but because of the weird tale of an incoming freshman in the first year of Grissom’s headmastership, it became iconic. 

No matter how well Headmaster Grissom ran The Lefferts School; no matter how well he ministered to his students, supported his faculty, or engaged parents and alumni, he was, and will always be remembered as The Headmaster with the Dog’s Jaw.

The image of Bill Clinton  dry-fucking Monica Lewinsky with a cigar and getting sucked off in return in the Oval Office will remain his iconic image. No matter his creditable record – no wars, no deficits, social harmony if not cohesion (“I am America’s first black President”) – he will always be remembered for his equally cheap, trashy, ambitious intern. 



Ivan’s Devil, a character in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, concedes that he is a vaudevillian.  How boring life would be without him, he says, an eternity of righteous church-going and right-doing.  He may not represent the best of all possible worlds, but certainly those of the most fund.  A vaudevillian, a burlesque performer, a clown invent, exaggerate, and play to the audience who want no truth, fact, or reality.  They want only performance and make-believe.  For however much they might claim propriety, they are only interested in low-life filth and backbiting innuendo.



Lord knows we are not perfect, but our imperfection and worse, our reveling in the imperfection of others, should be – if we were to anticipate Jesus’s response -  inhuman.

So be it.  God made us in is image, and must wonder at times what he had done let alone what image he was thinking of.