The Boy Scouts cover-up news this week

Let me be the first to say I'm not surprised that the Boy Scouts of America covered up hundreds of child molestation accusations over the past five decades. First, it should come as no surprise that such things happen: a boy scout troop is a target rich environment for pedophiles, and I'm pretty sure the average pedo has at least enough brain cells to figure that out.

I'm not surprised at the cover-up. This is institutional groupthink at its core: the institution is more important than its members, and protecting the institution in the immediate mode presses greatly on the minds of those involved in covering for a single case. What happens, though, is that after you've compromised your personal values to avoid embarrassing the institution in the current case, it becomes easier to compromise in the future and the fact that there are previous cover-ups makes the potential for future embarrassment greater. The problem snow-balls out of control.

Like the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts of America wear their morality proudly on their chests. Compromising those values once must have hurt, but eventually the core of the institution institutionalizes compromise. That's what we've seen with both.

I don't believe that all instituitons that minister to children are corrupt, but they will attract the corrupt-- and therefore those who go into those institutions with the best of intentions must have the right incentives to remain uncorrupted. The first is to acknowledge that institutions that serve children do attract people who would do them harm; that this neither makes them an attractive nuisance in the legal sense or makes them liable for attracting those with harmful intent; and than when an institution uncovers someone who has acted with malice the insitution's immediate action is praiseworthy.

Pornography without morals is boring.

I've been re-reading some old "How to write sex and romance" books that I have on my shelves, and the first one, Writing Romances," edited by Rita Gallagher and Rita Clay Estrada, may have had some good things to say about the genre, but is so sadly outdated that it fails to convey the modern market. The rise of the anonymous erotica romance makes all of the advice about subtletly and "this isn't soft-corn porn" seem trite and pointless. But it was Helen Myer's advice that really made want to throw the book across the room.

In a section entitled "The Love Scene," Myers tells us: "These are monogamous couples with healthy, sexual relationships. Mores and morals matter to these people, which challenges critics who label these books as soft pornography."

Uh, no. To claim that "mores and morals" are a challenge to pornography is to miss the point of pornography, and worse, leave no breathing room at all for that vast tract of writing known as erotica. Does it not exist, or can we admit that it exists on a continuum than envelops both the universe of romance novels and vast tracts of the the porniverse as well? To say that pornography writers write in a universe without morals is to say that pornographers write in a universe without plot; the two are inextricably entwined. Characters want, others oppose them, these conflicts keep the reader returning to an author or a series long after the sex has become routinized.

I've read romance where the passion is flat and drab and meanders across the page, and I've read erotica where there's no plot and no morals. (The latter often involves a lot of misogyny, surprise that.) Few people want to read much of that. But don't tell me that good pornography doesn't invoke questions of morals and mores.

What Ms. Myers is telling us, really, is that only in the monogamous sexual paradigm do love, romance, and respect intertwine. (I maintain the old-fashioned idea that having a solid set of working morals and hewing to them is the only source of self-respect.) She seems to have missed forseeing the rise of the polyamory/romance/erotica series coming out of the usual publishing houses these days. Well, we can't all be prophets.

Intelligensia, "Civilizations" [music, review]

I'm not even sure where this album came from. It's been in my collection for years, but I've never really listened to it closely until recently. Now that I have, I know exactly what playlist it's going into.

When I first heard it, I described Civilizations to my wife as "a lost Jean Michel Jarre album." So, no surprise when I look at Intelligensia's home page and discover that they've both contributed to the Jarre Forever Project and that they consider this album something of an homage to Jarre and Gene Roddenberry. They've really tracked down every voice Jarre used, paralleled without plagiarizing many of Jarre's music tics and themes, and come up with a very coherent, thematically pleasing album.

If you like Jean Michel Jarre, this is the sort of thing you will like.