Three Cheers for Hypocrisy! Really!

James Lileks looks at the drunken Danny DeVito interview and longs for the days of genteel hypocrisy, one of the underrated virtues:

So what was my point about Danny DeVito’s slurred slurs and the Bob “Jiffy Pop” Hope ad? Just this: I preferred it when the stars had to pretend they were one of us, really. That there were certain values - flag, country, detonated corn hulls consumed with your offspring – that we all shared. What really annoyed me about the DeVito remarks was his account of sexing up the Lincoln Bedroom with his wife; leaving aside the fact that America really doesn’t want to think about this hairy-backed gargoyle pinning Rhea Perlman up against the door, it was the lickerish lip-smacking delight in despoiling something that seemed so utterly typical of an aged ur-boomer. Why don’t we do it in the road? as the Beatles put it. Well, perhaps because you’re not dogs; perhaps because a school bus is due along in a few minutes.
For some people of a particular generation, sex is the only sacrament they have, but it’s anything but holy. It’s hot short and loud, like a rest-room hand-drier you turn on by hitting the button with the side of your fist. This has been going on for forty years, but they still act as if the Eisenhower Shock Troops will burst in and arrest them for talking about recreational sex. If they have a church, it has Lenny Bruce as St. Sebastian, pierced by a dozen hypodermic needles. He died for our sins. And what were our sins? That nagging sense of shame at finding a Playboy in daddy's sock drawer, I guess.

And of course this all makes me a prude, I know. And a hypocrite. And a fan of all the gleaming shallow Formica falsehoods propagated in the name of Bob Hope and Jiffy Pop. Perhaps; but sometimes I prefer that to the chattering, shiny, unmoored meta-reality that clatters out of the television sets, or the mouths of our pretty betters. There’s the famous recent Gwyneth Paltrow interview (subsequently denied, of course) in which she expresses her preference for the enlightened nature of England, with its fine dinner conversations over Substantive Ideas – as though your average chav is sitting around the pub discussing why Pope disliked the alexandrine. She said that Americans talked about money and jobs. As for the former, I’ve haven’t talked money at a dinner party in 30 years. It came up in college events, but only in the context of how we might separate the money from those who had it, and give it to others.