Made In America - Bill Bryson [194]
The Gulf War, despite its merciful brevity, was also linguistically productive. Among the new formations it inspired were clean bombing (i.e., with pinpoint precision), guest for a prisoner of war, headquarters puke for a junior officer whose responsibilities keep him safely away from the front, Nintendo effect (that is, to become desensitized to destruction through watching films of bombing raids that resemble video games of destruction), Airwing Alpo for inflight rations on fighter aircraft, the smart bomb, and mother of all, signifying ultimate, as in ‘mother of all tanks’, ‘mother of all wars’, etc.33
Finally, one of the most recent of military neologisms is also one of the most poignant: ethnic cleansing, signifying the removal or eradication of a portion of the indigenous population of an area. Apparently coined by Russian observers, it is a product of the war in the former Yugoslavia, and was first reported in English in the 9 July 1991 issue of The Times.
18
Sex and Other Distractions
In 1951 the proprietor of the Hi Hat Lounge in Nashville, Tennessee, purchased a life-size photograph of a naked young woman lying on a fluffy rug, and proudly hung it behind his bar. Even by the relatively chaste standards of the day it was not a terribly revealing picture – only her posterior was exposed to view – and probably nothing more would have come of it except that one day an electrician arrived to do some work and recognized the woman in the photograph as his wife, which surprised him because she had never mentioned that she was doing nude modelling for a local photographer.
The electrician took the Hi Hat to court, and for a short while the matter became first a local and then a national sensation. With the eyes of America on him, Judge Andrew Doyle ruled that as art the photograph was perfectly acceptable, but that as a bar-room decoration it was ‘unquestionably obscene’. He – suggested apparently seriously – that one of the city’s art galleries might like to take it over. In other words, if displayed in a darkened bar where it would be seen by no one but grown-up drinkers, the picture was held to be salacious and corrupting. But if placed in a public forum where anyone of any age could view it, it could be regarded as a local treasure.1 And no one anywhere appears to have thought this odd.
I bring this up here to make the point that America’s attitudes towards questions of public and private morality have long been a trifle confused. For this, as for so much else, we can thank the Puritans. As early as 1607, puritanical had come to mean stern, rigid, narrowly moral, and the view has been steadily reinforced ever since by history texts and literary works like Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter and Longfellow’s Courtship of Miles Standish.
The Puritan age was, to be sure, one in which even the smallest transgressions – or even sometimes no transgressions at all – could be met with the severest of penalties. Adultery, illegitimacy and masturbation were all at times capital offences in New England. Almost any odd occurrence darkened Puritan suspicions and fired their zeal for swift retribution. In 1651, when the wife of a Hugh Parsons of Springfield, Massachusetts, complained that her husband sometimes threw ‘pease about the Howse and made me pick them up’, and occasionally in his sleep made ‘a gablings Noyse’,2 the town fathers saw at once that this was witchcraft and hanged him from the nearest gibbet.
Equally unlucky was George Spencer of New Haven, Connecticut. When a one-eyed pig was born in the town, the magistrates cast around for an explanation and lighted on the hapless Spencer, who also had but one eye. Questioned as to the possibility of bestiality, the frightened Spencer confessed, but then recanted. Under Connecticut law to convict Spencer of bestiality required the testimony of two witnesses. So keen were the magistrates to hang him that they admitted the pig as one witness and his retracted confession as another.3
But in many other ways colonial