Today, I'm just sickened. It's a local newsitem - a common one repeated all over the country daily no doubt. Makes me ill anyway - a local teacher, coach, and boy scout leader for over 20 years in our community was jailed yesterday for soliciting sex from a minor over the internet. The details of the case in the paper today confirmed my guess that he'd been doing this for some time with other kids. Definitely more information than I wanted to know but had to read - his victims were young boys in our town. Yes, I know him. Yes, my son was in that scout troop for 2 years. No, he wasn't affected. Which of his friends were?
What's got me transfixed today is the juxtaposition of this real news with the content of a book I'm reading for my book club. The same kind of sex perversion is almost de rigeur in current novels. These are books by Nobel prize winning authors, not beach trash - Half a Life by VS Naipaul, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez, just to name a couple of my recent reads. It seems as if 'good quality' literature has to have something violently or sexually shocking in order to be really serious - such as treating incest or sex with children as if it were normal or just a cultural difference. You have to numb yourself to it in order to finish the book. I'm not a professional literary critic but much of the shocking content doesn't seem necessary to the story. Weren't great novels written where sex and violence either weren't relevant or were treated less casually and coarsely? It's like movies and TV also - lots of gratuitous sex and violence which we get used to seeing. Just the advertisements for these shows are way over the line for me.
I'm not a prude. I'm just glad that I'm still sickened by reality and that I still wonder when starting a new book what new travesty will assault me before I turn the last page.
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