Life can be cruel at times.  Life can be filled with contradictions.  Contradictions that become paradoxes in our day-to-day lives and as the years progress  leave us wondering,  what the hell happened?   The cruelty part is that there is no going back, no modifying the order of things or adjusting priorities.    Despite all good wishes and inspiring messages to the contrary, in pure existential terms we are left at the end of a cycle in possession of our triumphs and losses, our insights and misgivings.    Life in hindsight becomes a mathematical puzzle of sorts, but with escalating complexity as our perception of events and their outcome is constantly mutating, leaving us to readjust the pieces as time goes on.

There are different versions of assessment and readjustment, each filled with mixtures of satisfaction and regret.   I am not talking about the macro stuff here, the atrocities and eco-disasters, the flagrant disorders of the world.  Catastrophe is relatively easy to assess and reconcile on the macro level than the universal eventualities that sooner or later enter our lives.   Aging is one such area where the large, universal picture eventually makes a very lasting acquaintance.  With aging comes its usual accessories, health issues, frailty,  culminating in an intimate howdy do with our own mortality.    Such concerns are all out there, until that one day when you look in the mirror and start to think, “do I know you?”

But like it or not, we have all been programmed to deal with aging and mortality.  For the most part we think happy thoughts.  You turn on the TV and there is some saccharine commercial to remind you of all the tender moments you experience with friends and family in your approaching dotage.   We get the Lion King Circle of Life Routine , and we are encouraged that our brief blip on the radar screen may be filled with meaning and purpose.    We take heart in the acts of familial succession  and the belief we will reincarnate as we have before.    We project in the back of our thickening skulls that upon our return we will access the lush life, refusing to believe that in past lives and the ones beyond it we were meager peasants whose greatest triumph was now getting trampled by the noble’s horses.

Without all this concern for mortality and the afterlife there would not be much of a market for religion and corny movies.  All those Hallmark Cards and Kodak Moments may be selling at a discount on the dusty back bin of the  Dollar Store.   Mortality is perplexing.   It gives us food for thought and a sense of spirit and a glimmer of eternity.   It keeps us in line.  Or it doesn’t.    But few ever scoff at the notion that somehow, in some way, I am paying the price for my deeds and misdeeds.

But honestly, this is all the easy stuff.   Life and death; there’s nothing to it.  Whether you are stuffed in a hole or return again to repeat the same mistakes or make different ones, this concern is really a piece of cake.   Because at the end of the day your beliefs may give you comfort, offer solace at that heavy trafficked intersection of doubt and faith.   But the morning after, whatever you believe becomes moot.  Unless you hit the jackpot by guessing correctly on the Eternity Betting Pool  and then your journey to the other side rests comfortably on auto-pilot.

What isn’t easy is sex.   Sex is fraught with cruel paradox as if the great creator did some custom body work on Adam and Eve as if for the purpose of a practical joke.   Doesn’t really matter if it is Adam and Eve, Adam and Adam, or Eve and Eve, or any combination therein, the fact that each group is victimized by biology and its staggered time frame for sexual desire.    It is no secret that men are more interested in sex at an early age, their late teens and twenties.  Men have sexual thoughts about once every twelve seconds, barring distractions like earthquakes and fires.   And even then….  Women on the other hand may have sex at an early age but according to one study in the British Medical Journal that was also reported in Time Magazine, that for women that full blown libidinous activity doesn’t kick in until their late twenties.   The article reported that women are not having more passionate sexual fantasies between 27 and 45 but they are actually having more sex than women 18 to 26.   Sounds hard to believe, but, hey, its Time Magazine and the British Medical Journal, after all.  Who would know these things if they didn’t?

The theory is associated with evolution.  In a nut shell, in her younger years, a woman didn’t have to work so hard at sex to become pregnant.  It was only a matter of time.  Fewer times.   But over time and with aging having children was a greater challenge and as women had children at an older age, the sex fantasies and desire kicked in to accommodate the advancing years.

Here is the passage from Time Magazine–

Here’s how their theory works:

“Our female ancestors grew accustomed to watching many of their children — perhaps as many as half — die of various diseases, starvation, warfare and so on before being able to have kids of their own. This trauma left a psychological imprint to bear as many children as possible. Becoming pregnant is much easier for women and girls in their teens and early 20s — so much easier that they need not spend much time having sex.”

I believe there is more involved that physical evolution.   Reportedly, in women, the libido takes a breather, while for men it keeps right on going.    Boomer women especially, having been programmed to behave themselves in order to appear decent and marry the right sort of fellow, became sexually active a little later than the younger women of today.    Boomer women had to keep their legs crossed if they were going to be the good girl.  For extra money, the only call girling they did was to call their parents and beg for a larger allowance.   Or they worked in the college cafeteria or took a job as a waitress.  Alright, so come college they met a boy and the boy was nice…and they started to fool around.

It is only later in life that Boomer women start to smarten up and ease off the guilt that was fire forged and ice hardened by concerned but fearful parents.   Time is passing, and opportunity is dwindling.  Before you end up having heart-to-hearts with a pet iguana there is time for a virtual fling.   Some women, to avoid labeling and scrutiny even move to different and distant places.   Santa Fe in the years I lived there was fraught with single Boomer women on the prowl.  The difficulty was there were so few men, and the men who were single or available made the Peter Pan Syndrome appear the lexicon for ancient and sage-like wisdom.  Like I say, life can be cruel and full of paradox.   Even the married women aged 27 to 47 have more sex than younger or older women.  Sexual peak and all that.  As for the fantasies, let’s say more than a few do not involve their present partner.

But then, as the report contends,  after that hot and heavy decade or three of sexual desire, replete with fantasies and late night longing, the warranty on the libido begins to lapse.   The Cougar business notwithstanding, the  hunger is  more for the lascivious display at Yogurt Land than the sexual encounter.   The report, or the study, as with any other study, has its flaws.  Older women may be divorced or widowed, or are less inclined to gab it up at gray haired mixers.  I don’t know.

And there are the men.  Their trajectory is dramatically different.  They start off strong and then start to flag as they approach or enter middle age.   It is a mixed bag of reasons.   This is not to say men of this age have allowed women to corner the market on sexual fantasy and romantic pursuit.   But it just ain’t the same.   Suffice it to say they are far more interested in 3-D than a D-Cup.  Unless the D-Cup is actually on the 3-D Television, and then the may go off on his lonesome to remember old times.

But then something kicks in and as men get older they get horny again.   Go figure.  Just when you thought it was safe to crawl back between the sheets.   Back a few years in history,  a man confronted the dreaded reality that the brain may still be filled with desire, but the penis has downshifted to a lower gear.     Lust over limpness, if you will.  So in was once upon a time the awkward but somewhat natural order of things, both spouses acclimate to the new conditions of age and erosion and spend more time showing their friends more pictures of their grandkids or that wing ding at Lake Havasu.

An equilibrium of sorts had been established.  But along comes Viagra.  Men become randy old fools and, according to the report, women tend to other matters.  Statistically,  67% of the men between sixty-five and seventy-four were sexually active.   Only forty percent of the women in same age group were sexually active.   A third of the men in the age range of 75 to 85 said they had sex within the last twelve months.  Only 17% of the women in the same age group can make the same claim.  Frankly I am impressed by the men, not so much that they had sex but at that age they can still remember they had it.   As for the women, as noted before, the report did not take into consideration some easily identifiable extenuating factors.

Alright, so what has this been doing to senior America?  And you believed their main concern was losing their Medicare.  Unh uh.   Aged boners are messing up the fire drill.   Older men are zipping up the Sansabelts and jumping the reservation.   At an age when their physical activity may be a a vigorous workout on the treadmill, they are sowing sin in Sun City.   Talk about an alliance among the willing.   They are jumping off their electro carts and cruising the streets for desperate hookers in a down economy.     According to an article in the Daily Beast, they are bringing back sexually transmitted diseases to hearth and home.    Imagine this doctor’s surprise when an eighty-year-old guy shows up with the clap.   They are leaving their wives,  and they are cheating on their wives.  Or, worse, they are forcing themselves on their wives.

The result is mixed.  According to the article, some women are enthused.  But most are not.   They thought this part of their lives were over and now the long retired  Jumping Jack Flash has nothing but time on his hands and a chubby.    Many women find such entreaties annoying.   But then, if they don’t for a few bucks or a couple hours distraction someone else will.  So leave it to good old American know how to produce a female version of Viagra.   The intent was to utilize  Boehringer Ingelheim’s  flibanserin, a drug for premenopausal women, as the new boost for women who report a lack of sexual desire.  Let’s follow the credo, even if there isn’t a market, create one.   Lots of high hopes.   But in two different studies the drug failed to show any increase in sex drive.  The elusive search continues.

Like I noted, there are exceptions to all of this and there are certainly extenuating factors.   But there is still no denying that life is cruel and full of paradox.   Not only as Elmore James once declared does he love her, but she loves him and so forth…but the sexual trajectories of men and women are so different their sexual encounters are torn asunder by bad timing and nature’s doctrine.   It’s hard enough to find love, and then when you do it’s sexual manifestation can become a total pain in the ass.  Perhaps in the end, our desire for satisfaction had disrupted the natural order of things.   At this time of life, Bill Maher joked, “maybe people shouldn’t be having sex.  It has to hurt,” he said. ” It hurts just to stand up.”

For me the bottom line is like all challenges, time will eventually sort this one out.  Or not.   And maybe those who resort to prayer, asking the Lord or the Goddess or the Universe, whatever, to sort out the rights and wrongs, to give them things, bring peace and prosperity, should beseech that same supreme being  that it would really be nice to rethink the math on the cycles of human sexuality.  Life is hard enough.

When you think of China, you don’t think of it as a particularly sexy place.   Probably the Chinese don’t even think of China as a particularly sexy place as they tend to take their lead in sexual conduct from the West.   Nevertheless, with nearly 1.5 billion people, China is the most populated country in the world.   All those babies have to be coming from somewhere.

In truth, the citizens of China have practiced pre-marital sex for quite sometime now.   They may not have the long legacy of erotica  found in the West, initiated since time began and fortified by the art and literature,and ruminations of the Victorian Era, leading up through the pornographic “French Decks” of playing cards to the grand institution or erotica we extol today.   The Chinese may not even share the Japanese legacy, the artful and colorful paintings of lovers in bold colored silk robes contorted in every imaginable position, most of which having their visage in defiance of logical perspective.

Beauty shops and massage parlors permeate most Chinese cities, with each being the code word for a brothel.   While technically against the law, Chinese authorities tend to look the other way when it comes to the long stand presence of “beauty parlors,” kind of like what California does with its medical marijuana shops.  And like the medical marijuana shops, unless there is political pressure from a self-righteous group of do gooders with too much time on their hands, or the owner of the “beauty parlor” manages to upset someone in the bureaucracy, business goes on with little fanfare.

There is a preponderance of “adult health stores”.   These health stores are not to be confused with American health food stores where you can buy your granola in bulk.  Chinese Adult Health store is the given name for purveyors of every imaginable type of adult sex toy.   To say these stores are easy to find, is to equate their proximity with the nail salons of American.  If there isn’t one on every corner, then the sex toy shops are ubiquitous enough to assure no one will be waiting in line.  As for pornography on the Chinese Internet system, that is also forbidden.   But needless to say, thanks to the wonders of modern technology and with necessity being the not only the mother of invention but a matter of getting off, the Chinese can acquire software that can circumvent the government blocks.

As with most countries on an economic upswing, social regulatory efforts, if not necessarily the actual letter of the law, tend to liberalize in practice as well as theory.   When people are starving and struggling to survive, they have little time for sexual diddling.  Or if they do have time, it is because it is there only diversion from a dreary life, and those impromptu episodes usually result in the begetting or more children, which puts even more pressure on the family and its struggles, and makes for far less time in the exotic pursuits. A win-lose situation, for sure.  But when the good times are rolling, leisure and vice become a heady pursuit.

So what’s the big deal over the Chinese college professor, Ma Yahohai, who was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for having the temerity to engage in sex orgies and practice sexual partner swapping.?   Ma and his girlfriend were members of a group  of 22 persons that had some 35 swinger sessions over a two year period.  Frisky devils.  Ma participated in about half of these sessions.    Most of these sessions took place in Ma’s two bedroom apartment.   Ma shared the apartment with his girlfriend and mother.   What the adventuresome couple did with Momma during these libidinous occasions is anyone’s guess.   Maybe she took video.   Or like a good caring mother, washed off the sex toys to eliminate disease.  One can only imagine.

But the fact is that out of the twenty two arrested and charged with Criminal Law 301, Sexual Law 301, Crowd Licentiousness, eighteen of these randy souls were sentenced to prison.   While the defiant Ma was sentenced to his three and a half years, others were sentenced up to two and a half years.   No slap on the wrist, and no mention whatsoever about community service or making an anti-sex film.  The Chinese prison system has never been known much for luxury living.    So a couple of years in jail can give you a lot of time to ponder wistfully the sex orgies you will be missing.   As for the three defendants who got off without a jail sentence, I have no idea how they got so lucky.  Maybe they were only there to watch or serve hor dourves.

It could be worse for Ma and his swinging associates I suppose.  Back in the good old days of Chairman Mao and his successors,  various types of sexual congress, including group sex, could be construed as “hooliganism.”     “Hooliganism” was catch all charge for crimes that made you realize you were in big trouble.   Big trouble meant a lengthy jail sentence at a slave labor facility not of your choice.   You were looking at possible execution.  So by those draconian standards, I suppose, a couple years in jail is a slap on the wrist.

According to reports, there are 100, 000 alleged swingers in China out of the  1.3 billion population.  In terms of Chinese population this is but a measly few.    The measly few engage in group sex and brag about it by posting on the Internet.   Many more beyond the 100,000 read it as it provides if nothing else some vicarious thrills in a country that has yet to develop the 900 sex number.   But still, we are talking a small group of enthusiasts.   Not particularly threatening.  I would consider the group grope of twenty odd people in a two bedroom apartment more of a threat to the integrity of the carpet than to the burgeoning Chinese economy.

Other groups are considered far more threatening.    There are all sorts of radicals and terrorists groups who actually blow up things and don’t just brag about some sexual exploits on the Internet.    There are people trafficking in illegal everything, from counterfeit prescription drugs to counterfeit invoices.   There are myriad labor strikes and worker unrest, including violent demonstrations.   The citizens of the more rural provinces are restless and prtoesting the state appropriation of their lands.   This has resulted in massive riots.  In one riot recently, hundreds were killed in Sichuan Province.

There is airline corruption and all sorts of financial swindling.   Chinese law enforcement has been very busy as the nation pays the price of progress. Even the questionable menace of the Chinese Uighur population  would present more of a problem than a  couple bunches of swingers.   There are many millions of Chinese Uighurs, a Muslim group that is viewed by the Chinese Government as a radical faction and periodically subjects them to surveillance and harassment.   In Xinjiang Province alone, nearly half the population of 23 million are Chinese Uighurs.    I would venture very few Chinese Uighurs are swingers, but that is another story.  The fact is the swingers of China make up but a small but determined faction that you could probably fit into the Beijing Subway.  A chance at getting off at every station.

To be sure, I am not promoting swinging.  I am not promoting it in China or anywhere else.  In fact, mere photos of the swinging Internet set threatens to drive me to the monastery for contemplations of  semi-theistic metaphysics and far less carnal pursuits.  Watching the few happy partner swapping examples on the Jerry Springer Show made me seriously consider celibacy for the next millennium,.   Fortunately, reason took control of my senses.  I only took a shower, instead.   Here in America,  swingers can live large and lounge about in communal congress inside the often tacky but spacious environs of a split-level sub-tract with enough garage and driveway space for all those Toyota Camrys.     Meanwhile their kindred Chinese swingers must dangle their dongs in a measly two bedroom apartment.   Here you get to be on Jerry Springer or at least have your fat, naked ass plastered all over the Internet.   But in China you get a couple, few years in jail.

To loosely paraphrase Voltaire, I may not like swinging and partner swapping, but will defend to the death your right to engage in it, no matter how nauseating it may appear.   Alright, maybe I won’t defend it to the death, as I have better things to do than defend the randy rambling of a bunch of refugees from Wal-Mart looking for distraction in a down economy.    But at the very least,  I will give it lip service, even when I grimace and fumble with the shower faucets.  Why?

Because everybody should have the right to get laid.   It is a right, after all, and not a privilege.   Okay, so maybe sometimes it is less of a right and more of a privilege, a treat even,  a pathetically rare one, depending on the disposition and predilections of your spouse or lover.  I realize that sometimes your significant other does not find  either you or your entreaties as significant or otherwise as you might either hope for or come to expect.   So I guess like other debates over rights and privleges, there is at least a little wiggling room.  But once you do work it out with your lover or significant other you have the freedom to fire away, anytime, day or night.  Even if twenty two people are involved.

But as in China, there are some here and in parts of the world who don’t really see it that way.   They allude to some intelligent design and a divine plan where you must only do it with restrictions.   They ascribe the  damning words immoral and degenerate to a variety of sex practices that were apparently never detailed in the master plan.  Otherwise, I suppose, the master plan would have been just plain old porn and not some divine edict from the heavens explaining explicitly where Daddy and Mommy or Daddy and Daddy or Mommy and Mommy may put their thingies and Woo Woo’s.   In some cases they want to rearrange your thinking; they want to straighten you out.

Oppression always begins somewhere.   Usually in the stupid places, the places that make us wince.   But then they graduate to places where we are concerned where transgressions are made against our privacy and thought process.     We suddenly find our rights intruded upon and threatened by a group of ideologues who truly believe in this world of infinite choices they are so graced with absolute answers.   We find ourselves being subjected to embarrassment and thrown in jail for acting out on our natural impulses.  Oppression begins in the dumbest of places, and it ends somewhere else.   And we don’t know how we go there.

Chinese Professor Ma Yaohai has resigned from his teaching post.  He now lives off his savings and his mother’s pension.   He is appealing his sentence of three and a half years for “group licentiousness,” which translates into getting his rocks off with a couple dozen people.  As we have seen recently in this country, some of our own social issues that we thought were long put to rest, sexuality, racism, the right to live and breathe as you so choose, have resurfaced and been challenged by perhaps a well intentioned but vehement minority.  Given that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, we should never take the good professor’s condition all that lightly.  No matter who you are or where you sleep, something  may be lurking beneath the sheets.  Something besides your partner’s cold feet.

Everyone tries to declare how special they are.  While various groups debate their differences, define their histories and otherwise demonstrate their significance on what is becoming a very small planet, there is one undeniable fact that lingers in the back of our brain.   We are all going to die from something.   We may die quickly and violently, or we may linger and suffer before we pass on.  But the stark fact is sooner or later we are checking out of here.

It is almost funny that this is perhaps the one remaining single fact where there is little or no debate.  We argue about everything else.   We argue about the big stuff, and we argue about the little stuff.    We argue about global warming.  We debate the merits and deficiencies of race, gender, and sexual preferences.  We argue about gravity and the age of the Earth.   We can spend hours debating the morality of everything from where to buy the best pair of jeans to driving an SUV.   We argue whether we  Darwin evolved or were a product of a divine plan explained to us ever so precisely through umpteen religions and secular theories.    We argue whether cow farts and bottled water will hurtle out planet to its impending doom.

We argue incessantly.  Taking sides and shouting each other down  has become a major industry.  You can’t market complexity and nuance, because thoughts that are complex and nuanced are disturbing and prey on our insecurities.   We are more secure with crackpot theories than we are with uncertainty.    So we argue in absolutes,  and even then we prefer to keep our absolutes simple.   If they are not simple, you can’t buy the books, go to the lectures and otherwise listen to the pundits and politicians who cater to our particular set of beliefs.   Simply put, if you can’t put your thoughts on a tee shirt, they probably ain’t worth remembering.

But then every once in awhile some actual facts escape from spin cycle and we are confronted with their statistical reality. These are not the speculative statistics or manipulated statistics, positioned just  to validate our point of  view.   No.  Instead these are the types of fact that are actually hard to argue with.   The ugly truth as it is sometimes known.    These are the simple numbers that lay reality at your feet like an abandoned child that nobody wants to nurture.    These are facts that remain consistent regardless of the cause , blame or subjectivity.  These are the facts that leave little wiggle room, that are distinctive in their certainty so that debating them appears more like futile  buffoonery than rational argument.

Such facts?   Not only are we going to die, but we are actually killing ourselves.   Maybe it’s the lemming concept or the human version of the long march to the elephant graveyard.   Maybe its gross denial mixed with complex mixtures of stupidity and ignorance.   Maybe deep down we just don’t care.  Maybe our compulsion toward self-indulgence is so great that nothing, especially common sense, will get in the way of our collective suicide.

I am not talking here about the macro levels, the easy stuff, nuclear war,  global warning, and the death of the planet.  I am not even speculating on the probability of the sun eventually burning to the cinder or a meteor clipping us when we least expect it.   Even global starvation and massive pandemics are not on the table here.   Being invaded and eaten, as Stephen Hawking recently predicted, by aliens from another planet; we can forget about that, too. I am talking about how through our lack of responsibility we are in fact taking responsibility for doing ourselves in.

New studies report that nearly half the adult population in America has high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or diabetes.  One in eight is playing the quinella, where they have at least two out of three of these diseases.   According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, 15% of us are walking around unaware we are afflicted with at least one of the three diseases.   Which means to me,  folks can pontificate authoritatively about everything from the rash on our ass to the Rapture and the End of Days, and yet still walk around having no idea they are seriously ill.    We talk about lofty things like taking care of the planet and taking care of the poor, but yet we can’t seem to take care of ourselves.

What is even more interesting that certain diseases plague certain ethnic groups more than others. In America, African-Americans are prone to high blood pressure.  Those of European descent find high cholesterol gets in their way, while Latinos suffer more from diabetes.   Surely, there is some extension of these disease from one ethnic group to another, hands across the water so to speak.  Also, there are other serious diseases that afflict different groups.  I realize their are environmental concerns and individual or familial congenital defects.    And then, in terms of health and fortune, it sometimes boils down to nothing more than the luck of the draw. But for our purposes we can stick with the article and just these three diseases.

While each ethnic group seems more in peril from a particular affliction, the causes for each of the diseases are pretty much the same.   Mainly the causes revolve around smoking, a junk diet, obesity, and physical inactivity, better known as the sedentary lifestyle that makes the purchase of one of those fat mover electric scooters almost irresistible to some of the late night cable crowd.   I would think no irony should be lost on the fact that our true common ground is our self-indulgence and bad health.

I have often found it just a tad specious that just about every ethnic group likes to brag about its past.   Each ethnic group and nationality can go on for days about its glorious heritage and its contributions to civilization. There is no end to their performances and days of  glory.  Then.    It is not that a disbelieve their claims.  But often find myself searching for their particular relevance in the modern world.  I wonder if all the casting back to the past serves as a distraction from the vagaries of our present times.   I realize others will view a world through a different prism, but I tend toward the pragmatic and prefer to see how those past achievements can best be put to use in the modern day.   How do we put them to use, and where does it leave us now?

From the looks of things, it leaves us obese with hypertension, diabetes, and high cholesterol.   All represented in one form or another in the same collective rut.   So in existential terms, regardless of  specific achievements attributable to one group or another, we are all sitting here, living in denial and dying sooner than we should.   If there is any consolation; it’s all pretty democratic.   No matter what our ancestry, half of us are taking the decided inaction to let the quality of life slip out of our reach.     We talk grandiose about saving the planet, but according to the recent study, we are having a tough time saving ourselves.

We talk about being sensitive to our surrounding, aware of the environment, our fellow creatures, and the challenges we are faced with.  But yet in terms of our own well being, fifty percent of us can’t get out of our own way.  We can’t hurdle our indulgences or come to terms with the realities of our own health concerns.     Yeah, sure, we like to talk about it.    We talk about the junk food, our carnivorous habits, and the polluted air we breathe.  We even see the doctor.  Yet here we are.

So I guess at the end of all this I am forced to wonder how are we doing to do all this planet saving when we can barely hurdle our personal afflictions?   Is there any real logic to fending off hunger, water shortages, and global warming, while we continually ignore the factors causing our own demise?   Here was are, ethnically speaking, all stuck with some kind of health burden and the best we can do is to skew the statistics to our own disadvantage.  Maybe in the face of loftier ideals, the notion of the best example is the way we take care of ourselves.

Whatever happened to the working class?   From appearances they are all around us, working in everything from the dozen manufacturing plants still remaining in the United States to the auto and truck mechanic bays and doughnut shops across this fair land of ours.   There are carpenters, plumbers, electricians, truck drivers, butchers, bakers, cab drivers, bartenders, waiters, sewer workers, construction crews, landscapers, and even farmers and cowboys.    But, amazingly, no one is working class, anymore.

At least no one ever cops to being working class.  Not in this day and age.  When was the last time you heard a politician discuss the plight of the working class?   Television news pundits never refer as working class to the blue collar worker losing his job to some eight year old kid in China.  Or to a robot, also from China.     Even the working class doesn’t describe itself as working class.   Today the working class regards itself as middle class.    The Tea Baggers, many of whom are working class, hold up signs and make speeches about the potential demise of  the middle class.    The guy that delivers your paper every morning will lament how massive media consolidation has all but destroyed his position as a middle class earner.     Despite the dirt and grime of their professions, the hard physical work and all the dangers involved, the coal miners and oil drillers consider themselves members of the middle class.  The blue collar philosopher, Eric Hoffer, would today be described in the back of his books  as the notable middle class longshoreman.    Even the crack whore working in the grimmest parts of town will tell you now she isn’t working class, but middle class, and that her livelihood is  threatened by urban renewal ramped up  by the monied elite.

Blue collar workers describing themselves as middle class, to some extent, is nothing new.  In Europe the working class considered themselves to be working class, and they wore that distinction with pride, no matter how dubious a category it may appear to a lot of us.   Even here in the  early and mid-century United States, the working class was comfortable calling itself the working class.   Hell, labor unions were first formed around that very notion.   The workers.   The working class.  They recognized they were plumbers or trades people and as such they were people who worked with their hands.  They cut meat and splattered blood on their aprons, made bread and were covered with flour.   They laid bricks and dug tunnels, worked in steel mills and manufactured tools and garments.   They got dirty and were physically tired at the end of the day from doing all that physical work.    They had their dreams and visions, but suffered few delusions as to where they stood in the face of the overall strata.   Simply put, they were working class.

But come the sixties and when America was in transition, it was increasingly uncomfortable to wear the label working class.  Being working class meant that you maybe were less than your potential and couldn’t buy all the stuff that was being offered to consumers in the post-war era of guns and butter.   If you were working class, you might have doubts as to whether you were entitled to the finer things in life.   Perhaps you weren’t meant for that wall-to-wall nylon carpeting, the station wagon, and the Amana  over-and-under frostless freezer that was touted as the prize on every game show.

Owning a television was a whole different story.   You knew, even if you were working class, that you could at least have a television, because that kept you distracted and brain dead, which nullified the chance of self-improvement and further dissension.   You also needed that TV for the commercials, so you knew how much all new  and improved lemon scented  crap was out on the market, and which brand of crap you should buy.

I came from a neighborhood in transition.   It was the rare time in American history where doctors and lawyers lived next door to plumbers, carpenters, construction workers, and the guy who owned a store.   It was the era when ethnic groups emerged from the ghettoized neighborhoods at the urban core to the city fringes and city  suburbs where developing neighborhood offered affordable housing and access to the business centers.   For some, they moved into these neighborhoods with the intention of remaining there.  For a good many others, it was a whistle stop,  the starter house between the old world neighborhoods of the inner city and the new.  This is  where you firmed up your professional practice or got your business together, before moving into the suburbs where the single family ranch-style house,  two car garage and shopping mall waited to greet you new found success.

But no matter, whether you were the steel work, plumber, or the fledgling young lawyer, the general perception was you were middle class.   Forget about the junker car, the clothing bought from off-brand stores, the cheap food, and cramped living quarters.   Forget the fact that many of the parents were only high school graduates if that, and a portion of their kids what never put their foot inside a college door.   Forget all the parochialism, and rigid stricture of the immigrant and post-immigrant class.  The perception was you were doing better then both the poor bastards who had been stuck in the old world, or the ones fortunate enough to make it here.   They didn’t eat what they wanted, and they were lucky if they had a pair of shoes.  You had two pairs of shows, your work shoes and dress shoes.   You didn’t go hungry, and you had a car to drive and a place to drive it to.  You weren’t among the poor wretches working in some cotton field or some old world factory, scuffling out a a buck.    So you had to be middle class.

That’s what America was all about, wasn’t it?  Being middle class.   If you declared yourself middle class, you demonstrated you had arrived at least in some fashion.  You were doing better than your ancestors.  They, those poor working stiffs, would have envied you.   And while you shunned some of the constraints of old world morality and bias, you embraced enough of the Calvinist sensibility of hard work and a lot of denial to register as one with the middle class.   You wanted things, and in many practical cases you could actual buy them.   Who among your ancestors  in the Irish Famine or the dregs of Lower Slobovia, had ever heard of frozen produce or TV dinners?   And here you were loaded with those wonderful Birds Eye boxes of frozen Green Giant deliciousness stored  inside your all new Amana Freezer.

So now that no one was working class anymore, you had a nation of the middle class.   That is with the exception of the rich or wealthy.   And the poor.  but the poor had nothing and weren’t going anywhere, so there was no real need to pay much attention to them, other than to cluck cluck about how pitiful it all is and call them poor no longer.   Instead they are the underclass.    Sounds better, anymore than middle class sounds better to blue collar workers than working class.   Except the poor don’t really give a damn that they are now the underclass and not poor, as no word phrase shape shift half-assed magic is going to make them anything but poor.   No dilemmas here.

But enough of the poor.   Nobody likes to talk about the poor, except Mother Theresa and the patrons of a charity dinner where  a couple hundred cronies looking for a tax write off to appear noble honor a rich guy for his selflessness and generosity.   And since Mother Theresa is dead,  you won’t hear her going on and taking your time about the plight of the downtrodden and helpless.

So it’s the rich.  Once upon a time the wealthy patrician class in this country, the people who ran things, didn’t call themselves the rich.   In fact, in a vain effort to remain discreet, they didn’t call themselves anything at all.   But then they didn’t have to.     For one thing it was considered gauche and unacceptable.   Crude.    Everybody knew, anyway.   Besides, if you start calling your self the wealthy class then some of the working class might want some of your money.

But then, as the emerging wealthy class, as opposed to the established, patrician wealthy class, the Kennedy’s and the Rockefeller’s and the like,  began to make more money decorum went south for the season, and the neo-rich couldn’t resist flaunting their toys for all the world to see.  The very concept of gauche and good taste  put on its designer goodies and fled the MacMansion on a Gulfstream.   Gross consumption was the word of the day, and those who had come by recent wealth were heralded in the cross media platforms as  was heroes of the modern world.  They were to be admired, envied…and copied.

So this meant that the real middle class and of course the upper middle class– as there had to be at least an attempted distinction between the middle-middle and the upper middle–went chasing after the formerly middle but emerging wealthy class.   This meant the middle class wanted what the rich wanted, and the rich in this case were the oil barons, the bankers, real estate mavens, stock brokers, models, sports stars, and the twelve-year-old start up guys with a new kind of digital company.  Of course, this group, traditionally, were not at the pinnacle of great taste and culture.   But they had what they had, cretins or not, and the middle class wanted it, too.   And since some of the middle class was also the working class, calling themselves the middle class, you had an unprecedented  demand for what in marketing parlance is termed luxury items.

There is an inherent problem with luxury items.  It is not always easy to determine what is truly a luxury item and what is not.  Other than the price.   Once upon a time the more discerning, the connoisseurs could  discern the difference in quality from everything from food to furniture.   They were educated in the nuance and distinction.  They knew woods, fabric, drape, and workmanship.   The ability to distinguish the good stuff from the mediocre was either self-learned or  was part of the patrician package deal.   Or, at the very least, there was some cultural flunky in access who could fill them in.   How else were you going to be the ruling class and, no matter how discreetly, lord it over the masses if you didn’t know the difference between fine bone china and paper plates?

But that was a different world.   In today’s world who has time to learn all this stuff?    And even if you did, chances are in a cookie cutter world of mass consumption much of the luxury brands you are buying at premium prices are being knocked out by the same slave in the same factory in a village that ten years ago finally got running water..   So along comes branding.  You don’t actually need to know what makes something worth more, what gives it special quality and craft, form and function.  All you have to do is look at the label.  If it costs a lot, then it’s quality.   That’s it.  As with romance, politics, human behavior, or the history of the Earth, let’s not meddle in complexities.  Let’s instead carve it down to a few simple concepts that even the idiots in the cheap seats can understand.

So in the middle of all this, where in the hell is the working class?   And, more so, in this world of only one constant, that of eternal confusion, how do you make the distinction between the working class and the middle class, even the upper middle class.   The wealthy elite; that’s easy.   Just look for the Gulfstream parked in  he driveway.   But it it is only an RV taking up space in the breezeway and clogging all the neighbor’s view is the family who owns it working class and prepped for the big weekends out at Lake Somewhere, or are they middle class with a penchant for the great theme park?

Tough call.    What does make the difference between the working class and the middle class?  Is it education?  Breeding?  Income?   Is it where you buy your stuff?  But then the same designer sweat socks you paid a fortune for on Monday are selling Friday in a big box store.   So no go there.   If we  break it down to occupation, it is still pretty confusing.  Typically, a plumber or landscaper is working class.  But if he owns a company and has a fleet of fourteen trucks, and he raked it in big time in the housing boom, then maybe he is worth more than his station would indicate.  Maybe he is a wealthy guy, not wealthy class wealthy but upper middle class.   While, say  the account executive or sales manager who should be middle or upper middle class has fallen on tough times in the economic downturn in an industry that is facing obsolescence is making the same salary as the manager of a Piggly Wiggly.  If you go by salary, then maybe the troubled account executive is working class, or out of work entirely and desperately in search of a job.  But I digress.

And what about the manager in the Piggly Wiggly?  Is he working class or middle class?   If he has his name labeled on his shirt, does it make a difference as to which class he is part of.    We have to contemplate the station of the  IT guy, the techno geek, wearing the torn Mickey Mouse Tee-Shirt he bought at someone’s yard sale in order to forget he is very much under the thumb of a multi-corporate structure, is he working class or middle class?  As for the hooker, mentioned paragraphs ago.  Where is she in the class structure?  I guess as with any other commodity, it is a matter or pricing and volume.

So it would appear in the great socio-economic milieu that the working class is gone and forgotten.  It is an archaic term, I suppose, in some ways.  Everyone works, after all.

The head of the Intellectual Property Investigation Bureau for the Hong Kong Customs Office, recently reported that eighty percent of the counterfeit drugs seized are  used to treat impotence.  This means that despite all the diseases out there that require treatment, from heart disease to restless leg syndrome, the main concern is penis performance.   The heart arteries could be blocked, and the diabetes count could be four hundred and change; lungs could be like toasted marshmallows from years of cigarette smoke, and the brain riddled with mad cow disease, but if the penis works, then all is well with the world.

Stiffening the penis is big money wherever you look.   Between the lap dances and the porn sites, the sex junkets to Thailand, even the somewhat tame Victoria’s Secret Catalog, much of the international marketing thrust is designed for Chubby.    There are colognes promising sex attraction through Pheromones and monkey sweat.   There are any number of herbs and foods considered to be aphrodisiacs.  Where the penis is concerned, the world is its oyster.  We are not talking a few bucks here    We are talking mega-billions.

In fact the manufacture and sale of imitation Viagra and other such drugs used to treat erectile dysfunction generates more profits than any other drug sold in China.    Much of it is also exported.   But there is for the world wide boner effort, plenty of pills to go around.   Viagra and Cialis are the two most pervasive counterfeit drugs confiscated by customs officials.  Needless to say, these drugs are not regulated, so they either consist of harmful adulterants that can give the user damaging side effects, or they are merely placebos that have little affect whatsoever.   In all, it is a gamble that most customers are willing to take.   The hope of a hard on is more promising than the fear of, say, a liver disease.

I find this remarkable on at least one level.    The fact that consumers will take health risks for elusive or ephemeral benefits is really unremarkable.  In fact, it is commonplace.   People will use Botox in spite of some of the possible nerve damage it can cause.    They will smoke, drink, take drugs to excess.   They will  have themselves peeled and snipped and will disregard any possible dangers.   Hell, they will overlook all the warning signs of transmittable disease and come closing time go home with a disaster just waiting to happen.   So, I suppose, why not at least have a pharmacological  erection to accommodate that ill fated night you may long remember?

No, nothing remarkable about this.   What is remarkable is the fact that after hundreds and even thousands of years of the Chinese pursuit of the heavenly hard on, they are resorting to Western medicine to achieve their desired erections.  All those centuries of eating everything from deer antler, tiger penis, bear bladder, and even gall stones has not compared to the majestic little blue pill.  Or the yellow one.   So has all the years of imbibing Shark’s Fin Soup, Bull Dick and Testicle Soup, Ginseng,  Rhino’s Horn, Sea Cucumber and Bird’s Nest Soup not produced the results that we were led to believe?    One has to wonder if the desire for Western treatment for erectile dysfunction is because all that other crap doesn’t work, or it is largely the notion that downing Tiger Penis is a much tougher project than swallowing one small pill.   Even with hot sauce, it is hard to imagine what culinary delights the Tiger Penis has to offer.   Common sense would dictate it’s a lot easier to take the Viagra or Cialis and leave room in your stomach for some veggie fried rice or a nice, juicy steak.   But then the exotic lure of Tiger Penis is something that has escaped me, to date, so maybe there is in the end an acquired taste.

Chinese medicine has been venerated for a fair number of years.  Skeptics of Western medical practices, and there should be, believe me, have often extolled the virtue of Chinese Medicine.  We are not just talking acupuncture here, but the herbs and foods that offer curative power.   Chinese medicine is regarded highly in holistic circles as both reputable and in certain ways advanced in its understanding of the human body and the way certain diseases should be treated.   I have used Chinese Medicine.   So why, when there are nine million herbs, body parts, food sources and whatever that are over the centuries devoted to raising a woody, have the Chinese decided to eschew all that and switch over to the pill?

Perhaps it is the nifty commercials where a boomer band sits around singing “Viva Viagra,” at the top of its bar band  lungs as if a group grope at closing time is their collective reward for playing bad cover songs.  Or the kinder and gentler Cialis commercials where “when the moment is right for you.”   Yeah, like painting a room might suddenly inspire the two of you to put down the rollers and climb down off of that ladder.   I have wondered if the suggestion behind double bathtub commercial is that once the Cialis takes hold of Johnny Wonder it will drill through one tub into the other.    Better than Popeye’s spinach.

You would think with all the Viagra buying, the Chinese would have  a lot of sex on their minds.  The idea of buying counterfeit Viagra, or Cialis, or Levitra, for that matter, I would think is to keep the cost down.   If you are messing around just here and there, what’s few bucks more for  the real thing.   Okay,  one reason for buying counterfeit may be the confidentiality.   In China, where losing face, or whatever, is a big issue, the Chinese man may want to keep it on the low down that his thingie ain’t working.   It’s not like here where we are not only singing about it, but bragging to our friends.

Perhaps it is a quantitative thing and Chinese men have become a bunch of horny souls who thanks to the national surge in their economy are looking for love in all the wrong places.   It could be they went from the bitterness of short money and a lot of starvation to feeling flush everywhere but down below.   Deer Antler letting you down?  Try Cialis.   So there in the need for quantity comes forth the need for economy.  Viagra and such is expensive.   Counterfeit pills have to be a lot cheaper.  But then it is more than a tad ironic that a nation trying to retain population control is defying the odds of pregnancy that is strongly propagated by  an insistent erection.

But the Chinese have for at least the modern age been largely a prudish nation.  Movies are often censored.   National policy forbids pornography.  Yet when it comes to illegal brothels the government looks the other way.   Usually, the illegal brothels are fronted by a hair salon.  What a rude awakening for the unsuspecting soul ventures there for a cut and perm.     And since the “hair salons” proliferate Chinese cities, perhaps a pocketful of Viagra is necessary to just to work your way down the block.

In fairness, every nation has had its aphrodisiacs.   There are oysters, chili, dog meat, yes, dog meat, more oysters,ginkgo, turtle eggs, and  the skink.    After awhile, it seems just about everything but liquor and ice cream will help men get it up.   Of course, Western culture being what it is, nothing makes more sense than a single pill you pop an hour before your are ready to roll of the sofa and turn off the TV.   Can’t argue with that.

Although there are certain Westerners who are taking issue with the Viagra culture.   As the Daily Beast has dubbed them The Viagra Brigade, here are the women who at a certain age have had their sex drives diminished to levels of  a more  sedentary convenience.   Now here they are, content to pursue other interests, coping with a horny husband.  Some  of these men make increased demands on these women, depending on the size of the prescription.   And some go astray, complicating long term relationships by jumping the reservation and heading for the younger women world  for that one last time around.

Geezers with an attitude.   And then there are  the younger women who married the wealthier older man for security, companionship, and a lot of nice things his money could buy her.   Sex wasn’t really part of the package.  but now she suddenly has to perform.   Talk about an inconvenient truth.

Maybe had a way of telling us to slow down.   Maybe, in the original master plan,  with aging we were not about to reproduce so there was not much need for erections.   Maybe, after a certain point, the penis may be working with a little help from its friends, but the rest of us is not quite up to snuff.    There are aches and pains.  The aging body hurts just when you get up in the morning, yet alone when you are having sex.  So maybe we are in defiance of nature and the master plan.

But then again, maybe not.  Maybe the crap we put into our systems that we call food creates diabetes and assorted ailments that are well known to cause erectile dysfunction.  It’s possible being obese or a least a couple dozen pounds overweight may have something to do with the way the blood travels through the body.   Maybe the sedentary life and our self-absorptions, preoccupations and worries, real and imagined, impair the sexual reflect.   One could justify that screwing in the face of age and adversity is a grand act of defiance and of telling impending mortality to kiss our collective ass.   Maybe after the BMW and the decorator everything sex and its resultant pleasure is one of the only things that really matters.    After all, we have how many sexual thoughts per hour?  I have long lost track.

So for the horny Chinese and the horny rest of us around the world, if you can’t take the heat, stay in the kitchen.  Viva Viagra.   If nothing else, it is one of the few things in this world that actually works.