The now notorious "Paris Butt Plug," a work of 'art' by the American 'artist' Paul McCarthy in the elegant Place Vendome has been vandalized. After saboteurs cut the cords holding the inflatable sculpture up, the decision was made to deflate it for safety reasons, and it appears that the 'artist' has now decided against reinflating it.
But the work, which was intended as a carefully floated visual pun that only a limited audience would get, was doomed from the start, because, now, thanks to the general debauchery we call mainstream Western culture, everybody got in on the joke way too early.
In its inception, it was supposed to be a subtle in-joke for the cognoscenti, those Bohemian and urban elites familiar with aberrant sexual practices, or at least those with a knowledge of such: a Xmas tree that was also a giant anal plug. LOL! What could be wittier than that?
In its own way, it could have been quite a clever comment on the crassness and consumerism of Xmas – coming across as a traditional ornament, plasticized and streamlined almost beyond recognition, like so much else in modern Western society, for maximum production, cheapness, and efficiency; and in the process resembling another implement necessarily streamlined by its function in forcing wide a naturally tight orifice in preparation for acts of buggery: Xmas or the commercialism of Xmas as a giant act of symbolic butt fuckery. There might even have been something in that.
But for the joke to work, only a small, sophisticated elite could be in on it. The main part of the humor would have come from the unsuspecting majority – the doofuses – who would have continued to see it as a Xmas tree.
As Xmas approached, how hilarious it would have been to see normal families walking by on their way to do a bit shopping, or young couples whose sex life was still refreshingly uncomplicated by such perversions, stopping to look up at it, naively assuming that it was a symbol of the Christian holiday – and then, of course, there would have been Paris’s many Muslims. Would they have got the joke (and the gratuitous insult to their rival religion)?
The city’s gays and other cosmopolitan elites would have had a permanent smirk on their faces.
But, alas, we no longer live in such innocent times! In an age of pervasive pornography and unprecedented vulgarity enough of the media and the wider population was conversant with the minutiae of pornography and homosexual practices so that soon – much too soon – everybody got the joke, meaning that the joke was no longer funny anymore.
Like the slack arse of some ultraf@& who has been fisted too many times, our society has lost not just its innocence but any moral elasticity or tautness that was left; and jokes like this that needed that innocence to play off are simply left dangling disgustingly for all to see. Whoever cut its ropes merely put the plug out of its misery. But the real misery is the continuing moral degradation of the West where even subtle double entendres have lost all meaning.
 |
| The deflated 'Xmas tree' now looking more like a French letter than an anal probe. |
