Salacious in El Salvador

“Comfort sex” was our preferred title for this reflection but after connecting the dollar’s downgrade to Dania in Columbia, we were accused of taking a cheap shot at Amerikana, not so much on the greenback as with our seeming ethical bent on presidential security checking body temperature with their dipsticks on commercial fuel tanks. It now appears that this was a second incident that followed a previous warm and wet camaraderie in El Salvador.

No matter that both Columbia and El Salvador have legalized their commercial trade in flesh, and the security force frat guys were just observing an old boys’ fun-filled carousing tradition, it is an election year and Obama is an open dartboard for the least infraction on the nation’s manners. It reflects on the leadership, the GOP says.

China has a saying that “the difference between politic and polite is etiquette,” explaining the length the media goes into massaging their reports into the level of community standards. Not so our sleazy tabloid heritage, so it comes as no surprise that our Dania had hired a high-powered lawyer to look after her new celebrity status, and swiftly high-tailed it to Spain on the fear that the cowboy security boys will silence her now expected detailed account of their indiscretion!

It is comfort sex, however, that caught our fancy, not from the pages of Playboy but from some of our self-conscious women who are not too keen on the demands and commitments of covenant but do not mind cultivating friendship toward casual comforting and comporting under covers. “Comfort sex” has since been Googled into the same realm as “comfort food”! Neither is recommended for one’s health, but it is widely indulged in nevertheless.

It was the early ’60s when my Dad returned from almost six years of graduate work in a conservative school and geographical section of the United States, surprisingly carrying a 1958 brown-paper-wrapped book called Sex Without Guilt by Albert Ellis, an exposition of America’s researched practices and attitudes toward love and human sexuality, along with the explosive work of the controversial and famed Alfred Kinsey of Indiana.

We were too young to know what was dubbed the sexual revolution then, which confronted our tender moorings when it was our turn to walk the streets of San Francisco’s North Beach in 1966, though we did not go far enough to wear a flower in our hair, hang beads down our neck, and flashed the V-sign to onlookers at Haight-Ashbury.

What my Dad’s book represented (I never read the book but his possession of it did us a huge paradigmatic number) was, however, a way of thinking far too removed from my upbringing and the religious orientation that nursed my “faith.” That religious group, the United Methodist Church, was the reason I ventured back to Saipan’s lagoon after Thanksgiving in ’98 and helped redefine the institutional expression of my vocation.

The same body held its quadrennial General Conference in Florida last week (I was around at the Dallas ’60s and Denver ’90s gathering) and in a legislative session discussing the Church’s stance on LGTB, the most divisive issue in the guarded but non-operational psyche of Midwest United States, it was an African woman who cried her heart out in opposition to allowing homosexuality be regarded other than as a blatant “abomination to the Lord,” as denounced, she says, by Holy Writ and the missionaries of her upbringing. The UMC’s fastest growing membership is from the Third World with a 19th century missionary mentality that has come to haunt and drive out the more progressive elements of this distinctively American institution that grew in the shadows of the U.S. Congress rather than the White House.

In a confessional statement I made in my youth, I characterized my mother’s Roman Catholic Church and my father’s United Methodists as having, respectively, turned into a “whore” and a “pimp.” Very politic but not too polite, my literal metaphors did not meet an appreciative audience.

With Pope Benedict now going after Caritas International for not condemning homosexuality in its services, President Obama finally coming out in support of same-sex marriage, and Romney suddenly becoming adroit in avoiding any set position any given time but yet shamelessly revving up the hinterland’s defensive homophobia, our preoccupation with whether the President’s security were salacious in El Salvador, now scheduled for Senate hearing, makes the liberating U.S. land of the Alberts a rather sad-looking jaded juvenile.

We took a few months not too long ago to understand the workings on Saipan of what we called the House of Horus (the Egyptian pagan god Horus, promiscuous and polytheistic, gave us the colorful English word “whore”) wildly written up in these pages. It made us understand why our local male citizens get in trouble with new post-puberty virgin teens when we recall that the patriarchal Datus of Malayo-Oceania and the liege lords of Europe had it as their honored prerogative to deflower the village’s lassies.

We thought Ellis and Kinsey had catapulted us beyond our ancient prejudices. We’ve had some ardent holdovers to the past. Some even sit in legislatures.

Jaime R. Vergara (jrvergarajr2031@aol.com) is a former PSS teacher and is currently writing from the campus of Shenyang Aerospace University in China.