True.

Wolcott has been casting casting his fine eye at advance review copies of Dinesh D'lightful D'licious D'lovely D'Souza's newest tome: The Enemy at Home: How the Saatchi Collection, Internet Porn, and Nancy Pelosi's Love of Jello Shots Drove Osama to Justifiable Homicide. James pulls a doozy of a quotation in which D'Souza locates responsibility for the horrors of abu Ghraib in "the sexual immodesty of liberal America." Then some blub and blab: He doooes declare: If some liberal professor and his boffo barbarella concubine saw fit to gather the harem and film themselves licking ass like a bunch of Templars in some Soho loft, why, we'd all be hissing Guiliani for trying to censor the fucker. Wolcott locates the Soho loft bit as two decades out of date, and boy howdy ain't that the truth. On my last trip into, uh, "The City," the only people I saw in Soho were either tourists trying to figure out just how the fuck you're supposed to shop in that ludicrous Prada store (Answer: You're not) or else harried young mothers with double-strollers and a bluetooth pinned to their ear, whose idea of kinky sex is just having sex, between bedtimes, soccer games, and Mr. I-Swear-I'm-Gonna-Make-Partner-And-Then-Things'll-Change with his 70-hour weeks. Visiting New York with D'Souza must be like visitng with my grandmother: $35 runny eggs at brunch at the Oak Room and a fabulous post-show line for cheesecake at Lindy's.

At this point, I'm tempted to go into some boilerplate about consent versus lack thereof. I'm tempted to say that if it's your thing to get branded with hot irons, have spikes driven into your eyeballs, or hell, have glowsticks shoved up your ass, sign the consent form and away we go. Instead, though, I feel compelled to point out that it is not the sexually liberated who principally commit horrible sex crimes, but the sexually repressed, and that despite the girls of Sex and the City, D'Souza's likely research source, it is not immodesty that characterizes "liberal" sex, but relative honesty. "Must be into anal" may not win a man many dates (thanks, Neddie), but by god, it certainly improves the post-coital environment if you cover that bit in advance.

Such thoughts greatly damper the fall-of-man philosophizing that passes for thought in this great, amber-wheated land of ours, but for a fellow born in Mumbai, in the heart of Kama Sutra Kountry, he certainly takes a hollow view of human sensuality. I know that the good lord commands us to use our penises only for pissin and knockin girls up, but is it really exaltant of the human being to define the male as a baster and the female as a fleshy incubator? (D'Souza, perhaps, would answer yes, being of the opinion that the great liberal fallacy is its belief in the Goodness of Man. No Rousseau, he.) Anyway, what happened at abu Ghraib was not a key party, to pick an anachronism D'Souza might understand (perhaps he has read Updike, eh), nor a night at Plato's, but an example of American soldiers beating up a bunch of helpless Iraqis, stripping them, setting the dogs on them, and piling them on top of each other for some more beating and humiliating. That is not, perhaps, so romantic as libertine complicity in al Qaeda's plotting, although it has that distinct old advantage of being true.