The Michael Jackson trial was part of an epic cycle of celebrity trials that started with O.J. Simpson, passing through Kobe Bryant, Robert Blake and Phil Spector (Tyson and the Menendez brothers also bear mention). These trials — sometimes televised, other times reenacted, always dissected and second-guessed with obsessive attention — have undoubtedly become a new genre of entertainment. They are American tragedies for our age — big, crass, bizarre and, most crucially, morally empty.

The crimes or alleged crimes involved are as serious as they could be: murders, rape, pedophilia. The suffering, or alleged suffering, is profound. The scope and impact of the trials — from the investigations to the legal strategies, the media spin, the social repercussions — are huge. Yet it’s impossible to wrestle from them the moral or even the psychological lessons that classic tragedy provides.

Celebrity trials offer a potent cocktail of fame, sex and violence; they allow us to look behind the veil that usually protects the private lives of stars; they tap in to collective feelings and fantasies about the very nature of celebrity. What they don’t do is provide solutions, or even serviceable frameworks, for questions of right and wrong. Ultimately, they are just not about right and wrong. They are about wrong and wrong, and though they are tragedies inasmuch as they deal with terrible deeds and their retribution, they suggest a new definition of tragedy.

In the common use of the word, tragedy can happen when “right” clashes with “wrong” and succumbs to it — taking the form of sacrifice — or simply when somebody’s “innocence” meets somebody else’s guilt — taking the form of “victimhood.”

But classic tragedy is more complex; it has been defined as the deadly clash of “right and right.” In “Antigone,” the protagonist dies in the name of a simple principle: a sister must give her brother a decent burial. King Creon had forbidden the burial in the interest of the kingdom and must now — despite himself — carry out the consequences of his order, which is law, being disobeyed. Fraternal love clashes with the law: Both are right in their own way, but the two rights are irreconcilable. We watch the characters pay the price of their acts, and so fulfill their destiny, in a clean, inexorable, hopeless drama. The truths we learn are certainly bleak and sobering, but they also illuminate the supreme value of courage, coherence, compassion and knowledge itself.

Finally, in a more banal sense, tragedy can happen when random circumstances produce terrible outcomes, as in any “tragic accident.”

American tragedy, as embodied in this cycle of celebrity trials, seems to present something different: the clash of two people — or two “forces” — who are both in their own way wrong. O.J. and the LAPD. Robert Blake and his wedded grifter. Kobe and his testimony-shifting accuser. Michael Jackson and his alleged victim’s mother-pimp. (The exception here is Phil Spector, who allegedly took the life of a waitress-actress whose only mistake was to accept his invitation.)

We (a lot of us, anyway) follow and discuss these trials to establish degrees of wrongness, or simply to see which wrong will carry the day. Few people would argue that Michael Jackson didn’t cross a line with his bed sharing; the question was only how far he went beyond it. But at the same time, few people would argue that greed and hypocrisy didn’t taint the accusations against him; the question was simply whether we could still buy them at all. When presented with this kind of situation, we must choose, or accept to be divided, between two wrongs. We don’t have to believe that anybody is telling the truth. We can believe both that O.J. did it and that the LAPD is (or was) crowded with racists who compromised its credibility. That Robert Blake did it and that Bonny conned him six ways to Sunday. That Kobe did it — that he did “something” — and that his accuser set him up and embellished the tale. If there are innocent victims, they appear to be “caught in the middle,” or twice exploited.

The outcomes, therefore, cannot be “resolutions.” There is no “moral of the story” — if not a twisted, ambiguous, ironic one. O.J. gets off as a slap in the face of the LAPD; he becomes persona non grata in his former L.A. hangouts and has to relocate to Miami. Kobe gets off but has to admit infidelity and make it up with gifts of oversize jewelry, tattoos honoring his “queen,” and renewed commitment to his fans (as ultimate proof of his new faithfulness, he re-signs with the Lakers). Michael Jackson gets off but may soon have to sell the Beatles catalog back to Sony.

Much as classic tragedy is exact and rigorous, this American tragedy is messy and arbitrary. It is tragedy crossed with melodrama in its most degraded expression (the soap opera). It is tragedy for people who crave the frisson of morbidity much more than any catharsis. Classic tragedy is hopeless because the tragedy is preannounced and inevitable. American tragedy is hopeless because it assumes that we all are. One type of tragedy is moral; the other is cynical. We hear the rhetoric of the lawyers knowing that it’s just that — rhetoric — and knowing that everybody knows it. When both parties are somehow guilty, not only innocence but truth itself becomes “impossible.” Any truth will always be subjective, muddy and ultimately unsatisfying, like a negotiated, artfully worded statement. The truth is then beside the point: the point is just to win, to put one over the other guy. In classic tragedy, everything is known, everything is understood in its very terribleness. In this form of American tragedy everything is ultimately unknowable and impossible to understand.

But then, why do we need it? Why do we turn these trials into such compelling spectacle?

The answer, I think, has two levels.

First, the trials reveal that our relationship with celebrity has become perverse. As a spectacle, they are of a piece with VH1′s “Behind the Music” and the E! Channel’s “True Hollywood Stories”: mostly tales of excess and decline that satisfy people’s appetite for the sorrows of the rich and famous.

This appetite, which has always been the inseparable underside of the adoration for stars, seems now to be out of control. We are now likely to feel stronger about the celebrities we don’t like than the ones we like: a “reverse fandom” that can be a form of satire but easily spills into meanness. If we don’t like certain celebrities, we want to see them embarrassed, ridiculed, reviled. If we like them, we still want to see them exposed at their most vulnerable. More interesting than the work celebrities do is the work they have done on them. We obsess on the weight they gain or abruptly shed, the fashion blunders, the mating patterns, the abrupt weddings and divorces. The union of two celebrities seems to create grotesque two-headed monsters such as “Bennifer” or “Brangelina.”

At the beginning of jury deliberations on the Jackson trial, the New York Post ran a front-page headline screaming: “Sweat, Freak.” It made me feel sorry for Michael Jackson, but I’m sure the folks at the Post knew what they were doing. The growing industry of tabloid journalism seems to thrive on feelings of resentment and hate. And while those feelings may not have been shared by the Michael Jackson jury (or perhaps that jury disliked the accusers more), it’s unlikely that the acquittal will win Jackson any new fans.

Hypothetically, there is a version of celebrity trials that would be akin to classic tragedy: that is, a clash of right and right. The idea that all should be equal in front of the law, and the idea that celebrities are “special” and may need an extra measure of protection, are arguably both right. But the second idea becomes a compelling principle only when the special status has to do with merit. And here is the rub. Celebrity has become less and less meritocratic. We used to have Angelyne, whose self-conferred celebrity was always a fairly innocuous joke. She acted as if she was entitled to our attention, but she got it only for the time it took to drive by a billboard. But now we have Paris, who acts in similar way but gets a TV show and the big bucks. And if indeed we’ll always have Paris, we’ll also have this giant backlash against celebrity. It’s as if celebrity itself is the product of two “wrongs” — the corporate marketing of inflated egos, and the public’s lack of taste. The public may buy it, but it will feed their general sense that celebrity is undeserved. One may become a singing star boosting his or her voice with technology and shaking ass in the video. Or a movie star with the help of plastic surgery. Or a sports star with steroid-powered muscles. The more people are led to believe this, the more unhealthy their relationship with celebrity will get.

The second level of the answer has to do with power. Truly powerful people (politicians, moguls, industry titans) are themselves a kind of celebrities, but traditional celebrities are sort of the “face” of power and become our stand-ins for it. We associate them with both affluence and influence, the power to live as they want and the power to make things happen in the world.

And yet, power itself is not what it used to be. My friend Larry Gross (a veteran screenwriter and one of Hollywood’s sharpest minds) has convinced me that there is a new and profound cultural problem to contend with: as a society, we no longer understand power. The power of kings and dictators was always visible, tangible, understandable. The power of elected officers is by definition (if not always in reality) an expression of popular power. But the power of mega-corporations is as faceless and nebulous as it is pervasive. It hides in plain sight and communicates in code. Even the most powerful people in the world now seem harder to understand. George Bush is not the figure of gravitas, wisdom and trustworthiness we need a president to be. Bill Gates is not the charismatic, visionary egomaniac we expect the richest man in the world to be. They are ciphers, and they make their very power unintelligible. And so not only do we feel more powerless in front of a more absolute power, but we also feel unable to “relate” to it at all.

Celebrity trials provide people the sense of witnessing a form of history up close and personal. But the cultural dynamics represented in the trials always point to the fact that celebrities are ultimately “weird,” and that mere mortals getting too close to them are (intentionally or not) inviting trouble — which means they must also be weird. What we understand about celebrities is ultimately that we do not, cannot, understand them.

It’s a tragedy of unknowing and incomprehension, suggesting the larger tragedy of incomprehensible power.

Most important, though, it was an emotional laboratory where we could find, try on, pine over, old-fashioned notions of family and masculinity. The critical one is, of course, the notion of “father.” It’s not excessive to say that the history of the Mafia — both in society and in pop culture — is a history of fathers (or father figures), which starts with biblically powerful models and ends in crisis and extinction.

“The Godfather” — Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 masterwork — is the foundational myth of the genre. Establishing the template that would last for decades, it was, on the surface, a sweeping tale of illegal empire building, but at its heart it was a story of fathers and sons. Fatherhood was all-important: It was the source of authority, the reason for loyalty, the call of responsibility. It was the crucible where hard choices are made, and character tested. The word itself — “godfather” – evoked not so much “the man who sponsors a child” as “the father who is godlike.” It described a patriarchal archetype filtered through romantic idealization and made even more irresistible by the casting of such iconic actors as Brando, Pacino and (in “The Godfather: Part II”) De Niro.

Michael Corleone remains one of the most powerful role models that popular culture has produced in the last 50 years. The measure of his appeal is that we all look at him as a hero, despite the fact that he deals in blackmail and violence, has his own brother assassinated, and boldly lies to his wife. All this we justify because we buy into his rationale: We believe he does it for the greater good of the family. Family, in Mafia parlance, is both the group related by marriage and blood ties, and the larger group related by ethnicity and partnership in crime. What’s good for the first is, ideologically, the ultimate goal; but what’s good for the second is, pragmatically, the immediate priority. Context clarifies which of the two types of family one may be talking about in any conversation; yet a certain amount of overlap and ambiguity is there by design, as a constant reminder of their mutual necessity.

The climax of “The Godfather” is the montage going back and forth between the baptism of Michael’s nephew and the extermination of his enemies. This is not just a striking juxtaposition. It conveys the deeper point that Michael’s power to kill is rooted in his commitment to family (the immediate kind). He has the authority to shed other people’s blood because he’s ensuring the future of his own bloodline. In other words, family values justify violence against those who threaten us. The subversive reading of this embedded statement is that family values, sooner or later, will require that we commit such violence. As long as you believe that family justifies it, you are bound to kill your enemy (conversely, as long as you kill your enemy, you’re bound to justify it in the name of family). For Michael, the enemy is rival gangsters; for most of us it’s the criminal, the stranger, the infidel, the suspicious “other.”

To be sure, this radical social critique was not necessarily the filmmaker’s intention, and one can only read it against the grain of the film, with its seemingly incessant parade of dinners, weddings, masses, funerals, pregnancies, bedside visits and family reunions. The prevailing mood of the film is nostalgia, a sense that the past contains lessons worth remembering and traditions worth honoring.

That nostalgia was made more poignant by the Mafia’s real state of affairs at the time. As “The Godfather” was being made, the mythic “code” of the Mafia and its extreme version of family values were beginning to fall apart on the street in an orgy of betrayal. “The Godfather” itself had a significant effect on the Mafia — and although it was castigated by many critics at the time as a whitewash, it hurt the Mafia more than it helped it. While restoring its veneer of “nobility,” the movie also made it into a fashionable, highly commercial product. Mobsters became more and more obsessed with image; inspired by their on-screen counterparts, they pursued flash and celebrity. The Gambino family (sort of the Ivy League of the mob), started by the low-profile, dressed-down, laconic Carlo Gambino, was taken over by the flamboyant, nattily attired, boisterous John Gotti. With the help of the media, Gotti fashioned himself into a Hollywood star at large; not surprisingly, his stardom spurred his enemies and exposed his vulnerability. At the end, he was too big not to go down. Ratted out by his trusted lieutenant Sammy Gravano, Gotti finished his life in prison, fighting a losing battle with cancer. Ever since the “dapper don” put on the orange jumpsuit, the mob hasn’t been able to recover its luster.

Gotti had been behind bars for nearly a decade when “The Sopranos” stripped the mob myth of any residual romanticism. Coppola’s undeclared critique of patriarchy was suddenly in-your-face. The family was now fractious, dysfunctional, constantly threatening to disintegrate. Tony Soprano’s father was a painful memory; his mother was a fearsome harpy, laying massive guilt on him with methodical madness. Tony’s own marriage sustained itself on denial (before becoming a slow-motion train wreck and finally the most cynical of deals); his children seemed left with no apparent choice but acting out, or getting out. Tony was an anti-romantic: a creature of unrestrained appetites, eating, drinking, snorting, fucking ad nauseam to try to fill a massive hole, driven to panic and badly in need of a shrink. In sharp contrast to the godfather ethos, he lied for himself, not for his family; perhaps even more damning, he lied to himself.

Ultimately, Tony’s character was compelling precisely because it took the godfather archetype and filled it with doubt, anxiety and moral inadequacy to the point of explosion. Tony’s choices were harder than Michael Corleone’s, and more ironic: Going to war or killing his own, spending time in a crumbling marriage or with an array of psycho mistresses, giving it all up or being stuck in endless therapy. We felt for him in ways we didn’t feel for Michael: We didn’t admire his solutions as much as we understood his problems. The role of all-knowing, all-powerful father, guarding his secrets with manly stoicism or sharing them with other men in solemn rituals, speaking in few words with great meaning, as if he could create meaning itself — that role was never an available option. While lionizing family, and particularly fathers, had been the original effect of the Mafia genre, deconstructing the patriarchal model and exposing its every crack was now the genre’s new mission.

In A&E’s “Growing Up Gotti,” Victoria, John’s daughter, struggles with the hardship of single motherhood, the burden of her legacy, and the paucity of adequate suitors. Her ex-husband, Carmine Agnello (currently serving time), is only occasionally mentioned; the deceased patriarch, John, is mentioned or evoked constantly, but rather than making him an emotional presence in the show, the references only underscore his absence, the vacuum he left both in his own family and in the Mafia myth. “Growing Up Gotti” means growing up with the cumbersome name of a man who isn’t there, cannot be replaced, and cannot be lived up (or down) to. Despite the show’s complete lack of intellectual ambition — and, in a sense, because of it — “Growing Up Gotti” completes the arc that starts with “The Godfather.” The paradigm so effectively set up by Coppola’s movie, and so devastatingly dismantled by “The Sopranos,” becomes officially a thing of the past: The powerful father became the self-doubting father and, eventually, the vanished father.

Of course, “The Sopranos” is coming back one last time, and more Mafia movies, books or TV shows will certainly appear in the future. The success of “The Godfather Returns,” the official literary sequel to Mario Puzo’s novel, is a good indication of the enduring appetite for the genre. Still, “The Sopranos” was a crepuscular tale from the start, and “The Godfather Returns” is double nostalgia (not only for the ’50s, when most of the story takes place, but also for the ’70s, when we were first told it). The genre may continue, but an awareness of the end will color its future.

“Growing Up Gotti” is a particularly shrill death knell. The end of the Mafia is a given, a backstory. We start already on the other side, a grotesque place of showy bad taste and bratty behavior, material ambitions and raging hormones, a place most immediately defined by the complete removal of the father. Even nostalgia is beside the point; if anything, the point of the show is to take us on a tragicomic tour through the rubble of patriarchal collapse (and the soft female-empowerment fantasy that springs from it). The patriarch is a figurehead whose very history of crime and punishment is glossed over with calculated indifference; Victoria is more interested in remembering him as the first metrosexual, an apt grandfather to the self-appointed “hottie Gotti.” The patriarch is a legend; the patriarch is a punch line.

“Growing Up Gotti” is consistent with a larger attitude toward fathers and father figures in films and television. From “Gilmore Girls” to “Desperate Housewives,” from “Arrested Development” to “Six Feet Under,” from “The Simpsons” to “The Osbournes,” from “The Family Guy” to “The Bernie Mac Show,” fathers stand out for their absence, ineptitude or reluctance amid a growing crowd of single mothers, widows, all-girl clans, unconventional or dysfunctional families. Father knows best? Not in a long time. Dad-glorifying shows like “The Cosby Show,” “Happy Days,” “The Waltons,” “The Brady Bunch,” “Ozzie and Harriet,” “Leave It to Beaver” seem lost in ancient memory.

This media landscape points toward what might be a sort of national “father complex”: the combination of a growing mass anxiety about lost, absent, failed fathers, and fathers’ own struggle with the redefinition of their role after women’s liberation, artificial insemination and the custody wars. Statistics about fatherlessness in America are questionable, generally coming from highly partisan sources. It is a reasonable assumption, however, that the United States is at the high end of the world spectrum in the number of single-parent households, and the single parent is overwhelmingly female. A high number of American children grow up without a father at home; a vast majority of incarcerated men come from such backgrounds. While this is not an entirely new phenomenon (and neither is the relevance of fatherless characters in American culture, from “Huck Finn” to “On the Road”), what might be new is how deep it cuts today. Rap music, the dominant language of American teenagers, portrays a world of casual fathers and baby mamas; everybody is out for themselves, and life’s lessons are only learned the hard way. In movies, it’s interesting to note that several of this year’s Oscar contenders (“The Incredibles,” “Million Dollar Baby,” “Finding Neverland”) deal with father re-empowerment fantasies, or father figures filling a painful void. The flip side of the father complex is a stronger longing: Signals include the reelection of a dynastic president, “strict father” political metaphors, and a draconian reaffirmation of traditional family values against the perceived threat of gay marriage.

Because fatherhood is arguably in a crisis, it is nostalgically eulogized, combatively propped up, or turned into comic/lurid fodder. What seems no longer tenable is the romantic, idealized idea of fatherhood once associated with “The Godfather,” where the passionate mutual devotion of fathers and sons seemed completely of a piece with the relentless pursuit of power and destruction of the enemy. It was a notion of fatherhood and masculinity that allowed — indeed, that relied on — the fundamental hypocrisy of invoking family values to justify cold-blooded killing, being a caring and conservative family man who abhors vice while selling it to the next guy. The ability to mask the contradiction, to hold together domestic virtue and business ruthlessness in a seemingly coherent identity, was a father’s job. Ultimately, Coppola was criticizing this notion of fatherhood while ostensibly glorifying it, and that double movement was an important part of the film’s greatness.

Looking back at the “Godfather” trilogy in light of “The Sopranos,” the reasons for the don’s downfall come into clear, harsh focus. The general crisis of fatherhood might be the sign of times, but it was written all along in Michael Corleone’s DNA. In this, he wasn’t a figure of nostalgia but a harbinger of things to come.

The tragic irony of “The Godfather” is that his path not only led to scorched earth around the family but also destroyed the family itself. By demanding total clan loyalty — “my family right or wrong” — and meting out deadly punishment against transgression, he ended up damning the family in order to save it. His destiny reveals the weakness at the heart of a family ideal built on a code more than on love. While this ideal may remind us of Iraqi or Afghan tribes, with their honor killings and cycles of retribution — a still more extreme version of the southern Mediterranean family ethos depicted in Mafia films — it should also remind us of our down-home, “civilized” version. There is more in common than we care to admit: the ultimate authority of fathers, the religiously sanctioned concept of what a family is, the forceful exclusion of the “other,” the double standard of responsibility.

The final season of “The Sopranos” will undoubtedly reserve its share of surprises, but the reality of the mob’s near extinction, and the post-extinction quality of “Growing Up Gotti,” leave little doubt as to the general direction in which HBO’s greatest show must be headed. We already know there is no future for a fatherless mob: Its replenishing of ranks and transmission of power along generational lines were always the key to its strength.

The fatherless, doomed mob could be a gloomy metaphor for an increasingly fatherless America. But it could it be something more specific, and more hopeful — a metaphor for the death of a certain kind of father, a sign that the stern, law-giving patriarch is passing from the scene (though the 2004 election suggests that we may not be there yet, and that it won’t happen without a backlash). In any case, I look forward to Tony Soprano’s final act for a classy epitaph to the genre, and for further clues to dad’s state of mind in the face of impending doom.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s recent “girlie men” remark (he hurled the epithet at Democratic lawmakers) was the most flagrant example of the GOP’s classic strategy of sexualizing political discourse, both by pushing sexual issues to the fore and by framing other issues along sexually defined lines. The “war on terrorism” has provided Bush the ideal stage upon which to strut his administration’s political machismo and to contrast it with the Democrats’ supposed wimpiness. The GOP’s painting of John Kerry as indecisive and soft, and John Edwards as an inexperienced pretty boy, is an essential part of this strategy, which culminates in the use of gay marriage as a wedge issue intended to polarize the country, revealing Democrats as at best weak and unmanly, at worst as depraved and deviant.

It’s a natural strategy for the Republicans, one that relies on the traditional cultural and moral standards they have claimed as their own. A similar strategy paid off handsomely against President Clinton in the days of Monica Lewinsky. At that time, of course, Republican venom was directed at infidelity and libertine sexual behavior. Now it is directed against “girlie,” “French-looking,” “flip-flopping” men, as well as gays and lesbians who dare to demand that their mutual commitment be treated the same as straight people’s. Either way, Republicans reaffirm patriarchal order and religious values, and claim for themselves the appealing role of manly men, loyal to their wedded wives. Never mind that Schwarzenegger’s history of randy behavior makes Clinton look like a choirboy, or that plenty of Republicans cheat and divorce. What matters here are the proclamations and the posturing, however hypocritical, which allow them to stake symbolic territory.

This strategy reflects a keen GOP awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of their candidate. George W. Bush is not an articulate president by any stretch of the imagination. He’s not an empathetic president. He’s not a visionary president. He is, first and foremost, a posturing president. He is most comfortable and, in fact, most effectively communicative, when wearing jeans, cowboy boots and bomber jacket. He smirks, he squints, he nods, he points and shoots, he displays an easy grasp of male-bonding shorthand.

By contrast, the Bush campaign points at Kerry’s suspiciously cultured airs, his more overtly patrician demeanor, his unseemly displays of affection for the youthful and ever-smiling Edwards, as expressions of an overall decadence, the exposure to exotic and possibly un-American influences — in one word, a “Frenchiness.” And whenever Kerry strikes a manly pose, Republicans sneer at his put-on ruggedness, belied by the droopy slope of the shoulders or the dorky bike helmet. They even go so far as to dispute his military record, suggesting Kerry may be guilty of reckless tactical decisions or may have exaggerated his own wounds. While there’s more than a hint of desperation in this particular diatribe, as a whole the Republican attempt to paint the contest in terms of good old-fashioned manliness versus the more effete, Euro-influenced, self-doubting kind represented by Kerry, has been as transparent as it has been effective.

Teresa Heinz also provides easy fodder for this ploy. A clearly intelligent, worldly woman with her own wealth and a strong personality, she’s likely to bring out the worst in the Republican constituency — a mixture of misogyny, xenophobia and distrust of the “cultured elites.” To the average Republican, she is Hillary with money and an accent (it was telling that Chris Wallace on Fox News, which faithfully echoes the GOP’s world view, compared her to Eva Peron after her convention speech), and her powerful aura suggests that Kerry might not be the commander in chief of his own household. The unofficial contest between potential first ladies, as well as the two very different sets of daughters (both scheduled to appear in Vogue magazine features) will be an interesting facet of this election.

The great gay marriage debate is the linchpin of the whole strategy. The very argument against it, when boiled down to its essence, is about protecting traditional definitions of sexual roles.

Most arguments against gay marriage are, in fact, easily countered. It’s not what we have been used to? Neither was interracial marriage. It may have unwanted consequences on children? Not when adoption by gay couples is legal anyway. It threatens the “sacredness” of the institution? Not when so many marriages already end in divorce, when popular culture obsesses on fat, obnoxious fiancés and on who wants to marry some cheesy millionaire, when Britney’s instantly disposable wedding and Anna Nicole Smith’s nuptial countdown to death are so obviously representative of the attitudes of many modern spouses.

The only argument that requires a more complex answer is, I suspect, the truly fundamental one. Gay marriage calls into question established roles; it scrambles the basic coordinates we use to define ourselves. If married couples are to include “husband and husband” and “wife and wife” sets, or “husband and wife” sets from the same gender, what does being a husband or a wife actually mean? And if that becomes open to interpretation, what does being a man or a woman mean? A stand against gay wedding is, at its core, an insistence — and as we shall see a rather desperate, frightened and “unmanly” one — on traditional notions of masculinity. A man is he who is married to a woman, and who’s the undisputed father figure, provider for the family, maker of important decisions. (A man is also physically strong, adept at sports, comfortable with bikes, horses and other means of locomotion, not too big a talker but good with one-liners — all important qualities, but clearly subordinate to the ones expressed in the traditional family structure.)

In order to prevent gay marriage from becoming legal, Republicans have gone and will continue to go to far-fetched lengths. The knowingly futile attempt to amend the Constitution is a fascinating example. The Constitution provides no foundation for discriminating against gay couples. The implicit argument that the Founders would have supported the amendment creates a vicious circle, in which Republicans take a present-day issue, go back to the past and decide what the Constitution “must have meant” about it, then try to stop the present from changing using the supreme authority of the past, now adequately retrofitted. It makes no historical sense. But of course it’s not about historical sense — it’s about claiming the legacy of masculinity.

For the Republicans, claiming traditional masculinity is a matter of existential urgency, not just a tactical move. With traditional masculinity beleaguered and uncertain of its future, conservatives are clutching with increasing desperation to the John Wayne version. The more anxious they feel about what it means to be a man, the more they tend to enshrine the archetype.

This anxiety, which tries to come off as macho toughness, is something the Democrats ought to exploit. Kerry has tried hard (perhaps too hard) to counter the Republican attack on his masculinity. But Democrats should also expose the anxiety and insecurity that motivates the Republican’s macho campaign to begin with.

Schwarzenegger’s remark, for instance, deserves to be derided as not only crass and sexist, but also completely dishonest, even ludicrous, coming from a man who made his name as a bodybuilder. Bodybuilders spend all their time, money and energy refining the way they look: The kind of vanity that sustains the endeavor is arguably unmatched by the girliest girl in the world. There is no practical application for a bodybuilder’s muscles: They are not to be used to win a fight, or a race, or to prevail in any other match of strength and skill. It’s strictly about appearing a certain way. Bodybuilding was born, in fact, as a method to beef up scrawny physiques, and it was originally marketed at insecure young men who felt all too easily dismissed by women and bullied by other men — most famously in the Charles Atlas ad in which a voluptuous woman scoffs at the cowering “97-lb. weakling” tormented by a beach bully. It was, in other words, a self-help tool for “girlie men,” one that replaced insecurity with vanity — a different kind of “girlie” quality.

Bodybuilding competitions are essentially male beauty contests where bikini-clad competitors strut their stuff in front of jury and audience. Preparing for them, professional bodybuilders combine hard-core training with chemical self-abuse, extreme dieting, tanning, and the shaving of all visible body hair, while spending countless hours posing in front of mirrors to learn the angles, the lights, the twitches that display every part of their bodies to their best advantage. In short, bodybuilders train to preen; the whole pseudo-sport is a gigantic, shameless exercise in preening. Shall we talk about girlie men? (It should also be noted that bodybuilding magazines count on a vast gay readership, and the aesthetics of gay porn owe bodybuilding an obvious debt. I suspect Arnold is sophisticated enough to realize that full well, which makes his remarks all the more callous).

Ultimately, Arnold’s ridicule of “girlie men” is not a sign of his great manliness, but of his insecurity as a politician. Lacking a sophisticated grasp of politics, he falls back onto Hollywood mannerism and cheap jokes.

The same goes for Bush and his cowboy affectations: Contrast them with his minutes of surreal stillness in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” as he held on to his storybook after learning that the nation was under attack, and you see how thinly Bush the cowboy masks Bush the big baby. A big part of what makes Michael Moore’s film so devastatingly effective is how the president comes off it thoroughly emasculated, a frightened child suddenly swimming in his daddy’s shoes. Those minutes will remain a defining moment of his legacy; precisely because the moment is in such contrast to the trigger-happy months and years to follow, it reveals how the macho posturing, the “Bring ‘em on” and “Mission accomplished” boasts, the top-gun masquerade, are rooted in insecurity.

And yet, the film inadvertently also shows Bush at his most attractive, at least to those Americans who respond to his appeal: a kind of joking good ol’ boy, not afraid to look a bit like a buffoon, physically fit, informal, tough-talking when expected to be, and always engagingly simple. A good drinking buddy (before he cleaned up, anyway) you may call “partner” or “dude,” depending on where you reside. Which Bush Americans will choose to see — and which candidate they empower as the next four year’s planetarch — is ultimately a sort of national psychiatric test as much as a political question.

Clearly the Democratic Party has chosen to try to reclaim the flag, patriotism, and “manliness” from Republican hogging. This is a high-stakes bet. The Republicans start out with an advantage, because they get to claim masculinity without having to redefine it: Democrats are fighting on Republican turf. For Democrats, then, the trick is to challenge the GOP’s concept of masculinity, even as they reclaim it. This is difficult. But it’s doable, and it’s worth doing. Just as the flag doesn’t need to be used to smother dissent, so manliness doesn’t mean opposing intellectual complexity, let alone fearing strong women or demonizing gays. Fear of difference and mistrust of complexity are the real weakness. They need to be exposed as such — and that’s when the game stops being defensive. It may not be politically correct, but the Democrats should come out and say it anyway: Republicans are the real sissies.

The European championship isn’t the World Cup, but European fans care about it almost as much. Bragging rights in their own playground are at stake, and the tournament has a reliably high standard of quality. (European fans can be real snobs, and many don’t feel quite right about tournaments played at noon in the dead of summer, such as the U.S.-hosted ’94 World Cup, or in stadiums full of Korean fans in uniform blowing plastic trumpets.) Moreover, European clubs have so diluted their national identity that their performance in international games can’t possibly mean the same as it once did for the country they belong to. Real Madrid doesn’t have more than a handful of Spanish players; Arsenal (one of the historic London teams) is half-French, including the coach. Therefore, in the age of globalization and the European community, national team soccer plays an important role keeping national identities in shape. For the last hundred years, soccer has defined what it means to be Italian, English, Dutch or German as well as any other national endeavor. Club soccer may offer the absolute best of the game, but national team soccer retains the ability to express some of its essential values and archetypes.

And so: Everyone knows that the Italians are defensive-minded, and lure the opponent forward to stun them with crafty fast breaks; the English love to tackle and crisscross the field with long balls; the Dutch stress possession and versatility, their typical player being a jack-of-all-trades; the Germans rely on pace, power and simple geometries. Much can be written (and has) about the ways these styles of play reveal fundamental truths about a nation’s history and character. The Italians have always been smaller than Northern Europeans, and ever since the Roman Empire, Italy has been invaded by just about everybody, hence its defensive mentality; Italy also has rich artistic traditions, hence its taste for creative counterattacks. By the same token, England being an island, Holland being a hub of commerce, Germany being landlocked, etc., could be imaginatively connected to their game.

Of course, each national style can be perceived as a virtue or a sin, according to the changing fortunes of the respective teams in international competitions.

Take the Germans: Though always lacking in flair, their relentlessness and machinelike organization have made them a consistently dominating force. “Football is a simple game,” famously said former England player Gary Lineker, “where 22 players play against each other and in the end Germany wins.” Except it no longer does. And spoiled of its aura of invincibility, Germany now appears joyless and gray, painfully aware of its shortcomings and longing for new inspiration. Its coach Rudy Voeller was the first to resign after the elimination from the tournament, daunted by the looming task of leading the team in the next World Cup campaign on its own home turf. There was always something militaristic about the German game, a triumph of discipline and physical might. Suddenly this feels old-fashioned and obsolete: If Germany is an army, it’s an old-school one in a new type of war. To be German today is to learn self-deprecation and contemplate the strange notion of hiring a foreign coach; in other words, to look at the world with very different eyes.

Italy, which was an early favorite to win the trophy, was another crushing disappointment, and its campaign was marred by the tournament’s big scandal. On their first game against Denmark, Italy’s star player Francesco Totti was caught on camera spitting on a Danish defender, and was promptly labeled “the Italian llama” by the Danish press. UEFA had no choice but to disqualify him for three games. The Italian team plunged into chaos and paranoia, and flew home after just two more lackluster performances. Spitting is not unheard of in soccer (Germany coach Voeller, once an outstanding player, was literally showered by Dutchman Frank Rijkaard in the most egregious such incident), but the amount of coverage a game of this level receives makes it most unwise. Totti’s spit was unequivocally documented and available to see 24/7 all over the Internet.

Through sheer visibility, its very ethical dimension came into sharper evidence. Spitting can be seen as an act of rebellious insouciance or supreme arrogance. Totti’s spit carried both meanings. A proud product of the Roman borgate, or working-class suburbs, Totti is a rich white-trash boy who was lashing out against a lesser colleague, presumably angered by rude tackling. His spit expressed a rebellion against a system that stifles creativity with rough play, as well as the insufferable attitude of a spoiled brat. Does that say something about contemporary Italian men? Undoubtedly, the combination of rebelliousness and arrogance defines the ethos of one of Italy’s most culturally influential modern exports, the Mafia (full disclosure: I feel allowed to criticize Italy harshly, as I am Italian myself). Be that as it may, the Italian coach Trapattoni was sacked, and the new one (Marcello Lippi) promised to rebuild the team. Around Totti.

England was the most unlucky team of the tournament. It started the campaign with high expectations, fielding its best side since the legendary World Cup victory of 1966. The whole country was on a high. If you walked through the streets of London last Thursday, the day of England’s ill-fated match with Portugal (I happened to be there), you couldn’t go more than a few steps without passing by a Cross of St. George. Up until a few years ago, the national flag was hardly ever visible, a perceived anachronism that was best left alone due to its potentially inflammatory religious overtones, and the feeling that it had been co-opted and corrupted by the far right. The Union Jack was enough of a fashion statement to overcome such problems, but the Cross of St. George? Forget about it. Clearly, something changed over the last few years. A wave of popular enthusiasm for the national team reclaimed the flag and the desire to rally behind it (without having to go to war). England was on the verge of pulling a great upset in its debut match against France. Zinedine Zidane scored twice for France in overtime and crushed that dream. England regrouped, won the next two games with convincing efforts, and met Portugal in what will be remembered as the most dramatic match of Euro 2004. England scored first, Portugal equalized toward the close of regulation. Despite Portugal’s spirited performance, England should have won with a last-minute goal that was unjustly disallowed by the Swiss referee. The game went into overtime and then to the penalty kicks. England had to do without its best player, forward Wayne Rooney, who was the victim of an injury in the early stages of the match. To top it off, team captain David Beckham missed his penalty (his third consecutive miss in international games). Such momentous bad luck reminds us of the ultimate reason why the world loves soccer (and America doesn’t, at least not as much). A high-scoring game is best suited to ensure that the best team wins — especially if you have playoffs. Soccer still leaves a much larger role to chance and human error. In this sense, soccer is more like life: not fair. An England victory would have been unfair to Portugal, who did more to win the match. Portugal’s victory was unfair to England, who scored a goal that should have counted.

Still, there was a major consolation for England: In Wayne Rooney, not yet 19 years of age, it has the most exciting young player in the world. A stocky, rough-edged scouser (Liverpudlian), Rooney is the anti-Beckham. While Beckham graces the cover of Vanity Fair, is married to a Spice Girl, cheats on her with spicier ones, sports fancy tattoos not to mention ever-changing hairstyles, revels in his status as a gay icon and has once confessed a proclivity for wearing female underpants, Rooney harks back to pre-metrosexual models of masculinity. He wears a military haircut, already carries a few extra pounds, doesn’t court the media and surely wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a G-string. How refreshing to know he will be England’s hero for the next 10 years.

The underwhelming performances of Spain followed the country’s long history of choking. In a sense, that’s also true of Holland, which always makes it a little further than Spain, but almost never goes all the way. The same cannot be said for France, reigning European champions and ’98 world champions. In the last decade France took soccer by storm with a multiethnic team led by Franco-Algerian Zidane, and featuring several players of African, Caribbean and Armenian descent. They came from all the best leagues in the continent, bringing with them a wealth of skills, experience and tactical savvy. At its best, France looked like a world all-star team. At its worst, such as in this tournament, it resembled a foreign legion, battle-weary and demotivated. Thirty-one-year-old Zidane can still do things with the ball that most players couldn’t do if you removed the other team from the field. What he can’t do is outpace younger defenders, or save the day every time with a magic trick. Most of the French team isn’t any younger than Zidane, and France’s elimination is probably just a matter of wear and tear. Whether another great generation is ready to take over remains to be seen.

And so it was that the final came to be played by Portugal (the perennial unfulfilled promise) and Greece (the amazing dark horse, an 80-to-1 contender going into the tournament). Portugal was finally worthy of its self-image as the Brazil of Europe, defeating higher-ranking teams like Spain, England and Holland — matches evocative of ancient maritime rivalries. Coach Luiz Felipe Scolari and playmaker Deco are from Brazil, and Portugal’s dazzling wingers, old fox Figo and young hotshot Christiano Ronaldo, might as well be. Greece proved to be a well-rounded, hardworking, hungry team capable of beating the odds game after game (its victims include Portugal in the opening match, titleholders France, and the talented Czech Republic, who looked like a likely tournament winner until their captain Pavel Nedved, European player of the year, twisted his knee in the semifinal). Greece in the final is the inspiring proof, akin to the victory of the blue-collar Detroit Pistons over the superstar-laden Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA finals this year, that a team without stars but rich in commitment and tactical acumen can beat anyone. Interestingly, the team is coached by a German, Otto Rehhagel: Perhaps classic German wisdom is well suited to an emerging team after all.

It’s hard to resist the temptation to read Portugal and Greece’s success as a metaphor for their respective countries claiming a place at the table of the powerful nations of Europe. This final may not break most-watched records, but it’s historically significant. To appreciate this significance is to instantly understand a paramount reason why soccer has yet to claim the U.S. It won’t happen until this country can feel part of this centuries-old international drama of rivalry and envy, fate and willpower, generational grudges and karmic comeuppances. Ultimately, the international soccer fan is a different animal from any type of American fan because he brings to the game a stake in such larger narratives.

Soccer fever makes it clear why we need sports as much as ever. They are, of course, the last true meritocracy, where nepotism and lucky breaks can only take you so far (doping could change that, but not particularly in soccer, where size and strength don’t count as much as skill and vision). Most important, they provide an outlet for collective feelings that are otherwise repressed by the twin constraints of traditional responsibilities and modern p.c. ethics. The sports fan can evade responsibility and regress to his childlike self, accessing a world of clanship, masculine bonding and competition (with its dark side of violence and prejudice). For a few hours, he can dip into a bubbling cauldron of intense passions that only war could express more powerfully. Euro 2004, like any such tournament, was a spectacle on the stands as much as on the fields. Grown men and women dressed like oranges, roosters, Vikings, bullfighters, commedia dell’arte characters, singing, screaming and crying. There must be something to it. Watch the game Sunday, and judge for yourself.

“The Passion of the Christ” was accused by many detractors of being “pornographic.” The torture of Iraqi prisoners is pornography in a very direct and complete sense. It’s not just violence but sexual violation — what is more, it’s sexual violation staged and captured on camera, made into a spectacle readily available for future and expanded viewing. It’s sexual violation fixed into an essential symbolic image to be preserved like a trophy. Just like conventional porn, it’s completely self-conscious and deliberate yet morally unimpeded.

In a recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine, Susan Sontag criticizes Bush and his administration for their initial profession of shock and disgust at the Abu Ghraib pictures, “as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict.” This is of course richly deserved criticism, yet there’s another point to be made: The horror that was depicted was largely designed for the depiction itself. It was conceived and executed as pornography.

Several of the pictures we have seen show both victims and torturers posing for the camera. There’s a naked man kneeling in front of another man as if performing oral sex. A naked man on a leash held by a female American soldier. Naked men in chains. Naked men stacked up in a grotesque pile, half gangbang and half mass grave. Other alleged tortures, which may be documented by the hundreds of pictures we haven’t yet seen, included forced masturbation. Whether the sexual acts were performed or simulated, the prisoners were forced into the position of pornographic “actors.” Significantly, the hundreds of pictures seen by Congress after the scandal erupted included not only acts of torture upon prisoners, but acts of sexual intercourse amongst the guards themselves. The soldiers who took the pictures knew that, in both instances, they were making porn (albeit in different sub-genres.) There was no other reason to record the tortures; it was, in fact, self-incriminating and stupid by all practical standards. Except that the idea of recording the acts of torture was, to a significant extent, the inspiration to commit them.

You can sense the sexual disturbance in the minds of the soldiers responsible for this. It’s a disturbance exacerbated by the months away from home, but created by a lifelong familiarity with porn — its cynical humor, cheap patriotism, crude vocabulary of submission and prevarication. The president and his inner circle said, “This is not the America that we know.” But it is. The pictures from Abu Ghraib are American “gonzo porn.” They reek of frat-house hazing and gang initiation rituals, of “Jackass” and “Bumfights.” They encode racial hatred and fetishistic allusions to slavery.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich points out that the right is using the “pornography made them do it” excuse to scapegoat liberal attitudes, invoke censorship and exonerate the Bush administration. This may be true, but it’s no reason to gloss over the sexual nature of the torture. The torturers were enabled by specific political decisions. They were also inspired by broad cultural influences.

The torture/pornography connection is deep and inescapable. Mark Bowden, of “Black Hawk Down” fame, wrote a well-informed, compellingly readable article in October’s Atlantic Monthly about “the dark art of interrogation” (which was promptly optioned for movie development.) He makes a strong case for the effectiveness of torture as a means for acquiring intelligence — which of course is not an unchallenged notion, and not necessarily a justification. But torture is not the mere application of pain to the task of extracting information. Much of what we identify as torture is actually gratuitous, like the ear-severing in the film “Reservoir Dogs.” “I believe you,” says Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen), “but I’m gonna torture you anyway.” This is, arguably, the real “point” of torture — the assertion of power over the law, over pity, over logic. I’ll torture because I can. I don’t need a reason, I don’t need a goal — the arbitrary nature of the act is in fact its very essence. You cannot understand it except by internalizing the absolute fact that I have all the power and you have none, and our very identity as human beings is defined by this fact. You can conclude that I am not human because I lack pity. But that’s an abstraction. The concrete reality of the situation is that you are not human because you lack all freedom and all dignity.

The torturers of Abu Ghraib had both a reason and a political sanction to do what they did. Yet the nature of the tortures and their recording suggests a casual licentiousness, the arbitrary indulgence of mean appetites. The two aspects — rational justification and gratuitous sadism — are superficially at odds but deeply inextricable from one another. I must inflict pain on you because you and your associates are terrorists, evildoers to be stopped for the greater good of mankind. But because you are an evildoer, enemy of mankind, I can also abandon myself to the pornographic voluptuousness of total control. In fact, not only can I, I must. In order to torture you, it is important that I see you as less than human, and so I will use torture to reinforce that image.

When power is exercised in such an extreme, absolute form as torture, it literally dehumanizes those it’s exercised upon. And they know it. Stripped of rights, of the ability to trust a fellow human being, and most importantly, of self-respect, they lose the very sense of who they are. The identity of the torture victim can never be the same again. That’s why sexual torture is central to the experience. The emasculation of men, the degradation of women, turns them into something they no longer recognize as themselves. Torture is largely the business of creating shame, indelible memories of one’s own impotence which serve as warnings to a whole society. An instinctive understanding of this task can be evinced by the acts of the American torturers. They were aiming to hurt the Arab man where it counts the most — in his masculine pride. There was hardly a more explicit way to do it than to strip him naked and capture him in effigy as the perverse negation of his own self — as a pathetic loser, writhing on the floor or engaging in simulated sexual acts on command, while American men and women pose next to him with a grin and a thumbs-up. This instinctive understanding was further refined by the superior education in pornography that is typical of the contemporary American man (and to some lesser extent, woman.)

Pornography shares with torture an inherent ability to dehumanize. It reduces the individual to a sexual function, flattens identity to a physical act performed for somebody else’s ultimate pleasure. As a performer of pornography, you relinquish your dignity going in. You adopt a vulgar, ludicrous stage name and sell yourself by the pound — or more to the point, by the orifice. Pornography records acts of degradation to be perused, collected, lusted over by anonymous customers. A pornographic image is a trophy: the record of somebody’s submission to the base needs of a customer, exercised as “power” through the laws of the market.

It is noteworthy, of course, that at least three of the alleged torturers are women. This inspires two opposite conclusions: One, that extreme situations such as war produce aberrant behavior, and a woman may occasionally go against her feminine nature and behave like the worst of men (still, that being the exception that proves the rule). Two, the participation of several women in the tortures is consistent with larger social trends, and therefore it belies the idea that pornography, rape and sexually predatory behavior are the exclusive domain of men. If we follow this hypothesis, we may conclude that porn has so deeply corrupted the female psyche that women have become willing to endorse an enterprise that is largely directed at their own degradation.

There is ample evidence in our culture to corroborate this second scenario. Women have been co-opted into watching porn, shopping at the Hustler store, patronizing strip bars. “Porn star” is a label of cool. It’s routine to see actresses and singers showing every allowed inch of skin (and “suggesting” the rest) on the cover of mainstream magazines. Fashion dictates that thongs must peek out of low-rider jeans. Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton illustrate the willingness of a generation of women to ply themselves into camera-friendly sex objects. Much too much scandal was made out of the Janet Jackson Super Bowl exploit, but few people seemed to object to its most insidious aspect — not the baring of a nipple, but the pantomime of sexual aggression without reprisal: a man rips off a woman’s clothes, she pulls a funny face and keeps on singing. And as far as violence goes, it’s interesting that women are now victimized not only by men but, with statistically increased frequency, by other women. The Glenbrook North High School hazing incident, featuring junior-class girls forced to sit while drunken senior girls doused them in feces, urine, paint, animal guts and blood, followed by punching and kicking — much of which captured in yet another infamous video — was a chilling example of this trend.

This is the sad state of affairs that is, to the Islamic mind, the dark side of our much-touted freedom. And it is exactly this dark side that we are rubbing their nose in. The torture at Abu Ghraib says: Our pornography will conquer you.

In contrast, Islamic terrorists divulged the recording of a bloody execution. The victim, an American civilian: a sacrificial lamb whose blood was spilled with the declared intention to restore Arab pride. This is, as much as ever, a war of symbols, and the symbol of Arab emasculation couldn’t but inspire somebody to create a symbol of absolute and terrifying Arab supremacy over a Western man. The American government reacted with proclamations of horror for such barbarity. But such barbarity is a direct reflection of our own dehumanizing ways. A beheading (a 40-second beheading with a knife) undoubtedly represents a more extreme form of cruelty than to strip somebody naked, beat him, sexually humiliate him and put him on a leash. Yet one has to wonder how much further the American soldiers would have gone if not for fear of disciplinary consequences — something the terrorists don’t have to worry about. If you ever saw “Salo,” Pasolini’s allegory about the last days of fascism in Italy, you know his thesis that separating the exercise of power from the fear of consequences — whether because of granted impunity, or because of already certain doom — is the true test of one’s nature. The power of an individual over another will naturally tend to speak the language of sexual sadism, a language that articulates and celebrates it. Sadism will be implicit in every situation of captivity. It will be explicit in situations where the fear of consequences is reduced. It may become extreme where such fear is removed altogether.

It may seem ironic that a war fought in the name of principles and imbued with religious ardor should degenerate to such sordid lows. While in America people flock to see Christ tortured, in Iraq we torture our own prisoners — for information, for deterrence, but also — as the pictures document — for the sheer fun of it. And yet, perhaps “irony” is not quite the right concept. Perhaps the relationship between a U.S.-made blockbuster about Christ’s pain and the pain inflicted by our soldiers abroad is closer and more inevitable that the notion of “irony” would suggest, because many of the torturers are no doubt heartland Americans, many of them surely devout Christians — the core audience of “The Passion of Christ.” They are the people Bush directly addressed when he characterized the war as a crusade, a fight against evil in the name of the God. The aptitude of Christians for delivering pain draws on a rich, millennial tradition — a tradition built on certainty and a Manichean worldview. The ability to torture somebody both requires and confirms this certainty; the torturer’s exhilarating privilege is to feel right by God while doing what is normally forbidden.

“The Passion of the Christ” is, not unlike an exploitation movie from the ’70s, saturated with ultra-violence to the point of ridiculousness. Yet the representation of this violence is unobjectionable to the audience because the violence is inflicted upon the Christ. There seems to be no limit to the amount of violence you could show in this context (provided you could root it in the Scriptures). The torturers themselves are not the ultimate culprits: those are the Jews, as architects of the deicide. By assigning blame to “them,” we can watch an hour of torture entirely guilt-free. In fact, the more severe the torture, the more godlike and awesome Christ’s endurance. Which means we have a moral incentive to welcome the sight of torture, to wish for more and more punishment to be administered and exhibited on screen. The amount of butchery is directly proportional evidence of our own worth: look what Jesus, the extreme athlete of pain, chose to endure in order to save us! This is the fundamental perversion of the movie — that it encourages us to fetishize and get high on the horror of the martyrdom.

Sacrifice is perhaps the most ancient form of religious devotion. It goes back to pagan times, when it was meant to placate the gods. It is at the heart of our notion of justice, which focuses its previously random nature onto a “culprit” whose death will placate the aggrieved party. Christian sacrifice is rather meant to educate. It comes as the culminating point of a vast body of teachings. By choosing to emphasize the sacrifice outside the context of those teachings, Christianity (Mel Gibson’s version of it) harks back to the most primitive, bloodiest aspect of religiosity. “The Passion of the Christ” repositions pain, blood, sacrifice, at the heart of the religious experience.

Why is this exercise so relevant and so powerful right now? The answer takes us straight to 9/11. As much as we loathed the terrorists, we couldn’t help being affected by their conviction. When Bill Maher disputed the assertion that they were cowards, the hysterical outrage that met his remark was a symptom of a raw nerve being tweaked. Because this kind of conviction is precisely what we couldn’t be further from. The question is not whether their conviction justifies their action — it doesn’t (and I tend to believe a case for the fundamental cowardice of attacking any defenseless person, regardless of whether or not one commits suicide in the process, could be convincingly made.) The question is how we respond to the sheer intensity of the conviction. Because as much as this intensity horrifies us, it may also be something that, in some dark recesses of our psyche, we (some of us, anyway) envy. And so we may want to remind ourselves that our own God performed the ultimate act of self-abnegation, exonerating us from doing the same as long as we maintain and worship the memory of it. You can fly into the building in the name of Allah? We can reenact the torture and crucifixion of Jesus Christ in the name of our own God. The effort to distill every ounce of sacrificial pain from this representation, and the uplift that the audience gets from it, can be read as a response to the suicidal fury of the 9/11 terrorists. Our guy’s sacrifice was not only purer, because he didn’t bring any innocents along for the death trip, but it was also more painful. We can reach back into our spiritual history and find our own, superior certitude .

It’s not simply demagogy that the war against terrorism, or against Iraq, has been cast in religious terms, as a crusade, a fight against evil and for God-given freedom. Sept. 11 shook us to the core because if an act like that can be executed not in the name of profit, power or the traditional motivations we understand, but in the name of religious ideals (however aberrant), our own beliefs — or lack of them — are called into question. We suddenly realize we live in a spiritual vacuum, where no comparable degree of conviction can be easily summoned forth.

“The Passion” came to fill this profound need. Paradoxically, the fervor it inspires is directly proportional to the distance we have accrued from any kind of spiritual authenticity in our life. The more our culture obsesses about fad diets, plastic surgery, Paris Hilton’s sex video, Donald Trump’s hair or Jennifer Lopez’s butt, the more fervent our response to “The Passion” has to be.

And so we come full circle. While frivolousness and pornography saturate our culture, “The Passion” offers us redemption, all the more effectively for pushing the limits of graphic representation that porn itself has irrevocably stretched. And while at home we feast our eyes on the torture inflicted upon the Christ, abroad we vindicate ourselves by torturing the infidel with the same righteous abandon, in the way we know best — a pornographic way. Two faces of torture. Two faces of porn.