The Future of Vice

It's a sad commentary on our times--rather, on me--that the word vice had not actually crossed my mind since the TV show Miami Vice went off the air, in 1989. Sinful as I am, I may not be entirely alone. Vice--qua vice, as my colleague in this matching pair of essays would put it--is not a word, or even a concept, that one comes upon a lot anymore. If that tells us something of our time, perhaps it tells us even more about where--God save us--we are headed.

I did what any diligent vice researcher would do, given the task of finding out about the future of vice--I went online. I used a search engine called Northernlight.com, because someone had told me it was the most comprehensive. My initial impulse was to use Yahoo or Excite, because they sound so vicious--I'm using the word in its strict sense--as though they're panting to whisk you to a website so steamy that you'll have to get up and take a cold shower before it's even finished downloading.

I typed in the word vice. Northern-light did its cybershivering and blinking and a few seconds later announced that it had found some 3,192,738 items relating to vice, a virtual embarrassment of riches. The sheer magnitude made me feel somehow out of it. Here I hadn't even given vice any thought since Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas stopped pumping nine-millimeter rounds into vicious--in every sense--cartelistas, and now Northern-light was telling me that there was an abundance of it going on out there. At that very moment, someone was probably making a killing on a vice-related website IPO.

But as I read beneath the column titled "Documents that best match your search," I saw that the top half-dozen matches included, among others, the Regular Members Listing for Alameda County and the Emergency Procedures Division (concluded on page 250)Future of Vice(continued from page 98) of Student Affairs for Northwestern University. The second match was the 1998 Who's Who in the Men's and Boys' Wear Industry. (Confidential to the Men's and Boys' Wear Industry: You might want to give Northernlight.com a call about your listing.)

I pressed on, narrowing my search to the promising-sounding Personal Pages folder provided by the search engine. I was rewarded with 179,635 vicious items. But as I cleansed my already fogged glasses in anticipation of several hours of delightful research--what a great assignment--I found that the first five listings included a roster of agricultural organizations and the bylaws of the American Philatelic Society.

As a youngster, I collected stamps, and I can recall nothing vicious in it. Had there been developments in the gentle, even noble field of philately since I had put down the magnifying glass? Or had some non-English-speaking data enterer in Malaysia aurally confused the words philately and fellatio? I puzzled, eventually deciding that the only link between the two pursuits was the repeated administration of a fleshy organ of the mouth. Among the top-ranked vice sites, the only listing that seemed worthy of the category was the Bylaws of Kappa Omicron Chapter, Alpha Phi Omega.

I then instructed Northernlight.com to search its capacious hippocampus for listings of the word virtue. Thus we arrive at the bad news: There were a mere 470,923 listings in this category. This amounts to a vice-to-virtue ratio of about ten to one. To be honest, I did not peruse the half-million entries under this frankly boring category. I did make it through several hundred of the vice listings, and finally did have to go stand under an icy shower. When I returned to my desk, I found that I had forgotten to log off and my hard drive was very hard indeed.

What does this inquiry tell us? Not much, to be honest, though it was fun surfing through it all. A little more rummaging produced, courtesy of the Vancouver Public Library's Fort Knox-like quotation bank, the following gem by the great Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Men wish to be saved from the mischief of their vices, but not from their vices." Elsewhere, Emerson wrote that we recognized in the words of all great men our own stolen thoughts. So it seemed, once again, as I stared as this sagacious nugget on my screen.

Still, this told me nothing of the future of vice. I decided to look at vice's past as a predictor of its future. I scanned more words by the wise. Finally, I came to this, courtesy of Tacitus, the Roman historian (A.D. 55--117): "There will be vice as long as there are men." It's taking nothing away from Tacitus to say, No kidding. His is not an altogether elegant or even original thought, even for something uttered 2000 years ago. But then Tacitus managed to survive the parlous reigns of some of the most spectacularly vicious emperors of human history--Tiberius, whose indulgences in his pleasure villas on the isle of Capri included using little babies as, well, never mind; Nero, whose later reign included, among other felicitous innovations, the practice of using members of the new Jesus sect as street-lamps; and Vespasian, who inaugurated his new coliseum with an opening day slaughter of 5000 animals (the number of humans slaughtered that day does not, oddly, survive). Given his times, Tacitus' somewhat stern, moralizing tone in his histories should at least be placed in context.

Who's to say that the old scold might not look at the Rome of today, whose symbol is not a depraved or fiddling emperor but a frail, stooped old man in white, standing on a balcony every Sunday at 11:00, blessing the crowd gathered below, wishing peace to the world beyond the square, and conclude that even if vice is going to be with us as long as there are men, some definite changes had taken place during the sanguinary two millennia since his sandals trod the stones of the Eternal City? Two thousand years ago, the most powerful ruler on earth could do whatever he wanted in private. Today, the most powerful man on earth can do--whatever he wants to in private. But if he gets caught, we get to make fun of him, and he can't use us for streetlights. That's progress. Meanwhile, something simply must be done about those reprobates at the American Philatelic Society.