Sinners Are Boring (January 8, 2006)

Evil gets dull after a while.

I mulled this over recently when I read Walter Scott's answer to a Parade reader who asked, "Is it my imagination or has "Desperate Housewives" become boring?" Scott answered, "If anyone's imagination is failing, it's not yours; it's that of the writers of 'Desperate Housewives', who've run out of ideas about how to keep five monotonously promiscuous suburban women fresh and entertaining."

I've never seen "Desperate Housewives", but I have no doubt that the reader's evaluation and Scott's analysis are correct. Evil, whether in the form of promiscuity or any other vice, just doesn't have staying power. After it entices and entraps, it bores.

One fine fall afternoon 20 years ago I sat in the Quad of the University of Illinois and overheard a conversation between two students about the upcoming parties that weekend. It was unbearably sad. These two had evidently partied themselves out, and their conversation turned into a grim analysis of how pathetic and disappointing the weekend's gatherings would be. But they would probably go to them all the same.

I once saw a snippet of an interview with a man - I think he was the manager of a Las Vegas show - whose job included the regular evaluation of bare-breasted young dancers. Certainly that's the dream job of any reprobate male, but he intoned lifelessly to the interviewer, "To me this is like mixing cement."

It probably wasn't like mixing cement the first few times. But my guess is that it got old quicker even than literal cement mixing, which, if done diligently for the sake of building roads and homes while providing work for a man's body and sustenance for his family, would eventually bring more satisfaction than constant breast-gazing.

Virtue is the winning tortoise to vice's spent and exhausted hare. Read a novel like Leif Enger's Peace Like a River (I'm trying to get everybody to read it) and notice how the holiest character (the father, a janitor) is also the most compelling. The same goes for The Chronicles of Narnia with its diamond stars Lucy, Reepicheep, Puddleglum and of course Aslan. Take any George MacDonald novel and the same pattern holds. Evil is a shallow puddle whose resources are soon sucked dry; goodness is an ocean whose bottom you cannot sound and whose farthest shore you cannot reach.

I am certain the writers of "Desperate Housewives" would take no counsel from me, but I think I can solve the riddle of "how to keep five monotonously promiscuous suburban women fresh and entertaining."

Easy. Get them to repent.