Some 12 million Americans sat down on Sunday night to watch the final episode of a television institution, The Sopranos on HBO. Lexington, the commentator on U.S. affairs for the Economist magazine, starts out his column this week with a eulogy to The Sopranos that turns into a wider reflection on the moral blurring between good and evil that makes so many conservatives, in America and abroad (read: Islam), queasy. Tony Soprano, as the lead role and moral centre (in story terms only), is a murderous mob boss and adulterer but also a charmer and a family man. The show says "a lot of positive things" about America in that it can raise pop culture to the status of art, writes Lexington, but it so enrages moral conservatives and appears decadent in its desire to turn moral "certitudes" on their head. In terms of influence, American "soft power" by way of pop culture is every bit as influential as its "hard power" (in these war-torn times, perhaps even more so):

America has more to gain by spreading its ideas and values than through exercising its military muscles [say commentators]. They often seek to make a clear distinction between pro- and anti-Americanism. But a little time with Tony, Big Pussy and Paulie Walnuts shows that things are a little bit more complicated. Many people mistrust America not so much because they have not been wooed by its soft power but because they believe that they and their children are over-entangled in it. ...people are up in arms not simply because they are anti-American but because they are bipolar about America—simultaneously attracted and repulsed by what they see going on in the Bada Bing.

The Bada Bing, for you non-viewers, being the strip club that also serves as Tony's head office.

By drawing the point so sharply, Lexington finds the common ground upon which the White House and al-Queada accidentally but steadfastly agree: modern society is godless, morally adrift, corrupt and in desperate need of reform. Their only quarrel is who, exactly, has the moral superiority to start going about the job of reforming? And what if they, the immoral masses, don't want to be forcefully reformed? (Honestly, who does?) For the world's social conservatives versus the world's social liberals, both of whom gladly comment on modern-day America, does an obsession with sex and violence (a) signify the final throes of a failed system or is it (b) the price to pay for the hard-fought freedom to do just whatever you feel like doing?