"kinder, gentler smut"

[Doug Millison]

"Fourteen years ago, of course, Reagan's Attorney General Ed Meese 
launched a celebrated (and reviled) antiporn crusade that included a 
bevy of busts; but since then the LA-based
industry has grown into a multibillion-dollar business reaching into 
nearly every corner of America, culturally, politically and even 
economically. [...] In an effort to head off any potential anti-porno 
jihad by the Bush Administration, some of the major porn outfits have 
reached a common conclusion and issued sweeping new guidelines to 
producers and directors -- rules that are supposed to make even the 
most eager prosecutor think twice before filing charges. Anxious to 
sanitize their product to the point where it passes muster with 
compassionate conservatives everywhere, especially those living on 
Pennsylvania Avenue, major producers in the industry are proposing to 
discard or ban a host of sexual acts and scenarios that have in some 
instances become staples of the genre.  Welcome to the era of kinder, 
gentler smut."
from:
Kinder, Gentler Porn
Mark Cromer, The Nation
February 19, 2001
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=10498

"Just please go careful, Zoyd. 'Cause soon they're gonna be coming 
after everything, not just drugs, but beer, cigarettes, sugar, salt, 
fat, you name it, anything that could remotely please any of your 
senses, because they need to control all that. And they will."
"Fat Police?"
"Perfume Police. Tube Police. Music Police. Good Healthy Shit Police. 
Best to renounce everything now, get a head start."
-Vineland

There are Those who Know -- I know a few folks who think this way -- 
that the porn industry has been one of the ways that an international 
CIA/neo-Nazi/Mafia has laundered illegal drug profits, so that this 
move by Bush Jr, like the phony wars on drugs waged by his father and 
other presidential predecessors, serves to eliminate competitors of 
favored dealers and drive up prices and raise profits, which are used 
to fund the various sub-rosa dirty tricks that the U.S. government 
and its corporate backers carry on off the radar screen of public 
policy and legal activities....

....which leads, or might, to a discussion of Pynchonian paranoia, 
and "hidden agendas" that lurk behind making connections between 
individuals and corporations of influence and the evil they do, how 
to balance the necessity of holding them accountable for their acts 
and not destroying oneself in the process.

P.S.  Today's the anniversary of Malcom X's assassination. R.I.P.
-- 
d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>