VLVL RICO, morality police, etc.

[pynchonoid]

Pynchon would seem to make his thoughts about the
government regulating personal morality & behavior
clear in _Vineland_ and elsewhere.  For a different
view on violent pornography, see Roger Shattuck's
essay "The Divine Marquis" (not de Sod) in his
collection, _Forbidden Knowledge_.


September 5, 2003
The War on Pleasure
Exxxtreme Ashcroft

By Dr. SUSAN BLOCK

As US President G.W. Bush's Christian Petroleum
Crusade slaughters an average of one to two American
troops per day and over 3,000 Iraqi civilians since
the war began, back in the Homeland, Dubya's anointed
Attorney General is leading another crusade to
slaughter our civil liberties. Now America's erotic
freedoms are squarely in the crosshairs.

Welcome to Ayatollah Asscraft's Anti-Sexual Freedom
Crusade, coming soon to a pornographer near you. It's
already come to a pornographer near me in the form of
10 federal obscenity indictments filed by the US
Justice Department against the North Hollywood porn
video company, Extreme Associates Inc., and it's
owners, Robert Zicari, alias Rob Black, the producer
of the alleged obscenities, and his wife, Janet
Romano, alias Lizzie Borden, director of said
obscenities. Penalties upon conviction include up to
50 years imprisonment and a $2.5 million fine for
each, with a further $5 million fine levied against
the company. 

[...] I must admit I've never actually seen an Extreme
Associates film. Although I'm somewhat intrigued by
the fact they incorporate occasional political and
religious themes, I don't think I'd like to see them
because, quite frankly, Rob and Lizzie's graphically
violent erotica does not sound like my cup of love
juice. Unlike Dubya, I don't like to watch blood and
guts, whether they're fake or real, accompanied by sex
or not. I don't like watching horror movies, so I
don't watch them. I also didn't look at the snuff
photos of Saddam's murdered sons that the Bushies
paraded around the world. I didn't watch Arnold
Schwarzenegger pushing a woman's head into a toilet in
"Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines." And (as of
this writing) I don't watch Extreme Associates movies.

The point is nobody makes me watch them. Nobody makes
anybody watch them. As the late great First Amendment
attorney Stanley Fleishman (or maybe it was his
partner Barry Fisher, or maybe it was his client Max
Lobkowicz) once said: The only people being forced to
watch these movies are the judge and the jury in this
case. [...]


read it all here:
<http://www.counterpunch.org/block09052003.html>



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