HIGH? HILLARY HILARITY!
or, HIGH HILLARY? HILARITY?
or, HIGH HILLARY HILARITY, et al.
An Open Letter to The Honorable Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D,NY):
Hi, Hillary! Hilarity!
I just saw your latest headlines, and I have to wonder — as one of those who has been disgusted by the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy’s pre-emptive strikes at you. You know, I almost cancelled my subscription to VANITY FAIR when I read the slimy book excerpt they ran in the Nicole Kidman “Bewitched” cover issue a couple months back.
I guess what I don’t understand is how feminists got the idea that there was anything politically “sexy” about censoring “sexy” stuff.
Censors have been the bane of suffragists and feminists for a long time in this country, which is why I was wondering.
I mean, Margaret Sanger only managed to defeat uber-censor Anthony Comstock by outliving him. He literally chased her into exile in France because she gave out (gasp!) birth control information.
You remember Margaret? She personally introduced the diaphragm and the IUD into American society, smuggling them back from France hidden in wine bottles. She’s the one who financed the development of the pill and was one of the founders of Planned Parenthood.
I know that the last anti-contraception measures were only struck down in 1965 by those awful liberal activist judges of the Warren Court:
from: “Natural Law, the Constitution, and Judicial Review”
by Robert P. George
(from http://federalistpatriot.us/histdocs/naturallaw.htm)
“In 1965, the Supreme Court, by a vote of seven to two, invalidated a Connecticut anti-contraception law on the ground that it violated a fundamental right of marital privacy, though nowhere mentioned or plainly implied in the constitutional text, found in “penumbras formed by emanations” from various “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights.” Writing in dissent, Justice Hugo Black, accused the majority of indulging in ‘the natural law due process philosophy’ of judging.”
Hilarity, Hillary?
Because no cause has served the Right Wing better than censorship. For a good chunk of the Nineteenth Century and the Twentieth, Comstock and his ‘goodness’ goons stomped their godliness over the cultural landscape. You know, Comstock hounded Ida Craddock to death over a pamphlet whose “obscenity” was that it suggested foreplay as a necessary prelude to sexual relations. It was entitled something like “The Marital Bed” and was advice to newlyweds to, hopefully, keep their sexual lives from turning into a train wreck.
You know, it was a more innocent age, when most men and women went into marriage without so much as a clear idea as to what the genitalia of the other looked like. The boys had as much idea what to do as a caveman in a neurosurgery theater, and the girls likewise. (Oh, and an awful lot of them WERE boys and girls. Ages of consent of 14 or even younger were common, then.)
But it wasn’t censorship that brought needed information on contraception and the prevention of venereal diseases into common knowledge. It wasn’t censorship that stripped the shame away from talking about those things, and women (and the Women’s Movement) have benefited immeasurably thereby. Heck, ALL of us have benefited from the freedom from dark fear that sexuality represented.
An older friend of mine once told me about a friend of his, a contemporary, who committed suicide over masturbation (his own). The suicide, evidently, couldn’t stop and couldn’t shake the seeming-knowledge that he was corrupting himself with a horrific, soul-destroying sin.
Censorship aided and abetted his self-murder.
Now, we live in a world where any kid with a mild interest can find hard-core pornography over the internet. To the best of my knowledge, the generation that has come of age since 1995 (the first web surfers) have NOT gone collectively insane, have no higher incidence of sex crimes, nor have they exhibited any weirder tendencies in any direction than any other crop of teenagers, unless you want to lay off body piercing and tattooing on the pernicious influence of the internet. (Or, perhaps, in the interests of remaining au courant, to bloggers).
So, what is to be gained by censorship?
I thought that Democrats were the party of First Amendment liberties, but then again, Tipper Gore DID lead the “Washington Wives” on their crusade against 2LiveCrew and dirty lyrics. That sure helped.
Now, you’ve decided to go after “GRAND THEFT AUTO: SAN ANDREAS” along with Tipper’s husband’s running-mate, good ol’ Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. I guess what bothers me most about it is that you didn’t bother saying anything about the game when it was about stealing cars, running down pedestrians, buying drugs or slaughtering opponents and cops with an excess of gore and a surfeit of weaponry.
That was OK.
But it was revealed that a little “mod” called “Hot Coffee” could unlock a secret cache in the program, allowing the player to have “virtual sex” with various female characters within the game universe.
Frankly, Hillary, I’ve SEEN the screen shot of the “sex” part, and it’s really, REALLY, lame, Hillary. It’s hilarious, Hillary. Evidently one presses the “up” and “down” buttons on one’s player console (whatever it happens to be) as substitutions for “in” and “out.” There is a horizontal bar “satisfaction index” and when the little white piston travels the length, left to right, the virtual female tells your virtual avatar, “You da man!”
Or some variant thereof.
Not exactly internet porn, Hillary. Hilariously, Hillary, it probably only works when you’re high, Hillary.
But I see you’re in high dudgeon over it, and getting those all-important headlines (while Rove spins his satanic slipperies supply, seeding seedy scribes, surreptitiously).
But censorship, Hillary? Hasn’t that been consistently counterproductive? Caution! Corruption cedes the censor civic civility far less often than it creates cultural corruption and criminality.
As wars on drugs only raise the prices and profits for the wholesaler, censorship tends to create sales for the censored, and jacks prices up.
GRAND THEFT AUTO was already the best-selling game of the year. Now, thanks to you, it will be purchased by people who’d never heard of it before you started your crusade.
Anthony Comstock sought to ban prints of “September Morn” — a tasteful nude he’d seen in a New York gallery window — and it became the best-selling art print in America, selling an ASTONISHING number of prints.
So, if you’re mad about what they manufacture, why are you helping them to manufacture a lot more of it?
But the thing that I think bugs me the most is this: Why do you implicitly subscribe to the view that thought IS deed?
I mean, we’ve made a clear distinction between what you think and what you DO for thousands of years. It is one of the fundamental underpinnings of all Western thought.
Thinking about strangling your boss is perfectly OK. Doing it is quite a different matter. Aren’t we really making a mistake by acting as if both actions are equivalent?
But the Censor has held, for centuries — often backed up with “interrogation” techniques sort of like those most recently engaged in by our troops in Guantanimo and Abu Gharib prison — that exposure to bad thoughts or ideas automatically creates bad behavior. This seems to implicitly embrace a view diametrically opposed to our cherished notion of “free will” — or, the ability to choose our actions, and our responsibility for those choices.
We, as a civilization, have tried, rarely successfully, to maintain that what a person thinks is their own business, but what they DO, acting on those thoughts is something that we hold them accountable and responsible for.
For instance, I don’t have a problem with Anthony Comstock having narrow, priggish, and yes, even twisted ideas about the human body and human behavior.
But I adamantly object to any legal basis for his actions. You might remember that, during the Civil War, young Comstock was utterly incensed by the gambling, drinking, cursing, and casual attitude towards matters sexual and prurient of his fellow soldiers.
And you might recall how he arose from the New York “League of Decency” to become the postal inspector under the so-called “Comstock Act” — having the power to open anyone’s mail, to see if it was indecent.
Frankly, his actions repel me to this day. He destroyed lives, imprisoned Sanger, and those like her, and terrorized the nation with his disgusting concept of “decency” for decades. His grave is one well urinating on, by way of political commentary.
And, even more than the “war on sex” this mentality is still responsible for making Mark Twain’s HUCKLEBERRY FINN a steady entry on the Most Censored Books list for a century and more.
HUCKLEBERRY FINN? Hilarious, Hillary? Or horrible and hateful, Hillary: which is it? This is what I read (of the hundreds of articles) about Senators Lieberman and Clinton:
From the REGISTER (UK) Published Thursday 14th July 2005 09:51 GMT: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/14/hillary_clinton_gta
Hillary Clinton demands GTA smut enquiry
By Lester Haines
Senator Hillary Clinton has jumped nimbly on the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas rumpy-pumpy outrage bandwagon by demanding an investigation into the game’s torrid sex scenes as unlocked by Dutch modder Patrick Wildenborg.
To recap, Wildenborg’s “Hot Coffee” mod apparently disables the game’s “censor flag”, thereby allowing access to hidden XXX material. As Wildenborg exlained: “If the censor flag is set, all the sexually explicit scenes are blocked from the normal flow of events. That makes a difference in a game scene when the hero visits his girlfriend’s house for a cup of coffee. In the censored version, the game shows the exterior of the house while suggestive sound effects are heard. If, however, the censor flag is cleared, all the explicit scenes are tied into the normal gameplay.”
[…]
And that would have been an end to the matter were it not for the outraged intervention of Mrs Clinton, who has written to the Federal Trade Commission demanding to know “the source of this content” and whether the industry “erred in giving the game a rating of M, or mature, for players 17 years and older”.
According to the New York Times, Clinton claims that “50 per cent of boys between 7 and 14 were able to buy M-rated video games”, or at least that’s what the National Institute on Media and the Family says. The NYT notes Clinton’s intervention comes at a time “when many Democrats were trying to figure out ways their party can match Republicans on the issue of family values”.
Well, here’s a suggestion for the Democrats as to how they can help defend family values: don’t accept oral sexual favours from White House interns while you’re supposed to be running the country – and keep your cigars firmly to yourself….
It gets pretty British-raunchy after that. But you get the idea, Hillary. The Brits think your presenting yourself as a paragon of virtue is hilarious, Hillary, and not in a happy way for you. The Right Wing will probably have a field day with this as well — even though they would undoubtedly dearly love to censor every ‘objectionable’ thought they can lay their thumbscrews on. I just get this feeling that their idea of ‘objectionable’ forms a Venn Diagram that only intersects at this singular point with your ideas.
It might just be political opportunism, of course, but, Hillary, are you sure that this is the vein you want to mine for electoral ore? Most Democrats that I know are less inclined to censor lame video game sex than they are frightened of having their thoughts and opinions censored themselves: like those non-violent protesters who are looking at serious prison time for having exercised their supposed First Amendment right to protest their “president” on one of his private “loyalty oath” soirees.
Is this computer game really the danger? It is a greater danger than censoring thought because we decry the deed? Once that slippery slope is on the hiking trail, isn’t it a short step to “wartime censorship” and the increasing chill that’s come over “free” speech?
I mean, you have to go to a lot of trouble even to FIND the lame “sex games” on GRAND THEFT AUTO. First, you’ve got to plunk down your cash for the game. Then, you’ve got to go searching for a download of the “Hot Coffee” modification. Then you’ve got to apply the mod, and for what?
Something that pales in comparison to what any clever eight-year-old can find on the most “Net Nannied” computer in the world in about three minutes?
I guess you’ll be going after that one next.
But censorship in virtually any form leads to unforeseen consequences, including the consequence that I don’t vote for, or contribute to the campaigns of prudes, bluenoses or censors.
I’m sure you can offset this loss with Pat Robertson’s vote.
Hell, Hillary.
Sincerely, your pal,
Hart
Courage.
.
