Who's to Say What's Obscene?

by Paul Krassner

  “Yeah,” Shearer observed, “it brings you down seeing somebody eating better than you at a Burger King.”

  In the tradition of Lenny Bruce, he plays all the characters in audio-theatrical sketches that serve as a vehicle for his incisive humor. He has frequently presented phone conversations between George Bush and his father, taking the part of both and capturing the nuances of each. In his own voice, alluding to Bush’s crusade to stamp out global terrorism, Shearer has observed, “It’s like the war on drugs. It’s a totally metaphorical war in which some people get killed. I expect the Partnership for a Terrorist Free America to start soon.”

  But how will Shearer handle Barack Obama?

  “I think there’s going to be something sadly funny about the collision/intersection between the sky-high hopes and expectations of his supporters with the sky-high mountain of crap left on his desk by his predecessors,” he says. “I’m still learning his speech pattern, but there’s something about the way he emphasizes certain words, especially the ones at the ends of sentences, that gives the aura of decisiveness whether there’s anything decisive being said or not.”

  I asked Shearer, a dedicated news junkie (including satellite feeds), about his philosophy of comedy.

  “Comedy is good,” he said, “reality is better.”

  And his all-time favorite example?

  “Well, I would say my object of idolatry in that regard would be the tape of Richard Nixon just before he makes his resignation speech. You can’t beat that. [In Nixon’s voice] ‘Ollie there, he’s always trying to take another picture of me, but he’s always trying to get one of me picking my nose. You wouldn’t do that, would you, Ollie? That’s enough now.’ Just the lunacy of him kidding around with this crew that you can actually see on the tape—they don’t know what to make of this, and a guy who entered a field where one of the primary qualifications is the ability to make charming small talk, and then at this climactic penultimate moment in Nixon’s fall, what does he choose to do but walk in and make that insane small talk? That to me is one of the great choices ever.”

  THE POWER OF LAUGHTER

  I spent a weekend in September 2007 at the eleventh annual Earthdance celebration, a global festival for peace held in northern California, uniting with more than 250 locations in fifty countries, providing a wide variety of live music, workshops, speakers, inspiration and a worldwide sense of community.

  On Saturday, I was among a large group of men and women participating in the International Elders Forum. Each one had six minutes to share their wisdom with an overflowing crowd in the huge Electronica Dome. A Native American, David Rain of the Blackfoot tribe, would play the flute after five minutes of talk as a signal that there was one minute left.

  When my turn came, I began, “Whatever wisdom I have to share is in the form of comic relief, but just remember, if you don’t laugh you’re only helping the terrorists.” After seven minutes, I still didn’t hear any notes from the flute, so I decided to pass the microphone on to the next person.

  On Sunday afternoon, David told me that he had been laughing so hard he simply couldn’t play his flute. He tried again and again, yet the best he could do was spit into it. Of course, this was gratifying feedback to a stand-up satirist, but over lunch our conversation became deadly serious.

  In November 2006, he had wanted to sell a piece of equipment, and a man who saw the ad invited him to his converted garage apartment. There, David was told to help himself to a soda from the refrigerator, which he did. When he turned around, four men—biker/skinhead/Aryan-Nation types—burst through the door and attacked him with 2.5-inch metal pipes, first striking him on the forehead, then beating and kicking him while calling him a “dog” and a “prairie nigger.”

  He tried unsuccessfully to defend himself and finally dove out the first-floor window, bouncing off a table and a car before landing on the ground. He pounded on somebody’s door—yelling “9-1-1!”—then collapsed in a puddle of blood. He regained consciousness in a hospital where he got forty stitches for a cracked cranium and a head brace for his broken neck. His shoulder and hand were also injured. He was rescued by a friend and stayed at her home to heal. He could no longer do physical work, but she helped him open a small business.

  Two weeks after the incident, on Thanksgiving Eve, police arrested David for missing a court date on a traffic violation. He had missed the date because he was unconscious in the hospital at the time. In the Sonoma County jail, guards kicked him, removed his head brace, refused him all medical attention, placed him in solitary confinement, forced him to sleep on a concrete bed without a mattress and did not allow him to shower for six days. They eventually brought him to court, chained to a wheelchair.

  After he was released on probation, the district attorney demanded that David testify against the skinheads. Knowing the nature of the Aryan gang, he immediately expressed concerns about his safety, regardless of what his testimony might be. A couple of months later, the DA agreed to place him in a witness protection program. It turned out to be at the Pink Flamingo, a hotel in Santa Rosa, the same city in which he was attacked.

  On the third day, he walked out of the hotel and saw a crowd of bikers and skinheads hanging around. Not knowing they were there for a tattoo convention, he panicked, returned to his nonsmoking room and smoked a cigarette. The alarm went off. For that offense, he was evicted from the hotel and taken out of the witness protection program. The DA was angry. She made it very clear to him that “We have ways of making you testify.”

  The day before the trial, David was arrested again, on the way to the Indian Health Center, for driving with a suspended license. Again, he was denied medical attention, his head brace was removed, and he was thrown into solitary confinement. A week later, he was again brought into court chained to a wheelchair—unbathed, “looking like a wild Indian,” he says—and threatened with three years in jail. The DA was in the courtroom at his sentencing, pow-wowing directly with the judge.

  Immediately before the sentencing, David’s friend stood up and asked to speak out on his behalf, since his court-appointed lawyer had done so little to defend him. With the bailiff bearing down on her and contempt of court looming, the judge surprisingly agreed to let her talk. She stated how jailing David was “cruel and unusual punishment, because he would have to be placed in solitary confinement throughout his incarceration in order to avoid any contact with Aryan gang members, due to his status as a hate-crime victim.

  “He was in violation of driving with a suspended license only because he couldn’t afford to pay the fines; his injuries prevented him from being able to work in his chosen field to earn the money to pay those fines. Was driving with a suspended license actually worth three years of anyone’s life, or was there another agenda lurking in the courtroom that needed such leverage to pressure David into testifying against the assailants? Was it justice to, in effect, condemn him for the heinous crime of poverty?”

  The judge weighed the case and the next day released David on probation, warning him not to drive. Almost a year later, the DA was still hounding him by phone and subpoena, putting his life in danger by coercing him to testify. And where was Victims Assistance during all this horror? A Victim Witness Advocate told David, “I can’t help you. You’re on probation. Our hands are tied.”

  Since David was a victim, he didn’t have the right to a public defender. He was due to appear in court the week after Thanksgiving, 2007. He planned to say that he would not testify because, “If concern for my safety is not addressed, I could die.” He expected to be charged with contempt and, once again, to be put in solitary confinement. In the hope of extricating him from this profane injustice of criminalizing a victim, I was able to find a couple of attorneys who could give him helpful advice.

  Ultimately, he didn’t have to testify.

  I’m grateful to be in a position to communicate the details of this nightmare, none of which I would’ve known had David been able to play his flute after fiv
e minutes of laughter.

  2. THE WAR ON SOME PEOPLE WHO USE SOME DRUGS

  THE BALLAD OF TOMMY CHONG

  Jonathan Shapiro, a writer and executive producer of the Fox TV series, Justice, reviewed Tommy Chong’s book, The I Chong: Meditations From the Joint, for the Los Angeles Times. Shapiro wrote:

  “Being incarcerated for resisting imperial power or because of one’s sexual preference or getting sent to the gulag for dissenting opinions are searing human tragedies that inspired brave acts of artistic resistance. Selling bongs over state lines just doesn’t carry the same moral weight.”

  Hey, Jonny boy, whoa! You’d better buy a new state-of-the-art apocryphal scale if you’re going to measure for comparison the moral weight of prison sentences.

  On February 24, 2003, Tommy Chong was among fifty-five people who were arrested in raids across the country as a culmination of the DEA’s Operation Pipe Dreams, named after one of Cheech and Chong’s stoner movies. Agents forced their way through the door of his home at six o’clock that morning, with automatic weapons drawn. Chong was the only one who served time—nine months at a federal prison—and paid a $20,000 fine, not to mention the $103,000 that was seized when he got busted.

  The reason he became an exception and received such punishment was precisely because of his “dissenting opinions” and “artistic resistance.” It simply would not have happened otherwise.

  They wanted to get him really bad. Traditionally, local law enforcement has discretion to decide what priority should be given to prosecuting cases involving drug paraphernalia. Because both Pennsylvania and Ohio make that a top priority, the DEA chose to open a decoy head shop in Pennsylvania. Four times in one year, these stingmeisters tried to make an online purchase of a pipe autographed by Chong, but his Nice Dreams Enterprises would not fill any orders coming from either of those two states.

  However, a request from a different return address easily passed through the apparently fake firewall of a new employee. In an appearance at the Peppertree Bookstore in Palm Springs, California, Chong said that he suspected the employee was sent to infiltrate his company. I wanted to know why Chong suspected that. He responded that it was a very strong suspicion, based on the fact that the employee left the company a couple of days before the bust, giving no reason.

  In a deal with the authorities, Chong agreed to plead guilty in exchange for his wife and son not being indicted. Ironically, he was sentenced on September 11, 2003, the second anniversary of real terrorist attacks, rather than a business run by an actor in such Cheech and Chong movies as Up in Smoke and, more recently, a recurring role on a popular sitcom, That ’70s Show, where he continued to play the part of a dedicated pot smoker.

  The prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan—ignoring all relevance of the First Amendment in favor of her professional career—had the audacity to introduce Chong’s fictional character in the courtroom as evidence of his “frivolous” attitude toward the enforcement of drug laws. Chong said this was “like jailing all of the Police Academy people for making fun of cops.” Furthermore, he had joked with reporters about putting this criminal case in his next movie with Cheech. The prosecution insisted that such a comment indicated that Chong was making light of the case and might exploit it for money.

  Behind bars, Chong said, “I’m a doper comedian, and I’m in here because I made a stupid joke about the bongs being the only weapons of mass destruction that the Bush administration had found.” Half Scottish-Irish, half Chinese and raised in Canada, he points out that “when I became an American citizen, I took a vow to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Doing anything less than exercising my right of free speech in defense of pot and against its prohibition would be a violation of my vow.”

  So listen, Jonathan, for a future episode of Justice, how about considering a story line revealing the basic injustice of arresting 830,000 individuals every year for the “crime” of possessing marijuana? It may not get you high, but hopefully your consciousness will be raised in the process.

  As for prosecutor Buchanan, her career had been inadvertently boosted by the terrorist attacks in 2001 when a United Airlines plane crashed inside her jurisdiction, (sixty miles southeast of Pittsburgh), catapulted her to prominence in the law-enforcement community and enabled her to instigate the yearlong undercover sting. Three days after 9/11, she became the first woman and the youngest person in Pennsylvania history ever to be named a U.S. attorney, and for her first major operation, she chose Chong as her priority target because his career had “glamorized” the use of marijuana.

  In March 2009, she prosecuted the owners of a Northridge, California, company that sold videos depicting deviant sexual conduct, charging the couple with conspiracy to distribute obscene material, after a six-year battle over whether the First Amendment protects such material, which included scenes of simulated rape. They finally pleaded guilty. Once again, Buchanan had brought a case in western Pennsylvania, this time because the area’s “community standards”—which, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, govern what’s obscene—are more conservative than California’s.

  Meanwhile, the cruel absurdity of anti-paraphernalia laws continues to be underscored by such creative substitutes as apples, soda cans, toilet-paper cardboard tubes with aluminum foil, tweezers used as roach clips, and don’t forget those plain old regular tobacco pipes.

  In Fulton, Kentucky, police investigating a marijuana-smoking complaint found pot burning on a backyard grill with a large fan on the other side of the house, sucking the smoke throughout the home—in effect, said the police chief, “turning the house into a large marijuana bong.” Seize it immediately!

  BARACK OBAMA AND THE POT LAWS

  During a debate in the Democratic presidential primary campaign, MSNBC moderator Tim Russert asked the candidates who opposed decriminalization of marijuana to raise their hands. Barack Obama hesitantly raised his hand halfway before quickly lowering it again.

  However, in January 2004, when Obama was running for the Senate, he told Illinois college students that he supported eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana use or possession.

  “I think the war on drugs has been a failure, and I think we need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws,” he said during a debate at Northwestern University. “But I’m not somebody who believes in legalization of marijuana.” Was Obama now having a time-travel debate with himself?

  When the Washington Times confronted Obama with that statement on a video of the 2004 debate, his campaign offered two explanations in less than twenty-four hours. First, a spokesperson said that Obama had “always” supported decriminalizing marijuana, that he misunderstood the question when he raised his hand, and reiterated Obama’s opposition to full legalization, adding that an Obama administration would “review drug sentences to see where we can be smarter on crime and reduce the blind and counterproductive sentencing to nonviolent offenders.”

  But after the Times posted the video on its Web site, the Obama campaign made a quick U-turn and declared that he does not support eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana possession and use—thereby rejecting both legalization and decriminalization. What exactly is the difference? The definitions, according to Pot Culture: The A-Z Guide to Stoner Language & Life, by Shirley Halperin and Steve Bloom:

  “Decriminalization: When laws governing marijuana are changed to reduce the penalties for possession of small quantities (usually below an ounce) to non-criminal status. The first state to decriminalize was Oregon in 1973, followed by California, New York, Ohio, Nebraska, Minnesota, Colorado, Mississippi, Alaska, North Carolina and Maine.

  “Legalization: The complete repeal of marijuana prohibition and removal of all criminal penalties for its use, sale, transport and cultivation. The Netherlands is the only country in the world with such a policy.”

  Ron Fisher at NORML told me, “Decriminalization is the elimination of criminal penalties for the possession of marijuana, usually by replacing them
with a fine (similar to a speeding ticket). Full legalization is a more complex issue that involves U.S. treaties as well as the law. Legalization would be characterized by taxation and regulation of marijuana. This is NORML’s ultimate goal, but we work for decrim in the meantime for the sake of the 830,000 Americans arrested on cannabis charges each year.”

  Indeed, a CNN/Time-Warner poll shows that 76 percent of Americans agree with Obama’s original position, not to mention the 48 million who smoked pot in 2007.

  The Progressive Review quotes an old classmate of Obama explaining the meaning of chooming: “That’s what we called smoking marijuana. To ‘choom’ meant to get high, to smoke pot. I never heard the word used anywhere else, but Punahou kids had access to the very best pot available.” He and Obama were in the group of students who smoked marijuana, and members of the choom group did so both on and off campus. The irony is that, had Obama been arrested then, he might never have been able to run successfully for the presidency.

  Review publisher Sam Smith tells a story that underscores the hypocrisy of the political pandering that continues to allow unjust laws to turn tokers into criminals: “Early in the Clinton administration your editor had dinner with, among others, a high White House official—a lawyer. The conversation turned to marijuana. The lawyer said that numerous staffers had asked how they should respond to FBI queries on the matter. The official’s reply was that they should remember that they would only be in the White House for a short while but the FBI files would be there forever. And what if friends or relatives actually saw them using pot? The White House lawyer’s response: ‘If you can’t look an FBI agent straight in the eye and tell him they were wrong, you don’t belong here.’”