Who's to Say What's Obscene?

by Paul Krassner

  • “All hardback books forbidden, because the covers could be fashioned into weapons. Educational textbooks—a new rule precludes prisoners on Death Row [including this particular prisoner] or in lockdown from taking correspondence courses—and I’ve had a couple of books returned to sender on the claim they appeared to be for a course. MAPS [Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies]—their publication was sent back several times because maps are not allowed in here. High Times was repeatedly denied because it posed a danger to the safe, secure and orderly operation of the institution. ‘Smut mags’ like Hustler are reviewed monthly.”

  • “There’s a whole new genre of men’s magazines—Maxim, Stuff, For Him—which show it all except for nipples and beaver. Now the feds want to ban Maxim due to ‘security’ reasons. The ‘rejected mail’ slip they send you when some verboten material arrives has boxes to check (to specify offending matter), one of which says ‘pubic hair.’ ”

  • “Peace activist William Combs spent eight days in solitary confinement for receiving and sharing with other inmates what federal authorities consider disruptive, if not subversive, political literature. The offending ‘propaganda’ included commentary by such extremists as Bill Moyers and Ellen Goodman, and included an article published in Reader’s Digest. The common thread was that they all questioned the wisdom of government policy.”

  The name of the game is control in the guise of security—a microcosm of the nation outside prison walls—the practice of power without compassion.

  After Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs was rejected for the second time, I appealed to the Regional Director of the Bureau of Prisons (as instructed by the warden) for an independent review. I also wrote to the ACLU. I heard back from neither.

  Todd McCormick was released from prison in December 2003. Among so many other things to catch up on, he would finally be able to read what he had written. However, he was discharged to a halfway house, where all his books and magazines were confiscated as “paraphernalia.”

  THE THOUGHT POLICE AT WORK

  Paul Revere is remembered for riding his horse through the streets of pre-revolutionary America and shouting, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” These days, a contemporary version of Paul Revere would be riding his Harley-Davidson through the streets of pre-revolutionary America and shouting at the top of his lungs, “The thought police are coming! The thought police are coming!”

  A shocking violation of the First Amendment was foisted upon Ed Forchion, also known as the New Jersey Weedman. He had been sentenced to ten years in prison after pleading guilty to possessing twenty-five pounds of marijuana. He served more than sixteen months behind bars before being paroled on an early release program, and then he was arrested again for violating his parole.

  But what had he done wrong? He committed the heinous “crime” of advocating the reform of marijuana laws. It’s that simple, and it’s that terrifying. Forchion had the audacity to exercise his right to free speech by filming several public service announcements that expressed his point of view. The injustice is intensified by the fact that those commercials were never aired.

  Forchion is a Rastafarian who hasn’t exactly tried to keep a low profile. He’s run for Congress three times and smoked pot on the floor of the state Assembly as an act of civil disobedience. But now he had become a political prisoner—put behind bars for his ideas. U.S. District Judge Joseph Irenas scheduled a hearing where state officials had to show cause for imprisoning him. The judge pointed out that Forchion probably would not have been returned to prison if he had not spoken publicly about the drug laws.

  Forchion had already served six months. Now, Irenas ordered his release, stating that “speaking to the press, protesting and handing out pamphlets outside of the courthouse, running a Web site, or producing and appearing in television commercials [are] clearly protected by the First Amendment, particularly since [this behavior] primarily involved [Forchion’s] belief that marijuana should be legalized.”

  But wait. Because the judge ruled that Forchion should be returned to the early release program, he also ordered that Forchion cannot promote the illegal use of marijuana once he is released. And there’s more. Although his commercials dealt with First Amendment issues and the war on drugs, they did not explicitly advocate the use of marijuana.

  Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer once chastised Bill Maher for speaking out against the American invasion and occupation of Iraq with these words: “He should watch what he says.” Now that warning has developed tentacles. One such extension would be: “You better watch what you wear.”

  Item: Shana Weiss wanted to share a nostalgic moment with her family and friends. “I responded to those ads we see each night,” she explains, “sandwiched between iPod promos and Tiffany settings touting the virtues of PhotoStamps.” She ordered two sets of stamps—“one set of my 5-year-old in his Happy Feet ski hat, and one set of my 8-year-old in his T-shirt that reads Make Cupcakes Not War”—but when the package arrived, the latter set was missing. A customer service flunky told her, “Your order has been rejected because it does not meet our content guidelines.”

  Item: Ten-year-old Lydia Smith and her mother were taking a lunch break while shopping for new church clothes at the Battlefield Mall in Springfield, Missouri, when Lydia was approached by a security guard who asked her to remove the bandanna she was wearing. He handed a copy of the Battlefield Mall Code to her mom. Among a list of seventeen possible offenses, Lydia had violated the one that reads: “Failing to be fully clothed or wearing apparel which is likely to provide a disturbance or embroil other groups or the general public in open conflict.” Her threatening bandanna was decorated with flowers, smiley faces and peace signs.

  Les Morris, a spokesperson for Simon Property Group—which invokes similar rules at their 285 properties in thirty-nine states and Puerto Rico—explained that the mall’s primary responsibility is to protect its customers, tenants and employers. Ironically, at least one retail store at the Battlefield Mall, namely J.C. Penney, sells those forbidden bandannas. Morris reasoned, “There are things we sell that it’s okay to own them, but to use them in the mall setting is inappropriate.”

  Item: One afternoon, Mike Ferner, who served as a Navy corpsman during the Vietnam War, was sitting and drinking a cup of iced coffee at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Chicago when a V.A. cop walked up to him and said, “Okay, you’ve had your fifteen minutes, it’s time to go. You can’t be in here protesting,” said Officer Adkins, pointing to Ferner’s Veterans for Peace T-shirt.

  “Well, I’m not protesting, I’m having a cup of coffee.”

  “No, not with that shirt. You’re protesting and you have to go.”

  “Not before I finish my coffee.” The cop insisted that he leave. “Hey, listen,” Ferner said, “I’m a veteran. This is a V.A. facility. I’m sitting here not talking to anybody, having a cup of coffee. I’m not protesting, and you can’t kick me out.”

  “You’ll either go or we’ll arrest you.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to arrest me.”

  Ferner was handcuffed and led away to the facility’s security office, read his rights, searched and written up. He was charged with disorderly conduct. Charges of criminal trespass and weapons possession were dismissed, but he was informed that his weapon—a Swiss Army knife with a bottle opener, a tweezers and a reusable toothpick—would have to be destroyed. I asked if he would be wearing “that shirt,” the one that says Veterans for Peace with their logo—a military helmet and a dove—to court.

  “You betcha,” he replied.

  Then there was Richard Humphreys, who happened to get into a harmless barroom discussion with a truck driver. A bartender who overheard their conversation realized that George Bush was scheduled to visit Sioux Falls the next day, and he told police that Humphreys—who was actually making a joke with a Biblical reference—had talked about a “burning Bush” and the possibility of someone pou
ring a flammable liquid on Bush and lighting it. Humphreys was arrested for threatening the president.

  “I said God might speak to the world through a burning Bush,” he testified during his trial. “I had said that before and I thought it was funny.”

  Nevertheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to more than three years in prison. He decided to appeal, on the basis that his comment was a prophecy, protected under his right to freedom of speech. America continues to embrace suppresion in the guise of security. And in that process, rampant paranoia has now become our Gross National Product.

  In May 2007, the Pentagon announced that it was cutting off service members’ access to YouTube, MySpace and eleven other Web sites, some of which are used by soldiers on the front lines of Iraq and Afghanistan to post videos for friends and family back home. A few days earlier, the military had launched its own channel on YouTube, offering a “boots on the ground” perspective of combat scenes. That same month, an Iraqi government policy banned news photographers and camera operators from filming bombing scenes, so that video shot by citizens and uploaded to YouTube could become the only imagery that the public sees of such devastation.

  Finally, we come to the case of Brian Dalton. When he was 22 and living in Columbus, Ohio, he was on probation after having served time in prison. He had been convicted a few years previously for possessing pornographic photos of children. After being released, he kept a private journal in which he wrote down his fantasies about the sexual abuse and torture of fictional children. He made up their names.

  He had simply been exorcising his own demons. He never showed his journal to anyone else. But then one day it was found during a search of his home by his probation officer. There were fourteen pages of imaginary encounters with three children, age 10 and 11, who were kept caged in a basement.

  Dalton was arrested and charged under an Ohio law that prohibits the creation of obscene material involving minors. The prosecutor insisted that the statute covered not only images of real children, but also printed or written words involving fictional children, including words that had been intended for the eyes only of the writer himself.

  However, members of the grand jury found those stories so offensive that they asked the detective, who was reading them out loud, to stop almost as soon as he began. For whatever reason, fear or foolishness, Dalton pleaded guilty instead of challenging his conviction, and he was sentenced to seven years in prison plus eighteen months for violation of his probation. Thus he became the first person ever convicted in the United States for child pornography that involved writings rather than photographs, films or other images of real children. Nor had he ever disseminated those writings. The fact that he would actually go to prison for what he had fantasized in his own personal diary is way more shocking than any words that he wrote in it.

  Although Dalton later asked to withdraw his guilty plea in order to fight the constitutionality of the law, that request was turned down by a judge. The ACLU appealed his decision, but an appeals court threw out Dalton’s guilty plea. This form of persecution had its own history.

  In 1969, in a case being appealed from Georgia, the Supreme Court ruled that, “Given the present state of knowledge, the state may no more prohibit mere possession of obscene matter on the ground that it may lead to antisocial conduct than it may prohibit possession of chemistry books on the ground that they may lead to the manufacture of homemade spirits.”

  The court asserted that an American has a constitutional right “to read or observe what he pleases—the right to satisfy his intellectual and emotional needs in the privacy of his own home, and the right to be free from state inquiry into the contents of his library. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or films he may watch.”

  However, in a 1990 case arising from Ohio, the Supreme Court in effect reversed itself, holding that the mere possession of child pornography could be prohibited, based on the state’s “compelling interests in protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors and in destroying the market for the exploitative use of children by penalizing those who possess and view the offending materials.”

  Here’s how the court justified that ruling: “Evidence suggests that pedophiles use child pornography to seduce other children into sexual activity.” Obviously, none of this applied to Brian Dalton, but that was irrelevant to the new breed of thought police. They’re becoming more and more out of control.

  Some elementary schools have even gone so far as to ban parents from bringing cameras to record their children performing in the annual Christmas pageant, because authorities are afraid that those videotapes might somehow make their way into the horny hands of pedophiles.

  DONUTS, COFFEE AND WEED

  The irony of the Silly Season in America is that those who contribute to it seem to lack a sense of humor. Here are a couple of cases in point.

  The folks at Dunkin’ Donuts figured they had made a smart move when they hired Rachael Ray—the host of 30 Minute Meals on the Food Network plus her own syndicated daytime talk show—to hold a cup of iced coffee in their TV commercials and online ads. Simple enough idea, right?

  But a conservative Web site, Little Green Footballs, compared the fringed black-and-white scarf Ray was wearing to those typically worn by Muslim extremists.

  Next came right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin, asserting that the scarf did in fact resemble a keffiyeh, which, Malkin wrote, “has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad. Popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos, the apparel has been mainstreamed by both ignorant (and not-so-ignorant) fashion designers, celebrities, and left-wing icons.”

  Suddenly Dunkin’ Donuts was bombarded with so many calls from reporters seeking a comment that they chickened out and decided to pull the ad, explaining that “the possibility of misperception detracted from its original intention to promote our iced coffee.” Laughter had been replaced by fear.

  Now everybody wanted to get in the act. A YouTube video titled Rachael Ray Is a Terrorist made fun of the controversy, complete with a narrator admitting, “Yes, because when I look at Rachael Ray, I think 9/11.”

  And on MSNBC’s nightly news show, Countdown, Keith Olbermann labeled Dunkin’ Donuts as the “Worst Person in the World.” He said, “They were as weak as their decaf,” and called for public punishment of the chain. “How about this? How about the rest of us boycott Dunkin’ Donuts for giving in to fascists like Michelle Malkin? And for giving weight to perhaps the most absurd idea the lunatic fringers have ever belched forth—that there are terrorist scarves. Terrorist scarves! Dunkin’ Donuts—time to stop buying the donuts.”

  Rachael Ray will soon present her new recipe for Al Qaediced Coffee.

  The other example of severe silliness concerns a town in California called Weed—population, 3,000—named after Abner Weed, who was a state senator a century ago. A small brewery there has been placing a slogan, Try Legal Weed, on the bottle caps of its beer. Just a harmless joke, right?

  Not to the tunnel vision of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. They perceive those three little words to be an invitation to smoke marijuana. So they sent a warning to Vaune Dillmann, the 61-year-old owner of the Mt. Shasta Brewing Company. If he didn’t cease and desist, he could be risking fines or sanctions. This threat could conceivably ruin his livelihood.

  “This is ludicrous, bizarre,” said Dillmann, “like meeting Big Brother face to face. Forget freedom of speech and the First Amendment. They are the regulatory gods, a judge and jury all rolled into one. This is a life-or-death issue for my business.”

  A spokesperson for the agency tried to justify its position: “We consider it to be a drug reference, and find it to be false and misleading to the consumer in terms of what may or may not be the properties contained within that product.” />
  The mayor of Weed complained, “It’s just plain goofy to me the federal government is making so much of a fuss over this. I can sort of understand their point, but it all seems a little overboard.”

  Under the headline “Government Is Keeping Us Safe From Bottle Caps,” the Record Searchlight editorialized: “Let’s get real. Anyone old enough to legally buy a six-pack is mature enough not to be dragged into a life of drug-addled debauchery by a message on the bottle cap.”

  Gas stations sell T-shirts that say High on Weed—the town is at an elevation of 3,500 feet—and a placard at the town’s exit states, Temporarily Out of Weed. Dillmann’s bottled brews include Shastafarian Porter and Mountain High. His Try Legal Weed slogan has already appeared on more than 400,000 beer bottle caps. He recently bought another 400,000, and if they can’t be used, he’ll be out $10,000.

  In August 2008, surrendering to public outrage, that federal bureau reversed itself and approved the bottle cap with that controversial slogan.

  “Weed fought the law,” Dillmann reacted, “and Weed won!”

  But just wait till the government finds out about This Bud’s For You.

  WELCOME TO CAMP MOGUL

  My irreverent friend, Khan Manka, Chairman & CEO of Manka Brothers Studios, had broken his ankle and was afraid he wouldn’t be able to attend the twenty-sixth annual gathering of the nation’s most powerful executives and their trophy wives in Sun Valley, Idaho. I really wanted to spy on this 2008 summer camp for billionaires, so I suggested that Manka get a wheelchair; then I could serve as his official wheelchair pusher. He immediately went for the idea.