Who's to Say What's Obscene?

by Paul Krassner

  Metcalf had just read Orthomolecular Nutrition by Abram Hoffer. He questioned Scherr about White’s diet and learned that, while under stress, White would consume candy bars and soft drinks. Metcalf recommended the book to Scherr, suggesting the author as an expert witness. For, in his book, Hoffer revealed a personal vendetta against doughnuts, and White had once eaten five doughnuts in a row.

  During the trial, psychiatrist Martin Blinder stated that, on the night before the murders, while White was “getting depressed about the fact he would not be reappointed [as supervisor], he just sat there in front of the TV set, bingeing on Twinkies.” In my notebook, I scribbled “the Twinkie defense,” and wrote about it in my next report.

  In court, White just sat there in a state of complete control bordering on catatonia, as he listened to an assembly line of psychiatrists tell the jury how out of control he had been. One even testified that, “If not for the aggravating fact of junk food, the homicides might not have taken place.”

  The Twinkie was invented in 1930 by James Dewar, who described it as “the best darn-tootin’ idea I ever had.” He got the idea of injecting little cakes with sugary cream-like filling and came up with the name while on a business trip, where he saw a billboard for Twinkle Toe Shoes. “I shortened it to make it a little zippier for the kids,” he said.

  In the wake of the Twinkie defense, a representative of the ITT-owned Continental Baking Company asserted that the notion that overdosing on the cream-filled goodies could lead to murderous behavior was “poppycock” and “crap”—apparently two of the artificial ingredients in Twinkies, along with sodium pyrophosphate and yellow dye—while another spokesperson for ITT couldn’t believe “that a rational jury paid serious attention to that issue.”

  Nevertheless, some jurors did. One remarked after the trial that “It sounded like Dan White had hypoglycemia.” Doug Schmidt’s closing argument became almost an apologetic parody of his own defense. He told the jury that White did not have to be “slobbering at the mouth” to be subject to diminished capacity. Nor, he said, was this simply a case of “Eat a Twinkie and go crazy.”

  When Superior Court Judge Walter Calcagno presented the jury with his instructions, he assured them access to the evidence, except that they would not be allowed to have possession of White’s gun and his ammunition at the same time. After all, these deliberations can get pretty heated. The judge was acting like a concerned schoolteacher offering Twinkies to students but withholding the cream filling to avoid any possible mess.

  Each juror originally had to swear devotion to the criminal justice system. It was that very system that had allowed for a shrewd defense attorney’s transmutation of a double political execution into the White Sugar Murders. On the walls of the city, graffiti cautioned, “Eat a Twinkie—Kill a Cop!”

  In 1983, the San Francisco Chronicle published a correction: “In an article about Dan White’s prison life, Chronicle writer Warren Hinckle reported that a friend of White expressed the former supervisor’s displeasure with an article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian which made reference to the size of White’s sexual organ. The Chronicle has since learned that the Bay Guardian did not publish any such article and we apologize for the error.”

  It was 10 feet long, 3 feet 6 inches high, 3 feet 8 inches wide, and weighed more than a ton—no, not Dan White’s penis—the world’s largest Twinkie, which was unveiled in Boston. And on the fiftieth anniversary of the Twinkie, inventor Dewar said, “Some people say Twinkies are the quintessential junk food, but I believe in the things. I fed them to my four kids, and they feed them to my fifteen grandchildren. Twinkies never hurt them.”

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  When the jurors walked into court to deliver the verdict, they appeared somber, except for a former cop, who smiled and triumphantly tapped the defense table twice with two fingers as he passed by, telegraphing the decision of voluntary manslaughter. White would be sentenced to seven years in prison.

  In January 1984, he was paroled after serving a little more than five years. The estimated shelf life of a Twinkie is seven years. That’s two years longer than White spent behind bars. When he was released, that Twinkie in his cupboard was still edible. But perhaps, instead of eating it, he would have it bronzed.

  He called his old friend, Frank Falzon—the detective who had originally taken his confession—and they met.

  “I hit him with the hard questions,” Falzon recalled. “I asked him, ‘What were those extra bullets for? What did happen?’ ”

  “I really lost it that day,” White replied.

  “You can say that again,” Falzon said.

  “No. I really lost it. I was on a mission. I wanted four of them.”

  “Four?” Falzon asked.

  “Carol Ruth Silver—she was the biggest snake of the bunch.” (Silver realized that she might have been his third victim had she not stayed downstairs for a second cup of coffee that morning.) “And Willie Brown. He was masterminding the whole thing.”

  While White had been waiting to see Moscone in the anteroom of his office, the mayor was drinking coffee with Brown, chatting and laughing. Moscone told Brown that he had to see White, and Brown slipped out the back door just as Moscone was letting White in the front way. Thirty seconds later, White killed Moscone. The Marlboro cigarette in Moscone’s hand would still be burning when the paramedics arrived.

  White hurriedly walked across a long corridor to the area where the supervisors’ offices were. His name had already been removed from the door of his office, but he still had a key. He went inside and reloaded his gun. Then he walked out, past Supervisor Dianne Feinstein’s office. She called to him, but he didn’t stop. “I have to do something first,” he told her, as he headed for Milk’s office.

  George Moscone’s body was buried, and Harvey Milk’s body was cremated. His ashes were placed in a box, which was wrapped in Doonesbury comic strips, then scattered at sea. The ashes had been mixed with bubble bath and two packets of grape Kool-Aid, forming a purple patch on the Pacific Ocean. Harvey would’ve liked that touch.

  On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the twin assassination, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that, “During the trial, no one but well-known satirist Paul Krassner—who may have coined the phrase ‘Twinkie defense’—played up that angle. His trial stories appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. ‘I don’t think Twinkies were ever mentioned in testimony,’ said chief defense attorney Douglas Schmidt, who recalls ‘HoHos and Ding Dongs,’ but no Twinkies.” Apparently, he forgot that one of his own psychiatric witnesses, Martin Blinder, had used the T-word.

  Blinder now complains, “If I found a cure for cancer, they’d still say I was the guy who invented ‘the Twinkie defense.’ ”

  The Chronicle also quoted Steven Scherr about the Twinkie defense: “ ‘It drives me crazy,’ said co-counsel Scherr, who suspects the simplistic explanation provides cover for those who want to minimize and trivialize what happened. If he ever strangles one of the people who says ‘Twinkie defense’ to him, Scherr said, it won’t be because he’s just eaten a Twinkie.”

  Scherr was sitting in the audience at the campus theater where a panel discussion of the case was taking place. I was one of the panelists. When Scherr was introduced from the stage, I couldn’t resist saying to him on my microphone, “Care for a Twinkie?”

  In October 1985, Dan White committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. He taped a note to the windshield of his car, reading, “I’m sorry for all the pain and trouble I’ve caused.”

  I accept his apology. I got caught in the post-verdict riot and was beaten by a couple of cops. The injuries affected my posture and twisted my gait. I gradually developed an increasingly strange limp and I now walk with the aid of a cane. At the airport, I’m told by security to put my cane on the conveyor belt along with my overnight bag and my shoes, but then I’m handed an orange-colored wooden cane to enable me to walk through the metal detector.

  You just never
know what might be hidden inside a cane.

  THE LAST ELECTION

  The Republicans’ party line that Barack Obama was “pal-ling around with terrorists” didn’t work, although some people believed it because then they wouldn’t need a racist reason not to vote for Obama. Next, the campaign acted as though his advocacy of age-appropriate sex education for kindergarteners meant putting condoms on cucumbers. That didn’t work, either. Then John McCain tried calling him a “socialist.” Also didn’t work. Ironically, Socialist Party candidate Norman Thomas ran for president six times, and never won, but every one of his platform planks were eventually adopted by Democrats and Republican administrations alike. They just didn’t call it socialism.

  In January 2009, Christian fundamentalist Pat Robertson stated that God told him America is headed for veritable socialism as well as an economic rebound under President-elect Obama. “What the Lord was saying,” he claimed, “the people are willing to accept socialism to alleviate their pain. Cast off all the gloom and the doom because things are getting ready to turn around. I say with humility, I hope I’ve heard the Lord. I spend time praying and asking him for wisdom, and if there’s a mistake, it’s not his fault, it’s mine.” Humility in action.

  In any case, one of the factors in Obama’s win was indeed the confidence-destroying financial crisis, and now he faces a food chain of euphemisms. Hey, is this like the Great Depression? Nah, it’s not a depression, it’s only a recession. Wait, it’s not a recession, it’s just an economic downturn. No, it’s not an economic downturn, it’s a correction. Oops, it’s not a corrrection, it’s an adjustment. Hurry, get me a chiropractor. Similarly, there’s a food-chain of solutions to the problem. From the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the Bailout Bill to the Rescue Package to the Emergency Economic Stability Act to Alan Greenspan confessing “My bad” to Free Botox for Everybody.

  Perhaps the most bizarre byproduct of the campaign began with an anonymous ad on Craigslist headlined: “Need Sarah Palin Lookalike ASAP for Adult Film.” The pay would be $3,000 and, it was duly noted, “No anal required.” This porn flick, it turned out, would be shot by Hustler Video, and no, Tina Fey did not apply for the job. The climactic scene was a threesome with Sarah Palin, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

  Hillary was played by veteran porn star and sex educator Nina Hartley, who told me that “The big hullabaloo over the movie is being generated by feminists from both the pro- and anti-porn sides. They’re up in arms that ‘women are being nonconsensually satirized’ by Big Evil Porn and The Big Bad Larry Flynt. The usual nonsense from the usual suspects. Even some pro-porn feminists are upset at Palin being ‘targeted’ by Porn. They conveniently overlook the fact that most porn satirizes white men in power: politicians, police, professors. Most recent case in point, The Elliot Splizter Story. . . .”

  Who’s Nailin’ Paylin was ready for release before the election, as was an issue of the horror comic book Tales From the Crypt that featured on the cover a painting of Sarah Palin swinging her hockey stick to disperse the Vault-Keeper and other ghoulish characters as she sneeringly asks, “Didn’t we get rid of you guys in the ’50s?”—a reference to the censorship problems faced decades ago by EC Comics, the original publisher of Tales From the Crypt, and concomitantly a criticism of Palin for her “rhetorical question” about removing objectionable books from library shelves.

  However, another publisher was producing a comic-book biography of Palin that wouldn’t be released until February 2009, so two endings were prepared. But an edition of South Park—broadcast the day after the election—took a risk with only one ending, which lampooned Obama’s victory. Co-creator Trey Parker explained, “We’re just going to make the Obama version, and if McCain somehow wins, we’re basically just totally screwed.” Likewise, Garry Trudeau gambled that Obama would win, and his syndicated Doonesbury strip—published the day after the election—depicted three soldiers in Iraq watching the returns on TV as a reporter is saying, “And it’s official—Barack Obama has won.”

  Some editors were undecided about whether to publish it. Trudeau encouraged them to choose hope over fear. “If I’m wrong,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “it’ll be my face that’ll be covered with eggs, not theirs.” Times editors had decided, in the interest of accuracy, to wait for the election results, and if Obama won, they would publish the strip on Thursday, but then they must have realized it was just a comic strip, not investigative journalism, and they published it on Wednesday after all.

  Trudeau thought that newspapers should run the strip because “polling data gives McCain a 3.7 percent chance of victory.” Indeed, a week after Obama’s win, McCain himself admitted to Jay Leno, “I can read the polls—they tried to keep ’em from me.” There were dozens of polls, from ABC to Zogby, and, psychographic sophistication aside, they didn’t always exactly agree. For example, in Nevada during the last week of October, one poll put Obama’s lead at 12 percent, another at 7 percent, another at 5 percent and two others at 4 percent, which meant that, given the margin of sampling error, McCain could conceivably have been slightly ahead. This, then, was the last presidential election. In the future, you’ll only need to vote for the pollster that you trust the most.

  During the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, I was among 15,000 protesters who had gathered in Grant Park for a rally when the police, triggered by the actions of one of their own provocateurs, attacked the demonstrators and sadistically beat as many as they could reach. It seemed impossible that we could ever work within the system. But now, forty years later, there were 200,000 celebrants who had gathered in that same park, giddy with the excitement of Obama’s victory. They had worked within the system.

  During the past four decades, there has been a linear progression from Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock to Aretha Franklin singing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” at the inauguration. Is it possible that this event signified the early tremors of a nonviolent revolution? As the late singer/songwriter Harry Chapin once said to me backstage at a benefit: “If you don’t act like there’s hope, there is no hope.” And remember, placebos work. My main hope is that I won’t be disappointed.

  Meanwhile, the memorabilia business flourishes as millions of voters seek a variety of tangible items to remind them of the part they played in history simply by voting. You can find Obama’s image or name on mouse pads, baby bibs, aprons, dog jerseys, bobbleheads, condoms, dildos, toilet paper, an ice-cream flavor (Ben & Jerry’s “Yes Pecan”), niche buttons (“Ventriloquists for Obama”) and T-shirts (“Now I Don’t Have to Move to Canada”).

  Somebody bid $400 on eBay for the day-after-inauguration November 5, 2008 issue of the New York Times. USA Today printed 500,000 extra copies; the Washington Post printed 350,000 extras. The only thing I saved was a full-page ad by the 99 Cents Only Stores, which included a “Joe the Plumber Special” plunger. There was no limit on how many I could buy.

  AND GOD SAID, “LET THERE BE FILF”

  It was the film Deep Throat that first brought the language of porn into mainstream awareness. The Linda Lovelace character’s clitoris was located deep in her throat, and the only way she could achieve orgasm was through oral sex. Years after that movie, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s secret source in the Watergate scandal, the late FBI agent W. Mark Felt, was given the code name “Deep Throat.”

  More recently, the acronym MILF has also entered mainstream awareness, in print, in films and on TV, from the hosts of fake news shows to sitcoms where the laugh track responds to hearing “She’s a real MILF” uttered by a character, while parents try to avoid satisfying the curiosity of their kids by explaining that it means “Mothers I’d Like to Fuck.”

  Actually, the sentiment behind MILF is “The Wives of Other Guys I’d Like to Fuck,” but TWOGILF sounds too much like a Dutch denomination of money. As a longtime strong supporter of equal rights, it occurred to me that there must also be a porn category called FILF. Likewise, even
though it stands for “Fathers I’d Like to Fuck,” it really signifies “The Husbands of Other Chicks I’d Like to Fuck,” but THOCILF sounds too much like it could be a prescription medicine for vaginal dryness.

  Please excuse my generalization—about wives rather than mothers, and husbands rather than fathers—because in my research of FILF on the Internet (there are 120,000 such listings), I came across a few where it signifies other sexual preferences. For example, there are those who believe that the first F in FILF “is definitely for Friends, not Fathers.” Others insist that FILF applies to “Fatties I’d Like to Fuck.” Many men are turned on by women who are obese.

  FILF also applies to gays who prefer older guys, as in “Fags I’d Like to Fuck.” And did they think that the film MILK was an acronym for “Men I’d Like to Kiss”? One gay site states: “FILF (Fathers I’d Like to Fuck) is one of our favorite sections here at whatgaysite and we’ll do anything to find you the best that’s out there on the net. You just gotta love a hard-bodied daddyo with a throbbing cock hungry for fresh ass!”

  And FILF can apply to teenage girls, such as the one who said, “Maybe he’s one of our friend’s Dads.” A married male blogger wrote, “I won’t say I’m thrilled with the dude who shouted ‘MILF!’ in Baby Mama, but I can certainly understand his point. Of course, this leaves unresolved the question of whether anyone has shouted ‘FILF!’ at me from a moving vehicle since a baby came into our lives. The answer is no. Not once have I been sexually harassed as a new father.”

  For women in their twenties and thirties, FILF represents handsome movie celebrities such as Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. One woman mentioned Ashton Kutcher, adding that “technically, he’s only the step-daddy.” However, another woman made the connection between show biz and politics when she admitted, “Obama is hot. I wouldn’t say no to him.”