Canada is concerned that information about citizens living in the United States, working for Canadian companies in the U.S. or for U.S. companies directly falls under the Patriot Act. British Columbia privacy commissioner David Loukidelis stated, “Our research and analysis led us to the conclusion that the U.S.A. Patriot Act knows no borders.”
The Department of Justice refuses to confirm whether the government can see what you’re reading on the Internet without having to show probable cause for a crime, instead using “pen-traps” to garner such information—tools used without the same judicial oversight required for a wiretap—a practice codified in the Patriot Act.
The Justice Department now finds it necessary to have a website defending the Patriot Act. Their public relations campaign intensified before the November election, and apparently Bush has enough votes to continue most of the Act’s provisions past the December 2005 deadline.
“I was upset, although not entirely surprised,” Brasch told me, “at the number of people who were so overcome by fear after 9/11 that they said they would willingly give up some of their civil liberties in order to be safe. I expected this from those who stood close to the Bush administration. I did not expect to see so much of this from the people who claim to be moderates or liberals.
“I was also upset, although not entirely surprised, with the level of antagonism for dissenting views. While this nation had a long history of dissent, and an equally long history of people suppressing dissent, it seemed that the past three years have left more people willing to hide the First Amendment as a ‘necessity’ to keep America safe.
“While all administrations in various ways have tried to curtail opposition, there is in this administration an almost morbid fear of the people—or perhaps it is a fear that if truth emerges, the people will not support the adminstration. The frightening part is that this administration actually believes it has a mandate—from God? the people?—to do what it does, and opposition is not in the nation’s best interest. Indeed, we have a more modern divine right of kings.”
And the faucet of legalized repression continues to drip drip drip. . . .
NONPARTISAN HARASSMENT
Chris Warren is a politically conservative stand-up comic. Recently, he was threatened with arrest by the Secret Service if he dared to repeat a joke he told at the Brickwall Comedy Club in Spokane, Washington. I e-mailed him to find out what the joke was.
He replied, “It is not a wise idea for me to write out the joke online at this point,” though he gladly told me the punchline. But first the set-up, revealed in this letter from a female MD to the editor of a weekly paper, The Inlander, which was seen by a member of the Air National Guard who reported it to the Secret Service. The letter:
“When I go to an adults-only comedy club, I expect to hear adult humor (including off-color jokes, which are half the fun) but did not expect to come out completely irate. The night started with the owner, Chris Warren, getting up and telling a few jokes. His jokes consisted of not one but multiple jokes about rape. One of them started out by him asking if anyone had heard about the woman who married her rapist. His ‘punchline’? ‘At what point during the rape did she think, ‘Hey, this isn’t so bad?’ When the room was silent, he made a comment that maybe his joke was too dark for the crowd.
“It was not that his humor was too dark but that violent crimes against women are just not funny. Later he made a comment that Hillary Clinton should be raped and assassinated. When again the room was silent, he said, ‘OK, maybe we should assassinate her first, then rape her.’ This is supposed to be funny? I don’t care what your political persuasion is, wishing any person to be raped and put to death is just wrong. Maybe Warren should look at his material and figure out that there are certain subject matters that are never funny no matter how you tell the joke.”
And now the punchline about Hillary: “You’d need to shoot her first, then let the body warm up a little bit.” Warren told me, “Response was mixed, some howled, some stared. I told the joke several times after that and got lots of laughs. So I was surprised with the visit by the Secret Service. I was asked to tell them the joke, and they both laughed! However, I was then told that if I was to tell the joke again, I would be subject to arrest, charged with a federal crime, that of threatening a ‘protectee’ of the Secret Service, then put on a terrorist watch list.”
In 2003, he was among the first group of comedians to entertain American troops in Iraq. In 2004, he appeared with The Right Stuff, a right-wing comedy troupe that performed for delegates at the Republican convention in New York, at the Improv during the presidential debate in Phoenix, and before several dignitaries in Washington, including Ken Mehlman, Bush’s campaign manager, now head of the Republican National Committee.
“I was told I would no longer have clearance to do any of these type shows again. No clearance, as they put it, to work for ‘Kenny’ again. There was no humor in their tone at this point. I was told that they were continuing the investigation and I was asked for personal information—height, weight, Social Security number, home address, phone numbers—information they obviously already had. It seemed like a subtle threat to me.”
The intimidation worked. He hasn’t told that joke on stage since then, and won’t until his lawyer and the ACLU confirm that he’s not going to jail over a joke.
Meanwhile, you guys have been a lot of fun—be sure to tip the waitresses.
TWISTED PRIORITIES
A letter to the editor of a local newspaper begins, “It is my belief that most of the people who drowned in the tsunami had never learned to swim, and the death toll would be less than half of what it is if they knew how to swim.” The stupidity of that allegation is overshadowed only by the insensitivity. It serves to intensify the anguish, especially if you’re the friend of a victim’s family.
In my case, it’s Luke Scully, the son of Rock Scully, former manager of the Grateful Dead, and stepson of Nicki Scully, a professional healer and spiritual adviser, whom I first met in Egypt in 1978 when the Dead played the Pyramids, and Jerry Garcia gave the band last-minute instructions: “Remember, play in tune.” Happier times. . . .
A credit card transaction placed the missing Luke and his girlfriend Angie at a hotel in Phuket, Thailand on Christmas Eve. All I could do was say my atheist prayers for them among 150,000 anonymous others. Questioning the concept of God is one of the byproducts of this inconceivable tragedy. Star Jones said on The View that she would have been there if not for God’s blessing. Jon Stewart responded on The Daily Show that it wasn’t God’s blessing, it was God’s oversight.
Luke and Angie were, in effect, murdered by twisted priorities. Expressen, a Swedish newspaper, reported a crisis meeting attended by Thailand’s foremost meteorological experts, who decided not to issue a warning about the tsunami an hour before the first massive wave struck, “out of courtesy to the tourist industry.” That’s the kind of courtesy that can literally kill you. One can only try to understand their perverted version of Sophie’s Choice.
“We finally decided not to do anything,” explained one of the meteorological experts, “because the tourist season was in full swing. The hotels were 100 percent booked full. What if we issued a warning, which would have led to an evacuation, and nothing had happened. What would be the outcome? The tourist industry would be immediately hurt. Our department would not be able to endure a lawsuit.”
Ironically, in Thailand alone, where the tourist industry rakes in almost $8 billion a year, more than 5,000 people died at prime beach resorts—about half of them tourists—and anther 4,500 are still missing. Damages to businesses and property will reach into the billions of dollars, losses that will fall mainly on the tourism industry. Executives acknowledged that it would take time for the tourist trade to recover from the haunting images of bodies piled on the beach, as well as hotel rooms damaged.
Tourists weren’t the only victims of human decision. An independent listserv, CLG (Citizens for Legitimate Gover
nment) News, reported a Canadian expert’s claim that the U.S. Military and the State Department were given advance warning of the tsunami. Although America’s Navy base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean was notified, the warning was not passed on to those countries bearing the brunt of the disaster.
“Get some devastation in the back,” Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist instructed a photographer taking a picture of him before leaving Sri Lanka.
The only good news is a worldwide outpouring of aid to the survivors of Nature’s blind genocide, even though America is simultaneously wasting so many billions on destroying and rebuilding Iraq. But suppose the Indian Ocean tsunami had somehow managed to reach the Persian Gulf and destroy Iraq’s coastline. Would a mutual cease-fire then be declared, so that help—food, water, housing, health care, infrastructure rebuilding—could take place without the fatal annoyance of those pesky insurgents? It would, of course, be only a temporary cease-fire.
Meanwhile, the Luke and Angie Fund has been founded by their families to create a project for assistance and rehabilitation in Thailand.
SPRINGTIME FOR HARRY
A recent news report triggered a personal association that flashed back to a sharply etched memory. Concerning a British scandal that involved Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform with a swastika armband at a costume party, it was the best wardrobe malfunction since Janet Jackson caused a cosmic titter. Harry’s insensitive act occurred because he was simply ignorant, or else he thought it was a come-as-you-are party, or maybe he just happened to come upon an ancestor’s dusty old uniform in the attic.
As Andrew Gumbel, correspondent for the Independent of London, reminds us: “Nobody [in the British monarchy] represented the flirtation with totalitarianism more than Harry’s great-grand-uncle, Edward VIII, the ultimate black sheep of the family who openly sympathized with the Nazis and might have pushed Britain into an anti-Stalinist alliance with Hitler had it not been for his insistence on marrying the American divorcee—and equally ardent Nazi apologist—Wallis Simpson, an insistence that precipitated his abdication in 1936. . . .
“The reverberations from the abdication crisis are still palpable among today’s royals. Three of Prince Philip’s sisters married Nazi sympathizers, and the Windsors who succeeded Edward VIII—his brother, George VI, and George’s daughter, Elizabeth II—had to live it down, even after the Third Reich’s demise. . . . Harry’s costume revived unpleasant parallels between the Nazi taste for bloodthirsty imperial adventure and Britain’s own leanings in that direction—like using poison gas on the Kurds, shooting independence protesters in India and so on. Britain has long since repented of its imperial sins, but nostalgia still abounds in certain upper-class circles. . . .”
When my daughter Holly was eleven, her best new friend was Pia Hinckle, whose father Warren had been editor of Ramparts, Scanlan’s and City magazine. One afternoon, standing on the Hinckles’ front porch, Holly was yelling, “Hitler! Hitler!” That was the name of Pia’s cat, so named because of a square black patch under its nose, just like the mustache on Adolf Hitler’s face.
I asked Holly, “Do you know who Hitler was?”
“Didn’t he lead the Jews out of Germany?”
“Well, not exactly.”
By the time Holly was 17, she had read The Diary of Anne Frank and seen Holocaust on TV. She had bleached her blond hair platinum, and when the roots grew in, she maintained a two-tone hairdo. Later, she dyed her hair pitch black and kept it in a style that completely covered one eye. She wore a leather jacket with chains hanging from it, and plenty of makeup, including a multicolored lightning streak on one cheek.
She was planning to audition for a new wave band called The Vktms. A lyric in one of their songs went, “Hey, you know I ain’t no martyr, but I ain’t no Nazi.” She also wanted to change her name to Holly Hard-On, but she had the flu so her audition and name change became moot. Ah, yes, but she would’ve been following in my footsteps. Introducing Rumpleforeskin and his daughter Holly Hard-On. How proud could a father get?
SEX BOMBS
Yet another news report has triggered a personal association that flashes back to a sharply etched memory. This one is about a secret weapon that had been considered by the United States military—a “sex bomb” which would make enemy soldiers irresistible to each other.
Declassified documents reveal that the Pentagon spent six years and $11 million to develop an aphrodisiac chemical weapon in 1994. The gas would have made enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. The weapon’s developers said that widespread homosexual behavior among troops would deal a “distasteful but completely non-lethal” blow to morale.
In 1967, in order to build up public interest in an upcoming antiwar demonstration at the Pentagon, Abbie Hoffman invented an imaginary new drug, a sexual equivalent to the police tear gas, Mace. It was christened Lace, supposedly a combination of LSD and DMSO, which, when applied to the skin, would be absorbed into the bloodstream and act as an instantaneous aphrodisiac. Lace was actually Shapiro’s Disapper-O from Taiwan. When sprayed, it left a purple stain, then vanished.
A press conference was called at Hoffman’s apartment where Lace could be observed in action. I was supposed to be a reporter who got accidentally sprayed with Lace. To my surprise, I would put down my notepad, take off my clothes and start making love with a beautiful redhead who had also gotten accidentally sprayed, along with another deliberately sprayed couple, right there on a mattress on the living-room floor, while the journalists took notes.
I was really looking forward to this combination media event and blind date. Even though the sexual revolution was at its height, there was something exciting about knowing in advance that I was guaranteed to get laid—although I felt somewhat guilty about attempting to trick fellow reporters. But there was a scheduling conflict. I was already committed to speak at a literary conference at the University of Iowa on that same day. So instead Abbie asked me to buy some cornmeal there, to be used in encircling the Pentagon as a prelevitation rite.
In Iowa, novelist Robert Stone drove me to a farm.
“I’d like to buy some cornmeal to go.”
“Coarse or fine?” the farmer asked. I glanced at Stone for advice.
“Since it’s for a magic ritual,” he said, “I would definitely recommend coarse.”
I flew back to New York with a 13-pound sack of coarse cornmeal properly stored in the overhead rack. Meanwhile, the Lace story was reported in the New York Post, the New York Daily News and Time magazine, as well as the wire services, perpetuating the promise that three gallons of Lace would be brought to Washington, along with a large supply of plastic water pistols, so that Lace could be sprayed on police and the National Guard at the Pentagon demonstration, causing them to make love, not war.
The guy who substituted for me in that accidental sexual encounter with the beautiful redhead at the press conference ended up living with her. Even though I had never met her, I was jealous. Somehow I felt cheated out of a Yippie romance.
CONDOMS R US
I asked Annie Sprinkle, Ph.D.—the former porn star who is now a sexologist—how she felt about the use or non-use of condoms in porn.
“Condoms in porn are hot,” she said. “They look sexy. Because they simply say, ‘I care,’ and to care is sexy. I get totally turned off if there is no condom. I happen to like the hot pink, bright blue and sea green ones myself. But it’s important that there is plenty of lubrication and that the condom looks real shiny. Otherwise, I worry about the girl’s pussy getting irritated.”
The Los Angeles Times Magazine featured an article on pornography and HIV which quoted Roger Tansey, former executive director of Aid for AIDS, a West Hollywood based nonprofit organization that provides financial assistance for people with HIV. Referring to performers in gay porn, he said that “They all wear condoms. Gay actors and gay viewers don’t see unprotected sex as a fantasy. They see it as watching death on the screen.”
Howev
er, veteran gay rights activist Jim Fouratt told me, “I suggest you treat the quote from gay spokesperson Tansey with a huge grain of salt. Either he is stupid, involved in the gay porn industry, or simply ill informed. Let me just say that in the last several years, a very strong market has evolved for ‘barebacking’ specific videos and the re-release of gay porn made prior to the use of condoms and other safe sex guidelines. Much of this demand is created by gay media promotion of barebacking as a ‘freedom of choice’ of consenting adults.”
When I was a kid, condoms were called prophylactics, prophylactics were called rubbers, and rubbers were called scumbags. My friends and I would find used scumbags in a vacant lot or an alley between buildings. Once I found a large package of unused prophylactics in my father’s sock drawer. It must have held a dozen. There were nine left. Each was tightly rolled, bound by what looked like a miniature cigar band. I selected one, took the band off, and carefully unrolled it.
There was a legend printed right on the condom: “Sold In Drugstores Only For the Prevention of Disease.” What hypocrisy! They were sold for the prevention of pregnancy, which is a condition, not a disease. The irony is that now condoms do not carry that message and they are used for the prevention of disease.
However, the national $170-million-a-year abstinence-only so-called sex education program warns that condoms fail to prevent HIV transmission one-third of the time, despite the fact that studies show that properly used condoms are nearly always effective in blocking HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
On January 20, 2005, it was reported that the Roman Catholic Church in Spain supports the use of condoms to prevent AIDS. The very next day, that support was retracted faster than a foreskin in heat, with an explanation that the church still believes artificial contraception is immoral, even while a Mexican Catholic bishop joined the Spanish church’s original endorsement, stating that the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS should be tolerated as a “lesser evil.”
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