Lenny Bruce, Obscenity's Legacy, and Today's News

I wrote this late last night, when I should have been in bed. I was out for coffee this morning when The Guy emailed me with a link and said, “This will make you very angry.” Rightly so. It turns out the Supreme Court of the US has decided not to hear a case on internet-based obscenity, meaning that internet obscenity laws are to be decided on a local basis. IE, small towns can decide what’s “obscene” on the internet.
Think about this for a minute. REALLY fucking think about the ramifications of this, people. This is huge. You’re going to have Buttfuck, Idaho deciding on whether or not materials that are being used and seen by people AROUND THE WORLD are obscene… in the land of “free press.”
It all comes back to you. Your vote. It comes down to voting for leaders and politicians because you’re looking for a fucking tax break, but you fail to realize the implications of what that leader’s choices for life-long appointments to the Supreme Court are. Life-long: Meaning decades of deciding the interpretation of YOUR constitution.
You want to tell me that America’s passion for freedom of speech is greater than any other nation’s. Not anymore. Never has been. That’s the greatest lie ever told, my friends.
This year’s the 40th anniversary of the death of Lenny Bruce — a guy who met the wrong end of every obscenity law ever passed in the US. Four decades have passed, and this is the bullshit that’s starting to cycle back into action.
AGAIN, I ask you: Where is your voice?
The timing of that news is just strange, since I’d planned to post this today anyhow. A sad fucking day for freedoms, my friends. Know that.

__________________

The writer I am today is a result of the reader I was then. To tell the truth, I’m barely a reader today. I seldom settle in with a book, but I hope to change that behaviour.
I recently took some time to organize my bookshelves, and this book in the photo, my tattered copy of Lenny Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty & Influence People, still stands up on display, right behind my grandmother’s 1955 rotary dial phone, which still rattles and rings anytime someone dials me up. Next to it, a first-edition of the Arrow paperback version of HST’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.
When I was 18, my narrow, protected view of the world was shattered by HST, but then came Lenny. Like HST’s classic tome, it gets off to an unforgettable start – particularly if you’re an 18-year-old kid. Unbelievably, I had the balls to recommend this to my 14 year old student last week.

“Filipinos come quick; colored men are built abnormally large (“Their wangs look like a baby’s arm with an apple in its fist”); ladies with short hair are lesbians; if you want to keep your man, rub alum on your pussy.
Such bits of erotic folklore were related daily to my mother by Mrs. Janesky, a middle-aged widow who lived across the alley, despite the fact that she had volumes of books delivered by the postman every month — A Sane Sex Life, Ovid the God of Love, How to Make Your Marriage Partner More Compatible–in plain brown wrappers marked “Personal.”
She would begin in a pedantic fashion, using academic medical terminology, but within ten minutes, she would be spouting her hoary hornyisms. Their conversation drifted to me as I sat under the sink, picking at the ripped linoleum, day-dreaming and staring at my Aunt Mema’s Private Business, guarded by its sinkmate, the vigilant C-N bottle, vanguard of Lysol, Zonite, and Massengill.
At this tender age, I knew nothing of douches. The only difference between men and women was that women always had headaches and didn’t like whistling or cap guns; and men didn’t like women – that is, women they were married to.
Aunt Mema’s Private Business, the portable bidet, was a large red-rubber bulb with a long black nozzle. I could never figure out what the hell it was for. I thought maybe it was an enema bag for people who lived in buildings with a super who wouldn’t allow anyone to put up nails to hang things on; I wondered if it was the horn Harpo Marx squeezed to punctuate his silent sentences. All I knew was that it was not to be used for water-gun battles, and that what it was for was none of my business.
When you’re eight years old, nothing is any of your business.”

Lenny Bruce, if you’ve never heard much about the dude, was a pioneering comic who broke all the rules. The Jim Morrison of comedy, he had his ass busted for obscenity more times than Dick Nixon would proclaim he was not a crook. It was on his heels, on his ground-breaking sacrifices and legal hassles that Richard Pryor and every other comedian would follow. Without Lenny Bruce, there might not have been a Pryor, or a Hicks, or a Rock, or a Leary. Lenny Bruce said fuck you to the man, and he said what was on his mind.
These days, there’s something still admirable about someone with the balls to say “What you think is obscene is what others do behind closed doors.” As someone I quite like recently said, let’s meet at the corner of The 21st Century and Get Over It.
Laws of acceptability are drawn by people with the courage (or the accidental happening) to push envelopes in defiance of what accepted norms are. For instance, fucking can now be used as an adjective after 10 pm all because Bono accidentally said it as such during a broadcast of (insert irrelevant music awards ceremony name here).
But the ones who discover whole new lands, they’re the journeymen like Bruce because they’re the ones who consciously know what the accepted is, but choose to go far beyond it, consequences be damned.
You open to any fucking page, anywhere, and there’s something that even today is relevant. Me, my copy’s so fucking tattered it’s permanently mated with an elastic band, the only thing that holds it together. The page where the spine breaks clean in half, page 91, yielded this pearl from 1963, 10 years before my birth.

“Why don’t religious institutions use their influence to relieve human suffering instead of sponsoring such things as the Legion of Decency, which dares to say it’s indecent that men should watch some heavy-titted Italian starlet because to them breasts are dirty?
Beautiful, sweet, tender, womanly breasts that I love to kiss; pink nipples that I love to feel against my clean-shaven face. They’re clean!”

So many of us sex bloggers, we’re up in arms against this Moralizing of North America; the legislative attempts to arbitrate morality; this pitiful attempt to turn back the clock and eradicate sex and desire from the consciousness of the average person.
Got news for you, folks. We’ve been fighting this battle for decades. Whether it’s a brilliant writer and commentator like Lenny Bruce or a filthy fat fuck like Larry Flynt, the battles ain’t new, the war ain’t new, and the blood’s long from dry.
What’s different now, though, is the medium. Enter blogging. Enter podcasting. Enter streaming video. Now we have a voice. Now we don’t have to wait any longer for a voice crying out in the night, for a black-as-hell knight to ride in with a filthy leer and a winning argument. Now the undersexed, underfucked, randy-as-hell, crop-flogging, chain-wearing, paddle-using, nymphomaniacal, cross-dressing, same-sex fucking, porn-loving, and swinging folks, NOW they all have the ability to have a voice.
The thing about activism is that it’s not about ground breaking wide open in one fell swoop. Like any hole, it start with one push of the shovel. And another. And another. There will be rocks and boulders that limit progress, but with persistence, it all comes out. The greater the chorus of resistance, the harder it is to ignore. The greater the groundswell, the more ground we can break.
Unfortunately for the battle, Lenny Bruce died too fucking young. He should’ve died right around now, in his 80th year. Instead, a needle in his arm, he toppled off his toilet, and crashed to his death – a disgraced, bloated man who was mocked and ridiculed out of the mainstream, and instead, placed post-humously upon a pedestal by those who would continue to wage what was known as his crusade against semantics.

The book’s afterword ends thus:

“One last four-letter word for Lenny.
Dead.
At 40.
That’s obscene.”

And it was. It is. Few people ever have the balls that Lenny Bruce lugged around with him, and it’s a crying fucking shame. And still, here we are, fighting for the same things, dreaming of the same freedoms as this long-dead Jewish-American comedian, in this, the 21st century.

16 thoughts on “Lenny Bruce, Obscenity's Legacy, and Today's News

  1. Roscoe

    Now that’s some messed up shit…Sadly I have spent some time in Butt Fuck No Where Texas so…Holy Fuck Batman was the first thought that popped into my head, and because it’s the US Supreme Court can we even use Bush as a scapegoat?

    Hot damn will the world of free speech be messed up if this becomes possible and it’s a damn good thing the world is a bigger place than the hillbilly backroads of the USA and the internet is a much more powerful tool than most thought possible…

    Small minds, small world…Open minds and we have a wrold of endless opportunities for greatness…some minds had to have been open or Lenny Bruce would not have had an audience…

    Thanks for giving me the title of another book I gotta read…

  2. Anonymous

    Steff, it’s great that you highlight these issues. However, as Canadians, what can we do about it?

    I agree, spreading the knowledge and updating people is part of it. Protesting in the US? Gaining US citizenship (if you could), in order to vote?

    I guess what took me back about your article is the anger/passion (may not be the correct words) that you expressed over something that we have little or no control over.

    I’m glad that I’m a Canadian.

  3. scribe called steff

    Roscoe: Isn’t it, though? I think Bush, to a degree, can be held partly responsible. You’ve got a Supreme Court that seems to think it’s important enough to decide the fucking ANNA NICOLE SMITH case, but when it comes to having the balls to make a stand on internet-related obscenity, they pass the buck to townships?

    Bush has appointed two of the nine judges currently sitting, both of whom are young men in their late 40s, if I’m not mistaken, and one of whom is the Chief Justice.

    This is precisely the kind of case a Supremem Court NEEDS to decide, so why abstain on what could be a major, major fallout?

    Yes, some minds are open, but apathy is rampant, and when some 40% of people decide not to bother voting in federal elections, you have to wonder where the concern is.

    Anon — As Canadians, my first response is “Fuct if I know.”

    But two things.

    One, write your MLA. Insist that Canadian representatives speak to these issues. The internet belongs to ALL of us, not just One Nation Under God.

    Two, be very, very afraid of Stephen Harper. We’ve just elected in a man who ADMITTED he ADMIRED what the Bush administration has accomplished. We’ve elected in a man who believes that morality isn’t an option, it’s something the government must impose on its people. Stephen Harper has an agenda, and he would rather have one term in which he impacts this nation than two in which he simply governs as-is.

    So, again, writing your MLA and insisting WE do not follow the path of God’s Chosen Nation, but instead stick to our guns about what is or is not free speech.

    I mean, all we can do is go on record. They’re OUR governments. They represent US. And yet we let these extremists with moralist agendas shout at the top of their fucking voices, and we sit silently shaking our heads.

    It really sucks. There’s not a lot any of us can do, except speak our minds, go on record, and if we’re lucky, be heard.

  4. Goose and Gander

    It’s going to be interesting to see Bumfuck, USA try to control internet obsenity – all they’ll do is drive their local ISPs away and fall further behind the economic eight ball. Thanks for floating Lenny B into my consciousness – I need to go back to that well sometime soon.
    cheers
    PS – I don’t really know if weasels that are crazed fuck like crazed weasels. I just like the word weasel. Maybe I can start a new trend: fucking like crazed geese?

  5. Rally

    I beg of you. Please go to http://www.cnn.com I will wait while you do.

    Now that you are back, did you notice anything? I noticed that one of the lead stories was a coyote in Central Park. Another was something about Sharon Stone. There was one that seemed promising. It turns out though that Bush was merely pushing his Christian agenda on the Muslim world.

    Ok…my point you ask?

    Here we are in ButtFuck Nowhere as far as the US are concerned, and we are aware of what goes on in their nation. They are unaware, and mostly concerned with coyotes, and Sharon Stone. What does that tell you? It tells you that they are all so brainwashed into reading what is fed to them, via the media masses that there is, and there will be no chance for change in the US. Change comes from knowledge, and knowledge is being witheld. The currency of the current political climate is knowledge, and Bush personally is bankrupt, however the Republicans are the proverbial mint. Wag the Dog.

    Ciao babe. I vented, I saw your pretty blog, and your pretty face. I turned it into my own personal dirty story. I apologize for the mess.

  6. Mad Coyote

    First of all, let me say that seeing coyotes is a good luck thing. You can always get lucky with us. 😛

    Secondly, I swear to (insert deity here) I was nowhere near Central Park. Stanley Park maybe…

    Seriously though, I am fully with you Steff. I am terrified of Stephen Harper’s hidden agenda, and I thank (insert deity’s name here) that he has a minority. What truly scares me is the muzzle he’s clamped on to all the Tory MPs; the only voice allowed is his voice. Isn’t that how Kim Jong il runs North Korea?

    The problem becomes, what can we do? Yes, we can rant, rave, write letters, write blogs, but how effective is this? (And how long is it before all of us bloggers start getting strange knocks on our doors in the middle of the night by men in dark suits?) It hasn’t done a damn thing about David Emerson…and with another federal vote looking to be another year away…

    Funny, isn’t it? Democracy is supposed to be about the common man having power- so why are we so powerless in two of the “most proudly” democratic nations in the world?

  7. rachel

    Okay, I kind of feel like the odd man (woman) out here, since I am an American, and one from bumfuck (the south, no less – home of the bible belt), at that. Just in reply to rally, the problem isn’t that we don’t have the knowledge, because the knowledge is out there for us to grab. It’s that we don’t care. The apathy is what’s killing our country, not the ignorance.

    I’m 26, and the vast majority of people I know in my age group, give or take a decade or so, have never voted. It’s not ‘cool’ to care about politics. That’s for nerds, geeks, dorks, what have you.

    I have my own personal issues with CNN, but as far as the Sharon Stone/coyote thing, the problem is that they’re playing to their market. They’re only printing what people want to read. When you have a population that would rather hear about whether or not Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes did get married than what our government is doing to our basic civil liberties and the freedoms that this country was supposedly founded on, then the blame lies squarely on the people, not the media.

    America is filled with people who would rather hide their heads in the sand than look at the darker side of life. Why worry about people getting killed for nothing in Iraq when there are new shoes to buy? Why worry about some small-town, small-minded judge in South Dakota making decisions that affect your freedoms when you could worry so much more about your next Botox injection?

    Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll get off my soapbox. The apathy that I see day in and day out is definitely something I have a tendency to get all rant-y about.

    Great post, Steff. I never comment on anybody’s blogs, but you’ve got me almost permanenty de-lurked.

  8. mhorts

    If you want my opinion, the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case because they know there is nothing they can do about it. For years, the US government has been trying to a) control the Internet and b) tax the internet. The dirty little secret they have is that they cannot do either of these things. Do you think Bumf**k Idaho (or British Columbia, for that matter) would have any more luck? They can pass all the laws they want, but they don’t have the time and money to enforce them.

    The stuff the US is doing to Google right now is a lot more scary to me. They are trampling people’s right to privacy under the guise of trying to catch child molesters and kiddy porn peddlers.

    Keep up the good work Steff. I don’t like the America bashing much, but freedom of speech rules baby, no matter what country you exercise it in!!!

  9. scribe called steff

    I’ll add my two cents to everyone’s comments when I’m no longer feeling as shitty as I presently feel, but a reader sent me this email earlier.

    He’s a reporter who’s covered obscenity cases in the past, and seems to have a great working knowledge of these issues.

    So, read on for some great insight into this problem we presently face, and where it originates from.

    Anything that may reveal his ID has been deleted for privacy’s sake.

    Because it’s been copied and pasted, the formatting will be the shits, and the perfectionist I am, I’d normally take the time to heal it, but fuck that, I’m having a bath and putting my sick ass under the covers.


    First, the core problem is the obscenity laws enacted by Nixon to
    fight “Deep Throat.” Regardless of what the court(s) want to do, the
    fact that these statutes are still on the books–though rarely
    enforced–ties the hands of justices, because they can only work with
    the laws they have. Those obscenity laws are clearly unconstitutional,
    but no one has successfully fought them. And, of course, no politician
    in this country wants to, either. So the courts are confined to act
    within those, admittedly unconstitutional, laws. In this case, the court
    could not have overturned those laws, because they were not in the
    purview of the case.
    Second, this is a constitutional issue, but not in terms of free
    speech. The unfortunate fact about this country (and I am not applying
    this criticism to you, as you never claimed to have researched this
    topic exhaustively) is that the constitution is very little studied, and
    the amendments get far too much attention. When I say “far too much
    attention,” I mean the issues argued via the amendments are actually
    dealt with earlier in the articles of the constitution.
    In the creation of the constitution, and thus the United States
    (that name is important), the framers sought to retain the individual
    freedoms, perspectives, morals, and political perspectives of each
    state. Indeed, the “United States” are united “States” as well as a
    country; an often overlooked distinction. This is popularly known as the
    “state’s rights” position, and is unfortunately connected to
    conservative justices. Conservative justices do abuse this important
    idea in the constitution, no doubt, but it has a vital importance.
    Consider statues regulating the grazing of cattle. The needs of,
    say, Texas, and far different from Wisconsin, not to mention Florida. In
    Texas cattle are pretty much given free rein, legally, to graze, while
    in corn and soybean intensive Wisconsin, cattle grazing is strictly
    enforced. Florida, of course, has virtually no sustainable land for
    cattle, so the laws are relatively scarce. It is because the United
    States is such a large country both physically and demographically that
    the constitution was framed such that each state retained the right to
    legislate for its own needs and within its own context.
    This presents a problem, of course, for obscenity. The article you
    linked to was a bit incorrect in quoting the plaintiff’s attorney
    stating that the previous cases couldn’t apply to the internet–these
    laws were enacted for radio, which extends over local and state
    boundaries. In several court cases it was established that in the case
    of obscenity cases extending over local and state boundaries (like the
    internet), the district courts (which are regional, and thus still
    retain the local flavor, in theory) would decide the case.
    Enter Nixon’s obscenity laws. As federal laws, they applied to
    district courts, and thus those courts had no choice but to follow those
    laws. In addition, as federal laws, the case could be moved to any
    jurisdiction, thus ensuring the case would be moved to a conservative
    district court. Without those laws, the system would work. And our
    president and supreme court wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing otherwise.
    So in the end I’m writing this not to criticize you–not at all; I
    love what you do, how you do it, and that you’re bringing attention to
    this. But my point is that the fault lies, ironically in this case, not
    with the Supreme Court and Bush’s obvious stacking, but with the
    Nixon-era laws that no one has challenged. In order to change these
    laws–to abolish them–it will take either a very brave politician or a
    very talented and rich plaintiff, who argues the case correctly (i.e.
    not as a freedom of speech case, but as a constitution case).
    And as for those local obscenity laws (these preceded Nixon), which
    do indeed lead to the possibility of conservative communities outlawing
    all sorts of things–what about them? Again, it is a constitutional
    issue, and not free speech. The U.S.’s form of government is strongly
    local, that is, it is empowered and based on the local level, which
    supports the county level, which supports the state level, and to the
    country as a whole. There are huge merits–and necessities–in having
    local control over legislation (the cattle example), and unfortunately,
    as long as that control exists, it will also allow local communities to
    ban obscenity locally. That is where U.S. citizens have to start
    participating in local elections (turnout averages 20%). The structure
    of the constitution works–we just need to get people to the polls. Not
    just for the president, but for every election.
    So in the end, you have made a very good point on a very important
    subject, and that is why I love reading what you write (and think). The
    fault lies with attorneys in the U.S. not doing their homework, so to
    speak, and initiating cases in the correct context and against the truly
    bad laws (Nixon’s obscenity laws). We need to, in this country, stop
    beating the “free speech” drum (in the wrong cases, of course) and
    instead introduce constitutional cases, because it is in the articles of
    the constitution where our freedoms are established first.

  10. Cherrie

    A few comments from an American long concerned about the rightward swing of the pendulum since Bubba Bill was caught in a compromising position . . .

    U.S. politicians need money to keep their jobs. They have to run for election every 2-6 years at their own expense. Even though many national politicians are very wealthy, they can’t afford to pay for elections themselves.

    The religious right is small in number, but its members do participate in the political process, and more importantly they send money to the politicians they like. So the politicians pander to them in order to keep the money flowing.

    Those with a more liberal outlook, who are not offended by displays of human affection and, dare I say it, lust, tend to keep our purses closed when the politicians come around. Whose favor do the politicians curry? You guessed it.

    It doesn’t help that there is a subclass of people who prey unfairly on children and women, whom the politicans can claim to be protecting when they outlaw adult films (because, as we all know, a man who watches a fuck film will run out and rape the first pussy he finds).

    Even in Southern California, the base of the adult film industry, the politicians aren’t standing up to protect the jobs and income it generates for their constituents. Sad.

  11. scribe called steff

    Cherrie — And they think we’re whores? Oh, the irony.

    I’ll respond in depth later, but thanks for the very interesting comment. Being Canadian, I do miss out on some of the subtler aspects of your governance, but it’s insightful comments like this that clue the Canuck in me in. 🙂

  12. Anastasia

    Does an ‘Internet voice’ really matter in the larger scale of things? Really? I thought about this today, and have been following the Supreme Court development, first at work mind you (when the .xxx domain issue was launched, as I work in telecommunications) and this morning I experienced a vast load of Internet plagiarism at the hands of some cyber slut on AFF. So really does it really matter? Do I have a voice? Is the Internet a valid publication when its’ so easy for people to manufacture deception?

    The reality is there are some things that can be classified as obscene, if people ignore this and rant on about ‘freedom of speech’, and forget the other realities, of there being cases where people are bought and sold agaisnt their will over the Internet, or other forms of abuse, then where does that leave people?

    The other thing I know? Is that every page I open, the only issue that matters or that has mattered, was Hurricane Katrina, even though there were less than 2000 deaths. The majority of webpages on domains will promote this as the most signficant issue, despite the reality of there being 100,000 people dead at the hands of the most recent earthquake in Pakistan (but hey, who cares they don’t have mardi gras there right?) and this may not be a sexual issue, but I find this blatant ignorance (of other issues around the word) ‘obscene’. To me, that is humane obscenity.

    I don’t mean to be rude, but frankly when Americans make an issue of one thing, they magnify it like it’s the most urgent issue on this planet that supercedes every other issue. So people don’t have as much freedom to post graphic sexual images of people having enemas while swallowing ‘buckets’ (or what appear to be) of ‘cum’ or whatever other overt (for controversy purposes only) image they can find. THIS is what sexual obscenity is about. If it were about the current sexualities in blogs, then we’d all have been wiped off the Internet, and would be wiped off without so much as an apology.

    The other thing, the issue of freedom of speech has been focused on ‘sex’ this week, namely ‘pornographic freedom’, like that is a significant world issue or something. Yet no one in the sexual blogosphere even bothers to discuss the trade links the US has with countries such as China, where Microsoft deems it necessary to censor a blog that, no doesn’t detail sexual acts, but talks about the dismissal of a journalist in China. This is going on, and was going on before the Supreme Court issue, but hey it’s all about ‘sex’ isn’t it?

    please!

  13. scribe called steff

    anastasia —

    You’re Australian, so I’m not sure if you really get a sense of what the climate in America is right now. The sex thing, sure, you’re absolutely right, in the scheme of things — not that important. But in a way, it is. I’ll get back to that.

    First off, you mention the Pakistani earthquake. What a fucking travesty, and the Western World’s lack of response — what a goddamned statement about how friggin’ shallow we are. Pakistan is 98% Muslim. They’re all brown-skinned. Hell, they’re probably TERRORISTS. Fuck ’em! If they die, that’s all right! This is probably what some folks have been thinking. How absolutely wrong.

    Pat Robertson’s recently come out saying that Muslims are doing the devil’s work and are on a campaign towards world domination. Outcry? Nope. 46% of Americans, according to the Washington Post/ABC poll done lately believe Muslims are likely to resort to violence, and that they have a negative view of the faith as a whole.

    Me, I’ve taught Muslims and have known some very, very devout ones, and they have been, without a doubt, some of the kindest, most gentle, forgiving people I have known.

    The Tsunami hit a WHITE TOURIST area, and that got the majority of the media’s attention. If whites hadn’t been involved, the response, I bet, would have been slower.

    Hurricane Katrina, yes, only 2,000 or so died, but it’s woken the US up to the fact that it’s a dual-classed nation and the poor don’t fucking exist. It’s a huge source of American shame right now, and as such, is still a big topic.

    As far as the comments on American companies kow-towing to demands of censorship from the Chinese government, you’re fucking right, where’s the controversy? Everyone’s all cheering that Google’s standing up to the US gov’t on “privacy” laws, (while giving in to the Chinese on censorship simultaneously) but the reality is, Google’s just covering their financial ass so their competitors (who freely acquiesced to the gov’s demands) can’t discover the trade secrets that makes Google the top search engine in the world.

    You’re absolutely right — as far as ignorance goes, no one has as much a corner on that market as Americans — no offense to my American friends — and because they’re ignorant, because they don’t go behind the walls of their very infotainment-based news, ie CNN, they don’t even know how much they don’t know.

    But back to the issue in my post.

    You know and I know that to get people interested in change, you need to hit them where it hurts. “They’re gonna take away my porn?! FUCK THAT!” Everyone wants their porn.

    Lightness aside, the climate of America today is fast becoming the climate depicted in George Clooney’s Good Night, And Good Luck, about the House Un-American Committee. Objecting to the government’s stance on anything today is slapped with an “unpatriotic” label. Anyone who objects, is silent. They’re terrified to speak up and be labelled as a pinko leftie who sympathizes with the Murdering Terrorist Bastards.

    There is an atmosphere of fear, and despite thoughts there would be a backlash of anger and speaking up after the whole ridiculous reelection of Georgie, it has been the opposite. Things have quietened. The death toll in the war isn’t mentioned as often. Hell, even the wire-tapping has failed to ruffle many feathers. Bush could be impeached time and again, but he hasn’t. Cheney should have to resign — he fucking shot someone while in office — and he isn’t.

    Things are mighty fucked up in the States, and there’s little, if any, movement to change it. Where are the massive demonstrations? Where are the youth, who should be up in arms, shouting, “MY AMERICA DOESN’T SUPPRESS RIGHTS! MY AMERICA CELEBRATES FREEDOMS, DOESN’T MOCK THEM!”

    The youth are nowhere. They’re apathetic. They couldn’t give less of a shit about all of this. They’re more concerned with polyphonic ring tones and what Britney Spears did on the weekend. The youth are the embarrassment of their country, because they’re the only ones with nothing to lose, and the ones with the balls to fight, yet they choose not to.

    So, if picking a popular, vacuous topic like the protection of the right to “free speech” on porn and such is the way to fire up a little controversy, then so be it. I’m pandering to the masses in a way that I hope gets a few more people on page with the fight.

    And you’re right, too, in that the internet voice isn’t as valuable as we would hope it to be. My work was also plagiarized by that whore on AdultFriendFinder, too, so I know where you’re coming from. But I’m not just speaking in terms of having an internet voice — I’m wanting to see those demonstrations, demanding their America be a truly free place where dissent is encouraged, because DISSENT is what MADE America. How ironic.

    Being Canadian, it’s tragic, watching the downfall of a nation, and that’s what’s happening. The Canadian dollar is inching towards 90 cents on the American — up from 65 cents just three years ago. Give the Yankee buck a parachute — it’s gonna need it.

    It’s ridiculous, the ignorance and apathy in America today. As a Canadian, I shake my head. Daily. God, how I wish I could push a button to put the USA back on its path towards the American Dream, but there is no button, there is no path. It’s all just a blur of sanctimony and pomp. How sad.

    (Of course, there are a few Americans ballsy enough to speak out loud, with their real names. There are many Americans who understand the world issues and have passions for them, but most of them are too scared [and probably rightly so] to speak aloud. Then there are those like pretty boy Clooney who are drawing important parallels to their past. Ultimately, the buck stops at the press… and that’s a whole other issue. When the press is owned by mega conglomerates who have their own issues they’re concerned about — profit, legislation to protect their asses — how can you trust the source? There is no journalistic integrity in America today. It’s about fucking time journalists remember their job: To report on things as they are, and to try to change the world for the better. God knows that’s why I got my fucking degree.)

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