The presidential election was a noble cause. Of course, I was mightily impressed with the obvious intelligence and capability of Barack Obama, but the all-out fight, and by far the greatest effort, was to stop McCain/Palin and prevent the nation - and indirectly the world - being run according to the prejudices of Joe the Plumber and the Religious Right. We all knew the damage from four more years of Bush policies was unthinkable - particularly if they were served Palin-style.
Then, even as Obama was pulling ahead and the race appeared to be going his way, the chickens of the Bush era came home to roost. The housing bubble burst, Wall Street collapsed, banks foundered, and credit became a memory. We emerged from the euphoria of the Obama victory and the inauguration of the first black president into a bleak winter world of layoffs, shutdowns, paycuts, and surging unemployment, where money didn't talk - it whimpered. With a worst-case possibility that capitalism itself might actually be collapsing, the only salvation seemed to be government intervention, and we heard the word "socialism" as a possible alternative rather than an epithet.
As almost always happens, the noble cause gave way to worried self-interest. How were you and I going to survive in a world where Starbucks, General Motors, and Sprint Nextel are in deep trouble? The adult industry had encountered its own difficulties well before Wall Street crumbled and the banks spun out. Beset by piracy, constantly evolving technologies, plus the general decline in consumer spending, it had seen the disturbing decline in DVD sales and the falloff of online revenues.
I'm not quite sure what Larry Flynt and Joe Francis hoped to achieve when they went on TV to demand a $5 billion government porn bailout beyond garnering publicity for their repective empires, but it could hardly have endeared them to either the public or Washington. Not that it really mattered. No imaginable White House would risk underwriting adult entertainment, and porn is only going to survive this depression by a combination of its own efforts and a general economic recovery.
No one in the industry could have seriously expected any government hand-outs. The best anybody could hope for from Candidate Obama was that, if elected, he might usher in a cultural climate of increased tolerance and an end to random Justice Department harrasment and prosecutions. While President Obama has been far too busy trying to save the economy and contain the Bush wars to lay out any kind of cultural agenda, he has proved hip and eminently reasonable. He has directly embraced gay equality in a number of major speeches, and will certainly not appoint a fanatic like John Ashcroft or an incompetent like Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. I do, however, sense a slight aura of puritanism about him. I certainly don't see him handing over the FCC to the Religious Right, but if their support needed to be bought on some vital vote, I could see it being purchased with some token tightening up on porn.
Obama is too smart to do anything drastic. The supporters of porn-as-free-speech are distressingly few on the ground, but enough progressives would look very askance at any War On Porn coming out of the Eric Holder Justice Department, unless it was on kiddie porn or something equally horrific - although I sometimes wonder if consenting kink could be mistaken for horror by uninitiated squares, no matter how liberal.
No argument that Barack Obama has lost some of his original gilded wonder. Every day we see him, often in his shirtsleeves, leaning forward in concentration, as he deals with some new and horrendous problem, usually not of his making, and all the while taking merciless and frequently inane fire from Republicans who have nothing better to do. The Obama presidency is not, right now, a happy time, and the man is leading us through some unbelievably bleak and ravaged landscapes. But I am still very glad he's out there walking point for America. We picked him, and now is not the time to regret the decision.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com
This article originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of AVN Online. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscribe
