HOUSTON—Okay, so the rig is up. I mean, the jig is up. The oil has been spilled ... I mean, the beans. The truth has been unearthed. Pornography was not only behind the horrific “accident” that continues to wreak havoc in the Gulf, but it also was behind the failure to regulate the economy by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
But while it is not breaking news that two internal reports found that some employees at both the SEC and now the Minerals Management Service (MMS) were watching pornography rather than doing their jobs overseeing their respective industries, what is not generally known is the extent to which the porn industry was actively involved in creating the biggest stock market crash and the biggest North American oil spill in modern history.
Grab your undies, folks; these were not coincidences and the accidents were anything but.
But I’m not going to name names. I ain’t stupid and I’m a family man. I have a wife and kid and don’t want to wind up sleeping with now dead fishes. But conspiracies do exist and sometimes they’re just as serious, if idiotic, as they appear. This would be one of those seriously idiotic conspiracies that just happened to come off perfectly the first two times it was put into play. (Note the use of italics with the word “first.”)
Now, to put this into a modicum of context, there has been a smattering of mainstream journalists, like Daniel Indiviglio of The Atlantic, who have written pointed screeds about the worrisome extent of bureaucratic porn watching, but they are generally more in the vein of ‘being concerned’ posts rather than ‘wtf is really going on here’ essays.
Indiviglio penned two such wink-wink articles recently—subtly titled “Did Porn Cause the Financial Crisis?” and “Did Porn Cause the Oil Spill in the Gulf?”—that were designed to capture the reader’s attention and then quickly dispense with the idea that porn was actually to blame for either incident.
In the first, about the financial crisis, he takes the porn watching somewhat seriously, but notes, “On one hand, two cases in 2007 means that either it wasn't that widespread of a problem or it hadn't yet been detected. On the other hand, the fact that this behavior seems to have been so prevalent among senior level employees is particularly troubling. They're the ones who should have been closely watching the financial industry and leading the way to help prevent the system from collapsing.”
His second piece, written today, pulls back a bit on the idea that porn watching actually helped caused the spill. “What is it with bureaucrats and pornography? Last month, we learned that some SEC employees were busy surfing porn when they should have been discovering fraud or preventing the financial crisis. When will the government put some filters on its computers?
“Of course, the real question here is why government regulators don't just fail to do their jobs, but strive to fail so spectacularly? The report blames nepotism. It says most of the problem employees were hired more due to connections than actual knowledge or experience in the industry.”
And it is precisely at this juncture that pundits such as Indiviglio start to miss the real story, the real connection. Sure, we all know that most of the people hired during the Bush Administration to oversee the regulatory agencies were actually hostile to the idea of regulating the actual industries.
We saw that and understood that it was okay to do that because Bush was a man of character, and men of character never act out of character. In other words, what the hell else was he going to do, put an actual environmentalist in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency? If you believe that, what the hell have you been smoking? (Some of that good MMS crack, I’ll be guessing.)
But nepotism was just the tip of the iceberg. The real question was (and is), what were and are all those people going to do with their days if they’re not doing what they weren’t hired to do? They have to do something!
And that’s where the porn came in. It might have been someone deep in the bowels of the Department of the Interior who came up with the idea, but I’m not sure because I think they’re dead by now. But I know it was a low-level bureaucrat looking to rise quickly through the ranks who first came up with the idea to work with the porn industry to provide a “non-harmful” way to spend the day.
This, of course, was a brilliant if controversial solution. Brilliant because who doesn’t love porn during the workday, but controversial because it could never be revealed that Bush appointees considered porn “harmless.” (Did I mention that the originator of the idea is dead?)
It made sense for the industry, too. The reason why hardly needs explication. A bad economy means fewer jobs; fewer jobs means men at home; men at home means more men watching porn. (Note, please, that not all employees work for the government. Some fools actually work for companies that frown upon watching porn at work, and actually prevent it.)
The same goes for the spill. Oil in the gulf means no work for fisherman, no boating, and no swimming and no days at the beach; it also means fewer jobs on the Gulf, which leads us directly to the third prong of the preceding syllogism. People deep in crisis (or boredom) always retreat to the safest activity they know, and for men that usually means porn.
So there you have it. Porn has not only been a cause of these disasters, it has been a willing and active participant. A co-conspirator, if you will, with the government and industry. And the worst (or best) part is that the porn = disaster paradigm is far from finished. Think of the crash and the spill as wake-up calls, and measly ones at that.
We’re now working with the fine people who work at Area 51 on the mother of all wake-up calls. Unfortunately, (or fortunately) by the time y’all have pulled your heads out of your crotches and smelled the coffee, it’ll be too late.
Porn will have won and you’ll have no one to blame but the regulators.
