When former FBI deputy director W. Mark Felt broke his 30-year silence by revealing in a Vanity Fair interview that he was the notorious “Deep Throat,” not only was a 33-year-old mystery solved, but a number of odd connections came to light.
In this context, Deep Throat was the anonymous informant who, from the depths of a dark parking garage, steered Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s 1972 Washington Post Watergate investigation that led to the ultimate downfall of President Richard Nixon. Felt’s flippant code name was inspired, of course, by the legendary Linda Lovelace porn classic that was released within weeks of the Watergate burglary, and was the other big talking point of that highly dramatic summer of ’72, when comedians did Deep Throat and Watergate gags back to back.
The ambition of director Gerard Damiano had been to make Deep Throat the first porn movie ever to cross over into the mainstream, and, to a degree, he succeeded. For the first time, the title of a porn flick was mentioned in the national press and on network TV. Timing and Felt’s code name were not, however, the only coincidental connections between Deep Throat and the fall of Nixon (explored in the 2005 documentary Inside Deep Throat, incidentally).
Two years earlier, the notoriously sex-o-phobic Nixon had declared that, far from being acceptable in mainstream U.S. culture, smut should be eradicated. Nixon had set up his own Presidential Commission on Pornography and Obscenity, but had furiously dismissed its findings when it came back with conclusions like “Sex offenders were less likely to have used pornography than the average man and more likely to have been raised in a conservative, religious households,” and recommended that porn – being of no apparent harm and actually mildly beneficial – should be immediately decriminalized. Although quaint to the modern eye, Deep Throat was a direct challenge to that old-time puritan morality to which Nixon paid vote-pandering lip service.
Since Nixon, the wiping out of porn and defending the nation against smut has become a tradition among conservative administrations. From Nixon to George W. Bush, republican presidents have taken time out to defend the nation from the erotic—no matter how busy they might have been shredding the Constitution, creating their own private gestapos, tinkering with the electoral system, dismantling social services, or starting spurious wars. In 1986, Ronald Reagan had Attorney General Ed Meese set up a fresh Justice Department porn commission to refute the findings of the one that had so upset Nixon, but the draconian recommendations of the Meese Commission were swiftly declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
After eight years of comparatively benign neglect on the part of Bill Clinton, George Bush’s Attorneys General, Ashcroft and now Gonzales, resumed the War on Porn with a vengeance, and politicians like Rep. Michael Oxley (R-Ohio) thundered righteously that with “literally thousands of sites devoted to every manner of perversion and brutality ... the Web is awash in degrading smut.”
In bringing up the Internet, however, Oxley defined exactly why the War on Porn will ultimately be lost. If the fall of Richard Nixon proved anything, it was that politicians – even Presidents – can say what they like, but, ultimately, reality catches up with them. In this instance that reality is twofold. On one hand, porn has a vast and demanding consumer base that will not vanish simply because federal and local prosecutors go after a few content providers or websites. We also live with a technology in which delivery systems multiply faster than any justice department or federal commission can frame legislation to control or censor them. The monster irony confronting today’s foes of indecency is simple, but massive and unchallengeable. Whether the likes of Rep. Oxley like it or not, the consumption of smut is the Will of the People, and, in the long run, there’s no way to fight the Will of the People. Nixon learned that the hard way.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com.
