If only by the law of averages, some of you reading this must be both Republicans and staunch supporters of President George Bush and his policies. If the polls are to be believed, while some of us are of the grim opinion that the war in Iraq is an indefensible military seizure of some of the world’s richest remaining oil reserves, others will claim that our invasion of the Middle East was a vital move to protect the security of the USA and the free world. Some of us may be horrified by the Homeland Defense measures that have come into force since the 9/11 attack on New York, seeing them as a dangerous erosion of the Constitution, while others accept them as necessary safeguards against the threat of terrorism. A number of you reading this column will be completely apolitical, simply going about your daily business, doing your best to make a buck, and only confronting the broader issues when they have a noticeable impact on daily life. What really unites any of us who read and write this magazine is that we have an interest - or a vested interest - in adult entertainment on the Internet.
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You may not see the Bush administration as your enemy, but the feeling is hardly reciprocated. Like it or not, adult entertainment is viewed in some sections of the Ashcroft Justice Department as a criminal activity that should be treated accordingly. We are the evil pornographers and must be eradicated. Norman Mailer, writing in The New York Review of Books just prior to the invasion of Iraq, delivered a similar warning. "From the militant Christian point of view, America is close to rotten. So one perk for the White House, should America become an international military machine huge enough to conquer all adversaries, is that American sexual freedom, all that gay, feminist, lesbian, transvestite hullabaloo, will be seen as too much of luxury and will be put back in the closet again."
Indeed, it may well go deeper than even Mailer imagines. Many in the White House, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon must feel that the root of the problem is the Internet itself, and would dearly like to pull the plug on the whole unmanageable monster, killing the smut, silencing the dissenting voices, and damming the flood of all those undisciplined e-mails. By default, the Web is the electronic grapevine of the anti-war movement, and has to be a thorn in the government’s side. For a couple of months now, we have been on the receiving end of totally managed news. On CNN and Fox, Donald Rumsfeld and the generals have been doing all of the talking, and the only alternative to the official TV doublespeak has been the Internet.
Obviously, the Internet cannot be shut down. Major corporations have too much serious money invested to ever let that happen, but what we may see is an increasing degree of blocking, and attempted censorship in the name of everything from parental control to national security. Some of you may be gung ho for Bush and applaud everything he’s doing, but you may still find yourself in the same free-speech slit trench with the peace marchers, the dissidents, the protesters, and the conspiracy theorists. I don’t recall who said that war can make strange bedfellows, but it would appear to be true, whatever, and whenever the war.
Mick Farren is an Englishman living in L.A. He is a journalist, novelist, recording artist, and all-around troublemaker. He has also written songs for bands, including Motorhead and Metallica. He made legal history by defending himself at a lengthy U.K. obscenity trial for publishing the work of controversial cartoonist Robert Crumb. For more, visit www.thanatosoft.freeserve.co.uk.
