Making Larry Flint Blush
Commentary by Greg Lewis / TheRant.US
January 19, 2005
We're in the midst of a technology-driven transformation
of the meaning of the word "morality" that would have been impossible
to foretell even a quarter century ago. The virtually instantaneous availability
of — to cite only one example — pornographic material of every
imaginable (and some unimaginable) variety to anyone with high-speed internet
capability veritably defies our society's ability to manage it.
Whether we're considering the sheer rapidity with which
enhancements to the technologies that facilitate such access occur, or
the economic inducements to (in this case) porn principals, particularly
producers and female stars, to continue to pursue their chosen "careers,"
we're dealing with an industry (pornography), not to say a cultural phenomenon,
that epitomizes an unprecedented change in what is morally acceptable
to the American public. Indeed, the mainstreaming in a variety of venues
of what has traditionally been considered off limits stands to render
obsolete the very moral and spiritual standards that have formed the foundation
of our nation since it was created more than two centuries ago.
For starters, the consequences of recent changes in the
way information is transmitted would have defied any of our country's
founding fathers' abilities to foresee. I mean, who the hell could have
predicted in 1985, let alone in 1785, that pornography would be mainstreamed
to even a fraction of the degree it is today? Who could have told you
in the mid-1980s, during the heyday of the centralized distribution of
porno films via "adult" theaters, that within ten years or so
a few clicks of your computer's mouse would enable you (or, perhaps more
to the point, your adolescent son or daughter) to access, in the comfort
of your home, pornographic images that would make Hustler Magazine publisher
Larry Flint blush?
The real upshot of this technology-driven mutation in
moral values is its effect on our society's young people between the ages
of about 10 and 17. It is our sons and daughters who are growing up as
members of a newly minted, digitally mediated, anything-goes generation.
From the raunchy and irresponsible sexuality flaunted via such venues
as MTV, to a drug culture that pervades our lives, to schools whose teachers
and administrators — in a cowardly bow to the left's imposition
on our society of its lack of principles — willfully refuse to stand
up for, not to say promote, positive moral and spiritual values, our kids
are, in too many cases, set adrift in a bewildering environment, one in
which, given their collective lack of a moral compass, it must be enormously
difficult for them to get their bearings.
The moral and behavioral principles that many of us 50-
and 60-somethings internalized as we were growing up during the 1940s
and '50s too often today are looked upon by our children with a "so-what"
attitude. Where our kids are accosted on all fronts by an information
technology that promotes a culture of violence and promiscuous sexuality
and whatever-gets-you-over ethics, principles of behavior that counsel
restraint and adherence to a code of conduct which runs counter to quick
success and immediate gratification are hard to sell.
This circumstance was exacerbated by Democrats who, in
their attempts to mainstream Bill Clinton's dalliances (to put the best
face on the former President's occasionally rapacious relationships with
the female predatees — is "predatee" a term that can be
invoked to refer to the objects of a predator's attentions? — whom
he stalked prior to and during his presidency) have managed to define
sexual perversity, not to mention the acceptance of same, upward.
But notwithstanding the desperate attempts of liberal
justifiers of the legitimacy of sexual promiscuity who surfaced to defend
their embattled President, even Democrat perversity-flaks would have been
hard-pressed to foresee that the U.S. pornography "industry"
would be legitimized to the point where it was holding its own annual
awards ceremonies — the venal counterpart of Hollywood's Academy
Awards — in which we could witness porn starlets (the porn industry
is dominated by women; men are only coincidental, and underpaid, adjuncts
to the success of porn productions) breathlessly thanking their producers
and directors and co-stars for voting them "this honor." Indeed,
these young women not infrequently go so far as to acknowledge their families'
contributions to their surpassing prowess at the art of screwing for the
camera.
Which is to say that, in the past several years, the act
of having remained emotionally uninvolved while having sex with any number
of partners and at the same time managing to convince porn addicts (who,
admittedly, are not among the most discerning of audiences) that you're
being transported to the heights of sexual ecstasy by what your partner
is doing to you has become the acknowledged standard by which a whole
class of actors' performances are judged and rewarded. Not only that,
it's become a standard which the porn industry is more than happy to flaunt
through rebroadcasts on obliging cable TV networks of its awards ceremonies.
Indeed, porn is now being granted legitimacy as a full-blown
(sorry!) industry, a segment of the American economy that generates revenues
significant enough to warrant recognition. Porn's economic clout, as measured
by the sheer dollar-volume of sales of pornographic videos and sexual
paraphernalia and internet-based subscriptions and other related merchandise,
has given rise to nothing less than a "star system" populated
by young women who, usually at a fairly green age, decide to "get
into" porn and, by dint of a combination of innate personal appeal
and hard work and perseverance, manage to create a distinctive identity
for themselves among the genre's enthusiasts. But porn's ascendancy is,
if nothing else, a disturbing reminder that the broad acceptance of lowest-common-denominator
popular culture in America is a phenomenon against which appeals to traditional
morality and adherence to higher standards of behavior carry increasingly
less and less weight.
In the most important sense, it is the ascendancy of the
left/liberal/Democrat agenda that has enabled this state of affairs to
come about. Hell, in the name of freedom of speech, public libraries aren't
even allowed to block access to internet porn to the kids who use their
computers. That's because protecting Larry Flint's right to spew filth
indiscriminately trumps the rights of everyday citizens — including
our right to fulfill our responsibilities as parents — to inculcate
in their children a sense of what is right and wrong that will enable
them (the children), at the low end, to avoid contracting an STD, and,
at the high end, to become genuinely upstanding members of their communities,
citizens who uphold and perpetuate the values we must live by and pass
on to subsequent generations in order that our unimaginably wonderful
way of life might be perpetuated.
The situation today has an inordinately high perversity
coefficient. Liberals and feminists will insist that males in the workplace
who tell an off-color joke in mixed company be pilloried and then dismissed
from their jobs for sexual harrassment, while at the same time they defend
the rights of producers of pornography to distribute their material without
restriction, even to children. Adult working women must be protected at
all costs against the slightest affront to their sensibilities, while
innocent children can be subjected to all manner of the most degenerate
pornographic material without its purveyors suffering any consequences.
Comedian Dennis Miller summed up the situation with his usual caustic
acuity: "The ACLU will bitterly contest our right to display the
Nativity on public property at Christmas, but they'll defend to their
dying breath the drunk who stumbles onto the same Nativity scene and tries
to screw one of the sheep."
Because we have allowed the Left to frame the cultural/moral/spiritual
debate for the past half century or so, we have abdicated the moral high
ground, not to say the psychic territory defined by spiritual truth. When
leftists are allowed, through political and cultural and judicial activism,
to impose upon the American people positions that are incompatible with,
not to say destructive of, the values and principles on which our nation
has risen to its current position of global prominence and positive influence
. . . when we cede the right to even defend, let alone promote, universally
positive values as representing the foundation of a truly harmonious global
community, then we shrink from our most important responsibility to the
world community. It is a responsibility we must not continue to abjure,
not to say one which we must reclaim with all due haste.
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