THE DAILY TRAVESTY for March 6,
2000
Volume 1, Issue
43
Here to gladly put up with your
shit!
Holy Mother of God, I shall proclaim this from
mountain tops!!
Pornography Is Good For You
by Gary McIntosh
Pornography is good for you.
Heresy and blasphemy are good for you. Sedition is good for you.
Secular humanism is good for you. And perversion, when channeled properly,
is extremely good for you. But censors are not good for you. Censors
are mother-fuckers.
They are. What they want to do
is eliminate your access to information. Why do they want to do
this? Censors, such as US Senator Jesse Helms (who has become a one-man
Hayes Office for the NEA), are megalomaniacal rat bastards who know information
is power and ignorance promotes passive acceptance of multiple
oppressions. Megalomaniacal rat bastards get all hot and sticky at the
thought of oppressing anyone or anything. But try to get them to admit
that. They'll never concede the truth, preferring to maintain their stance
of moral purity.
Oscar Wilde was right on target
when he wrote, "I
never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not
heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid and entirely lacking in the smallest
sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simply
beasts. I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural
virtue."
Morality, such as it is, is a moving
target. Society is fluid. For people who cannot bear to see the
details change -- even if the big picture remains unaltered -- censorship is the
easiest of cop-outs. It is an act of both tremendous cowardice and
astonishing chutzpah to declare any set of ideas off limits. All of us are
offended by something, but that's part of the obligation of living in a world
full of eclectic and various ideas and people. Humanity's lack of
homogeneity is what makes life interesting despite its travails. It's the
reason we have conversations, it's the reason we have sex, it's
everything. To be frightened by eclecticism and diversity is to be
frightened by reality.
Usually that big picture does remain
the same, by the way, even if the mitering on the frame changes a bit from time
to time. The emotional and psychological repertoire of humanity is
consistent. From one generation to the next, our bodies and intellectual
capacity remain pretty much immutable. Our biology requires that we eat
and sleep and have sex. Our culture is nothing more than a set of
sanctioned behaviors -- most of them arbitrary. Are you paying attention,
Rev. Wildmon? New ideas are frequently all we have to set us apart from
those who preceded us, and ideas go in and out of fashion all the time. That
amorphous series of blobular info-bits is what propels us from one discovery,
invention, masterpiece, epiphany, poem, painting and industry to the next.
Without such momentum, our species would shrivel and die.
And so the mother-fuckers, craven
bullies all of them, in a great Olestra-like flurry of intellectual anal
leakage, begin their campaigns of information destruction while those who defend
the US Constitution, such as the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
are demonized as un-American. God forbid anyone should have (or defend) an
original or an unsanctioned thought. God forbid anyone should question the
status quo, or the church, or the government. God forbid we should see an
uncovered crotch. God forbid we should communicate with or learn from one
another. God forbid.
The thing with censors is, they're
never satisfied. Just look at Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting
Network, who thinks his pale white ass should be in the Oval Office and his
apocalyptic trigger finger on the doomsday button. Censors' hunger for
power, dominance and control is insatiable. They start with the easiest
targets: Unpopular ideas are always the first ones excised. But they're
never the last. As soon as one victory is theirs, censors' demands are
doubled. Exponential increases in power are the real goal, obscured by a
pretense of piety. Censors are generally those people who know their ideas
are insufficiently interesting, reasonable, or worthwhile to survive in direct
competition against other ideas. They must act quickly, dishonestly to
gain and keep the upper hand despite their poverty of merit, acting against the
best interests of their society and their species. As an example, school
textbook censors such as Mel and Norma Gabler of the Texas-based Education
Research Analysts or Phyllis Schlafley of the Eagle Forum aren't merely
anti-intellectual, they are anti-intelligence. We have arrived in a future
where intelligence is actively discouraged and, whenever possible,
crushed.
Censors could reasonably be called
the Anti-Meme, a sort of Anti-Christ for memetics.
We are not obliged to like or
encourage people, thoughts, or actions that offend us. However, we are
obliged to ask questions and challenge assumptions and learn from one
another. The cliche tells us to know our enemies. That's fine
advice, if for no other reason than because exposing ourselves to ideas which
challenge our assumptions might lead to understanding and alliances rather than
combat, or it might give us what we need to discredit an opponent's ridiculous,
vile notions. Censorship eliminates both of these possibilities. All
it leaves is ignorance, and ignorance leads perhaps inevitably to
oppression.
Censors hate anyone with a brain, a
heart, or a backbone. If you have any one of these things, you have an
enemy. Better that you should know.
"The moment dogma enters the
brain, all intellectual activity ceases."
Robert
Anton
Wilson