The New Pornographers

In September 1980, conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. paid a left-handed compliment to satyr Hugh Hefner, stating, “No one has practiced the art of civic diversion more prodigiously than Hugh Hefner, the founder of ‘Playboy’ magazine and godfather of the sexual revolution.”

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The context was a column he wrote critical of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish monitoring group, sometimes itself in the news, ironically enough, for policing speech, for giving America’s most illustrious pornographer its First Amendment Free Speech award. But times have changed since then, and pornography has drifted steadily from the margins to the mainstream. Such that today, it’s quaint examples of opposition to it that stir up faint, seismic reverberations. A case in point: Calvin College, a Christian school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, made news when it disinvited The New Pornographers, a Canadian indie-pop group, after first asking the band to perform on campus. The band’s name, which seems to imply it endorsed pornography, was given as the reason why. Hence, the following message posted on the college website providing some clarification: “The band’s name, to some, is mistakenly associated with pornography. Consequently, Calvin, to some, was mistakenly associated with pornography. Neither the college nor the band endorses pornography.” For fans of the Bare Naked Ladies, this hang-up over a name will evoke a time when an assistant for Toronto mayor June Rowlands made a decision to drop BNL from the line-up of performers on the bill for the 1991 New Year's Eve concert in Nathan Phillips Square. The reason? The staffer felt the band’s name objectified women. In any event, being the object of officious censorship gave the band a million dollars’ worth of free and sympathetic publicity (speaking of, If I Had a Million Dollars), and launched them on their career in a big way. As I write, Toronto is finishing hosting the Toronto International Film Festival for its 35th year. During all that time, scores of films were shown that have objectified women. Amazing how blinkered bureaucratic officialdom can be! Also amazing is how inclusive the definition of pornography’s become, for we now have so-called “emotional pornography” -- hyper-sentimental story content that’s meant to tug at our heartstrings, as with so many tear-jerkers. Hands up all who wept copious tears over the sorrowful ending of Old Yeller or the joyous conclusion to Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Wallowing in “emotional porn,” were we? And, as a subset to this, we note the arrival of “pessimism porn,” the economic prognostications of doomsters that are anything but upbeat, all brimming with hope of an imminent turnaround, but that bristle instead with talk of being only at the beginning of a steep and protracted downturn. Were Walt Disney and Saturday Evening Post illustrator Norman Rockwell, by contrast, pitching “optimism porn?” The phrase “pessimism porn” was coined by New York Times business writer Hugo Lindgren to deprecate the often spot-on trends forecaster Gerald Celente’s predictions of a middle-class tax revolt, food riots, and America’s city parks host to sprawling tent cities for the homeless. This happened back in early February of 2009. Of course, America now has a feisty Tea Party movement, 40 million citizens dependent on food stamps for hand-to-mouth sustenance, and new armies of the night, homeless families, sleeping in their cars, seeking shelter in storage rental units, and pitching their tents on municipal green. Who knew that porn could be this insightful? New modalities of obscenity are springing up like poisonous mushrooms. Some, like the ultra violence in the recent crop of video games, where grisly chainsaw dismemberments are the norm, are too obvious to merit comment. So, let’s belly up to the concept of “food porn.” A guest on Oprah this past August, weighing in at well over 500 pounds, confessed to devouring a two-tiered wedding cake over two days, which she managed to coax down with a gallon of milk. That kind of caloric excess is, of course, simply mind-boggling. But isn’t that the idea? The individual at home, fretting at being a mere 40 pounds overweight, is confronted by this ghastly spectacle of a morbidly obese, gargantuan flesh pudding, intent on shedding 400 pounds. Any concern Mr. Couch Potato might have at carrying a spare tire around quickly fades, replaced by a gaga fascination over the fate of a woman entombed in layers of dimpled fat. When the circus came to town, along with the dizzying rides and the spectacle of tigers jumping fiery hoops, there were the freak shows, with their bearded lady, Lobster Boy, and Elephant Man. It came and then, after a couple weeks, the circus left town, while bemused townspeople turned their attention to serious matters once again. But now the circus never leaves, and the freak shows run 24/7 on TV and on other forms of electronic media. Richard Hofstadter’s much-debated 1964 essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics introduced readers to the motivating power of ideological porn. It contains this rather head-spinning sentence: “Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan.” Hofstadter elaborated on what professional psychologists called projection; that is, when members of one group will ascribe to another rival group a bizarre mindset and deviant set of practices that underscore their creepy menace, their alien status. Think of these dark suspicions as barbed splinters dug out of the quick of the oversoul from within one faction and then jabbed vindictively into the tender hide of another. Hofstadter could just as easily written: Anti-Judaism has always been the pornography of the National Socialist. A thesis that is made easily defensible by simply citing the lurid anti-Semitic editorial cartoons in Julius Streicher’s Nazi-era newspaper, Der Stürmer. It is this same dynamic that accounts for the great success of black propaganda in wartime, and which gave us the World War One German as a “ruthless Hun” and World War Two Japanese as the “yellow-bellied Jap.” Old stereotypes are given a sinister makeover, to conform to the necessary, new racial prejudices. Far more impressive, mind you, are the embellishments added to the leader’s image by the perverse cosmeticians who gave us “Uncle Joe” and that later prototype of modern progressive revolutionary, Chairman Mao – shorn of the hobnailed jackboots of Genghis Kahn and Attila the Hun, he came off as avuncular and genial as the Gucci-shod, TV talking-head pitching low-premium life insurance, extra-strength denture adhesive, and Viagra. A veritable monument to high-end “optimism porn.” After digging in the Beijing archives of Mao’s old Public Security Bureau and finding revealing historical documents, Hong Kong-based historian Frank Dikötter has published Mao's Great Famine; The Story of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, a new work in which we learn in detail of a state-run mega-holocaust that killed 45 million Chinese between 1958 and 1962. That this was an orgy of unspeakable sadism, this single paragraph, lifted from the book review in Friday's edition of London’s The Independent, makes abundantly clear: “State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death.” (cf. Arifa Akbar, “Mao’s Great Leap Forward ‘killed 45 million in four years’,” The Independent, 17 September 2010.) It’s truly impressive how much Maoist “optimism porn” was mainstreamed over the decades; including the trendy films of New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, silk screen Mao portraits by Andy Warhol, Pierre Trudeau’s travel book Two Innocents in Red China, uncritical adulation surrounding the person of Dr. Norman Bethune, cult of the “barefoot doctors” touted by Dr. Joshua Horn, promotion of Mao’s Little Red Book, and on and on. Mao, as a liberal media darling, was, for years, hailed as an iconic saint in progressive circles; a lot like Fidel Castro's old comrade, Che Guevera, today. Say, have you heard? Playboy magazine is now available in the Braille format. Egalitarian -- or what? Orest Slepokura is a retired schoolteacher, after 30-odd years spent teaching, much of that in Alberta; but also in and around Montreal, as well as in a Native community on James Bay, over in London, England, and Toulon, France. A lifelong reader, Orest continues using much of my time reading books, journals, and newspapers.

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