I have pornography on the mind lately.
You might say “tell us something surprising” or “aren’t you a little old for that?” But that would miss the point of why I have it on the mind. One obituary and a news mailing from my Law School did it to me.
Until just a few years ago, my hometown still had an independent bookstore and magazine stand downtown, City News. It was mostly magazines, frankly, and about 15% of it, as I recall, was pornography. One of the brothers who owned it until it finally closed died May 11.
City News and I had some history together. As a young adolescent, I was keenly interested in the — ahem! — “adult” material they had, and they were lax about underage browsers (this was before the brothers owned it). As a professional working half a block away decades later, I resented the pornography, but I realized that City News probably wasn’t viable without it. And I see that the brother who died, of complications of ALS, was pretty darned smart (Duke, magna cum laud) and had a pretty admirable life that I didn’t know about.
As I mused aloud on this, my wife reminded me that as a journalism major, she interviewed the female owner of a similar news stand in Peoria. Asking about the porn (which as I recall was “harder” by the standards of that day than what City News ever carried), she got the answer “I have a disabled son who is very costly to raise. Without pornography, the store dies and I’m out of work.”
Even Barnes & Noble and Borders have a small stash of what today qualifies as soft core, prudently wrapped in plastic bags.
I write this from a Marriott Hotel in L.A. Marriott is under Mormon ownership, as I recall. There was no Gideon Bible for my morning devotions, but I could have viewed pornography on the TV had I wished. I know offhand of no exceptions to “pay-per-view” porn in major hotel chains. The market apparently demands it.
I thought of this, too, as I saw a photo of my law school classmate, Scott Flanders, arm-in-arm with the Dean, with the caption declaring that he is CEO at Playboy. Scott was a libertarian-type conservative. Perhaps he still is. How wide the gulf between cultural conservatives and others of the “conservative” label!
Porn is everywhere. Yesterday before leaving for L.A., I attended a Daybreak Rotary meeting to receive a grant check for Matrix Lifeline, a pregnancy resource center I’ve been affiliated with for nearly three decades. Another grant recipient was the PEERS Project in Lafayette. It and all similar programs are losing their federal funding (elections have consequences). Mike Boston, the leader in Lafayette, trying to convey what they’re up against, said “just watch MTV for seven minutes if you can stomach it. No, just three minutes is enough.”
My wife just told me, as she leafed through an L.A. travel guide, that there’s a Porno Hall of Fame on Santa Monica Boulevard not too far from where we sit.
I hate it. We have lost all sense of shame seemliness. Some things are meant to be kept in private. Time was, not long ago, that the Dean of a good law school would have hesitated to be photographed with the CEO or a porn empire. Time was that a news stand could have survived without trafficking in porn.
I don’t accept market demand as an excuse. There are some things the market should not provide, demand be damned. And there are some trades less honorable than ditch-digging, even if they’re more remunerative.
Brother Jim, requiescat in pacem. I can’t really approve of the choice you made, but your Judge knows exactly how to factor in the spirit of the age.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 