[lit-ideas] Republican Values, Republican Porn

(An interesting article at the Washington Post on the Republicans' "Values" and 
how they got 
their money. -- andreas)

(...) one of Bush's most popular stump speech lines from the 2000 election: "My 
job will be 
to usher in the responsibility era, a culture that will stand in stark contrast 
to the last 
few decades, which has clearly said to America: If it feels good, do it. And if 
you've got a 
problem, blame somebody else."

But this strategy conveniently exempts the corporate elite from those high 
standards of 
responsibility. In his buzzed-about book, "What's the Matter With Kansas," the 
liberal 
writer Thomas Frank hypothesizes that today's winning GOP majority is the 
culmination of a 
marriage of convenience between the GOP's economic elite and social 
conservatives. The 
economic elite needs the votes of the social conservatives to win elections. 
And the 
economic elite needs to win elections to pursue the tax cuts and deregulation 
they seek.

Frank believes that the economic conservatives convince the masses to vote 
against their 
economic interests by creating an angry and permanent cult of victimization 
that diverts 
attention from the elites and pins all of the country's problems on the 
eponymous liberal 
bogeyman. Even as the GOP continues to consolidate and hoard its economic and 
political 
power, the Washington-based leadership and strategists of the GOP mask its lack 
of progress 
in the culture war -- even as it accomplishes its goals of tax cuts and 
deregulation -- by 
convincing the masses to rise up against their true oppressors, Sean Penn, 
Harvard, and the 
New York Times editorial page.

In the end, the Rupert Murdochs of the world could not exist without the Utah 
Counties of 
the world. His political party needs their voters. His businesses need their 
patronage.

(...) In this world of irony, corporate leaders at companies as diverse as News 
Corp., 
Marriott International and Time Warner can profit by selling red state 
consumers the very 
material that red state culture is supposed to despise. Those elites then 
funnel the 
proceeds to the GOP, which in turn has used the money to successfully convince 
red state 
voters that the other political party is solely responsible for the decline of 
the 
civilization.

There was never any doubt how the good people of Utah County, Utah, would vote 
on Nov. 2. It 
has long prided itself as a bastion of conservatism and family values. And so 
when voters 
were given the opportunity to choose between President Bush and Sen. John F. 
Kerry, 86 
percent of them went for Bush, making Utah County the second most Republican 
county in the 
most Republican state in the country. Utah County has a population of roughly 
370,000. Its 
largest employer is the Mormon-run Brigham Young University.

But Utah County is also the home of a mid-1990s court case that demonstrated 
some of the 
ambiguity about "values," even in the reddest of the red states. Randy Spencer 
was the 
attorney that the court appointed to defend a the Movie Buff video store in 
American Fork 
from local prosecutors who had charged the store's owner with 15 counts of 
pornography for 
renting tapes such as "Jugsy," "Young Buns II" and "Sex Secrets of High-Priced 
Call Girls." 
The prosecutors claimed the store was violating the community standards of 
suburban Provo. 
Spencer, who describes himself as a devout Mormon, challenged the prosecution's 
definition 
of the community's values by subpoenaing records that showed Utah County 
tolerated the 
consumption of porn in several outlets: Utah County cable subscribers had 
ordered at least 
20,000 explicit movies in the past two years; the Sun Coast Video store in the 
town of Orem 
was deriving 20 percent of its rental sales from adult movies, even though 
adult movies only 
made up 2 percent of the store's inventory; Dirty Jo Punsters in nearby Spanish 
Fork was 
racking up on average $111,000 dollars per year selling sex toys, blow up dolls 
and other 
adult fare; the Provo Marriott across the street from the courthouse sold 3,448 
adult 
pay-per-view movie rentals in 1998 alone.

More at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15644-2004Dec21.html

yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com 

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