[lit-ideas] Republican Values, Republican Porn
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 11:26:58 -0800
(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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