If it were fear, I’d have more sympathy. I get scared sometimes, and I’m when scared I’m not entirely rational. And I see plenty of things in porn that scare me.

But as usual it’s not fear, it’s that lovely two-some that seem to follow naked ladies around like hungry dogs: greed and laziness.

Harmer is a lawyer, who at 71 thinks he’s going to hit it big importing Chinese cars into the US (The cars still can’t meet emission standards). But thanks to his “anti-porn crusade” going out all accross the AP wire, he’s now a “Utah-based auto exective”. Makes it sound like he heads a GM division in the beehive state, doesn’t it?

But he’s not. He’s just a hustler looking to cash in on the cheap labor and lack of environmental protections in China.

Hammer is no different from pornographers who tack PhD on the end of their names, and Crary is no different from a dozen other journalists who “report” on this stuff without doing even a simple hour of Google research that would show that Harmer’s never made a nickle selling cars, and that those “doctorates” are available to anyone with a $5,000 line of credit on their Visa card.

Of course the stories lose their punch when you take out “auto executive” or “Ph.D” out of them, so there’s precious little inscentive for Crary to spend the 30 minutes it took me, someone with zero background in investigation, to find these things out. That’s how thing like “porn is a 12, 15, 52 billion dollar a year business” get in print and stay in print.

A little more googling and we see that Hammer and our old friend Ed Messe have cooked up a little 501(c)(3) chicanery at http://www.lightedcandlesociety.org/leadership.html

Call me cynical, but this doesn’t look like convictions, this looks like a chance to cozy up to an administration whose favorite whipping boy is porn, and whose favorite totalitarian regime trading partner is China.

I doubt Ed needs the money, but I bet all this erototoxin nonsense has him thinking this is another chance for him to hear his name on the nightly news.

Make that three dogs: greedy, laziness, and self-aggrandizement.

I should be spanked. With a Strunk & White. Vigorously. And perhaps on film.

A few times in my teaching career, I’ve given essay assignments that require students to explore various positions on ideas such as violent music causes violence. They go out, they do their happy research, they compile article on article that supports the relationship between, usually, hard-core rap and increased violence in children.

And then I bring in a copy of Eminem’s “97 Bonnie and Clyde” and we listen to it. We analyze the lyrics and we talk about how often it has come up in their research, which, it turns out, is quite often. Then I bring out the Billboard charts for the song’s CD and we talk about the numbers of people who bought the album and what we would expect, given the relationships that all these journalists have stated, to happen in terms of rates of American violence.

And…there’s a whole no connection. Which then leads into why journalists and others would seem so committed to saying that this kind of music–or video games or porn or whatever–is bad for society.

People are so easily threatened. And I wouldn’t care except for the fact that their fear makes them idiots.