But it was nice while it lasted. The ban, I mean. For a minute there, it seemed that Babbitt was alive and well in Mississippi, striking a quixotic blow for the kind of middle-class morality that once strived to cordon off the public square to keep it neat and clean -- sterile, even, in that wholesome way that once drove true artists out of bounds and into paroxysms of creativity. In the age of the Internet and wireless communication, such boundaries are nothing less than quaint and nothing more than window-dressing, just a handsome-prince fantasy in a reality of cultural degradation.
The same day I happened on the library story, I came across a lavish profile in Vanity Fair of pornographer Bob Guccione. It is an exercise in hagiography, depicting the 74-year-old former Penthouse publisher as "the fallen king," "one of the greatest success stories in magazine history" blah, blah, done in by "Reagan-era censorship, the Internet, and a series of expensive dreams." In other words, no typography of irony here. (Save that for "democracy" in Jon Stewart's "America.") Lamented son Bob Jr.: "He wanted so much to be acknowledged for something other than pornography."
But what a pornographer he was. Having launched Penthouse in 1969, "Bob outraunched Playboy by displaying genitalia and pubic hair in a magazine," a colleague told Vanity Fair approvingly. "That had never been done before." Certainly not in a magazine that plied the mainstream, both as a widely available mass publication, and as a mass influence on a wide variety of publications.
Which is where "America (The Book)" comes back in. The Guccione article alludes to a hazard of the porn trade: jaded customers, which were already a concern for magazine pornographers by the middle 1970s. Simply having lived through the several decades since -- even through a brief description of those decades -- makes us all, to some extent, jaded customers. Which means that no one, not even in Mississippi, is shocked by nudity alone. What is troubling is the, well, naked intention to level a pillar of our democracy --the law -- and leave behind vicious little images of humiliation and shame, discomfort and exposure. Which is a kind of pornography in itself, I would argue, but one Americans seem happy to consume.
This gives Bob Guccione another legacy after all: "America."