I'm of an age such that, when DEEP THROAT first came out, I was just under the legal age to see it. Being a normal lad, I obtained a fake I.D. and a friend and I went to see it at the porno theater downtown, located, (I kid you not) on Beaver Street.

I quickly grew bored with it, as everything about it was cheap and tacky and poorly done, and even the sex seemed dull (never having had sex myself at the time, I had nothing to compare it to, but it sure didn't succeed at its primary task: to excite one's prurient interest).

However, compared to what little I've seen of contemporary porn, DEEP THROAT presented a picture of somewhat human figures who did seem to want to try to relate to each other for mutual pleasure. It seems today, as you point out, all about the performance...but the performance itself is too often grotesque...with the male performers going at it like jack-hammers, literally pounding their partners as if they were non-human objects, trying to break them open. I've also never understood the unappetizing appeal of ejaculating over the faces of the women...it seems to appeal to the desire of men who want to degrade women. (Mind you, I make no judgments about what two--or more--consenting adults do with each other in private, and I can see the appeal in letting oneself go and doing that which seems objectionable to public notions of propriety...that is, "getting dirty." But not everything one might do in private for fun can be depicted on film, as it is the ineffable emotional context that makes certain behaviors exciting; severed from the attendant emotions, one is left with a debased or debasing caricature of human behavior.)

And this is what we seem to have come to: porn in which the performers can't even begin to pretend they or their partners are human beings. Pity the men and women who think they must erase their humanity and who aspire to be, literally, "sex objects."

This is horrifying and sickening, not just in the particular but in what it reveals about the actual state of our country: as others here have already recognized, we no longer even pretend to be a nation of laws...we are an overt police state now.

Can we expect any ethical reporter to challenge Obama at a press conference and ask him--in the light of his campaign criticisms of Bush's policies of rendition, torture, secrecy, and the like, followed by his promises to rescind all that, but followed now by his post-election continuation and expansion of Bush's grotesque policies--why we should not see his administration as merely a continuation of the Bush administration under another name, and why the American people should not consider Obama to be nothing other than a rank liar and a hypocrite with regard to his promises to return us to adherence to the law?

My question is rhetorical; I know none of the sellouts in the White House press corpse (sic), pretend journalists who relish their tangential membership in the country club of power, will dare risk their prestige, status, income, or employment by putting to our public servant in chief a direct and damning inquiry as to his utter complicity in the war crimes of the previous administration.

LDWWDL nails it in his posts: Obama "the reformer," the bringer of "change," the harbinger of "hope," was a fabrication. One learned all one needed to know in Obama's pre-election vote for the revised FISA bill, which expanded government prerogatives in their use of wiretaps while weakening judicial restrictions on same, and, more egregiously, granted retroactive immunity to the telecoms from civil liability for their illegal participation in Bush's illegal wiretapping. Did I mention it was illegal? And that no one may now sue the telecoms for their crimes?

As if his vote for this travesty were not enough, Obama had vowed that he would not vote for a bill that included immunity for the telecoms. In the end, like all dissembling political weasels, he voted for it with mush-mouthed remarks along the lines of "not what I would have preferred" "not the best" "better than no change at all" and so forth.

I had been wavering, never having been much taken with Obama's paper thin "charisma," as to whether to vote for him and I had concluded I probably would. With his FISA vote, Obama immediately lost me: it showed he was simply one more in an overpopulated cohort of craven Washington jackals who will justify any reversal of promises and betrayal of avowed principles with just such self-serving words that make sound but contain no meaning. My vote went, not for the first time, to a third party candidate.

One must give the Republicans props for one thing: they're honest in their intentions, they'll tell you straight up the hateful shitty things they intend to do, because they have conviction in their craziness. Most Dems do not, because there is a fundamental disconnect between their pandering "for the people" feel-good rhetoric and their actual personal hunger for power and sponsorship by the same corporate swine who the Republicans serve proudly. (I don't deny there are good, sincere people in Congress who want to actually serve their constituents at home--not the ones in the board rooms--but those who aspire to rise to to top of the power hierarchy must abandon any such naive concerns and make clear their obeisance to the owners of our empire.)

Obama's not listening; he's too enchanted with the sound of his own voice and too beholden to those who gave him the power that he wanted, that was his only real cause or goal.