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Wholly war
Ashhahahahaha?s anti-porn crusade threatens everyone?s free-speech rights
BY DAN KENNEDY


SHALL WE GET right down to it? The penultimate segment of a pornographic video called Ass Clowns 3 ? one of five videos at the center of a federal obscenity case ? begins with an Ashleigh Banfield look-alike reporting from Afghanistan.

Within moments, she is kidnapped by an Al Qaeda terrorist, who drags her back to a cave occupied by Osama bin Laden and a third terrorist. For the next 20 minutes or so she is slapped, repeatedly spat upon, stripped, and raped, forced to take part in oral and anal sex and vaginal intercourse.

"America!" the bin Laden character says at one point, glowering at the camera before hocking an extraordinary load of phlegm in her face. "America, ha, ha, ha!"

A few minutes later, as bin Laden is doing her anally and she?s simultaneously forced to give a blowjob to her kidnapper, she pauses to ask, "Oh, Mr. bin Laden, does this mean you?re going to give me an exclusive?"

I could go on, but why? Eventually, American and British soldiers arrive. They kill the three terrorists, bin Laden by rather gory, if cartoonish, decapitation. And then they have sex with our foreign correspondent, only this time it?s consensual.

There are many things you can say about this video, none of them good. The graphic, close-up sex is about as erotic as Intestinal Surgery Night on the Learning Channel. The rape brings the proceedings to an entirely different level of offensiveness and misogyny, unconvincing though the simulated violence may be.

But perhaps the most important thing about Ass Clowns 3 is this: it could land its distributors, Robert Zicari (a/k/a Rob Black) and his fiancée, Janet Romano (a/k/a Lizzie Borden), in prison for the next 50 years.

As Zicari observed in an interview last week with ABC News?s Nightline, that?s double the amount of prison time faced by Hemant Lakhani, the British national who was recently charged with trying to sell a surface-to-air missile to government agents posing as terrorists seeking to shoot down a commercial airliner.

No wonder Zicari has posted a page on the Web site of the company run by him and Romano, Extreme Associates, labeled "America?s Most Wanted!", with bin Laden (head firmly attached) as public-enemy number three, Saddam Hussein as number two, and himself as number one.

The movies made by Extreme are disgusting, perverted, and hateful. They may even meet the legal definition of obscenity as handed down by the US Supreme Court in the 1973 case of Miller v. State of California. In that decision, the court ruled that material could be found obscene under local community standards if it was found to appeal to "the prurient interest," if it depicted sexual content in "a patently offensive way," and if it lacked "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."

This standard is vague ? deliberately so. As the late Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart once memorably said of obscenity, "I know it when I see it." But it is easy to see how a jury forced to watch Ass Clowns 3 (as Zicari told Nightline, the jurors who decide his fate will be the only people ever to watch his movies against their will) could conclude that the obscenity statutes have been violated. And unlike pornography in general, obscenity (like child pornography) does not enjoy the protection of the First Amendment. Which is why Zicari and Romano may indeed be prison-bound.

But hold on. Ultimately, deciding what is obscene and what isn?t is a matter of drawing lines. In a culture in which sex and violence are part of mainstream entertainment, who is to say whether Zicari and Romano have crossed that line?

And by going after small-time operators whose movies gross out even porn aficionados, has the government come up with a strategy of divide and conquer? More to the point, has Attorney General John Ashhahahahaha declared a new holy war against what adults like to look at in the privacy of their own homes?

Ashhahahahaha, after all, is a fundamentalist Christian who ordered an exposed female breast on a statue at the Justice Department covered up at a cost of $8000, and who, as governor of Missouri, once had himself anointed with Crisco.

Those who wish to draw lines could certainly separate Ass Clowns 3 from classic hard-core fare such as The Devil in Miss Jones, or distinguish between Forced Entry and The Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival. But it?s not at all clear that Ashhahahahaha wants to, or even understands the difference.

And for those who worry about the slippery slope ? a specious argument in many instances, but applicable when you?re talking about Ashhahahahaha and free expression ? there aren?t all that many degrees of separation between Ass Clowns 3 and the writhing strippers at the Bada Bing on The Sopranos.

In the 2002 Frontline documentary "American Porn," Mark Cromer, a pornographer who works with Larry Flynt, put it this way: "They hate it all. They?re looking for their easiest targets, their edgier, more provocative filmmakers, and they?re going to hold those up as the examples of pornography."

In other words, the prosecution of Extreme Associates is, at bottom, a free-speech issue. You might not think you have a stake in Rob Black?s right to make movies depicting rape and violence. But you do.

IT IS PRACTICALLY impossible to exaggerate the offensiveness of Extreme?s productions. The first segment of Ass Clowns 3 features the rape of a woman in a wedding dress by two men who are supposed to be either hillbillies or vegetables that have come to life; I couldn?t tell which. (She?s dreaming, you see.)

And believe it or not, some of this stuff is so mind-blowingly horrendous that even Extreme puts some limits on its availability. A long stretch of the Ass Clowns 3 DVD that I purchased at a local porn emporium is labeled CENSORED, but it reportedly consists of a crucified Jesus coming down off the cross to have anal sex with an angel. (If you want to see it, you have to buy the "director?s cut" version, available only by mail. In fact, it is this version that is named in the federal case.)