Life in America has never been better. There is no crime, there is no hunger, there is no disease, there is no governmental or corporate corruption, city infrastructures are sound, the weather is beautiful, the world is at peace, and its children, like their parents, are all beautiful, well-educated, and in perfect health with brilliant futures spreading before them like a never-ending holiday ripe with opportunity and fulfillment. Given the status of things, it is only natural that the good people who work so hard for us every day in Washington, D.C. should turn their cheerfully tax-sponsored attention on another area that they can improve, make better, perfect for this and future generations.Once the needs of the body have been so thoroughly secured, the needs of the mind and spirit logically follow. And we all “know” that nothing is as damaging to the development of a healthy mind/body/spirit than exposure to the obscene, the profane, the indecent – and that nothing is more obscene, profane, or indecent than adults having sex with themselves or one another without benefit of marriage, a closed door, and the light off.

All joking aside, after watching Thursday’s Senate Commerce Committee’s “Protecting Children on the Internet” hearing I can’t help but wonder, not for the first time, if my priorities and those of the government I help pay for are even slightly the same – and whether we even live on the same planet, let alone in the same country.

While Osama bin Laden promises President Bush another 9/11 if he doesn’t withdraw U.S troops from the Middle East, while ruined houses in New Orleans are still marked with paint telling how many died inside, while evacuees wonder where they’re going to live once FEMA pulls its belatedly installed plug, while workers continue to die in West Virginia mining disasters, while bottle nosed whales swim along the River Thames, and while the Miss America contest tries to reestablish its bikini-wearing self – the president and attorney general steadfastly insist that the most pressing issue in the United States is “indecency.”

What color is the sky again?

Oddly enough, the only people who appear willing to admit to actually watching porn are me and my freaky friends and associates. Nobody who spoke during the recent internet porn hearing indicated that they had ever looked at a naked photo without it being another tedious work-related project, although they all have opinions on the subject, of course. Tim Lordan, the executive director of the Internet Education Foundation went so far as to show great sympathy for the long-suffering FBI agents and other authorities who have had to view adult content as part of their ongoing efforts to do whatever it is that they’re supposedly doing to make things better for whomever it is that’s supposed to benefit from their work. So, it looks like me and the folks I know have somehow, on our modest salaries, managed to spend about $12 billion viewing online smut during the last year – and that total doesn’t include the videos and magazines that we filled our eyes and minds with. During our extensive national traveling, we naturally rented copious in-room porn videos in a variety of low, medium, and up-scale hotels, cuz there’s just nothing more relaxing after a hard day’s work in the porn mines than an evening filled with even more pornography. Yes, it’s a miracle that we had the energy to pay our bills, let alone get any work done. But you should see our upper arms!

The absolute and utter hypocrisy of so many within the government when it comes to issues of erotic and explicit content not only infuriates me as a rational human being whose mind/body/spirit balance is just fine, thank you very much, but also as an American citizen who’s about to dig into her lint-filled pocket and summon forth another quarter’s worth of taxes. Given that I and my companions can’t possibly be bearing the entire financial weight of the multi-billion dollar porn industry (and visiting the “red states” frequently to assure their continued supremacy in the consumption hierarchy), I’m rather distressed to see so many of those tax dollars going to complicate the process of making sure adults – many of whom were probably in attendance at that committee meeting as well as watching it on television – have a more difficult time accessing materials they find enjoyable, while NO children are in any way saved from exposure to materials their predominantly lazy parents claim they don’t want them to see. I’m already helping to pay for schools where children learn how to make good decisions – do I and my pals have to do the frickin’ parenting, too? Honestly, it shouldn’t take a pornographer to remind people that their responsibility to their children doesn’t end at the moment of birth.

The truth, in my opinion, is that it’s much more exciting to divert America’s short-attention-span from that nasty war thing that’s not going so well in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Iran, or wherever we’re sending what’s left of our military these days. Apparently Bush, Ashcroft, Cheney, and the rest of his suddenly anti-Capitalist free market cohorts think a shell game featuring the ominous specter of naked women will distract a closeted and titillated populace from focusing on impeachable offenses including the government’s unrepentant spying on its own citizens – while simultaneously claiming it couldn’t possibly have expected Hurricane Katrina to have caused so much gosh-darn damage, not that the city isn’t ready for full habitation again, of course… The same governmental officials that don’t realize that porn spam isn’t much of a problem anymore and that even Internet Explorer can be configured to block many sites that parents find objectionable seem convinced that scouring through search records from Google (and Yahoo and MSN and AOL) will somehow reveal how many kids snuck a peek – excuse me, were traumatized by the unwelcome and “harmful” sight of bare adult flesh pressed wetly together. It’s smoke-and-mirrors busy work that does nothing to protect anyone, as far as I’m concerned, and I’m sick and bloody tired of paying for it – especially with my porn drenched dollars.