http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/Arts/content?oid=oid:74163
Larry Flynt says the religious right would disappear
if the nation had better mental health care.
Citizen Porno
by Daniel Oppenheimer - July 15, 2004
There are some wonderful moments in Larry Flynt's
new book, Sex, Lies & Politics: The Naked Truth .
On page four, for instance, the Hustler publisher
and First Amendment hero writes of meeting
John F. Kennedy when the president took a tour of
the naval carrier on which Flynt was serving as
a petty officer.
"At that moment," he writes, "I never could have
imagined that fifteen years later, I would be
publishing nude photos of his wife."
On page 82, on the hypocrisy of Strom Thurmond --
who campaigned as a segregationist 20 years after
fathering a child with his family's black
housekeeper -- Flynt writes, "The cornerstone
of his career was laid back in 1948, just about
the time I was trying to have sex with a chicken."
Or there's the passage on page 104: "The right-wingers
in power today would try to tell you that Hustler is
obscene, but I find their tax policies obscene.
Obscene is not how I would describe a beautiful
nineteen-year-old girl running around buck naked,
but it is how I would describe a nineteen-year-old
soldier getting both his arms blown off in a war
we got into on the basis of lies and spin."
Or -- one more -- there's page 218-19, where
Flynt recounts his own experience of religious
conversion, which doctors later diagnosed as
bipolar disorder.
"Maybe that's one reason right-wingers fight so
hard against affordable health care for everyone,"
he writes. "If we had better mental health care
in this country, the religious right would disappear.
Instead, people with chemical imbalances in their
brains say they are born-again, and they become
pawns of the church for the rest of their lives."
Flynt's main target in the book is the hypocrisy
of Republicans, who, he writes, "have managed to
exploit our conflicted attitudes about sex in order
to create an effective voting block they wouldn't
otherwise have on the basis of their policy positions."
And he's effective when he has concrete vessels --
Thurmond's miscegenation, Rush Limbaugh's many
wives, Newt Gingrich's serial philadering --
to deflate with his self-deprecating,
chicken-fucking humor.
He's also valuable in his willingness to ascribe
some of the blame for our confusedness to the
American Voter. "I'm also going to Flynt the
fundamental hypocrisy of the American voter,"
he writes, "who nods along to 'family values,'
supports 'just say no' sex education for kids,
and allows a policy of denying advice on
birth control to women in Third World countries
while at the same time spending $10 billion
a year on pornography."
Unfortunately, most of the book is a retread of
all the other anti-Bush books --by journalists
like Joe Conason and David Corn, or humorists
like Al Franken and Michael Moore -- that he lists
in a bibliography at the end. We hear once again
about the Florida vote-counting shenanigans of 2000;
the Bush-Saudi connections; the Halliburton
profiteering. Flynt is neither a journalist or
a humorist, and he covers little new
informational or comic ground.
What Flynt is, and this does come through in
the voice of the book, is the rare person who's
achieved enormous wealth and influence without
sacrificing his individuality. He's a fairly
disgusting person -- as he says repeatedly in
the book -- and he's working with an awfully
simplistic theory of geopolitics, according to
which we'd all be good citizens if we just had
more sex with less shame.
But because his beliefs are genuine and in
line with his actions, he has the advantage
of both the Republicans he abhors and the
Democrats he scorns (whose triangulatingly
insincere "family values" talk makes them easy
fodder for the right-wing meat grinder).
The best example of what this power could do
for Flynt is what he's already done. In 1998,
during the impeachment proceedings, Flynt
took out a full-page ad in The Washington Post
offering a reward for information on the
leaders of the impeachment effort.
"Many of the people sitting in judgment of
the President of the United States have
engaged in similar illicit encounters, and
they have not told the truth," said the ad.
"We'd be more than happy to pay a million dollars
to anyone who can document having had such an
affair with a key player such as Gingrich,
Lott, Armey, etc."
As a result of the ensuing investigations,
on which Flynt reportedly spent $4 million,
the adultery of Speaker of the House-designate
Robert Livingston was revealed. Livingston was
forced to retire, and though it may not be true,
as Flynt asserts, that the outing -- along with
the threatened exposure of other GOP hypocrites
-- was responsible for derailing the impeachment,
it was an awesome act of political retribution
nonetheless.
The Flynt Report , which came out the following
year with further details of bad behavior by
stalwarts like Livingston, Newt Gingrich, Bob Barr
and Dan Burton, is an important historical document
(at least I hope so, since I own a copy).
Flynt seems to have fallen in love, though, with
his post-Milos Forman The People vs. Larry Flynt
respectability. He still talks as if he's the same
guy who grew up in Kentucky in "a place called
Lakeville, near Lickskillet Holler," but he fights
like the guy who's been celebrated as a public
intellectual in Germany, France, the U.K. ("They
ask me about politics," he writes of the French.
"In the U.K.," he adds, "I was big cultural news.")
Flynt's obviously a smart man, but his genius,
it seems obvious, has been in playing dirty,
selling dirty, fighting dirty. This book,
though it's sprinkled with a lot of profanity,
is strategically a pretty clean affair. We
shouldn't begrudge him that, perhaps, but we
can mourn for the Larry Flynt who once published
a cartoon of Jerry Falwell losing his virginity
to his mother in an outhouse.
oppenheimer@valleyadvocate.com Hustler
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