LUDIC LOG

Here cometh April again, as the saying goes, and so far as I can see, the world hath more fools in it than ever. Let's examine one of my favorite fools today.

John Ashcroft, the nation's current attorney general, has been causing new lows in my already subterranean respect for law and authority. Never the most agreeable figure in his days as a senator (his most notable accomplishment was to spearhead G.O.P. attempts to stonewall then-President Clinton's judicial nominees -- a tactic which has rather nastily come back to haunt the Republicans now that they've got the White House back), and never what one would call a popular politician (he famously lost an election to a dead man, which we know from decades of sitcoms is the absolute nadir of political failure), he has at the very least turned the peculiar and unexpected trick of replacing Ed Meese as the most reviled AG in modern history.

Of course, their approaches are entirely different; Meese was bedeviled by charges of being too little concerned with the law (in particular, he seemed to have some trouble accepting the notion that it applied to him), while Ashcroft strikes one as being a bit too much devoted to the law, having taken the horrible events of September 11th as a sort of carte blanche to fulfill several decades' worth of Republican wet dreams vis-a-vis law enforcement. No fan of civil rights, separation of church and state, or the notion of a right to privacy (an idea he calls a "fiction"), this humorless, parch-voiced Babbitt from Missou-rah has spearheaded initiatives that are questionable in every regard, from the legally iffy (his notion that civil protections under law do not quite extend to aliens or foreigners, the World Court notwithstanding) to the philosophically unsound (the recent advertising blitz, launched by his minions at the Justice Department, which attempts to link casual drug use with the worst excesses of terrorism) to the the politically inexpert (his harsh manner and domineering attitude are said to be winning him no friends in Washington outside the Bush cabinet, and an attorney general who does not make peace with the House and Senate is an ineffectual attorney general). But unlike the porcine, rapacious hypocrite Meese, he seems to be unimpeachable in his personal life, sadly and bewilderingly living the exact straight-arrow life suggested by his grim Protestant demeanor and droning, passionless voice.

However, there are a number of similarities beneath the surface. Both men, considering their stations as the leading law enforcement officer of the nation, seemed a bit shaky on certain applications of the law (Ashcroft has repeatedly sought to annul a number of hard-fought civil rights as they pertain to those accused of high crimes, while Meese notoriously expressed the opinion that Miranda rights were of no use except for the guilty, as innocent people are never suspects); they're both relentless anti-federalists and state's rights advocates, except where it does not suit their ideology (in the case of local drug laws for Ed Meese, for instance, or assisted suicide for AG Ashcroft); and they both find themselves in the uncomfortable position of begrudgingly enforcing laws they really would prefer did not exist (financial disclosure laws for Meese, abortion laws for Ashcroft, and a shared dislike for search-and-seizure laws).

But it is in the sticky, slippery realm of sex where the two truly meet -- and truly diverge. Ed Meese, who made his nut on the chicken-and-peas dinner circuit lecturing, or at least pandering, to right-wing Christian zealots in the 1970s, is best remembered for having convened a presidential commission on pornography. The commission acheived very little, aside from wasting a tremendous amount of taxpayer money and publishing an official report that became an ironic hit among pornography devotees for its hilariously encyclopedic listing of dirty book titles. Like every attempt to do so since the dawn of civilation, it failed to wipe out pornography, or even wipe it off. John Ashcroft, who was one of the poultry-eating fundamentalists to whom Meese lectured back in the seventies, is gearing up to launch his own anti-smut crusade -- this time against internet pornography, an entirely different sort of beast whose massive prolificity and decentralized nature surely means nothing but a vaster waste of resources to an even more meagre end.

Amateur psychologizing is a cheap and dirty tactic, but we here at Ludic Syndicate World Control are nothing of not cheap and dirty, so we will publicly wonder: how pathological does a man have to be that the partial nudity of a classical sculpture -- a sculpture, indeed, that symbolizes everything great and subtle and beautiful and noble the man's life work is supposed to stand for -- distresses him to such a degree that he orders it concealed from public view? How, well, deranged does a person have to be, how deep-seated his sexual neuroses, that he engages in such an activity while simultaneously attempting to drive any mention of sex from the most vast communication medium the world has ever known? As with many questions we pose around here, I don't know the answer. But one thing I can say for certain: it takes a man to make you miss a pig.