FINAL REPORT
Attorney General's Commission on Pornography
Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, July 1986
1960 pp., $35
Whenever I write a review of a book, it must be to celebrate," said author Elie Wiesel last March before receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.
On that note, let it be said that this review, in good conscience, celebrates the publication of the Final Report of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography. If the published findings are honored and the recommendations implemented, this book may go down in history as marking the braking point on the slippery slope to total decadence. What the two-volume Final Report offers to the American people is nothing less than a foothold for reclaiming the high ground in their communities. The book clearly and concisely documents a constitutional blueprint for damming the flood of dehumanizing pornography now freely polluting mainstream America. Stripping violent and degrading hard-core pornography of its Orwellian euphemism, "adult entertainment," the commission bares it for what it really is: obscenity. Ugly, destructive, and illegal.
There is no dearth, however, of "critics" eager to mete out punishment to the eleven commissioners who, in essence, wrote the book. In fact, the unrelenting distortions of the commission's findings and the high-priced campaign to discredit the Final Report have been so far beyond the pale that one, in good conscience again, might characterize the concerted attacks as "the 1986 Big Lie" - to be repeated cynically over and over until the people begin to believe it.
This disinformation campaign, however, underestimating the native intelligence of the American people, may backfire. As Reo M. Christenson, a professor of political science at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, once put it, "Maybe all the 'dumb people' are not so dumb after all." Writing in 1970 to another government commission on pornography - an ultraliberal one - Christenson added, "Maybe the people are right in sensing that sex needs to be treated with some caution, that sexual privacy needs to be preserved from commercial contamination, that sexual relations must not be divested of all sanctity, all mystery, and reduced to the level of leer and titter. It is a disturbingly democratic idea that the common man just might be smarter, now and then, than many of our avant-grade intellectuals."
The year 1986 may be one of those times. There is growing grass-roots evidence that "the common man and woman" may be a lot smarter than those who seek to dupe them into believing that the commission was a "moral Trojan horse" carrying concealed weapons to destroy the First Amendment and censor everything from the Sistine Chapel to Donald Duck. This scaremongering is so preposterous that someone should set it to music and feature it on Broadway as a musical comedy.
This is not to say that the American people can never be duped, for insidiously over the years, the masses have been led to believe that the obscene materials on sale in their communities must be legal. How else can one account for their open display? The Final Report answers that question: Egregious lack of law enforcement, particularly in Los Angeles and New York City, two
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