Even Pakistani people.

I’m not going to pick on Pakistan or Pakistanis, or Polacks, or Peruvians, or Pennsylvanians (though that last group deserves scrutiny … Steelers fans often demonstrate psychotic tendencies).  Yet when a brand is violated by those who own a brand – such as when Apple iPhones flake – then some good natured rib jabbing is in order.

But please don’t jab Steve Jobs’ ribs.  You might hit the reset button on his second hand liver.

Pakistan is one of those oddball countries who think mixing religion and politics is wise, a position that survivors of the Inquisition will vigorously debate.  Thus the edicts, ethos and etiquette of the religion are codified in law and conspicuously practiced by the population. Sect dissimilarities aside, certain things are frowned upon and others are promoted.  Like every religion, Islam tends to amplify its good points and play down its lunatic preachers (seriously, there isn’t a dimes’ worth of difference between Jeremiah Wright and Ayman al Zawahiri).  Islam and Christianity share common roots, and among other things frowns upon evils like incest and lite beer.

Interesting then is the fact that Pakistanis are ape over donkey sex.

Google lets people drill into Google tracking data.  Google Trends allows any person perform interesting drill-downs, including such things as discovering that Pakistan has achieved the highest per capita search rate for “horse sex” for six years running and “child sex” for almost as long.  They are also especially interested in rape and extracting revenge from dogs that hump their legs by humping them back. And, yes, “camel sex” is also popular, though there is no indication if Pakistanis prefer one hump or two.

Drawing a cartoon of Muhammad could get you stoned in Islamabad, though not in the pleasant sense, yet searching for and consuming child rape videos are raging pastimes.

Granted, you find sheep shaggers in every country (rumor is that Scotsmen wear kilts because sheep can hear a zipper from 50 yards).  Virginia residents think every vertical male in West Virginia has intimate knowledge of the reproductive regions of a sow.  And rumors of what Kiwis do on wool farms is legendary.  Yet in a land where Islamic virtue is law, it seems that animal husbandry is a very real concept.  This is the side effect of parochial polygamist societies – the bachelors don’t have single women or even infected hookers with which to do the dirty.

And forget about boinking other men – that could cause neck pains.

Pakistan’s recreational extreme porno habit raises the question why Pakistan has not cracked down.  Being a country with an autocratic government in a state of perpetual paranoia about India, their Internet hubs have been under control and surveillance since shortly after copper wire appeared inside their borders.  It is doubtful that authorities there are unaware of Pakistani peccadilloes, though we have to concede that maybe all these unseemly searches come from Pakistani government offices (your foreign aide dollars at work).  So Pakistan is tolerating, and perhaps even endorsing dalmatian diddling, camel copulating, filly fornication and bambino boinking.

Maybe because it is sanctified by Islam.

Granted, I am no Islamic scholar.  All religions are null programs, and anybody who seriously thinks they speak for Gawd started the day by chewing through their restraints.  Yet it appears that certain sexual intersections that would put you on Texas’ death row are openly permitted in Islam.  Muhammad himself had a bride so youthful that even Brigham Young (a.k.a. Bring’em Young) blinked.  Ayatollah Khomeini, the man who turned a secular Iran into the golden palace/shower that it is today wrote that frolicking with farm animals was alright providing you killed them afterwards.  Not only does this prevent tainted meat from entering commerce, it also gets rid of the witnesses.

Unless your kid/wife was watching.

So perhaps Pakistan’s proclivities are proper.  If the state religion permits pedophilia and heavy pet petting, then perhaps the Pakistan censors who shut down access to Facebook merely saw nothing unusual when Abdul accessed ass ass and Gabir Googled goats.  Perhaps Pakistani authorities thought these were perfectly natural unnatural acts, though porking Porky is certainly a sin.

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The theory is that the Internet has made it so easy to find targeted information that our attention is now confined to the small tidbits we seek.  Whereas we once read books and obtained a depth of knowledge about a small number of topics, collectively we now learn very little concerning millions of subjects.

At least I think that is what the article said.  I could be wrong – got distracted by a link to a news story concerning albino catfish farmers.

I cannot confirm this is true.  My attention span has eroded, but it wasn’t robust to begin with and I confess to ingesting significant volumes of Jack Daniels over the years.  Both might have some bearing on my situation.  I also live in San Francisco which is a contact high – no telling what illegal chemicals I have inhaled at the Fillmore or ingested at some of the more interesting parties.  For other people cerebral degradation may be inorganic.

Or we may simply be witnessing the elevation of the scatterbrained class.

Few folk ever obtain a depth of knowledge about any subject.  Academics do, though they study one topic to the point of functional imbecility (I knew a physics professor who couldn’t be trusted to tie his shoes).  The average Joe and Jane don’t have the time, skill, inclination, patience or topic interest to plow into a stack of books to obtain information that is useless in their daily lives.

But surfing The Net fulfills an innate human desire to discover.  The very design of the web was to facilitate chaining fragments of information together.  Google made the fragments searchable.  People with short attention spans were drawn to the Internet like suicidal moths to a volcano, rapidly exploring and ransacking info.  It was once postulated that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at keyboard could recreate the works of Shakespeare.  The easily distracted class never before had keyboards or a common place to commune.  Now they do and we see that the original monkey postulate was unfounded.

They can discover Shakespeare, though they will be detoured by Brittney Spears.

We may not be seeing the destruction of the human mind, but the ratcheting elevation of the intellectual subclasses – folks too lazy or disinterested to visit libraries are now scanning The Net for an infinite number of interesting items (and evidently an infinite amount of pornography).  This may indeed be the first small step to the ultimate enlightenment of the entire species, through slow and steady acculturation to autodidactic acumen.

But we need to keep them from voting until then.

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Before today I had no opinion about Chomsky.  My conservative friends tend to despise him and my liberal friends suddenly look nervous when his name is mentioned.  Swirling rumors about what he wrote and its relationship to propaganda theory and practice kept landing like drunken MIT co-eds in my mind (and there is nothing quite as amusingly amorous than a liquored-up geek girl).

I’m peddling a book to publishers on the very topic of agitprop.  Having invested a decade in exploding gun control myths I have encountered most every manifestation of misinformation.  Since gun control myths are a subset of propaganda proper, and since Noam wrote on the subject, all these rumors about Chomsky’s insights and how they might be currently leveraged by the left demanded I read into his work.

Can’t say I’m impressed.

I have to give Noam some windage here.  His Manufacturing Consent was penned before every teenager had their own blog and before newspapers began evaporating faster than the last wisp of rum from aforementioned co-ed’s breath (though I will confess that Myers taste better when slurped from her bellybutton).  Thus a fair amount of Noam’s noodling is non sequitur.

Some of it was plain wrong when written.

A primary premise in Manufacturing Consent was that the advertisers led the media by their financial noses.  Noam was metaphorically looking down the wrong end of the barrel (it would be a wonderful event if the barrel analogy were literal).  The media is a matchmaker, with the audience as client.  Any media outlet that creates content disagreeable with the consumer goes out of business.  The primary financial incentive is to give the public what they want, regardless of how bland, sleazy or repugnant it may be.  Without content consumers, the media ceases to exist and no amount of advertising money will enact resurrection.

This is why the main stream media is moribund.  In the 80’s and 90’s a few university journalism schools, paired with statisticians, measured media bias and quantified that the American media was slightly to the left of Fidel.  Given that the polled public perceived itself slightly right of center, there existed a daily disconnect between the media and the public.  What Ma and Pa witnessed day-in-and-out disagreed with what the media marketed.  Fox News has high ratings simply because their content provided something that an otherwise homogeneous media did not.

Chomsky contends that the media was subservient to the advertiser.  Having worked in marketing I know this to be less than half the story.  Advertisers want to reach people, and the editorial leanings of the media are nearly irrelevant.  If a television channel reaches millions of males between 18 and 32, and if the advertiser sells Girl’s Gone Goofy videos, they would not care if the media was a nexus for necrophilia (which may be the next NBS reality show).  Based on ratings and demographics the vendor could predict their sales volume and would buy ad space.  Indeed, the only thing that would stop an advertiser would be if the anti-necra lobby threatened to boycott stations that aired drunken co-ed videos.

Hence, the left-leaning nature of the old media.  In the absence of competing outlets (pre talk radio, internet and Fox) they had insufficient backlash from the consumers. Thus, advertisers were content with the available advertising venues.  Without corrective action from either end of the financial relationship, we see two realities:  First, Noam didn’t know what he was talking about.  Second, the bulk of news was thus controlled by the media and the government, not advertisers.

Forget the military-industrial complex.  The media-politician complex was and is the real threat.

I know enough reporters to confirm that they live for two things:  telling a good story and exercising power.  The former is only of interest to other writers, and we get it.  The later is understandable only in the context that some small and sinister part of the populace always wants to control other people.  Reporters, producers and media moguls are no exception.  Controlling information was a great way to push the public toward some journalists’ political ends.  ‘Was’ is the operative word.  Today everybody is the media – there are millions of board and bathrobed fact checkers armed with an online sea of information that would make an Alexandrian librarian faint.

The media is no longer in control of the conversation, something they have yet to realize.

Noam got the financial aspects of the media backwards.  He also undersold the motivations of the media itself, which have been both malignant and manic.  Too many times we have witnessed major media outlets sell what remained of their souls in order to assassinate a person, company, industry or cause.  NBC faked exploding pick-up trucks.  CNN used machineguns to misinform the public about the power of sporting rifles.  ABC staged impossible self-defense scenarios.  CBS bought or co-produced fake documents during an election.  And MSNBC can’t emit an electron without it being accompanied by misinformation.

Yet Chomsky does not see this as a major source for the manufacture of “consent”.  Willful blindness or purposeful obfuscation?  Don’t know, but either way it says volumes about the quality of his analytical abilities.  He possesses all the functioning cognitive capacity of a drunk co-ed, but with none of the giggling charm.

Chomsky also felt that reporters, as a subspecies, trusted governmental information sources more than private.  Here Noam was nearly correct.  Like humans in general, reporters believe what they want and many seek information that bolsters their pre-existing biases.  If a corporation, advocacy group or man on the street helps assault whomever a reprobate reporter wishes to journalistically bludgeon, that is who will appear on the evening news.  Since reporters have been measured to be more liberal and Democrat than the public at large, they will more often accept government’s guile than General Motors’ (not that there is a difference between those two entities any more).  Yet when the government or a particular politician is the target of a reporters wrath, then non-government sources of deception work just as well.

Ask Dan Rather, providing his meds are allowing him to talk coherently this week.

Noam’s neglectfulness centers mainly on the assumption that “the media” (a rapidly evolving complex organism) is a mindless machine that is easily manipulated.  He ignores the media’s motivations and members therein who are merely activists with press passes.  Therein was the true source of propaganda – an unchecked media with no competition on the sources and distribution of information.  In the bad old days, your world view came from three very similar network news programs and one or two local newspapers.  Now with 500 television channels, several 24×7 news networks and the entirety of the Internet, the old threat of media manufactured consent is mitigated if not eliminated.

Noam Chomsky may have influenced a few, but his depth of analysis betrays a shallow intellectual pond.  Now that everybody is the media, Noam can be ignored … again.

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This is a disturbing notion.  In reaction to the Tea Party movement (which we have already seen is composed of a peaceful, multi-racial, pan-sexual, multi-generational Americans) some players planned on crashing the Tea Party events.  Their tactic was to dress and act in ways similar to how they incorrectly stereotype Tea Party members.  They planned on carrying racist banners, act like trailer trash, talk in threatening manners, all with the intent of getting the media to misreport the essence of the Tea Party itself.

So would they bomb a building?

We have already confirmed that people who dislike the Tea Party (and by proxy dislike freedom) will lie, disrupt and discredit.  They have openly demonstrated willingness to violate codes of honor, civil discourse, and fundamental honesty in order to silence opposition.  Their stated goal was to make the rest of America fear and loath the Tea Party.

The question on the table:  Where is their limit?  To what disreputable extents will they go in order to achieve their goals?

To answer this question, we have to investigate the moral equation in the collective heads of any group.  People who are center-right tend to be law-and-order, God worshiping orientation (and hence biblical-law obeying) and in-your-face honest.  Alternately, people with socialists/communist fetishes (which do not include the vaguely center-left masses) have a long and well documented history of believing that the ends justify all means.  It ranges from the comparatively innocent Tea Party crashers to Pol Pot’s mass murder.  The sentiment is the same – ignore moral imperatives, just get the job done.

Kinda like the way they passed Obamacare.

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What a bunch of racist homophobes.

I decided to inspect a Tea Party today.  Not being a member of any movement, I have watched this one since it was inspired in the latter days of the Bush Botch-up.  I wanted to see if the Tea Partiers had changed much in the subsequent year.  When they initially erupted, it was obvious from the event I attended that members of the nascent mobilization were from every corner of the American political map minus socialists, communists and other lower life forms.  Reacting to taxpayer bail-outs of failed and possibly criminal corporations, conservatives, independents, libertarians and even some classical liberals came out to protest a government that had zero regard for the express written will of the American people (a.k.a. the constitution).

The movement is even more so today.

I chatted with a candidate named Adnan Shahab, which is about as un-Anglo Saxon as one can get without immigrating from another planet.  I overheard a woman who carried a sign reading “I’m an angry Democrat” speak of betrayal by her representative.  One young lady wore tea bags on her hoop earrings while signing-up at an NRA recruiting table (which, I’ll note was doing a brisk business).  All ages, all races, all income levels, and all sexual orientations.  A more mixed demographic cross-section cannot be found outside of … well, it just can’t be found.

Being color blind, egalitarian and “a friend of the family” according to a gay acquaintance, I found none of this unusual from a human perspective, and in some ways from a political one.  But it did raise to the top of my alleged consciousness a question:  What is the common denominator?  Why have such different people banded together and taken to the streets?

Freedom.

Nobody with honest intent can examine bank bailouts or insane and equally unpopular insurance legislation without concluding that our federal government has jumped the rails.  No misreading of the Constitution can cause one to conscientiously conclude that either is permitted by The People.  Even those originally enamored by the current and temporary president are fearful of what may come next.  When theft and conscripted commerce occur, there is in theory no limit on what the federal government could do to individuals.

Freedom is an individual thing.

It is not surprising that the young black fellow in the wheelchair attended the Tea Party, for the concept of slavery is doubly real for him.  The Hispanic woman who struggled to escape from under a dictator’s thumb and come to America now fears the freedoms she longed for will be taken.  The lesbian couple protested because any government that forces them to buy health insurance could force them into re-education camps (for their own good and the good of society of course).

The teenagers see tens of thousands of dollars in federal debt, for which they already are liable, and prefer the freedom of a future.

The People forgive a fair amount of federal skullduggery and ineptitude.  Even the occasional lapse of constitutional commitment from elected servants is considered tolerable if the courts correct it.  But in under two years the wholesale assassination of constitutional government has caused people of every attitude to recognize that Washington no longer considers liberty an imperative.  The social pact between the state and those who created it has been broken.  The government is declining to heel, and its masters are about to jerk government’s dog collar.

It is a people thing.  It is a freedom imperative.  It is an American movement.

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This month, it is booze and Men’s Health statisticians have obviously been drinking themselves.

Foremost is the fact that Boston somehow bottomed the list, allegedly less alcoholic than Colorado Springs.  A city littered with Irish who long suffered under Teddy Kennedy cannot possibly be more sober than Seattle, where the cold and rain keep people far from bars.  I have had the experience of visiting Boston more than once, and I’m unsure I met anyone unblitzed.  Not even the nuns.

If we assume that the rest of Men’s Staggering List is anywhere near accurate, one oddity emerges from the failed city side of the roster.  The ten most intoxicated towns have three entries each from Texas and California (and strangely, my San Francisco is not on the list, which clearly means I need to work harder).  Granted, California and Texas are big places with even bigger egos, so they each have statically better chances for bad behavior.  Yet for 2/50ths of the states to claim 6/10ths of the Drunks Hall of Fame not only bends the curve, it ties it into a neat little knot.

Of course we need to judge each city by its individual ethos.

Getting drunk in Fresno needs no explanation – it is the only alternative to experiencing Fresno.  Riverside, on the other hand, is so boring that imbibing might be the only way to feel anything, if regurgitation is a feeling.  California’s last detox destination is Bakersfield, which at least has the advantage of being further away from Hollywood than Riverside.  One would think the sobriety quotient would thus kick Bakersfield off the rummy roster.  But it has been said that Bakersfield combines the worst elements of So Cal, the desert and Sierra hillbillies, so perhaps Bakersfield has a corrupt city-wide gene pool.

Texas, never to be out done, shoved Lubbock, Austin and San Antonio onto the chart.  San Antonio simply makes no sense, aside from being pouty because Houston blocks their view of New Orleans.  The town is simply too tidy to tipple totally.  Lubbock, being a cheaper version of Bakersfield, gives reason to suckle bottles, but not much more.  Austin is infinitely more understandable.  The town is the live music capital of America, and has more open bars than anyplace outside of New Orleans, and with equally good music.  It is also a left-of-center city in a right-of-Reagan state, so it suffers from isolation syndrome and needs a good belt … hourly.  Worse still, Austin is the state capital, and as Ray Wylie Hubbard sang in his tune Screw You, We’re From Texas, their “politicians are swindlers and loco.”  Such a high concentration of elected sleaze will drive any populace to partake.

The other three non-Texas and Non-California cities make and don’t make much sense.  There’s nothing wrong with Tucson, Arizona that moving it to Phoenix wouldn’t fix.  Reno, Nevada is perpetually drunk, but then again is was designed precisely for that purpose.  That leaves Billings, Montana.  Having 34 square miles and a mere 104,000 people means you have drive somewhere just to see other humans aside from those that live with you.  Given what winter in Montana is like, you may be stuck with your family all season long, which now that I think about it is a swell reason to swill.

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Of course I speak of Obama.

Several combined news items show a certain cluelessness about the regime du jour, the type of obliviousness that in other circumstance proceeds being belted by a biker or ditched by a girlfriend.  Within the gears of political machinery, slow-mo self destruction comes from declining to see that The People dislike incompetence or autocracy, though they will tolerate a competent scoundrel (for all his sins, and there were many, at least Bill Clinton lifted his head from an intern once in a while to take the pulse of the voting public).  Obama combines incompetence and autocracy in such a unique package that he’ll have the same number of terms as Nero, though ten fewer years to fiddle.

Such is Obama’s perpetual misreading of the public and voter demographics on the issue of health insurance.  Polls routinely show voters against legislation as drafted at Obama’s behest (Gallup say 60% against and Rasmussen says 56%).  By and large, The People are disenchanted, showing detest and come November they will be inclined to divest.  The secondary stimulus for their disaffection is the feeling that Obama and Company are not listening much less obeying.  Ever want to whack your child for being dangerously obstreperous and disobedient?  I know my parents did.

Voters appear poised to backhand Obama.

The primary political point is a general discontent with Washington, personified by the Tea Party movement.  Unlike the media, we must keep in mind that Tea Party rabble was roused in the waning days of the Bush administration as a backlash against incomprehensibly unconstitutional bail-outs of buddies (the unsavory collusion of Hank Paulson on behalf of his perpetual employer Goldman Sachs being instructive).  The peasants (a.k.a. my friends, family, neighbors, employees, preacher … everyone aside from politicians) were revolting against unrestrained power and apparent corruption before Obama waltzed into the White House.

He merely poured jet fuel on smoldering embers.

The Tea Party movement is a reflection of something deeper in the American political psyche.  Republicans imploded because they failed to stick to constitutional principles.  Democrats, not equally handicapped by constitutional fidelity, hijacked the crisis of economy and attempted an ideological end-run around the express written will of The People, folks with a nasty tendency to vote.  Disenchantment with the two parties and their indifference to The People’s policy is the paramount propulsion behind party defection, and the growing number of voters who self-identify as independents.

Independents hate ObamaCare more than Republicans or Democrats, with a full 62% willing to vote out anyone who votes up Obama’s legislation.

The collision ahead can only be ignored through blindness, willful ignorance, outstanding arrogance or plain stupidity, with “all of the above” being a distinct possibility when describing Obama’s latest misstep.  During this week’s refreshingly teleprompter free, but unfortunately day-long health insurance summit, Obama made it clear that his Henchman Harry would use a budgetary procedural gimmick (which Reid opposed when his party was out of power) to enact legislation despised by 62% of the largest voting block in the country.  Summarized, Obama is antagonizing the group most likely to beat him to an electoral pulp.

Uncle Bob used to call that “pissin’ in your own porridge.”

Tea parties have a recurring theme.  The original party was called because the government at that time ignored the express written will of The People.  The modern Tea Party movement and growth of the independent voter block is rising from resentment to the two halves of a similarly arrogant government.  When the 1773 government failed to listen to the people and abide by their will, blood was shed.  Let’s hope King Barry learns from King George before history reluctantly repeats itself.

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One good outcome from this encounter is that a cultural mystery has been solved.  In many Asian regions, people eat dogs, which is more or less unheard of in Western civilianization (aside from Michael Vick).  Shih tzu’s are the key to the cross-cultural riddle.  These and other Asian breeds are small, annoying and perpetually agitated rodents.  They are unpleasant, odiferous and no burglar takes them seriously.

They don’t even make good footballs.

In other words, the only thing you can do is eat them.  I hypothesize that long ago one of those yapping rats was pestering a chef when the cook discovered there was no meat for the dish.  With hungry customers waiting, and with a good half pound of protein circling his ankles, the chef decided to improvise, no doubt telling his clientele that the mystery meat tasted just like chicken.

Indeed, this clever culinarian was likely the first person to ever wok a dog.

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The problem is that old bigots fade about as slowly.

I am assuming that Keith Bardwell is an older man. Bardwell notes that he has been a justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana for 34 years. Assuming that Bardwell was not elected at birth (and given Louisiana politics and corruption, this is not out of the question) he is likely approaching or has achieved dotage. Thus some of the peculiar notions onto which old folks cling are understandable.

Until those notions are inflicted upon the citizenry.

Down south where Bardwell dwells as I once did, race relations are a messy affair. When Dixiecrats and other dinosaurs roamed the swamps, racial hatred was institutionalized in many pockets of prejudice. These districts, which thanks to George Wallace included the better part of Alabama, were the functional minority. Most southerners had worked together for centuries and were largely unaffected by race. Some of our ugly minded cousins occasionally obtained office – either public, in their local Klan chapter, or both simultaneously. These Crackers with Credentials were the unfortunate face of The South and ones which modern media amplified into an unrealistic caricature of southerners in general.

That’s the media’s job – the amplification their own prejudices.

Over the eons, as air conditioning permitted Yankees to relocate in the lowest of the 48, the myth of wall-to-wall racists faded. When one of the few and rapidly dwindling dimwits sounded, the majority of honorable southerners would wince in embarrassment while reaching for a shotgun. Yes, bigots are stupid, but they are bright enough to understand the downside of buckshot.

With the possible exception of Keith Bardwell. I fear intelligence has stealthfully bypassed him, which explains why the only work he can find is in elected office.

Being a justice of the peace is lowest rung on the judicial ladder and mainly involves paperwork and petty crime adjudication. One of Bardwell’s burdens is to pass out marriage licenses, a nominal task as the only criteria for obtaining one is that both parties are adults and that neither is already married to someone else (the latter being negotiable in parts of Utah). Ancillary issues are not criteria for denial of a license to surrender your freedom and happiness via wedlock.

Except in Tangipahoa Parish.

Seems a 30+ couple came to Bardwell seeking the requisite paperwork to legally bind them together … and were refused. Bardwell, scraping together what only in his alleged mind could pass for logic, said that that his concern was for any children the interracial couple might spawn (which shows Bardwell is completely unaware of out-of-wedlock birth rate in his state – a lack of marriage being no obvious barrier to bayou babies). His assertion is that mixed race progeny are problematic, saying “I think those children suffer and I won’t help put them through it.”

Then in a fit of oxymoronic muttering Bardwell claimed “I’m not a racist. I just don’t believe in mixing the races that way.”

Ignoring for a moment that justices of the peace are not empowered to make such judgments nor deny a license outside of legislative criteria, we must wonder foremost if the allegedly good people of Tangipahoa Parish had any inkling of Bardwell’s mental illness. The parish is not minor backwater after all. There are over 100,000 people residing there and household incomes indicate that Tangipahoa tenants are at least properly educated, a benefit forsaken by Bardwell.

“I didn’t tell this couple they couldn’t get married. I just told them I wouldn’t do it.”

What makes Bardwell’s buffoonery amusing is that the sitting governor of Louisiana is an East Indian, and several shades darker than the man Bardwell refused to license. Since Jindal is a Republican, Bardwell’s Dixiecrat buddies will no doubt find a way to blame this situation on the Governor.

The problem with prejudice is generational. Old men harboring ancient ideologies linger longer than we like. We must tolerate their company since beating old people is in bad form. Removing them from positions of power is not, and Bobby Jindal needs to make a public example of Bardwell … before the Dixiecrats find a way to pin this episode on the Republican Governor.

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Unless it is downtown San Francisco and the one wielding the whips is a lanky blonde in a leather body suit, wearing little else aside from a maniacal grin.

San Francisco is a city where fetishes are topics of discussion at PTA meetings and where even the nuns are kinky (and the pseudo nuns are odder than the authentic variety). It is a town where you are likely to meet your neighbors at a sex club. When common debauchery is nearly communal, the truly twisted are not far beneath the surface and occasionally escape.

Such is San Francisco’s annual Folsom Street Faire, an event where the interesting and somewhat scary people come to exhibit themselves and their hardware. The Faire attracts whips and chain, BDSM and all manner of leather clad folk from around the globe, as well as a stack of innocent watchers who want only to sneak a toe into the wild side.

The rest of the attendees are happily disturbed.

Which brings us back to the whipee – a well built man (in all manner of speaking) who was roped in a spread-eagle hang, under a sign for an online fetish pornographer and before a mixed audience of the similarly situated and the utterly stunned. With each stroke of her nine tails, short whip or jolt from a miniature cattle prod, he thanked her for inflicting injury (she did stop once to get an alcohol swab for his welted rump).

The scene was almost Romanesque. With a one-handed shocking device, she jolted his back, arms, chest and then headed south to his naked nether regions. She asked the crowd which part of his genital and surrounding territories she should electrocute next. Each audience member shouted their request in an orgy of borderline blood lust. I’m sure the Coliseum saw more action than the Folsom showcases, but maybe not by much.

Shameless is our city, and more so the people who tour these event in the nude. I’m no prude and a good looking and equally naked woman always grabs my attention. Sadly most of the public nudists at the Folsom Fair are exactly he kind of people you want to keep clothed, with the majority being pale, old, fat white men. Seriously, either keep your clothing on or drop a few pounds and shave your back.

And women thought saving their legs was tricky.

In the mix are the committed and the comical. The former are those who have made their particular peccadillo an utter lifestyle. Swarms of identically clad men stand in the intersections watching for soul mates and bedmates to gravitationally attract. Women both tied to Saint Andrew’s crosses and switching the bound, the latter stopping only long enough to ponder the selection of straps with which to whip the former. Men looking particularly breathless in their corsets, women looking particularly excited about chains, and the straights looking particularly perplexed.

They contrasted sharply with the wannabes – those who may some day be devotees but for now sport dime store dog collars. As with musicians, you could tell the experienced from the amateurs by the quality of their gear. The fellow who strode mightily toward the entrance in a leather vest thinner than a politician’s promise was obviously a newcomer. The more mellow man had a think harness, double knitted chains, accessorized nipple clamps and a crotch pocket that appear to have been custom molded to his member.

And then there were the drive-by tourists who collided with one another while rubbernecking the entrance line.

Every city has an essence and San Francisco’s is merely unabashed. Local constabulary willingly allow anything (aside from smoking in public) that doesn’t result in non-consensual violence. What other Americans do in private and feel guilty about in public, San Franciscans do on street corners to exorcize their exhibitionism. The lunatics are running the asylum … and are doing a pretty good job of it.

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