Debbie Nathan

As roosters go, this one looks too slender and callow to be an adult. I think he’s an adolescent. Let’s say that in chicken bio-time, one month equals eight human years. We’re looking at a teenager. He’s a Chicken Little. A minor.

Not only that, he’s got those nasty razor contraptions under his feet. He’s involved in cockfighting. That’s illegal in the US for adult roosters, never mind chicks.

I confess — I purchased this picture south of the border and carried it home in my luggage. It’s an image of an actual, young Latino fowl engaged in acts which are permitted in Mexico but prohibited in the US. Here, it’s child pollography.

Yikes! Can I get busted? Well, not if I just hang it on my wall. But what if I make copies and start offering it for sale?

Then I’m in trouble, according to an article in the New York Times on July 11 discussing the constitutionality of a law criminalizing the sale of depictions of animal cruelty, even if the cruelty is legal in the jurisdiction where the image is made. In Puerto Rico, for instance, cockfighting is legal. But it’s banned in almost every US state.

An animal-cruelty image sales prohibition law was enacted during the waning years of the Clinton administration. It was passed to deal with “crush videos” — where women say smutty things to rodents and other small animals, then trample them with their bare feet or shoes. According to the Times, President Clinton wanted the bill used only against depictions of cruelty to animals “designed to appeal to a prurient interest in sex.”(Good thing he never taped himself being mean to Monica, with all his refusals to have intercourse with her.)

So this law isn’t supposed to apply to cockfights. Or dogfights. Bullfights. Or, god forbid, hunting. Not even hunting — on preserves — of chubby, for-all-practical purposes-domesticated deer, by attractive little Texan girls like Courtney (this photo was spotted recently on a bulletin board in GanderMountain, a camping and hunting supply store in Tom DeLay’s stomping ground, Sugarland. Dad! Do not make it into a calendar for sale to help the local Rotary Club! And fellow Texan Kurt Eichenwald — do not buy it!).

Despite the sexual “smash video” limitation, notes the Times, people have been prosecuted for selling videos of dog fights. And now, a company that webcasts cockfights from Puerto Rico has gone to federal court in Miami to argue that Americans have a First Amendment right to market such images, even if the behavior depicted is a crime in the place where the image is consumed.

The First Amendment argument has nothing to do with commercialization. It’s about possession and viewing per se. The argument goes like this: It’s not the image of a crime that should be criminalized–it’s the crime itself. If bad behavior isn’t outlawed in the jurisdiction where the image is produced, the remedy is not to ban the picture. It’s to change the law to prohibit the conduct. Then go after the law breakers for committing the crime. Use the pictures as evidence. But don’t make images of the crime illegal.

Interesting.

And here’s what’s more so: You can make the same arguments about child pornography — not the rooster version, of course, but the real thing.

Child porn images deserve to be illegal, the government argument goes, because adults shouldn’t be having sex with minors, or pushing them to do sexual things they can’t legally consent to. If such conduct is illegal, then child porn is a visual record of crimes, just as cockfight videos are a visual records of crimes if they’re made in the US, where cockfighting is illegal.

But the First Amendment question is, what right does the government have to ban the viewing and even distribution and possession of visual records?

And what if the porn was made in countries where 16 year olds are allowed to perform sexually? In such countries (there are many) no crime occurs when 16 or 17 year olds are filmed in sexual poses. But it’s against the law to webcast or otherwise distribute their images in the US, because our age of consent is 18.

Then, there’s all the material made by minors of themselves and their underage friends. These days, ego-porning by teens seems to be the genre’s biggest growth area.

So, is separating the image from the crime — and outlawing the image — right or rational? Maybe yes, maybe no. When it comes to cockfights and dog fights, the courts are batting around these questions, Constitutional scholars are jumping in, and and the Times has a front-section, full-of-Times-gravitas story.

But do you ever hear the same reasoning (or rationality, or mainstream reporting) applied to the child porn question?

You may protest that children are not chickens. Many people (including those in the Department of Justice) argue that subsequent to the commission of child sexual abuse, distributing the visual record of that abuse hurts child victims all over again. Others note that this claim sounds plausible on the surface, but there’s no data to back it up.

(There’s no data, either, to tell how all those Abu Ghraib victims feel about the mass distribution of photos showing them being sexually assaulted. But no one … except the government … has ever suggested it should be a crime to look at the images of those assaults.)

Interesting that we can mull over First Amendment rights when it comes to crimes against chickens, dogs, and Iraqi sex torture victims. But not children.

Maybe the pollos can open a discussion.

Kooler than Kahlo? “Whorehouse: Pseudo-journalists at a good price” Zócalo, July 2007

Did Frida Kahlo have spinal bifida? Does correctly guessing the Mexican left’s future lie in parsing its gusto for Canal-Street-style trinkets? Tune in, folks — below.

First, Frida’s medical problems. A New York Times story today about the artist’s current exhibit at Mexico City’s Bellas Artes museum notes that the show’s purpose is to get beneath the myths Kahlo spun around herself and which have since been tricked out, as her art, face, and Hollywood box office possibilities have been fully exploited — in coffee table books, cheap jewelry, tee-shirts, purses, and so on and on, sin fin.

The Times remarked that the pain and suffering in Kahlo’s self portraits came from injuries she suffered while young: first, a bout with polio, and later, a traffic accident involving a street car.

But last week, Mexico City’s newspaper Reforma ran a long piece on Kahlo, noting that most of her chronic pain came from having been born with incomplete closure of the spinal column: spinal bifida. Kahlo never talked about her spinal bifida, however. Apparently she thought the street-car-accident story was more … well … mythic. To my mind, for the Times to omit spina bifida in its Kahlo story contradicted the point of the piece. Oh well! It’s just the Times.

Anyhow, I never got to the Frida exhibit, because my plans to view her flashy paintings were waylaid by the siren song of bargain bling from Andrés Manuel López Obrador (nicknamed AMLO) and his leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). I’d hit the streets Sunday morning, planning to visit Bellas Artes. But oops! It always happens. I got mesmerized by the Zócalo — Mexico City’s venerable town square. Its civic juice never fails to amaze.

Last time I was there (early May), I walked by accident into the logistics of a Spencer Tunnick nude shoot, where 18,000 people eventually showed up to take their clothes off for art. Fascinating — Bellas Artes could wait! This time, I spotted a crowd of 80,000 milling, marching and chanting. It was PRD’s first annual protest against July 2, 2006 — the day, PRD claims, that candidate Lopez Obrador was cheated out of the presidency by fraud.

Or, um, maybe it wasn’t a protest, but a celebration, since AMLO claims to be acting as president, complete with a shadow government featuring the “Secretary of This” and “Secretary of That.”

Mainstream Mexico press treats AMLO as a joke. Even many lefties are embarrassed by his refusal to admit defeat and seek more potent ways of doing politics. The Zocalo event I witnessed was a lot smaller, and — the papers said — more subdued than the electric, mass gathering that coalesced right after he lost the election. A friend in DF said many, if not most, of those 80,000 people in the Zocalo this time around are AMLO diehards in what now is shrinking to little more than a cult filled with old people and peasants who get trucked to AMLO events in free buses and, for their trouble, are given a much needed sandwich.

But hmmm. What about the tchotchkes??

They were everywhere. AMLO flags. Pirated DVDs of Italian and French movies. AMLO coffee cups. AMLO ballpoint pens. AMLO digital clocks. Faux designer scarves with PRD’s sunburst logo (Hecho en Mexico? Or en China?). AMLO shot glasses. AMLO dolls that say something when you squeeze them but I’m not sure what. Even “General Zapata” sliced white bread, looking every bit as overprocessed and avitaminized as Pan Bimbo. If the crowd was lackluster, you couldn’t say the same for the shlock. It was psychemodelickly vibrant.

Which started me thinking: How do you get left political organizing to tickle people’s libido with as much mojo as the right musters by tapping their deep, subconscious Jesus and anti-onanism fixations? Progressive movements worldwide are now experimenting with costumery, mummery, music, comedy, street theater. In addition, buttons and posters are now joined by tank top tee-shirts for sale, nutty post cards, rock CDs and even panties (remember all those 2000 and 2004 plays on “bush”?).

Good old, evil commodity fetishism, it seems, is one mark of a living, breathing Left. Maybe even in Mexico. I wish I could have bought a 99-cent store’s worth of AMLO products, but I still had to go through customs. I took these pictures instead.

As faithful readers of this blog already know, I was interviewed by Susie Bright a few weeks ago; we discussed everything from moral panics in general to child endangerment paranoia in particular, and the need to review and question every claim the government makes — including about the nature and prevalence of child porn on the Net. For a few weeks, the interview (in two parts) was available only in the sound version, at “In Bed with Susie Bright,” on Audible.com. It’s still there, and you need an IPod or ITune program, plus a few bucks, to get it.

Today, the website 10 Zen Monkeys published a transcript of the interview. Click here to read it.

After you finish checking out 10 Zen’s site, go visit Susie’s. It’s so smart and saucy, it’s addictive. Send her a few bucks, subscribe to “In Bed With” or buy a book from her because, like my sis says, “Susie’s a national treasure.” Unlike Mount Rushmore or Library of Congress, however, she’s not taxpayer supported. Well, not yet…