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The Latest News
on Power and Evil
in Washington
(and Elsewhere)
PUBLISHED
ON SEPTEMBER 6
PANAM 103 TRIAL:
The Case Falls Apart;
Inside Story of How the
US and the UK Tried
for Years to Insure the
PanAm 103 Case Would
Never Come to Trial in
a Fair Courtroom Because
They Knew They Couldn't
Make the Case Stick
How Qaddafi, Helped
by Mandela and a Canny
Scots Lawyer, Called
the West's Bluff
How the Western
Press Covered Up
NADER'S CAMPAIGN:
Is It Building a Movement?
PUBLISHED
ON AUGUST 28
COUNTERPUNCH
GOES TO LA
A FIELD DAY
FOR THE HEAT:
Cops Riot As Planned,
Bravely Trample Trapped
Crowd With Horses,
Fire Point Blank
At Unarmed Kids,
Amid Huzzas of Press
GORE/LIEBERMAN TICKET:
Sprayed With Cash
In Tinseltown;
Judeo-Christian
God Hailed At
Every Turn
EDWARD SAID
ON RALPH NADER:
What Nader's Campaign
Means for America
and the World
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
The Getty Museum vs.
The Watts Towers
BASIC INSTINCT:
Tipper's Secret
Love Diaries
PUBLISHED
ON AUGUST 1
THE TRUTH ABOUT
DICK CHENEY:
He's Dumb
SPECIAL PRE-LA
REPORT ON AL GORE:
° Soul Brother to Newt
° Betrayer the Environment
° Friend of Nuclear Power
° Hated by Senate Colleagues
° New Deal Sabotuer
° Reinventing Government
on the Backs of the Poor
Search CounterPunch
Read All About Al Gore:
a User's Manual, the explosive new book by CounterPunch editors
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Whiteout:
the CIA, drugs & the Press
by Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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September 15, 2000
The Gores' Culture Wars
Within the
past month we've had an FBI report on the "school shooter"
threat profile, which again strains to make a link between popular
culture and teenage mass murderers. We've had a report from the
Federal Trade Commission lacerating the entertainment industry
for marketing violence to minors. The Senate Commerce, Science
& Technology Committee, on which Joe Lieberman sits, held
hearings on these issues in September. For their part, Al Gore
and Lieberman have told the entertainment industry that it has
six months to clean up its act, or, once installed in the White
House, the next Democratic administration will draft laws to
compel Hollywood, the computer and video companies, and the music
industry to mend their ways.
Grandstanding about the entertainment
industry has been a specialty of Al and Tipper Gore since Al
first entered Congress in 1977 (the year the couple were formally
Born Again). Tipper was part of a Congressional wives' club agitating
against violence and sex on TV, and then in the mid-eighties
came Tipper's famous campaign, abetted by her husband, against
explicit rock 'n' rap music. Until Gore brought Lieberman onto
the ticket, Gore apologists tended to blame this foray into censorship
as a misadventure by Tipper, ultimately rectified when the Gores
traveled to Hollywood and told recording-industry executives
that the whole drive to censor music had been a mistake and somehow
not their fault. But since Gore and Lieberman are now revving
up a culture war far more sinister than anything proposed by
Dan Quayle back in 1992, it's worth remembering what exactly
Tipper and Al got up to fifteen years ago in their campaign against
explicit rock 'n' rap.
In early June of 1985 Tipper's
group PMRC (Parents' Music Resource Center) sent a letter to
Stanley Gortikov, president of the Recording Industry Association
of America, demanding a ratings code. The group called for an
X to be put on records that contained profanity, violence or
sexually explicit lyrics, including "topics of fornication,
sado-masochism, incest, homosexuality, bestiality and necrophilia."
The
inclusion of homosexuality harked back to Al's comment in 1976
as he campaigned for Congress that he considered homosexuality
to be "abnormal" behavior.
But this was not all. Just as Gore
and Lieberman now protest their affection for the First Amendment
and insist they are opposed to censorship, Tipper back then swore
up and down that she and her group were against censorship. This
was false. In a memo to Gortikov the PMRC wrote that it wanted
the record labels to "reassess contracting artists who engage
in violence, substance abuse and/or explicit behavior in concerts
where minors are admitted." So much for Al's favorite band,
the substance-abusing Beatles. So much too for Tipper's Rolling
Stones or Grateful Dead, whom she welcomed into her office in
1993, thus honoring a band that had introduced two generations
to the joys of drugs.
From
the start, Tipper's PMRC worked hand in glove with right-wing
fundamentalist Christian groups. One of her partners in the PMRC
was Susan Baker (wife of James Baker, a Cabinet officer in the
Reagan/Bush years), who was also a board member of the Rev. James
Dobson's Focus on the Family. This outfit, now based in Colorado,
is notoriously antigay and antiabortion. Dobson, who argued that
serial killer Ted Bundy had been driven to murder by an addiction
to pornography, served on Attorney General Ed Meese's 1985 commission
to eradicate smut.
This was not the only group touted
by Tipper's PMRC. Take the Missouri Rock Project, an outfit run
by an associate of Phyllis Schlafly, which distributed information
packets, prepared by the Victory Christian Church of St. Charles,
Missouri, claiming that the Holocaust was overblown, that Hitler
didn't write Mein Kampf and that Hollywood shamelessly advocates
race-mixing. The church described the slain civil rights leader,
whose memory is often invoked by Al Gore, as "Martin Lucifer
King." Enthusiastically plugged by the PMRC as a useful
resource were the writings of David Noebel, author of Rhythm,
Riots and Revolution, whose essays in music criticism include
the following: "The full truth is that [the origin of rock]
goes still deeper-to the heart of Africa, where it was used to
incite warriors to such a frenzy that by nightfall neighbors
were cooked in carnage pots!"
Contrary
to Tipper's repeated suggestions that the PMRC wanted to act
only as an agent of consumer information, the rock "porn"
crusade quickly transmuted into a spate of legal proposals and
criminal trials of musicians, songwriters and record retailers.
In Maryland a bill that would have made it a crime to sell "obscene"
music to minors was only narrowly defeated. Similar measures
were proposed in eighteen other states. In 1986 Jello Biafra,
lead singer of the anarchopunk band the Dead Kennedys, was charged
with producing "material harmful to minors." Tipper
applauded the prosecution and lamented that she hadn't personally
been responsible for the charges being brought. For Tipper, the
band's "tastelessly styled" name may have been enough.
But Biafra had enclosed in one album a poster of a painting by
Swiss artist H.R. Giger titled Landscape #20, depicting, as Tipper
excitedly put it, "multiple erect penises penetrating vaginas".
The Gores and PMRC were prudent
about one sector of the recording industry, headquartered in
their occasional home port of Tennessee. Country music, despite
its obsession with despair, drinking, adultery, suicide and revenge,
was spared their scrutiny. Ed Meese was successfully ridiculed
by liberals for his censorship campaign. The Gores survived intact,
and their concerns became Administration policy in 1993, with
the successful drive for the V-chip, the war on teenage mothers
(often linked to the one against music and MTV) and kindred moral
campaigns. And now the PMRC crusade is being Born Again in Campaign
2000. All this year Al Gore has boasted about his wife's PMRC
campaign, most recently on The Oprah Winfrey Show. "She
was early, and she was right," he has said.
The
film director Robert Altman told a British newspaper recently
that he feels it will be a "catastrophe for the world if
George Bush is elected. You won't see me for dust. I for one
will be leaving the country and living in France." As an
entertainer, he's got the wrong candidate. CP
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