Squicky Bernie Ward & the View From Atalantis

I spent much of the past week agonizing over Myanmar.

Why Myanmar?

Well, because back when it was Burma, it was the one place I always really, really wanted to go. The idea of a medieval Buddhist kingdom sharing the Tibetan border high on the Shan plateau was very appealing. A little piece of my imagination broke when I was twenty-two and the (inevitable) Socialist revolution took place.

I wanted to see Mandalay, the pagodas of Bagan, the pigeon blood rubies – maybe the Buddhists had rubies that matched the blood hue of every animal that had ever evolved, locked away in some kind of super, secret Buddhist underground vault. I wanted to see the fast inland Lake Inle. I was certain that the color of the sky was different in Burma – it was some place very strange.

The enormity of a hurricane that wipes out 100,000 people staggers the mind.

One has to assume, of course, the death toll is due not so much to the intensity of the storm as it is to the inadequacy of the infrastructure. If that same storm happened here it might have a death toll in the dozens.
And a hundred thousand is just the proximate death toll. The secondary mortality stats from famine, disease, civil unrest could well top a million.

It's hard to wrap my mind around that kind of misery.

I wonder why I feel compelled to do so

I suppose it's this… sense. Like I'm a citizen of Atlantis. One morning I woke up and heard a sucking sound: the waves along the shoreline were receding. Everyone around me was behaving as though nothing was happening. But I knew something was. Only there was no high ground to run to, Atlantis being an island. So all foresight was gonna do for me was prolong the margin of panic…

The other current events story I've been obsessing about all week long is the Bernie Ward case. Ward changed his plea on child porn distribution charges to guilty this week.

I listened to Bernie Ward quite a bit when I was working at ICM, commuting between Monterey and San Francisco on a regular basis, usually late at night. I was perpetually sleep deprived in those days and of course, I've always hated driving at night – I have lousy night vision. It's a wonder that I never got into an accident. I survived by thinking of the various milestones as Stations of the Cross and Ward's raspy voice as some kind of guided tour through them.

I didn't like Ward though and it kind of pissed me off that I agreed with so many of his politics. The guy was just unpleasant. It had tickled me initially to find a leftwing talk radio guy using the same tactics as Hannity or Limbaugh. But the thing is Limbaugh is funny. Like him or not, Limbaugh's very amusing. Ward was just strident.

Still, my first thought when the Ward charges came down: The guy is being railroaded.

A couple of months later, the Smoking Gun published transcripts of Ward's online chats with a Stanislaus County dominatrix. It kind of boggles the mind to think of a dominatrix living in Stanislaus County in the first place – I'm not sure whether Larry McMurtry or Annie Proulx should write that novel. Be that as it may, the transcripts are squicky indeed, almost physically nauseating.

Ward was clearly not doing "research."

But the other thing he was clearly not doing is molesting an underage child.

Of course the distribution of that one photograph through any means is what constitutes the crime. It's a crime that can carry a twenty-year prison sentence.

Isn't this a bit of an over-reaction? Twenty years for a single photograph?

The larger issue though to me is that the distribution of this photograph is a crime without reference to intent. So, I have in my possession many naked pictures I took of my kids in the bathtub when they were little tots as well as several naked pictures of me my mother took. Can I get busted for showing them around under the existing statute? Apparently I can.

What's most disturbing to me about this case, though, is that Ward is essentially going to prison for a thought crime. I mean – no one is alleging that he ever touched an underage child in a sexual way. However disgusting those transcripts – and they are disgusting – these are fantasies.

I wonder what would have happened had the image Ward distributed been a highly realistic computer graphic?
For years when I was still in the Internet business, I used to ponder what the Killer App would turn out to be. The Killer App – I figured – would be something that allowed you to act out porn fantasies involving movie stars. Or, I suppose if your tastes run that way, underage minors. The Sims comes close – particularly because users can design all sorts of mods for the Sims. I've actually seen a Sims rape mod.

Would it be illegal to playact sexual fantasies involving children with the Killer App? I mean sure, yeah, it's disgusting – at least to me. But is it illegal? Should it be illegal?

I would answer, No.