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Should "Jerry Springer" be banished from the airwaves or just dismissed as silly? Discuss trashy talk shows in the Television area of Table Talk
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No glitz please -- we're British Under the Covers The labyrinth of Paz Brad and me Hollywoodland BROWSE THE
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Oklahomans to Tom Tomorrow:
AN ORGY-DEPICTING "THIS MODERN WORLD"
Three weeks ago the Oklahoma Gazette, a free alternative weekly, ran a cartoon by Dan Perkins, aka "Tom Tomorrow," a syndicated political cartoonist whose strip, "This Modern World," appears in about 100 publications, including this one. The cartoon opened with a panel showing grainy, antique drawings of six naked people engaged in what appears to be the early stages of an orgy. A woman on the left side of the panel, who is leaning forward slightly as a man embraces her from behind, chirps, "If you ask me, the media have really gone into a FEEDING FRENZY over Clinton's alleged sexual misconduct." In the next panel, a woman whose breast is being fondled by a man opines, "For instance, while journalists rush to report the latest salacious rumors, CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM has been quietly defeated for another year." In the final panel, hordes of bodies writhe in a heap while one, reaching eagerly into the sea of flesh, complains, "Unfortunately, these media elitists seem to believe that Americans won't pay attention to ANYTHING unless it involves sex!" Perkins' self-satirizing mocking of media sensationalism probably gave readers in New York or San Francisco no more than a mild frisson. But in Oklahoma, one of the most conservative states in the country, it set off a firestorm of moral outrage that resulted in the newspaper dropping Perkins' strip. Public pressure also led a local school board to refuse to renew a major contract with the paper's publisher's law firm. Perkins, who recently won a prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, finds the whole affair highly ironic. "If these people would actually read it, they would probably agree with what it was saying," he says. "This particular cartoon had a very puritanical message. It was denouncing the media's obsession with sex scandals; it was about campaign finance reform. Were they afraid some kid is going to masturbate to campaign finance reform?" The strip's oddly antiquated sexual images were taken from 18th century engravings of a Roman orgy scene, which Perkins says he spent hours cleaning up to remove anything sexually explicit. But apparently he didn't clean them up enough for Bob Anderson, the executive director of a fundamentalist Christian group called Oklahomans for Children and Family (OCAF). When Anderson saw the strip, he hit the roof. The strip, he said, showed "people doing all types of sexual activities -- oral sex, anal sex, group sex, bondage, torture, everything imaginable. You do not need to show illegal stuff to get a political point across." Anderson said he didn't even read the strip until he'd looked at it three times (possibly proving Perkins' point). Not wanting even a cleaned-up drawing of a Roman orgy to fall into the hands of children, Anderson swung into action. He called the "team leaders" of his organization, which has a mailing list of 10,000 people. They mobilized their members, who called the paper's advertisers, the police and State Rep. Forrest Claunch. Claunch wrote a letter to the city's district attorney, asking him to review the cartoon and take legal action. "I believe that such material is offensive and should be pornographic if it is not, and I am even more offended that it is made readily available, without restriction, for any child to view," Claunch wrote. Within 24 hours, an obscenity complaint was filed with the police department. "This Modern World" had only been running in the Gazette a few weeks when the controversy erupted. Mike Easterling, the paper's editor, says he didn't think twice about running the "Orgy Cartoon": He thought it was clever. Easterling says he knew that some people would be offended, but he didn't expect the uproar that followed. "The depth of feeling that people are exhibiting on this on talk radio or in the letters they've written to us -- they're taking this very personally," Easterling says. "It's almost as if we had run up to their house and shit on their front porch." The outraged citizenry also showed up en masse to a school board meeting in Moore County, a suburb of Oklahoma City, where they denounced the strip and the Gazette. Not coincidentally, Bill Bleakley, the paper's publisher, is also a principal in the law firm that represents the Moore school district. The law firm's $40,000- to-$60,000 contract with the school district, which was up for renewal at the beginning of the meeting, was not renewed. Lee Bocock, vice president of the school district, declined to comment in her official capacity on whether the cartoon influenced the school board's decision not to renew. But she said she personally was offended by it. "When you've got group sex in a cartoon, frame after frame, the point is, 'Who cares if we all have multiple sex partners' -- which is a gross lie," she says. When asked if it was fair to punish Bleakley's law firm for something his paper, a separate entity, did, Bocock responded: "I don't personally see how a person can wear two hats." OCAF's Anderson denies that his group was involved in the campaign to put pressure on Bleakley's law firm, but says he supports the school board's decision. He also says he believes that the very fact Bleakley published a paper that would run such filth raised questions about his capacity to practice law fairly. "If he is representing the school and a little girl is raped in the restroom and he's the type of guy that runs this cartoon in the newspaper, whose side do you think he'll be on? I think he'd be very biased." As for Perkins, he insists that his cartoon was perfectly appropriate for alternative papers, which run explicit sex columns and phone-sex ads. "I offend people all the time. That's my job," he says. "That's what I get paid to do when I suggest that Mother Teresa was less than a saint or that we've gone overboard on the death of Princess Di or that you're a flag-waving meathead if you don't understand that civilians are going to die if we bomb Iraq." The Gazette is not the first publication to feel the wrath of OCAF. The organization attempted to remove five books for young adults, including "It's Perfectly Normal" by Robie Harris and "Boys and Sex" by Wardell Pomeroy, from the public library. OCAF's biggest flap, however, involves the Academy Award-winning film "The Tin Drum," based on Günter Grass' novel. Last summer, while listening to a conservative radio talk show, Anderson heard someone say that "The Tin Drum" was pornographic. After an aide viewed the film, OCAF turned it over to the police, who passed it on to the district attorney, who handed it to a district judge. The judge said it contained child pornography. The Oklahoma City Police Department then obtained a list of all the people who had rented the film from Blockbuster and another video store and, in a bizarre development, went to their houses at night to retrieve the film. Among the people who had checked out the film, unfortunately for the city, was Michael Camfield, development director of the local chapter of the ACLU. He is now suing the city for violating his rights under both the First Amendment and the Fourth, which protects citizens against unlawful search and seizure. The case is scheduled to come to trial in August. "Hope springs eternal that people will leave other people alone and respect civil liberties," Camfield says. "I should have known better." Easterling confirmed last week that the Gazette was dropping the strip. The paper will not face prosecution on obscenity charges: In a letter to Rep. Claunch, the state district attorney's office opined that the strip was protected free speech. "Offensive as these depictions are," the letter says, "it would be difficult to characterize the cartoon as anything other than political satire, and therefore beyond the reach of both the statutory language and constitutional protections governing Oklahoma law." Anderson isn't satisfied. He vows to continue putting pressure on the Gazette until the publisher makes a public apology and promises to never again publish anything as offensive. But that may not be the end of Bleakley's troubles -- or that of his law firm. When asked if a statewide campaign might take place to pressure other school boards against renewing their contracts with the publisher's law firm, Moore school district official Bocock says, "Maybe." One of the state's largest school districts, Putnam, however, says that it will continue to retain Bleakley's firm as counsel. "I think it sends the worst possible message to cave into these bluenoses," says Perkins. "But it's kind of a shame that it didn't go to trial because I would have certainly been the first person in history to be brought up on obscenity charges for a cartoon about campaign finance reform."
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