From the www.tbo.com: In another life as an investigator for the Internal Revenue Service, Cindy Rush spent her days laboring over the arcane and hardly thrilling world of columns of numbers, flow charts, profit-and-loss statements – and, yes, you may doze off, right about now.
But on a recent afternoon at the John F. Germany Public Library, Rush is staring at a computer screen watching a piece of cinema featuring two naked women doing … well, if I can figure out a way to describe this in a family newspaper without making you toss your breakfast, I’ll get back to you.
It’s not that Rush gets her jollies by watching naughty, kinky sex videos in a public library. Rather, consider this moment a sort of exercise in cinema veri-T&A.
Barring a last-minute postponement, sometime today Paul Little, also known as Max Hardcore, the David Lean of Loins, will be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Susan Bucklew to a prison term and a fine, following the California resident’s conviction in June on 10 counts of distributing obscene materials through the mail and over the Internet.
No one will ever confuse Little’s cinematic oeuvre with “The Sound of Music.” His prodigious porn output is heavy on scenes involving urination, vomiting and the perverse treatment of women.
Geez, this stuff makes “91/2 Weeks” look like “It’s A Wonderful Life.”
But to suggest that by simply sending his quadruple-X coo-coo-ca-choo flicks featuring consenting adults doing bizarre stuff into the mailboxes and computer screens of other consenting adults somehow violates the community standards of Tampa – with its international reputation as a kind of Sodom & Gomorrah-lite of prurience – stretches the bounds of credulity.
That brings us back to Cindy Rush and the John F. Germany Public Library OH-MY-GAWD! Film Festival.
Rush was one of Little’s defense team investigators who were able to prove the very same content Little is now looking at doing hard time for distributing is readily available throughout Tampa.
Although the public library system installed filters on its computer system to prevent access to pornography, Rush was able to log on, easily bypass the library filters and within less than a minute we were watching the two naked women doing things to each other that defied the laws of physics, physiology and mechanical engineering.
Investigators were also able to repeat the same feat at the University of South Florida and the University of Tampa libraries.
These were not exactly Cartesian moments in library science.
As well, the investigators ordered the exact same illicit material Little was providing from numerous other Internet sites, which Rush had sent to her home via the postal system.
Now this isn’t a defense of Little’s First Amendment rights of “artistic” expression, but rather a simple acknowledgment that in the Internet world if the feds are going to start locking people away for being sleazy, perverted and twisted, we’re going to need an awful lot more jail cells.
The Paul Little case is nothing more than a drop in the bucket of tawdriness. And let’s not even contemplate what that drop consists of.