From the ArcaMax Publishing, Alexander Cockburn Newsletter:
http://www.arcamax.com/news/alexandercockburn/s-639303-269607
Just how funny was that story of the man in Fairfax County, Va., who
got up early on Monday morning, Oct. 19, walked naked into his own
kitchen to make himself a cup of coffee? The next significant thing
that happed to 29-year-old Eric Williamson is the local cops arriving
to charge him with indecent exposure. It turns out that while he was
brewing the coffee, a mother was taking her 7-year-old son along a
path beside Williamson's house, spied the naked Williamson and called
the local precinct, or more likely her husband, who turns out to be a
cop.
"Yes, I wasn't wearing any clothes," Williamson said later, "but I was
alone, in my own home and just got out of bed. It was dark and I had
no idea anyone was outside looking in at me."
The story ended up on TV, starting with Fox, and in the opening
rounds, the newscasters and network blogs had merciless sport with the
Fairfax police for their absurd behavior. Hasn't a man the right to
walk around his own home (or in this case, rented accommodations)
dressed according to his fancy? Answer, obvious to anyone familiar
with relevant case law, absolutely not.
Peeved by public ridicule, the Fairfax cops turned up the heat. The
cop's wife started to maintain that first she saw Williamson by a
glass kitchen door, then through the kitchen window. Mary Ann
Jennings, a Fairfax County Police spokesperson, stirred the pot of
innuendo: "We've heard there may have been other people who had a
similar incident." The cops are asking anyone who may have seen an
unclothed Williamson through his windows to come forward, even if it
was at a different time. They've also been papering the neighborhood
with fliers, asking for reports on any other questionable activities
by anyone resembling Williamson -- a white guy who's a former diver,
and who has a 5-year-old daughter, not living with him.
I'd say that if the cops keep it up, and some prosecutor scents
opportunity, Williamson will be pretty lucky if they don't throw some
cobbled-up indictment at him. Toss in a jailhouse snitch making his
own plea deal, a faked police lineup, maybe an artist's impression of
the Fairfax Flasher, and Williamson could end up losing his visitation
rights and, worst comes to worst, getting 10 years plus posted for
life on some sex offender site. You think we're living in the 21st
century, in the clinical fantasy world of "CSI"? Wrong. So far as
forensic evidence is concerned, we remain planted in the 17th century
with trial by ordeal such as when they killed women as witches if they
floated when thrown into a pond.
Let's head north from Fairfax County to Massachusetts, home of the
witch trials. How about if you're white in Boston (wise decision),
weigh yourself in your own bedroom with no clothes on and. ... But let
my Boston friend pick up the story because it happened to him.
"It was the early '90s. Early on Xmas eve two burly cops pushed into
our house and invaded our bedroom -- no warrant. They only backed off
after they realized that the scale in our bedroom where I weighed
myself was in front of a window. To see me there the born-agains who
moved in next door (actually on the far side of a vacant lot
separating us) had to keep a tight watch since it does not take long
to weigh oneself.
"My girlfriend was dressing in the bedroom and my mom and stepdaughter
were visiting. By the time the cops understood that I had been
weighing myself every morning, the paddy wagon was there ready to take
me away.
"I would have sued them but I was running for Congress at the time.
The cops liked my opponent, a right-wing pro-lifer, and I have always
thought that had something to do with their moral diligence that day.
One of the cops, the chief, later resigned in a corruption scandal."
Now this was in the early 1990s, please note. This was when the wave
of hysteria over satanic abuse of children was in full spate with
people being imprisoned for life on just the sort of "evidence" the
cops are now trying to marshal against Williamson. Massachusetts
actually saw the first trial of a daycare teacher charged with satanic
abuse. Bernard Baran was released after 22 years and exonerated three
years after that, on June 9 of this year.
As the attorney Mike Snedeker, who co-authored with Debbie Nathan the
1998 book "Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern
American Witch Hunt," recently reminded us on the CounterPunch
website, there are victims of that hysteria, almost certainly
innocent, still rotting in prison: Fran and Danny Keller in Texas;
James Toward and Francisco Fuster in Florida almost a generation
later.
Earlier this year, Nancy Smith, a schoolteacher, and Joseph Allen, a
Head Start bus driver, were released from Ohio prisons after serving
14 years for committing phantom crimes against 5-year-olds. John Stoll
-- convicted of allowing people he barely knew to sodomize his
6-year-old son, and himself sodomizing young children he had just met
and then sending them on home after school-was released in 2004 after
20 years in state prison. He is featured in the documentary "Witch
Hunt," narrated by Sean Penn, and recently settled a civil rights suit
against Kern County, Calif., for $5.5 million.
Among the many brilliant observations of Morse Peckham in his 1969
book, "Art and Pornography" (published by the Kinsey Institute) was
that the concern with sexual behavior has nothing to do with sex but
everything to do with policing. American sexual prudery is part of
political and social policing within the nominally legal context of
supposed individual freedom. People learn to be prudish with sex
before they understand anything else in society and this prudery is
transferred to other areas later, which are even more important for
social control and stability.
The control of sex and pornography is a major part of promulgating a
puritanical political culture without ever imposing an overt political
censorship regime. Sexual repression, through the allegation of
"deviant" fantasy crimes, is often the designated stand-in for
violations of the social order harder to stand up in court.
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Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new
book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils,"
available through www.counterpunch.com. To find out more about
Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and
cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.