Richard D. Moore's

Infernal Internet

Some people try like hell to scare you. To give you goose bumps with their stories. To make your heart beat faster and faster as you delve deeper into the netherworld they've constructed. To satisfy your need for a shudder and jolt of hard uncompromising fear. And for that we love them.

Others need only exist for us to tremble with genuine terror upon encountering the twisted logic of their belief systems, and the things they're capable of doing to their own kind in the name of those beliefs. Hitler. Vlad the Impaler. Osama Bin Laden. Vanilla Ice.

my music will tear your soul apart

All are guilty of their crimes against humanity. All have darkened mankind's history; a history that would have been far different had they never existed. Alright, maybe I'm being a little unfair to Vlad here. After all, without him, we wouldn't have Dracula, right? But the rest... We'll never be the same as we were before their evil madness was unleashed upon us.

And yet, for all the evil we've survived, new monsters await us with the dawn of every new day. Their faces may be ever changing, but their intentions remain the same. They want us to bow before them, want to control us, want to rip love to shreds and fill our hearts with suspicion and hate.

There's a lot of scary shit going on out there right now. Scarier than any fiction, no matter how extreme. I won't go into the obvious one, as a fellow who shares my last name has pretty much covered that. But I will tell you about some of the stuff that scares the living shit out of me.

The latest killer computer viruses, for example, are pretty damned scary, but not half as scary as the knowledge that there are people out there with the brains to think up said viruses, and the madness in their souls to release them upon us.

Poetry.com which is run by the National Library of Poetry, and easy to confuse or mistakenly associate with The Library of Congress, is pretty damned scary too, in the way it panders to the ego of anyone who submits a poem to the site, sending endless mail announcements of books and awards and plaques and cups and tapes and conferences that will commemorate the poet's outstanding achievements in poetry.

No pictures of the International Library of Poetry exits, but here's the place a lot confuse it with.

I pity the poor dupes that were scammed this way. And I should know since I was one of them. They got me by informing me that one of my poems had been chosen to appear in a book of poetry, and that the book could be mine for just seventy dollars. Like a fool I told my mother, and being the proud mother that she is, she went right out and ordered a copy. Each book holds thousands of poems, and you can imagine how many copies some people must order when they find out The National Library of Poetry has chosen to include their poem in a 'beautifully bound volume printed on the finest of papers, yours to treasure for years to come, and available in all major book stores'. Yeah right. But even that isn't half as scary as what happened when I went to see the tepid verse that a hazy Heineken induced spark of creativity had produced. I couldn't get to my poems or anybody else's on Poetry.com. Their database lists in the millions, but any name I clicked on just showed me the same thing: an ad for some upcoming contest or other and the vast amounts of cash won by entrants in previous contests. If you enter a contest, by the way, you are automatically put on the list of prizewinners. Unfortunately, you didn't win any cash, a letter will tell you a couple of weeks later, but you have won the opportunity to have your poem read aloud at a Poetry.com conference that only costs a grand to attend. Other special announcement will soon thereafter inform you that your poem has been chosen to appear on an 'outstanding achievement in poetry' plaque and can be yours for just a hundred and fifty dollars. Scary, man. But it gets worse. I called Poetry.com and told them I couldn't get to any of the millions of poems in the database. The operator told me that to read my poems or anybody else's, I would need to disable my Norton anti-virus. "Disable my Norton?" I said, and laughed, thinking she was having me on. She told me that she was quite serious. Disabling Norton is the only way to read the poems. Now I'm not saying anything untoward is going on here. All I'm saying is that it strikes me as a little bit odd. A little bit strange. A little scary.

But even that isn't the most frightening thing I've come across while conducting my Infernal Internet investigations. Rob Black, who hit the news recently with his controversial adult movies doesn't scare me, but what's happening to him does.

TO FREE OR NOT TO FREE? AH, THERE'S THE RUB

If anything, I see Black, who runs a company called Extreme Associates, as the Roger Corman of porn. His exploitation movies, which feature gross out gore and murders, differ chiefly from the usual low budget horror movies in that they also contain hardcore sex. What scares me is that Black is being prosecuted by that good old poster boy for the Religious Right Johnny Ashcroft, who is charging Black and his wife/director Lizzie Borden with conspiring to distribute obscene videotapes and violation of the obscenity code by featuring clips from their films on their website.

“I SWEAR TO YOU GW, THAT LITTLE HEATHEN SLUT'S BOOBIES ARE THIS BIG”

I personally have never seen an Extreme Associates film, but I gather that they incorporate political and religious themes, feature simulated lust murder, gang rape, real beatings (at the explicit consent of the performer), and the consumption of all known body fluids. They never feature bestiality; Black draws the line there, as well as anything involving children.

While Rob and Lizzie's graphically violent sex films might not be everybody's preferred cuppa, they are only available through mail order, and as Dr. Susan Block points out in her excellent article about Black and Ashcorft, "those of us who do not like to watch a woman's head being pushed into a toilet in Terminator 3, or snuff photos of Saddam's sons on the TV, don't have to watch. We can choose not to. The point is nobody makes me watch Extreme Associate Films. Nobody makes anybody watch them. The only people forced to watch them are the judge and the jury in this case." Dr. Block further goes on to point out "Rob and Lizzie are simply exercising their First Amendment rights to make disgusting movies. Just like any other pornographers, just like horror moviemakers, just like slasher and adventure movie producers, just like a lot of tabloid journalists and TV news producers, just like a lot of artists, just like any of us in the Free Speech-dependent communications game."

To date Rob Black's legal fees in this case have exceeded $300,000. If found guilty Rob and Lizzie may face $2.5 million in fines each, and up to 50 years in prison. More than forty agents raided Extreme Associates and seized copies of movies, sales records, distribution records, and every other kind of record of business. As this was a preliminary investigation, no arrests were made. The warrant lasted ten days, and in that time these agents were paid their salaries and put up in hotels and flown from one side of the country to the other and back again. Right now, this case has cost the US taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars and it isn't even close to being over yet. Scary, scary stuff. Rob Black had this to say about the obscenity charges he and his wife are currently facing. "I find it completely ridiculous and disheartening that on the same day these federal agents delivered "shock and awe" to us, halfway across the world, the very same government is currently bombing Iraq in the name of 'OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM!' The government drums up support by telling us that they are attempting to liberate the Iraqi people and give them the most precious freedom we enjoy. Meanwhile, on the home front, they quietly attempt to limit this AMERICAN freedom. The key word is quietly. But as anyone who knows me, (and the government should know me well enough by now), knows that QUIETLY JUST AIN'T IN MY F*****G VOCABULARY.”

Keep talking Rob. I might not want to watch your movies, but I'll keep my ears wide open.