Bar Blog: The Saga of Alvin Greene

On my days off I like to sit at one of my favorite neighborhood pubs from open to close. The political dailies at arm's length, I will quietly drink and observe the varied people who enter and exit. I often fantasize about their lives, imagining their friends and lovers, daydreaming of what it must be like to be a human being with self-respect. Oh, to be young! And happy! And someone else with a totally different life!

Just an hour ago I was diving into my seventh gin margarita, imagining dropping some PUA lines on the fat Juicy Couture-clad Latina at the end of the bar, when my boss here at BLOG called me with an emergency fill-in. It turned out my fellow blogger Steve Pozneg had come down with a nasty case of rigor mortis and was unable to write his weekly gadget column "Tech Shit." As a veteran political reporter, I am used to meeting tight deadlines on short notice, and I couldn't let a little thing like being drunk or contemplating a murder-suicide deal get in the way of my duties. After all, I had been waiting for just the right opportunity to write about the remarkable saga of South Carolina Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Alvin Greene.

Despite having raised no money and done no campaigning, Greene, an unemployed Army vet, beat establishment pick Vic Rawl, an actual politician, by over 30,000 votes in the Democratic primary last month. This fall Greene will face conservative Republican Sen. Jim DeMint.

You would probably not think that your writer -- a notorious political scribe whose resume features dozens of references in the media industry, many of them positive -- has much in common with Alvin Greene, an unemployed 32-year-old African-African. Of course, you would be wrong: in fact, Greene and I have both been unfairly prosecuted by backwards, prudish authorities for so-called "obscenity." From Mother Jones:

Last November, Greene was arrested on charges of "disseminating, procuring or promoting obscenity" to an 18-year-old college student at the University of South Carolina, after which he suggested they go up to her dorm room, according to court records. Camille McCoy had been working in a computer lab in a restricted part of campus when Greene approached her and showed her Internet pornography, according to the student’s mother, Susan McCoy. Camille recounted what happened afterward to the AP: "It was very disgusting. He said, 'Let's go to your room now.' It was kind of scary. He's a pretty big boy. He could've overpowered me."

MidlandsConnect:

Camille McCoy says she was in the library when Greene approached her.

She was shocked at what happened next.

"He says, 'do you like football,' and I told him yeah," McCoy says. "He was like, 'well look at my screen then,' and it was just porn."

"We're very much here and I intend to be his worst nightmare until he resigns," explains mother Susan McCoy.

If I may extemporize, reader, exactly what did Alvin Greene do that was "wrong" or "illegal" here? It seems to me that Mr. Greene was simply surfing the web in a public space where he happened upon a "pornographic" image of such quality that he kindly offered to share it with a nubile white young coed. Where is the violation? Is it a crime now to view "prurient" materials in the computer room of a college where one is not enrolled? Sounds like SWMA: Surfing While Middle Aged. Maybe in Obama's America it is a crime to have the basic human decency of offering a gander of a particularly delicious slice of digital gash to your neighbor. And are we not allowed to invite ourselves to a stranger's home in this insane post-feminist world? If so, the feds had better start building more FEMA camps to lock up all us upstanding citizens who will be incarcerated during these 21st century Rosy Palmer Raids.

How's that "hope and change" working out for ya?

As a frequent patron of college campuses and public computer rooms, I can tell you with confidence that Alvin Greene's actions were neither uncouth nor out of the ordinary. In fact, if you happen to be seated in a Columbia University computer lab at a certain hour, you might turn to see this writer at the terminal beside you, engaged in a healthy dose of "research." And if I like the way you smell, I might share my latest findings with you.

Yet like Alvin Greene, I have also been charged with obscenity in these United States. In certain jurisdictions where the Bill of Rights apparently does not apply, your writer has been arrested for such innocuous acts of free speech as:

• clipping the centerfolds out of old Hustlers and pasting them inside the newspapers on people's lawns in the early morning;
• disseminating information about birth control through the Federal mail in envelopes sealed with his own biological fluids;
• replacing the VHS tapes at elementary schools with artistic works like the Emmanuelle series or Salo in an attempt to introduce a little culture to our public schools;
• and exposing his erect penis on the G train while crying uncontrollably.

Have we as a society learnt nothing from Lenny Bruce? From Oscar Wilde? When did our government morph into George Orwell's worst masturbation fantasy, persecuting our brightest members of society merely because of their healthy desire to share erotic works of art with young, defenseless strangers?

Alvin Greene, I stand with you. You can sit next to me in the computer lab at the Cooper Union any day. And Al: I am always up for looking at some "football."