http://static.userland.com/sh4/images/b ... kBerry.jpg
Honey Trap
for release 04-06-06
Washington D.C.
Am I missing something here?
You can't have watched the news this week without seeing the story of Bryan J. Doyle, the Dept. of Homeland Security employee who is accused of soliciting sex on the internet with a hypothetical 14 year old girl whose part was being played by a Florida undercover cop.
This is a typical cop technique--create a crime so you can 'solve' it. It's an exercise in job security. The cops call it a 'sting' but I call it what it is--entrapment. Things are a little slow around the cop-shop? Hey, let's throw a 'sting.' We'll drop a wallet full of credit cards and cash on the sidewalk and arrest the first sucker that picks it up or we can put Paris Hilton on the street corner with a feather boa and red nail-polish and a skirt that is barely there and a sign around her neck that says '$50' and wait for nature to take its course.
The Polk County, Fla. Sheriff's Department on Tuesday charged Doyle with 23 felony counts including 16 counts of sending pornographic movie clips to a minor. The problem with this scenario is that there was no minor.
Who knows what evil lies in the hearts of men? What 55 year old man reduced to working for the government wouldn't be flattered by the attentions of a teen-aged girl? Even a fictional one. If you started going door to door on your block and knocking, I guarantee that your knuckles would not be red before you encountered a middle aged man who has not had sexual fantasies about a high-school girl. From Nabakov to Brittany Spears' first hit video that showed her as the Lolita in her plaid, pleated school uniform complete with pouty lips and bedroom eyes to the Kevin Spacey character in American Beauty, literature and art have long understood the midlife fascination that men have for young girls. Not that it doesn't work both ways--Mrs. Robinson and Mary Kay Letourneau come to mind..
But in America we arrest people for evil deeds, not evil thoughts. Or at least that's the way it used to be. We all have evil thoughts. If you say otherwise, you are deluded or just a hypocrite. We are human.
Fortunately most of us don't act on our evil thoughts. Most of us are sufficiently enculturated so that convention takes precedence over desire. And just because you have thought about what it would be like to boff Lolita or Mrs. Robinson or your neighbor's wife, doesn't mean that you did it.
But now we have the internet, where at the stroke of a key you can view any variation of the male or female anatomy in gynecological or proctological detail. With the premium membership you can chat live with the man or woman of your fantasies, even if he or she happens to be a retiree in Phoenix trying to make extra money on the telephone.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I have the quaint notion that in order to have a crime, you need a victim. Not a theoretical victim, but a real victim who has been harmed in some way.
Ah, but these are the days of pre-emptive wars where the search comes before the warrant. We have conspiracy laws that make just talking about or even thinking about an illegal act, a crime.
And these are the days when your every evil thought is known to all. The internet knows everything. It knows your Social Security number, whether you are dead or alive. It knows your ancestry and your credit history. It knows your shopping habits and whether you go for barely legal teens or mature amateurs or cartoons. It knows what you are searching for. How intimate is that?
This is also a day when forty percent of teenagers have surrendered their virginity by the age of fourteen.
These are the days when it serves the interests of some to have you in a constant state of low-level hysteria about the possibility of invasions by wild-eyed, rag-headed terrorists and pedophiles seducing your children on the internet.
Oh, I know that the word 'sting' sounds like a legitimate police operation. It conjures up fuzzy pictures of Robert Redford and Paul Newman. But what a 'sting' really consists of is entrepreneurial police work in which the cops create the crime in order to 'solve' it.
It's slimy and it's rotten. It is not the job of the police to run about creating crimes or the opportunity for crimes, just so they can profit career-wise from 'solving' these invented infractions.
Let's stipulate that Doyle did talk dirty and send pictures to an anonymous screen name on the internet. This happens thousands of times every day. It's perfectly legal between consenting adults.
But in the Doyle case the government maintains that he thought that the recipient of said filthy pics and text was a fourteen year old girl when, in fact, it was to an adult male police officer who was wasting your tax dollars by sitting in front of a computer playing role-games.
The whole thing is just too Kafkaesque.
Now, if Doyle was talking to a real fourteen year old girl on the internet and he arranged to meet her and had sex with her, I would say, "hang him from the highest tree." That would be an actual crime. But for the cops to create a fantasy victim for the purposes of pandering to the baser instincts of a typically imperfect human is Satanic. We pay our police to enforce the law and to arrest those who violate it. We don't pay them to be tempters.
The legal definition of entrapment centers on the concept of 'pre-disposition.' Maybe I'm a cynic, but I think that most of us are pre-disposed to do anything that we think we can get away with. We all have larceny in our hearts. That's how con-men stay in business.
The Poet's Eye sees that this hysteria about internet exploitation of children is just a ruse. The powers that be are scared to death of the internet. Why? Because the internet resembles true democracy. They want control of it at all costs. The only handle they have on it is the emotionally visceral issue of child porn.
Teach your children well.
Sweet Little Sixteen
She's got the grown - up blues
Tight dresses and lipstick
She's sportin' high - heel shoes
Oh but tomorrow morning
She'll have to change her trend
And be sweet sixteen
And back in class again
--Chuck Berry
to subscribe to The Poet's Eye
click Here
