Pedophiles: America's Security Blanket

It's been a great year for creepy pedophiles.

First there was John Mark Karr, bedizening newspapers once again with the creepy little face of JonBenét Ramsey. When that story lost its creep factor, we got Mark Foley in all his horny splendor; and once we're Foley-ed out, we can go to the new movie Little Children and see a former child star play a child-molesting creep.

And I couldn't be happier. How can you resist the cozy, uncomplicated wickedness of pedophilia? Like a witch or monster in a fairy tale, an exposed pedophile inspires cathartic chills of revulsion-along with the smug conviction that we ourselves are safe. Taking a quick glance at history, I think I speak for the American people when I say that I LOVE pedophiles. They're the blanket we clutch when we're afraid of the big scary world.

It all started in the 1930s. On the heels of the Roaring '20s sexual liberation, the Great Depression saw what the newspapers called a "sex-crime wave." Hundreds and hundreds of articles were published on the danger of the "sexual psychopath"-the New York Times even added a special "Sex Crimes" category to its index in 1937. Who cared about poverty, starvation, or that unnerving Hitler fellow who was gaining such popularity across the sea? Sex perverts were the real danger!

Then we entered the war, got distracted, and forgot to worry about pedophiles until the paranoid 1950s. By then we were afraid of Communism, nuclear holocaust, and Alfred Kinsey-and so, in 1955, we rounded up 20 confirmed Iowa homosexuals, pronounced them potential child molesters, and committed them indefinitely to a mental hospital. That was bound to scare off any remaining Commie spies...I mean, sex perverts.

The next nationwide sex panic was in the 1980s. Our fear had switched from Communism and nuclear holocaust to, well, Communism and nuclear holocaust, so it was obvious where we needed to focus all our national attention: a small preschool in California. The children claimed that their teachers were abusing them in Satanic rituals involving sharks, flying witches, underground tunnels, and Chuck Norris-and everybody knew that kids never lie! Okay, maybe we sent a few innocent people to prison. Sue us; it took our minds off the nuclear war.

The media seized the case of JonBenét Ramsey in 1996, just in time for us to ignore Timothy McVeigh and the possibility that we could all get killed by terrorists. And then, in 2004, the media ate up the Michael Jackson trial. Remember when you couldn't look at the news without seeing Michael Jackson's freakish face? It was a horror to behold-but it sure beat looking at the photos from the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, which made the news at the same time.

So let's hear it for Mark Foley: the current, distracting dauphin in a long line of beloved American pedophiles. North Korea who? Darfur who? What Iraq war? What terrorist threat? What Torture Bill? I can't hear you! All I can hear is Mark Foley's voice.

"Get a ruler and measure it for me," it chants, like a soothing mantra. "Did any girl give you a handjob this weekend? Did you spank it this weekend yourself? Do I make you a little horny?"

On behalf of your country: Yes, Mr. Foley. You make us all pretty damn horny.

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