Obscenity

 A video recently went viral, according to the Intercept, of body cam footage showing a small town police officer wrestling a grandmother to the ground at a No Kings protest. 

Her crime? 

Wearing an inflatable penis costume. 

Seriously. 

How is that a crime, you ask? She certainly didn't see how it could be. Political speech—even of a ribald and satirical variety—is protected under the First Amendment. 

And symbolic expressions of political views fall under this category. 

The penis here was unmistakably political. Not only was she wearing it to an anti-Trump protest, she also carried a sign. "No Dick-tators," it read. 

Both the sign and the costume, as far as I can tell, are constitutionally protected. 

But this didn't stop one local cop from yanking her to the ground from behind, then charging her with "disorderly conduct." 

I'm reminded of how they got Wendell P. Bloyd, the local village heretic in Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River: 

They first charged me with disorderly conduct,

There being no statute on blasphemy.

Apparently this is still the preferred method in small town America for circumventing the Bill of Rights. 

When the cop first accosts her in the video, he demands to know how she would explain what she was wearing to his grandchildren. 

Well, I reply—how would you explain the president's expletive-laden social media post yesterday threatening horrific war crimes against Iranian civilians to those same grandchildren?

What is the biggest obscenity here? An inflatable penis? Or the president and his various illegal wars it is skewering, like so many weenie-kabobs?

I recall how Harold Pinter used satirical vulgarity to protest the Bush administration's invasions: "There's no escape/ The big pricks are out," he wrote. 

No prick-tators, we might say. 

His point being that perhaps sometimes obscenity was a justified literary response to an obscene political reality.

Perhaps the infinitely greater obscenity here is not a reference to human genitalia, but a government that bombs to death thousands of innocent civilians.