Dear Professor Potter,

Argus, Sept. 30, 2005: “’I enjoyed Professor Potter’s discussion of the power of the conservative movement in pressuring Reagan to implement legislation,’ said Namrata Kotwani ’06. ‘It showed how scary conservatives are.’” The student was alluding to your lecture, “The Sexual Counterrevolution: Women, Children and the Crime of Pornography,” in which you referred to persistent calls on President Reagan by Christian conservatives to have pornography criminalized.

Alas, it wasn’t conservative Christians who turned the Fells Acres Day School inside—out in the early 80s in an effort to link its owners, the Amiraults, to child pornography. That was the “scary” call of Massachusetts liberal Scott Harshbarger. Finding nothing salacious, the future Democratic gubernatorial candidate settled for charging Violet, Cheryl, and Gerald Amirault with multiple counts of child abuse.

Remember the case, Professor? Children testified that they had been forced to drink urine and eat cakes of feces; one little witness swore he’d eaten a baby. Others recalled that butcher knives and swords, no less, had been thrust up their rectums.

Neither the fact that there was no evidence of injury, nor the fact that the children’s recollections of their abuses appeared less real than imagined, dissuaded the jury: The actual abuses the children had suffered were so unspeakable that they repressed them and dreamed up distorted versions – the nightmares to which they’d testified. Thus spake the child-abuse expert. Who were the jurors, mere lay folk, to gainsay the sexpert?

Several years later, “All of the child witnesses initially – and quite amazingly – withstood the barrage: they all denied any abuse. Eventually – now we understand predictably – they were broken down….Every trick in the book was used to get the child to say what the investigators – and eventually her parents – wanted her to say, rather than to learn in a fair manner whether anything had actually happened to her.” Thus spake the judge who threw out the convictions. (The previous quote and the one which follows were taken from Wall Street Journal columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz’ magisterial “No Crueler Tyrannies.”)

Alas, ’twas not conservative Christians who pushed for Grant Snowden’s Florida conviction in the mid-80s. That was the headline-grabbing achievement of Dade County State’s Attorney, liberal Democrat Janet Reno. During the trial “The four year old provided testimony as planned, some of it more revealing than the state might have wished. She had visited with the prosecutors thirteen times, the child told the court proudly, and, she testified, she got ‘better and better’ at telling her story.”

For Snowden’s trial the tried-and-true was applied: a combination of lollipops and thumb screws until the child ‘volunteered’ the required answers. Needless to say, the prosecution couldn’t lose. (Nor could it lose in the Salem witchcraft trials, in which the accused was bound and thrown into a pond. Her floating was proof of her powers of witchcraft, for which she was forthwith burned. How could the accused establish her innocence? By sinking and drowning.)

Grant Snowden spent 12 years in prison before his conviction and that of dozens of other so-called mass child-abusers were overturned. Could he and the other victims sue for damages? No, thanks to the Mondale Act, which protected the prosecution’s expert witnesses from prosecution. After all, countersuits might have ‘a chilling effect’ on their willingness to testify. Sponsored by liberal Democrat Walter Mondale and passed in 1979, the Act which bears his name and gushered funding into the child-abuse detection racket, led to the rash of child-abuse prosecutions which broke out in the early 80s and spread through the body politic in the 90s.

While innocents by the score were being financially ruined and jailed for up to 17 years by Harshbarger, Reno, & Company (“We’re the demolition experts!”), what was American Studies Professor Potter doing? Was she drawing her students to the obvious parallels between these latter-day witchcraft trials and the originals? Or was she too busy seeding weeds on the grave of J. Edgar Hoover, the bug who tapped into the headlined demand for a war against crime by laying the keel for a craft she calls the “intrusive… surveillance state” – a paranoid’s dream come true. And yet, in the days leading up to 9/ll, evil genius Hoover’s “invasive,” “statist,” “interventionist” brain child hadn’t a clue. (You never can find an invasive, statist, interventionist, intrusive, surveillance state when one is really needed, I’ve always said.)

Professor, while you were writing “War Against Crime” (a war dead and buried with Bonnie and Clyde), the innocent men and women jailed in an ongoing, real-time war against due process – a war crying out to be written about or at least decried – were rotting.

Well, we all have our priorities. Crushing the knuckle-dragging Christian conservatives’ undiscerning critique of pornography seems to be yours. One can only hope that in a more perfect garden of earthly delights your students will not be the lone illuminati discerning enough to distinguish the noxious from the innocuous strains of the flora porn.

Such is the state of American Studies here in Pornocopia. What’s that, Professor? Such a term, you fear, will frighten the horses? I doubt it. The horses’ hind-quarters, maybe. Would a less freighted term be Paradise on High?

Ah, but there’s trouble in Paradise: Ariel Levy ’96 has drawn on her Wesleyan years in authoring “Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture.” Unlike bipeds inclined to stand tall, the pigs are under the feet (the cloven hooves, I should say) of the sacred cows: diversity, feminism, postmodernist theory, hypercritical studies, et al.

And that, in alumna Levy’s book, is the barnyard known as Alma Mater. What will the horse’s hind-quarters on High say? And the studied professors in bed with him? (No, I won’t name them; they know who they are.)

A final word, Professor, one fluent writer to another. It’s a shame – indeed, a crime – that your craft is stuck in the stagnant bog of dogma-logged American Studies.