But Spring is streaming through the Speakeasy these days, warming up the castle walls, thawing out the indoor tundra. Mel the Bird is singing like a nightingale, Evie the Snake is stretching out in her cage, and it’s Spring-cleaning in the Commissary. Juices are flowing, sexual and creative. Love is in the air. Lust is on the brain. Orgasms are plentiful and deep. We’re adding lots of amazing new stuff BACKSTAGE. Margo is almost finished editing BLONDE ISLAND: An Island of Pleasure in a Sea of War. Canaan is shooting his Speakeasy movie. We have new downloads and podcasts in the Erotic Theater. We have exciting guests lined up for the next live show. The jack-booted thugs haven’t kicked in our door. Life is good, and seems to be getting even a little bit better..

Yet the political realm is more of an Orwellian Bizarro World than ever. Our President is talking like a delirious, drug-addled, neoconed loony-tune. Either that, or he’s the most sadistic diabolical dictator this land has ever known, and he’s got enough of us hypnotized into thinking he’s just a harmless Village Idiot that he can get away with trashing the whole Bill of Rights without most of us leaving our barcaloungers. Probably, it’s a combination. Everyone I know says the Bozo-in-Chief deserves to be impeached, if not for the Disaster in Iraq or the one in New Orleans, then for the Lying and Spying. And now, when I write stuff like that, I don’t get an avalanche of frighteningly vituperous hate mail like I used to. Even the old rabid-dog *patriots* seem to grumblingly acknowledge that things are rotten on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue..

Nevertheless, the money shot of impeachment is still a long shot on the Hill. To make matters even more frustrating, we have mainstream media like CNN chiding us that all this impeachment talk will only galvanize the Republican base come election time. Even though most Americans clearly want a divorce from this abusive prick and his cronies, our *representatives* in Washington still stand squarely behind their *leader,* forcing us all to continue this awful shotgun marriage, beholden as they are, not to us, but to their corporate sponsors, Big Oil, Big Pharma, the Military Industrial Complex, the Purveyors of Perma-War, the Profiteers Off of Violence.

Everybody I know seems to see this now, and we’re all pretty depressed about it. This winter, many of us cocooned ourselves within our families or small communities, within our lovers’ arms or within our own little worlds, trying to protect ourselves from the rotten toxic stink emanating from our nation’s capital. And maybe it’s because we’re at the end of our political ropes, or maybe it’s the outrageousness of the Big Lies, or the stench of mass murder in Mesopotamia, or maybe it’s because it’s Spring, but some people are busting out of their cocoons and just saying what’s on their minds.

Take Charlie Sheen. Thanks, I’d love to. What a hottie. He’s gorgeous in a funny, goofy way that’s irresistible. And he’s smart in that Hollywood, yes-I-have-a-working-brain-behind-my-sexy-eyes kind of style that America eats right up. He’s the son of Martin Sheen, distinguished Hollywood political lefty. He’s divorced (so he’s no angel, but he’s available, ladies!). He’s known as a party animal (hey, better to get bombed than to bomb). And he has pretty openly patronized sex workers (even testified about it at the Heidi Fleiss trial). He seems honest, or let’s just say he’s a pretty good actor. He was great in “Platoon.” He’s believable, approachable, a regular guy, but not too regular, a little edgy. He’s also extremely popular right now. I don’t watch much TV, so I haven’t seen his CBS-TV show “Two and a Half Men,” but I understand it gets high ratings, and looking over a picture of the whole cast, I’d guess it’s because of him.

Earlier this week, as Spring was just springing onto the Norther Hemisphere, Charlie Sheen became the first major Hollywood star to go public with his feeling that the official government explanation for the collapse of the World Trade Center Twin Towers and the attack on the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 is the real “conspiracy theory,” one that just completely falls apart under a few basic questions.

Monday, Charlie went on the Alex Jones Show to say he just didn’t buy the official 9/11 explanation of Osama’s amateurs flying planes into buildings to everyone’s immense surprise. The next day, AJ Hammer picked up the story on CNN’s Showbiz Tonight, coming back to it the next day because of the huge response. A CNN poll asks, “Do you agree with Charlie Sheen that the U.S. government covered up the real events of the 9/11 attacks?” 84% of respondents have said yes. Even the Fox hounds were forced to cover the Charlie Sheen 9/11 story, holding their patriotic noses as they did, but obviously not capable of defending the government version with any conviction, let alone evidence.

Is Charlie Sheen a sign of the times? Maybe we can run him for President; after all, his Dad played a great Prez. America, in its deprivation-anxiety over royalty, likes to elect sons or other relatives of previous U.S. Presidents, and youthful drug problems and poor grades in school are obviously not disqualifiers. Charlie could have legs. He sure has sexy eyes.

“The worm is turning, the consciousness is shifting…People want the truth,” Charlie said to radio host Alex Jones, an independent 9/11 investigative journalist who has a voice that that sounds like there’s a truck backing up into his tonsils, and a dogged interest in poking holes in the government’s explanation of what happened on September 11. Even before the first day of Spring, I’d received Alex Jones’ film “Loose Change” from my dear friend and mentor, the woman that gave me my first orgasm, Dr. Betty Dodson. She wrote:

“Please watch this…Here I go again! I’m a fan of watching controlled demolition shows where buildings miraculously collapse straight down on themselves. When I watched the Twin Towers do the same thing, I was dumbfounded. As a visual person with reading comprehension difficulties, relying on what I see has been my strength as a sex educator. Words can be so tricky, so misleading, so seductive. So watch this documentary and SEE what’s before your eyes. Remember the child who said, “But the King is wearing no clothes.”

I don’t know what really happened on 9/11, neither does Betty Dodson, Alex Jones, AJ Hammer, and neither does Charlie Sheen. But I do know that the official explanation for what happened is filled with more holes than one of Dick Cheney’s victims. It seems to me that believing without question in the Bush Administration’s explanation for 9/11, and the incurious investigation of Bush’s handpicked 9/11 Commission, is very much like believing that the Bible – or fairy tales – are literally true. No wonder Bush the Born-Again Fundamentalist has been tasked with selling this story that requires a fundamental suspension of disbelief in what you know to be true.

The mysterious burning of the Towers, twin phallic icons of American power (America’s biggest dicks), brings to mind the similarly mysterious burning of the Reichstag in 1933. The Reichstag was a very large important German building that was set ablaze by a fire that was officially declared to have been started by a Jewish Communist Terrorist, though most modern historians now concur that the Nazis themselves probably set it. The burning of the Reichstag, a large important edifice of German power, provided a dramatic excuse for German Chancellor Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party to seize full control of the German government and suspend German civil liberties. German invasions of foreign lands, the devastations of World War II and the horror of the concentration camps followed.

One of the first casualties of Hitler’s mad reign was the sex community in Germany, most notably the erotic culture of Weimar Berlin, the focus of our latest BlockFilms documentary, WEIMAR LOVE: Hot Sex in Pre-Nazi Berlin. Yes, my darling bloggamists, it’s time for another shameless plug: I just received an email from Lasse Braun, Father of Modern Euro-Porn and director of numerous award-winning films such as Sensations and French Blue and author of Lady Caligula who also happens to be in “Weimar Love” (playing himself). Lasse writes from his native Rome:

“Beautiful, adorable Susannina, I just watched your WEIMAR LOVE, and I really enjoyed it a lot! Very well done, great vintage pieces, concept, music, editing and you… your gayety and smile and voice… you know how much I love your style… This comes straight from my heart and also from my director’s brain, knowing the technical and creative aspects of such a complex piece of ART… Your eternal friend and admirer, Lasse Braun”

Lasse Braun’s blessing means a lot to me, and not just because he’s also the founder of Eros Day. But because he’s old enough to have seen real Nazis in action as a little bambino. He’s been fighting the good libertine fight against fascists of all stripes for a long time.

Which brings us back to the Stories of 9/11/01 and the 1933 Burning of the Reichstag which are, of course, very different in various ways. But just as the German trauma of their big burning Reichstag allowed the Nazis to seize unprecedented power in the Fatherland, the American trauma of 9/11 seems to have created a similar opportunity for American fundamentalists to take our *Homeland* into another Dark Age, where Perma-War, Big Lies, massive bombings, murder, torture, detentions and disappearances are becoming more and more commonplace, where government officials warn citizens to “watch what you say,” where the “chilling effect” of such policies may have an impact on the arts, the media, education, general culture and our erotic lives for years to come.

Will we ever get 9/11 investigated by a neutral commission? Will We the People ever spring out of our cocoons and take our country back? Let’s do it now!