Another irony hit me. Tobacco and liquor advertisements, which promote products far deadlier to children than any obscenities, were reaching the Net. The Internet Sleuth, for example, one of my favorite collections of Net indexes, had advertised Smokin’ Joe’s tobacco products over a period of at least several weeks. And yet the Exonians could not stop fixating on words and pictures, as opposed to a massive, proven threat that had killed millions of Americans. I didn’t want the government to ban even cancer-weed ads from cyberspace, lest the regulators go wild and try to make the Net TV-bland; but if Exon and allies had to crusade, they might as well be consistent about it. Perhaps as a true children’s advocate, Exon could even give back the more than $27,000 that his campaign had collected between January 1989 and December 1994 from the tobacco and liquor industries. That was just a fraction of his total take, but a statement just the same. Maybe the operators of “adult” bulletin board systems—who used the Net to post samples, the real source of the problem—could befriend Exon-style pols with a well-funded political-action committee. “PornoPAC”? I wondered what would happen next if the net.censors won in the House of Representatives. Earlier, in chapter 4, I had quoted Peter Lewis of the _New York Times_ as alluding to the “pencil-dicked geeks” who flamed him. Would Washington let _NetWorld!_ go out over an Exonized Internet? This was the only time I had ever seen such language in e-mail from Lewis, a gifted professional. Society didn’t prevent a woodcarver from using a certain kind of wood just because hoodlums might buy some baseball clubs made from it and split each other’s skulls open. Why, then, draft legislation that so despicably intruded on writers’ work? And what about teachers and students of literature, including bright, stable teenagers under eighteen? Or readers who just loved good, expressive writing? Knowingly or not, the savages in the Senate could be banning even _Ulysses_ from the public area of the Internet. Never mind the forthcoming age of electronic books; might Washington someday go on to suppress the paper editions from stores and libraries? Quite correctly the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned of the folly of turning the public regions of the Internet into “the equivalent of the Children’s Room at the public library,” and forcing Netfolks to seek out “adult” areas. Get carried away on an Exonized Net, use the wrong word, and the Feds could fine you up to $100,000 and jail you for up to two years. Even in private e-mail you’d need to behave yourself: You could not harass anyone with an “obscene” remark or image, lest he or she report you. What if an ex-lover took innocent comments and put them in the wrong context? Tough luck. Sooner or later the courts would probably clean up after the politicians and toss out the censorship, but that would hardly matter to the many who suffered in the meantime.