The De-Kline of Western Civilization

Lou Reed is riding shotgun.

His voice emanates from the console. His words hover in the passenger seat, peering curiously, cautiously out the window at the grain silos, cornfields, and billboards for antique malls and adult bookstores, which blur together as I accelerate away from the tollbooth scrum and into the yawning expanse of the prairie.

Holly came from Miami, F-L-A ...

It is highly improbable that my passenger was conjuring the Kansas Turnpike when he penned his undulating ode to transvestites, guttersnipes, users, abusers, hookers and hustlers. Interstate 70 is several things, but a walk on the wild side isn't one of them.

Hitchhiked her way across the U.S. A. This particular ribbon of asphalt is spawned in the outskirts of Baltimore and makes a crooked incision across America's midsection before fading into the Utah desert. But it's the stretch that starts at the eastern terminal of the Kansas Turnpike that is the beginning of the endless. It's a lonely land bridge filled with drivers fueled by shitty truck-stop coffee and the persistent fear that they'll be stuck here for all of the 537 miles that separate Topeka and Denver.

Plucked her eyebrows along the way ...

The tortured souls determined or desperate enough to traverse these miles must wonder why the pioneers who eyeballed the imposing horizon didn't just say, "Screw it," circle the wagons and make Kansas the "I've Seen Enough" counterpart to Missouri's "Show Me" state. It's pretty and all, but they don't call these the plains for nothing.

Shaved her legs and then he was a she ...

But those brave settlers refused to let cholera, covered-wagon stink and the land's rightful owners prevent them from pissing on the prairie to mark their territory. Were they motivated by opportunity, by greed or by the alone time with their first cousins? I'm not sure. But I know that Lou and I have all the motivation we need to merge onto the main artery of the heartland.

She says, 'Hey, babe, take a walk on the wild side.'

His name is Phill Kline.

Don't be fooled by that feral extra lin the first name. This man wants nothing to do with superfluous consonants. He has no desire to walk on the wild side. And no, he does not want any jam on his toast. Are you fucking crazy?

Say, 'Hey, honey, take a walk on the wild side.'

Kline is attorney general for the state of Kansas. He heads the top law-enforcement agency in the land of sunflowers. The tasks charged to the general's army include fighting crime, keeping kids safe and "protecting consumers and the vulnerable." Sort of like Superfriends without the tights. And they are here to protect you from Lou Reed.

And the colored girls go do-da-doo-da-doo-da-doo-do-da-doo-do ...

I was wasting Whitney Watson's time.

The attorney general's spokesman didn't point this out in any specific terms, but the gist was conveyed by his tone of amiable exasperation. He had grown weary of answering questions about Kline's decision to turn away 1,600 CDs from a shipment of 51,000 that the state received as part of a $143 million anti-trust settlement between the federal government and the recording industry.

"This really is old news," Watson told me last week. "The story broke in other parts of the country 2 or 3 months ago. I hate to waste time on this when there are so many other things this office is involved with that deserve attention."

Like battling the societal ills sputtering on George Foreman Grills statewide.

A June 30 press release on the attorney general's Web site proudly proclaims that Kline used a price-fixing settlement from the company that manufactures the Foreman Grill to help "knock out malnutrition in unborn babies." It's a wry way of saying Kline gave the money to four anti-abortion "pregnancy-maintenance organizations."

Atta boy.

But there haven't been any similar self-congratulatory statements regarding Kline's refusal to allow 33 individual album titles donated as part of a CD price-fixing settlement from being circulated within the Kansas library system.

The multistate lawsuit, settled in 2002, required CD distributors and retail chains to cough up $13.86 to each consumer who filed the necessary paperwork and to send more than 5 million albums to the states that participated in the lawsuit for dissemination to public schools, libraries and nonprofit organizations.

Watson said the attorney general received a list of 1,700 album titles available for distribution to Kansas' 300-plus public libraries. But the state had a say only in which albums it did not want.

"I would have picked a lot of Johnny Cash or Entertainment Weekly Greatest Hits of 1987 myself," Watson quipped. "But we couldn't pick what discs we wanted. We were only able to select which albums that we didn't want."

And that was precisely the problem.

Most of the forty states involved in the lawsuit turned down a percentage of the available albums. (California was the lone exception.) But nobody seemed to notice until the Associated Press obtained a list of the artists whose albums Kline's office had refused.

Artists such as Lou Reed, Nas, Soul Asylum and ... Devo.

Yes, I said Devo.

Yes, that Devo.

Watson told the Associated Press that the albums "did not mesh with the values of a majority of Kansans" and that the folks in Kline's office rejected titles that promoted drug use and violence.