Politics & Power Quote by Charles W. Pickering

A judge invoking “America” isn’t just making a moral plea; he’s claiming jurisdiction over the nation’s identity. Pickering’s phrasing turns cultural anxiety into civic duty: vulgarity and sexual exploitation aren’t framed as harms with specific victims so much as contaminants that stain “our values” and, crucially, our export brand. The line about “the world” is the quiet engine here. It suggests the real emergency is reputational, that public decency is a form of soft power, and that shame - not only justice - is a legitimate tool of governance.

The rhetoric works because it fuses three authorities into one voice: law (a judge speaking), nation (“America does not want”), and morality (“better standards”). That fusion lets personal sensibility masquerade as collective consensus. “We” is doing heavy lifting, smoothing over disagreement and implying that dissenters are not merely wrong but un-American. It’s also a neat inversion: rather than asking whether institutions have enabled exploitation, the focus lands on “vulgarity,” a slippery category often policed through taste, class, and censorship.

Context matters: this reads like late-20th-century culture-war language, when battles over obscenity, pornography, and broadcast standards doubled as proxy wars over feminism, youth culture, and the perceived unraveling of social order. Pickering’s intent isn’t only to condemn explicit content; it’s to authorize regulation by casting restraint as national self-improvement. The subtext: if you want to be “better people,” someone must define “better” - and the courts, by implication, are fit to do it.