“You’ve got to be a fucking idiot to be an undecided at this point,” Mike Edison declared Thursday night while celebrating the publication of his new sex-and-politics-themed e-book, Bye Bye, Miss American Pie. Edison, formerly the publisher of High Times and editor-in-chief of Screw Magazine—and a 2011 Big Jewcy—offered the call to action in time for tonight’s final presidential debate and next month’s election.

At Jimmy’s No. 43 in the East Village, the mensch-pornographer was accompanied by a band that included Sonic Youth’s Bob Bert for a literature-meets-music-meets-revolution book party, the latest event in a tour that has included stops at the New York Public Library, where Edison is an Allen Room scholar, and 92Y Tribeca for the fifth annual Banned Books Festival, which featured an appearance by fellow Big Jewcy Rachel Shukert. “What brand was Lewinski’s blue dress?” Fleshbot.com editor Lux Alptrum asked the crowd before Edison’s reading. It was Gap, it turns out, and Judy McGuire, Edison’s co-host on the Mike and Judy Show, won a porn DVD for answering correctly.

Edison’s latest, which was what the amped up crowd was really there for, mounts an attack on political apathy. The novella channels the raunchy libertarianism of Edison’s past for a relevant conversation about sex, scandal, and politics. It reads like the 1968 cult classic flick, Wild in the Streets, in which a rock-star-turned-politician calls for the end of power in the hands of anyone over thirty years old and lowers the voting age to 14—except in Bye Bye, Miss American Pie, a female politician’s indiscretions lead to orgies across the country, and this year’s party lines, press relations, and voter opinions are on full display.

Edison doesn’t hesitate to include a Hillary Clinton-esque woman in the canon of badly behaved public figures, embroiling politician Barbra Bernstein in a sex scandal after her husband’s exploits go public. Bernstein boldly defends herself in a surprisingly powerful passage:

“The problem with self righteous people,” she began, “is that they always want to rain on someone else’s parade. Haven’t we had enough of prudes running this country?” It wasn’t Lincoln’s first inaugural, nor Kennedy’s, for that matter, but it was loaded with pith and dramatic import. It didn’t quite hit the high notes of Martin Luther King’s “I have been to the Mountaintop” speech, but for some members of the American people, it still rang with the bell tones of liberation.

She went on to talk about the Pursuit of Happiness. She talked about Liberty, and Freedom from Tyranny at home. She looked straight into the camera, straight into the hearts and loins of America, and this is what she said: “I got mine, America, now get yours. You know you want it!”

Edison acknowledges that his pornography past might turn off potential new readers. If he were a horny housewife from Toronto, perhaps, people might embrace Bye Bye, Miss American Pie as quickly as they devoured Fifty Shades of Grey. Regardless, Edison hopes the book will wake people up. “Reading Bye Bye, Miss American Pie should be like taking the red pill in the Matrix,” he told me. “It should tear the sheets off of a fabricated reality.” In this election year, we need that more than ever.

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From the moment Mike Edison wandered into Los Angeles’ Stray Cat Cafe with his entourage, including Counterpoint/ Soft Skull Press publisher Charlie Winton posing as his chauffeuring Samoan lawyer, for the occasion of a very Jewcy interview before a lively reading of his newest Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! across the street at The Last Bookstore, the vibe of the evening was a largely liberated one. And not in the scary Big Lebowski nihilist we-believe-in-nothing sense, but somehow still bound by something sacred, despite the passing around of a vulgar vintage canned Penthouse puzzle and even more filthy discourse. Yes, while he just about manages to use every word soapboxed by Carlin in the index alone, Edison engages in something wholesome and good in his chronicles: preserving freedoms.

Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! reads like the lovechild of Screw Magazine and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. In this highly researched yet devourable volume, Mike Edison, founding publisher of High Times and editor-in-chief of Goldstein’s Screw (a cornerstone of uncensored, smart free speech with an actual informed opinion–pro-sex, yes, but also anti-war), provides a historian’s perspective that is that of the insider at the top, but also more importantly that of the active citizen who has done his part in testing, exposing, and now chronicling the limits of freedoms so that they (and we) could continue enjoying them today. Dirty! pops four notorious gentlemen–Hefner, Goldstein, Flynt and Guccione–into a time machine so that they could be reread in their appropriate contexts, rather than through the traditional skewing lens of a moralizing public applying an emotionally-charged value system. And the outcome is not entirely reverent.

Starting with a crash course in the history of US sexuality, Edison hits up the most interesting gamechangers in the perceptions of sex through the country’s short history. It’s a match between the Comstock-humping prudes and the libertarians fought outside the ring (that Edison is familiar with in his dabblings with Kaufmanesque wrestling) and in the centerfolds, courthouses, cities, and suburbs of the country.

The book is riddled with citations of court cases. Another American tradition after porn is the popular punishment of its purveyors and fans, citizens on the prowl for the perfect quench to a primitive thirst sans measurable harm to others, reactionary persecution that is an offense against constitutionally protected individual pursuits of happiness. In addition to the freedom of religion, Dirty! reminds that it is important to defend the part of the first amendment that also protects freedoms from religion so that the peaceful minority can do what it does without the restraints of a system to which it does not subscribe even tacitly. Through this volume, a contextualized discourse that goes beyond good and evil is made possible equally for those who agree and disagree with the achievements of fellow American playboys and hustlers.

Dirty! deeply profiles the drives behind smut kings and what dents they made in the economics, politics, and morality of the country over the decades between the 50s and the information age. Their victories (like Goldstein’s relatively modest win against Pillsbury for cartoons in Screw portraying indecent acts among baked goods with yeast infections) and failures (Guccione’s Gore Vidal-screenwritten, Roger Ebert-walked-out-on Caligula) are scrutinized unapologetically (with his sex-drugs-rock-and-roll-allegiant biases exposed gonzo-style at every peephole) side-by-side with other iconic champions of freedom off the printing press like Jewcy-favorite Lenny Bruce. One of the shiniest gems in the book is the primary document that acts as the final chapter, an interview with Chip Maloney, a smutty relic of a pretty much extinct breed of journalism. A man with “so much shit inside his head, he should clean his ears with Pepto-Bismol,” Maloney’s is a day-in-the-life account from the perspective of Goldstein’s favorite ghostwriter, pairing well with Edison’s first book, his autobiography I Have Fun Wherever I Go.

Man-haters may be silenced in noticing that a prevalent persuasion in the book is Edison’s staunch feminism, manifesting most vividly in his disdainful view of Hugh Hefner, Playboy extraordinaire who helped send the modern material girl to the shallow end of the pool. It is a passion felt most during the Dirty! “reading” in his inspired beat “Hugh Hefner Hates Girls,” (accompanied by the Space Liberation Micro-Arkestra, featuring Danzig veteran Howie Pyro on zero-gravity fuzz guitar, Beatnik No. 9 on bongos, and Edison on electric space piano and theremin). Throughout the progression of Hefner’s trajectory, Edison deduces the king-pimp’s deep-seated anxieties stemming from early miserable romantic relations that reveal some major roots of idealogies supporting the possession of women in modern pop culture.

I don’t care who he had to screw to get here, Edison’s is noble work done not because he hates women, but because he loves people and their freedoms. As was deduced at the Stray Cat, he is the gentleman pornographer. An established “fucking mensch,” these two words describe the state that every self-respecting human being wishes to embody, from the holy rabbi to the common scumbag.

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