Teutonic-style outrage over the infinitely exploding amount of spam - unsolicited bulk emails - has officially replaced weapons of mass destruction and even monkeypox as the leading threat to all that is good and decent ...

In the current climate - which includes various pending and sure-to-be-useless legislative fixes - isn't anyone brave enough to say something good about spam? Well, I am. I love spam - and not only because I just placed an order for a guaranteed system that will enlarge my penis so that I can use it to clean my septic tank while playing solitaire with a deck of Iraq's Most Wanted cards. (As long as I'm sharing, I should mention that I only paid $59.99 for all this, using the same unsecured credit card that allowed me to take advantage of Mr Kwame Ashantee's generous invitation to invest heavily in the Ghana Gold and Diamond Mining Corporation ...)

Even as spam clogs my inbox the way the Atkins Diet is clogging colons all over the country ... I remain thankful for the wonderful alternative universes that the junk opens up for me. Who knew, for instance, that farm animals enjoyed such interesting, if libertine, lifestyles? ...

But what I really love about spam comes down to two points quite unrelated to bestiality, online gambling, and messages with phrases such as "Ô í Í û í..." in the subject line.

First, in what is widely acknowledged to be an unprecedented age of rank ideological bickering (unprecedented, that is, since the age immediately preceding our current one), spam has managed to bring the right and the left together in a way that even a terrorist attack on US soil failed to. "Spam fight unites liberal, conservatives" shouts a headline for an Associated Press story detailing how Charles Schumer, the Democrat senator, has taken the step of teaming up with the Christian Coalition to choke spam - especially porn-related spam - off the internet ... As John White, a political scientist at Catholic University in Washington DC, observed, the Christian Coalition is "actually working with someone they disagree with on 99% of all other issues, and who they would like to defeat when he runs for re-election" ... The fact that spam has created not simply a dialogue but a partnership between these two is a sign that the age of miracles is not yet over.

The second large point relates to the legislation Mr Schumer has introduced, the stop pornography and abusive marketing (spam) bill ... Mr Schumer's bill would not only potentially outlaw anonymous emailers - a service that is part of what makes the internet the internet - it showcases how political solutions often miss their real mark. "Laws should focus on what is the harmful thing that's being done," privacy consultant Ray Everett-Church said. "In the case of spam, it's really a question of cost-shifting from the sender to the recipient. If there were a law against shifting the cost of advertising on to the recipients, then you could go after junk faxes, spam and (wireless) spam."

Another count against Mr Schumer's bill is that spam, like the pornography it so often advertises, is in the eye of the beholder. Or, more precisely, the nuisance level of spam is highly subjective and can only be properly sorted out at the individual level. As the New York Times has detailed, the vastly popular Iraq's Most Wanted cards were almost completely a function of spam-based marketing; clearly, the folks who bought over a million decks in a matter of days didn't necessarily find that particular piece of spam insulting.

· From www.techcentralstation.com, June 16. Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of Reason magazine.