| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"George Washington Hayduke" |
| Date: |
28 Nov 2004 02:39:53 PM |
| Object: |
OH, the poor, suffering little children. |
From The New York Times, 11/28/04:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/arts/28rich.html?pagewanted=print&position=
The Great Indecency Hoax
FRANK RICH
OH, the poor, suffering little children.
If we are to believe the outcry of the past two weeks, America's youth
have been defiled en masse - again.
This time the dirty deed was done by the actress Nicollette Sheridan,
who dropped her towel in the cheesy promotional spot for the runaway
hit "Desperate Housewives" that kicked off "Monday Night Football" on
ABC.
"I wonder if Walt Disney would be proud," said Michael Powell, the
Federal Communications Commission chairman who increasingly fashions
himself a commissar of all things cultural, from nipple rings to "Son
of Flubber."
It's beginning to look a lot like "Groundhog Day."
Ever since 22 percent of the country's voters said on Nov. 2 that they
cared most about "moral values," opportunistic ayatollahs on the right
have been working overtime to inflate this nonmandate into a landslide
by ginning up cultural controversies that might induce censorship by a
compliant F.C.C. and, failing that, self-censorship by TV networks.
Seizing on a single overhyped poll result, they exaggerate their
clout, hoping to grab power over the culture.
The mainstream press, itself in love with the "moral values" story
line and traumatized by the visual exaggerations of the red-blue map,
is too cowed to challenge the likes of the American Family
Association.
So are politicians of both parties.
It took a British publication, The Economist, to point out that the
percentage of American voters citing moral and ethical values as their
prime concern is actually down from 2000 (35 percent) and 1996 (40
percent).
To see how the hucksters of the right work their scam, there could be
no more illustrative example than the "Monday Night Football" episode
in which Ms. Sheridan leaped into the arms of the Philadelphia Eagles
wide receiver Terrell Owens in order to give the declining weekly game
(viewership is down 3 percent from 2003) a shot of Viagra.
From the get-go, it was a manufactured scandal, as over-the-top as a
dinner theater production of "The Crucible."
Rush Limbaugh, taking a break from the legal deliberations of his drug
rap and third divorce, set the hysterical tone.
"I was stunned!" he told his listeners.
"I literally could not believe what I had seen. ... At various places
on the Net you can see the video of this, and she's buck naked, folks.
I mean when they dropped the towel she's naked. You see enough of her
back and rear end to know that she was naked. There's no frontal
nudity in the thing, but I mean you don't need that. ...I mean, there
are some guys with their kids that sit down to watch 'Monday Night
Football.' "
Yes, there are - some, anyway - but you wonder how many of them were
as upset as Mr. Limbaugh, whose imagination led him to mistake a lower
back for a rear end.
(He also said that the Sheridan-Owens encounter reminded him of the
Kobe Bryant case; let's not even go there.)
The evidence suggests that Mr. Limbaugh's prurient mind is the
exception, not the rule.
Though seen nationwide, and as early as 6 p.m. on the West Coast, the
spot initially caused so little stir that the next morning only two
newspapers in the country, both in Philadelphia, reported on it.
ABC's switchboards were not swamped by shocked viewers on Monday
night.
A spokesman for ABC Sports told The Philadelphia Inquirer that he
hadn't received a single phone call or e-mail in the immediate
aftermath of the broadcast.
Even the stunned Mr. Limbaugh, curiously enough, didn't get around to
mounting his own diatribe until Wednesday.
Mr. Owens's agent, David Joseph, says that the flood of complaints at
his office and Mr. Owens's Web site also didn't start until more than
24 hours after the incident - late Tuesday and early Wednesday.
Were any of these complainants actual victims (or even viewers) of
"Monday Night Football" or were they just a mob assembled after the
fact by "family" groups, emboldened by their triumph in smiting
"Saving Private Ryan" from 66 ABC stations the week before?
Though the F.C.C. said on Wednesday that it had received 50,000
complaints about the N.F.L. affair, it couldn't determine how many of
them were duplicates - the kind generated by e-mail campaigns run by
political organizations posting form letters ready to be clicked into
cyberspace ad infinitum by anyone who has an index finger and two
seconds of idle time.
Like the Janet Jackson video before it, the new N.F.L. sex tape was
now being rebroadcast around the clock so we could revel incessantly
in the shock of it all.
"People were so outraged they had to see it 10 times," joked Aaron
Brown of CNN, which was no slacker in filling that need in the
marketplace.
And yet when I spoke to an F.C.C. enforcement spokesman after more
than two days of such replays, the agency had not yet received a
single complaint about the spot's constant recycling on other TV
shows, among them the highly rated talk show "The View," where Ms.
Sheridan's bare back had been merrily paraded at the child-friendly
hour of 11 a.m.
The hypocrisy embedded in this tale is becoming a national running
gag.
As in the Super Bowl brouhaha, in which the N.F.L. maintained it had
no idea that MTV might produce a racy halftime show, the league has
denied any prior inkling of the salaciousness on tap this time - even
though the spot featured the actress playing the sluttiest character
in prime time's most libidinous series and was shot with the full
permission of one of the league's teams in its own locker room.
Again as in the Jackson case, we are also asked to believe that pro
football is what Pat Buchanan calls "the family entertainment, the
family sports show" rather than what it actually is: a Boschian
jamboree of bumping-and-grinding cheerleaders, erectile-dysfunction
pageantry and, as Don Imus puts it, "wife-beating drug addicts
slamming the hell out of each other" on the field.
But there's another, more insidious game being played as well.
The F.C.C. and the family values crusaders alike are cooking their
numbers.
The first empirical evidence was provided this month by Jeff Jarvis, a
former TV Guide critic turned blogger.
He had the ingenious idea of filing a Freedom of Information Act
request to see the actual viewer complaints that drove the F.C.C. to
threaten Fox and its affiliates with the largest indecency fine to
date - $1.2 million for the sins of a now-defunct reality program
called "Married by America."
Though the F.C.C. had cited 159 public complaints in its legal case
against Fox, the documents obtained by Mr. Jarvis showed that there
were actually only 90 complaints, written by 23 individuals.
Of those 23, all but 2 were identical repetitions of a form letter
posted by the Parents Television Council.
In other words, the total of actual, discrete complaints about
"Married by America" was 3.
Such letter-writing factories as the American Family Association's
OneMillionMoms.com also exaggerate their clout in intimidating
advertisers.
They brag, for instance, that the retail chain Lowe's dropped its
commercials on "Desperate Housewives" in response to their protests.
But Lowe's was not an advertiser on the show; the advertiser who
actually bought the commercial was Whirlpool, which plugged Lowe's as
a retail outlet for its products under a co-branding arrangement.
Another advertiser that the family-values mafia takes credit for
chasing away, Tyson Foods, had only bought in for one episode of
"Desperate Housewives" in the first place.
It had long since been replaced by such Fortune 500 advertisers as
Ford and McDonald's, each clamoring to pay three times as much for a
30-second spot ($450,000) as those early advertisers who bought time
before the show had its debut and became an instant smash.
But perhaps the most revealing barometer of the real state of play in
American culture in 2004 is "Desperate Housewives" itself.
Conceived by Marc Cherry, who is described by Newsweek as a "somewhat
conservative, gay Republican," it is a campy, well-made soap opera
presenting suburban American family life as a fugue of dysfunction,
malice and sex.
It's not for nothing that its characters are seen running off to
Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder retrospectives or that some of the
episodes are named after Stephen Sondheim songs like "Who's That
Woman?" and "Pretty Little Picture."
The children of Mr. Cherry's Wisteria Lane can be as poisonous as that
small-town brat in Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt": one preadolescent
girl is an extortionist and one teenage daughter all but pimps for her
divorced mother.
The career-driven husbands are as soulless as the office rats of
Wilder's "Apartment," and their wives are, yes, as desperate as those
in the Manhattan high-rises of Sondheim's "Company."
Whatever else is to be said about "Desperate Housewives" - and I
haven't missed an episode - it is not to be confused with the kind of
entertainment that the Traditional Values Coalition wants to impose on
the airwaves.
It not only emulates HBO Sunday night hits like "Sex and the City" and
"Six Feet Under" in its cheeky, sardonic tone but brushes right up
against them in language and action.
In one recent show the most oversexed character on screen, a
17-year-old jock having an affair with a married woman, is revealed to
be a member of his high school's "abstinence club."
(Surely it was a coincidence that this revelation butted right up
against a commercial for Ortho Tri-Cyclen, a prescription
contraceptive.)
In another, a wife collapsing under the burden of stay-at-home
motherhood slugs her spouse when he contemplates not using a condom.
Then there was the dinner party where another of the wives tries to
humiliate her husband by telling the assembled that he "cries after he
ejaculates."
"Desperate Housewives" is hardly a blue-state phenomenon.
A hit everywhere, it is even a bigger hit in Oklahoma City than it is
in Los Angeles, bigger in Kansas City than it is in New York.
All those public moralists who wail about all the kids watching Ms.
Sheridan on "Monday Night Football" would probably have apoplexy if
they actually watched what Ms. Sheridan was up to in her own series -
and then looked closely at its Nielsen numbers.
Though children ages 2 to 11 make up a small percentage of the
audience of either show, there are actually more in that age group
tuning into Mr. Cherry's marital brawls (870,000) than into the
N.F.L.'s fisticuffs (540,000).
"Desperate Housewives" also ranks No. 5 among all prime-time shows for
ages 12-17.
("Monday Night Football" is No. 18.)
This may explain in part why its current advertisers include products
like Fisher-Price toys, the DVD of "Elf" and the forthcoming Tim Allen
holiday vehicle, "Christmas With the Kranks."
Those who cherish the First Amendment can only hope that the
Traditional Values Coalition, OneMillionMoms.com, OneMillionDads .com
and all the rest send every e-mail they can to the F.C.C. demanding
punitive action against the stations that broadcast "Desperate
Housewives."
A "moral values" crusade that stands between a TV show this popular
and its audience will quickly learn the limits of its power in a
country where entertainment is god.
---
Stop Elmer Fudd web site: http://www.ElmerFudd.US/
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