[Mb-hair] Interesting NY Times piece on the culture wars

[NewChaz64 at aol.com]

THE NEW YORK TIMES
February 6, 2005
FRANK RICH 
The Year of Living Indecently

LET us be grateful that Janet Jackson did not bare both breasts. 
On the first anniversary of the Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction that shook 
the world, it's clear that just one was big enough to wreak havoc. The ensuing 
Washington indecency crusade has unleashed a wave of self-censorship on 
American television unrivaled since the McCarthy era, with everyone from the dying 
D-Day heroes in "Saving Private Ryan" to cuddly animated animals on daytime 
television getting the ax. Even NBC's presentation of the Olympics last summer, in 
which actors donned body suits to simulate "nude" ancient Greek statues, is 
currently under federal investigation. 
Public television is now so fearful of crossing its government patrons that 
it is flirting with self-immolation. Having disowned lesbians in the children's 
show "Postcards From Buster" and stripped suspect language from "Prime 
Suspect" on "Masterpiece Theater," PBS is editing its Feb. 23 broadcast of "Dirty 
War," the HBO-BBC film about a terrorist attack, to remove a glimpse of female 
nudity in a scene depicting nuclear detoxification. Next thing you know they'll 
be snipping lascivious flesh out of a documentary about Auschwitz.
This repressive cultural environment was officially ratified on Nov. 2, when 
Ms. Jackson's breast pulled off its greatest coup of all: the re-election of 
President Bush. Or so it was decreed by the media horde that retroactively 
declared "moral values" the campaign's decisive issue and the Super Bowl the blue 
states' Waterloo. The political bosses of "family" organizations, well aware 
that TV's collective wisdom becomes reality whether true or not, have been 
emboldened ever since. They are spending their political capital like drunken 
sailors, redoubling their demands that the Bush administration marginalize gay 
people, stamp out sex education and turn pop culture into a continuous loop of 
"Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm." 
With Sunday's Super Bowl, their crusade has scored a touchdown. MTV has been 
replaced as halftime producer by Don Mischer, the go-to guy for a guaranteed 
snoozefest; his credits include the Tony Awards, the Kennedy Center Honors and 
the 2004 Democratic National Convention at which the balloons failed to drop. 
(His subsequent cursing was heard on CNN, but escaped government sanction 
because no Republicans were watching.) Fox Sports Net has changed the title of its 
signature program "Best Damn Sports Show Period" to "Best Darn Super Bowl 
Road Show Period." The commercials, too, will "be careful" and in "good taste," 
according to the head of marketing for Anheuser-Busch. Fox, which recently 
pixilated the bottom of a cartoon toddler in a rerun of the series "Family Guy," 
now has someone on full-time rear-end alert: it rejected a comic spot for 
Airborne, a cold remedy, showing the backside of the 84-year-old Mickey Rooney as 
he leaves a sauna. 
This might all be laughable were the government not expanding its role as 
cultural cop. But it is. The departures of Michael Powell, the Savonarola of the 
Federal Communications Commission, and John Ashcroft, whose parallel 
right-breast fixation was stimulated by a statue in the Justice Department, are red 
herrings. "Thank God he's gone, but God help us with what's next," said Howard 
Stern upon learning of Mr. Powell's imminent exit. He's right. After all, L. 
Brent Bozell of the Parents Television Council condemned Mr. Powell for "four 
years of failed leadership" in fighting indecency. (Mr. Powell's commission had 
the temerity to actually reject some Parents Television Council jeremiads, 
which are distinguished by their inordinate obsession with the penis.) Mr. Bozell, 
whose organization has been second to none in increasing the number of annual 
indecency complaints from 111 in 2000 to a million-plus last year, is angling 
for a tougher successor and may well get one. 
His wish has in effect been granted even before Mr. Powell's chair is filled. 
The second Bush term began with the installation of a powerful new government 
censor in another big job, Secretary of Education. Margaret Spellings hadn't 
even been officially sworn into the cabinet when she took on "Postcards From 
Buster," threatening PBS with decreased financing because one episode had the 
show's eponymous animated rabbit hobnobbing with actual lesbian moms while 
visiting Vermont to learn how maple syrup is made. Though Buster had in previous 
installments visited Muslims, Mormons, Orthodox Jews and Pentecostal 
Christians, gay couples (even when not identified as such on camera) are verboten to our 
new Secretary of Education. "Many parents would not want their young children 
exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in this episode," Ms. Spellings wrote in 
her threatening letter to Pat Mitchell, the C.E.O. of PBS.
The letter, as it happened, was unnecessary: Public broadcasting says that it 
had decreed on its own only a few hours earlier that it would not distribute 
the offending show - the most alarming example yet of just how cowardly it has 
become and how chilling the Janet Jackson effect has been. (Since then, some 
two dozen member stations out of a total of 349 have rebeled and decided to 
broadcast the episode anyway.) But the story won't end with this one incident. 
Ms. Spellings' threats against PBS are only the latest chapter in a continuing 
saga at an education department that increasingly resembles an authoritarian 
government's ministry of information. 
A month before the election, The Los Angeles Times reported on its front page 
that the department had quietly destroyed more than 300,000 copies of "a 
booklet designed for parents to help their children learn history" after Lynne 
Cheney, who has no official government role, complained about its contents. The 
booklet burning occurred under the watch of Rod Paige, the education secretary 
who, we would later learn, was simultaneously complicit in another sub rosa 
exercise in heavy-handed government information management: the payment of 
$240,000 in taxpayers' funds to Armstrong Williams, a talking head and columnist, 
to plug Bush administration policies on radio and TV. 
Mr. Paige fled his post last month without adequately explaining what he knew 
about these scandals. Enter Ms. Spellings, previously a White House aide who 
by some accounts had been a shadow administrator of the education department 
during Mr. Paige's out-to-lunch tenure. With all the other troubles in public 
education, why would she focus on a single episode of a single children's 
program on her second day in the job? We don't yet know. But her act was nothing if 
not ideologically synergistic with still another freshly uncovered Bush 
propaganda effort. Just as Ms. Spellings busted Buster, two more syndicated 
columnists copped to receiving taxpayers' dollars, this time siphoned through the 
Department of Health and Human Services, to help craft propaganda for a Bush 
"healthy marriage initiative" that disdains same-sex couples as fervently as Ms. 
Spellings did in her letter to PBS.
What makes this story more insidious still is the glaring reality that the 
most prominent Republican lesbians in America are Mary Cheney, a former gay and 
lesbian marketing liaison for Coors beer, and her partner, Heather Poe, who 
appeared as a couple in public and on TV during the presidential campaign. That 
Ms. Spellings would gratuitously go after this specific "lifestyle" right 
after taking office is so provocative it smells like payback specifically pitched 
at those "pro-family" watchdogs who snarled at the mention of Ms. Cheney's 
sexual orientation during the campaign whether it was by John Kerry or anyone 
else. Surely Ms. Spellings doesn't believe in discrimination against 
nontraditional families: by her own account, she was a single mother who had to park her 
13-year-old and 8-year-old children in Austin when she first went to work at 
the White House. Then again, President Bush went on record last month as saying 
that "studies have shown that the ideal is where a child is being raised by a 
man and a woman" (even though, as The New York Times reported, "there is no sci
entific evidence that children raised by gay couples do any worse").
That our government is now both intimidating PBS and awarding public money to 
pundits to enforce "moral values" agendas demonizing certain families is the 
ugliest fallout of the campaign against indecency. That campaign cannot really 
banish salaciousness from pop culture, a rank impossibility in a market 
economy where red and blue customers are united in their infatuation with 
"Desperate Housewives." But it can create public policy that discriminates against 
anyone on the hit list of moral values zealots. Inane as it may seem that Ms. 
Spellings is conducting a witch hunt against Buster or that James Dobson has taken 
aim at SpongeBob SquarePants, there's a method to their seeming idiocy: the 
cartoon surrogates are deliberately chosen to camouflage the harshness of their 
assault on nonanimated, flesh-and-blood people.
This, too, has its antecedent in the McCarthy era. In his novel "The Amazing 
Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," Michael Chabon was extrapolating from actual 
history when one of his heroes, a gay comic book artist, is hauled before 
Congress to testify about pairing up "strapping young fellows in tight trousers" 
as superheroes. A Senate committee of the time did investigate the comics. Its 
guiding force was the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's fear-mongering 1954 tome 
"Seduction of the Innocent," which posited that Batman and Robin could 
corrupt children by inducing a "wish dream of two homosexuals living together." The 
decency cops of that day, exemplified by closeted gay right-wingers like J. 
Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, escalated a culture war into one with human costs by 
conflating homosexuality with the criminality of treason. 
One big difference between that America and ours is that the culture 
industry, public broadcasting not included, has gained much more power since then. 
Should Sunday's Super Bowl falter in the ratings, its creators will lure that 
missing audience back next year with wardrobe malfunctions that haven't even been 
invented yet. 
But gay parents whose "lifestyle" is vilified by a cabinet officer don't have 
that power. They're vulnerable even in a state like Vermont that respects 
their civil rights. "I feel sick about it," Karen Pike of Hinesburg, Vt., told 
The Burlington Free Press, after learning that PBS had orphaned the "Buster" 
episode showing her, her partner and their three children. "I understand they get 
public funding, but they should be the one station we feel confident in, in 
knowing that what we see there represents our country." 
No one had told her that some stories are no longer welcome. You have to 
wonder if anyone has told Mary Cheney: Focus on the Family could not have been 
pleased to read last week's New York Post report that she has hired Bill 
Clinton's high-powered literary dealmaker to peddle her own story as a book.
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