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

[Michael Butler]

Thanks I had sent it to the Civic and Hair Lists
Hope you are well
Peace and Love,
Michael

> 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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