>>Valley Patriot>> |
Mad media mavens wasted no time in expressing their shock and outrage over the latest indiscretion from the first family of Gary, Indiana. All were shocked—shocked!—over what happened at the Super Bowl halftime show. Most distinguished in this regard were the Angry White Males of talk radio, who seized upon the incident to launch a moral crusade. Alas, a good many of these rabid, righteous, right-wing radio vigilantes were in a rather strange position to decry the moral pollution of the public airwaves. (One, in fact, reacts to “slow news days” by urging his audience to respond to the question: “Who would you like to see naked on TV?” And yet, The Day After, he was up front, as it were, with his moral outrage over the previous day’s doings in Houston.) And that was hardly the only irony. Ever on the lookout for a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, the AWM quickly connected the corporate dots from CBS (legendary land of Commies Murrow and Cronkite) to MTV (chief visual agent of Satanic Rock, Salacious Sex and other sure-fire corrupters of youth—not to mention the spawning ground of Madonna and the most infamous of Janet Jackson’s brothers) to the masters of all the aforementioned, the Viacom empire. The irony? Anyone who dared call the AWM but two days before with a questioning, much less a denunciation, of unrestricted media conglomeration and the dangers therein would likely be humiliated on the air as a liberal, communist, homosexual wimp. And yet, B-(as in breast)Day +1, there they were, these avatars of the Holy Rite of the Free Market, demanding government intervention. Isn’t it interesting that, only at times like these, when the erotic makes them psychotic, do we hear such talk from the defenders of the Free Market faith—those devotees of every Invisible Hand high priest from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman. But let Janet of Gary flash but one of her two mammary glands, and Rush Limbaugh Clone Nation starts sounding a lot like a Noam Chomsky seminar on the media. (Wonder what would happen if, say, one of the leading AWM—one who, per usual, advocates a lock-‘em-up-and-throw-away-the-key policy toward drug offenders, got busted for drugs himself? Oops, I just remembered….) But wasn’t Ms. Jackson’s immodesty yet another attack on that most sacred of institutions, the American family? All right, family-values warriors, here’s a question: how many families went hungry the week after the Super Bowl because the breadwinner didn’t make the point spread? Alas, the AWM didn’t discuss that on their Marconi sets that week, did they? The question just wasn’t, if you’ll forgive the expression, “sexy” enough. (Besides, gambling isn’t really an “attack on the family,” is it, Bill Bennett?) But, surely, the Super Bowl halftime show wasn’t the time or the place for such doings, was it? I would think not. But then, maybe I’m old-fashioned. I can remember when the Super Bowl started, back in my personal Holy Year of 1967. It began as the true national professional football championship game between the champions of the National and American Football Leagues. It really meant something. But since the AFL committed suicide in 1970 (one depressing example among many of victorious 1960’s rebels becoming 1970’s sellouts) it has become nothing more than the NFL championship game. Having been, if you’ll pardon the expression, stripped of its real significance, the Super Bowl became a garish bacchanal in which the game itself became virtually irrelevant to the event: Las Vegas meets Mardi Gras. As for the games themselves, most have been crashing, one-sided bores. Hardly a coincidence, methinks. Such being the case, I find the outrage over Janet Jackson’s “desecration” of this sacred, all-American, “family” event to be a bit disingenuous, to say the least. (For further evidence, take a look at some of the recent Super Bowl halftime shows.) Having permitted the Super Bowl to become as it is, the NFL, the TV networks, the media and the fans themselves should not have been too surprised that Janet Jackson took things to their logical, if a tad extreme, conclusion. Having consciously (if that’s the right word) pitched their product to the same demographic as the beer companies, the “laddie” magazines and the video game producers, they all got what they deserved, if not so graphically wanted. And
that’s the naked truth.
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Prior Columns by Hartley Pleshaw |
As of this writing, the reaction to
l’affaire Janet Jackson is well into its second
month. The forces of reaction are empowered, the witch
hunters are at large, the Constitution is threatened.
Never underestimate the power of one exposed female
breast to expose the banality of the savage collective
breast. Or, to put it another way, one boob has brought
out H.L. Mencken’s booboisie in force. Only in
America.