Wednesday 1st December, 2004
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Rod in “The Best is Yet to Come” 11/6/04
Photo by Shira Greenburg ©2004 by Broadway.com. Used by Permission
A Thought for Today
I'll try anything once, and anything that
doesn't hurt more than once.
Frank Rich is arguably the most knowledgeable, respected and
fire-breathing critic of pop-culture in the nation. He attracted major
notice as The New York Times reviewer of productions on Broadway and as
plays and musicals began to turn into a predictable formula he bailed
out.
Turning his true, keen eye toward American life, politics and culture
Rich became an unerring watchdog of all things American – in particular
the phony, faux and the faux pas of those would be arbiters of what
should and should not be “it.” (i.e. their templates for our lives.) His
Sunday column in the NYT is a must for millions.
As one of those who stand in awe of Frank Rich I urge you to read the
following from beginning to end.
RM 11/30/2004
Frank Rich
THE GREAT INDECENCY HOAX
By FRANK RICH
-from The New York Times • Published: November 28, 2004
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.
©2004 New York Times. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission
AND FINALLY
Today is World AIDS Day and whether or not you believe it AIDS is
everybody’s problem. You are misinformed if you think AIDS is a ‘Gay
Plague.’ In the USA African-American women constitute 60% of those
currently afflicted with HIV/AIDS.
In a recent report CNN pointed out that because of sexual enhancement
drugs, seasoned citizens in senior housing complexes are now
experiencing an outbreak of HIV cases. Imagine living your whole life in
relatively good health only to contract a fatal disease in your senior
years.
Because of the unchecked, widespread HIV virus the life expectancy in
some African countries is as low as 34 years. Statistics are hard to
come by but The World Health Organization estimates that the HIV virus
has infected one in four citizens in Russia, India, South America and
nearly every country in Asia. This has produced not thousands, but
millions of orphans and robbed the world of two generations of young
productive and working adults.
HIV/AIDS is everybody’s business.
RM 11/30/2004 1:22AM PST
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