Related articles and links |  1 of 5

The indecency discussion that erupted a year ago encompasses images and words: a flash of breast in the midst of a violent game, a nude Desperate Housewives actress jumping into the arms of a star football player in a Monday Night Football teaser, and Howard Stern's revolt against the FCC, which has evolved into a multimillion-dollar deal to move his misogynistic talk to satellite radio in 2006.

The ruckus made me a little smug because a catalyst for our family's ditching TV altogether had been the 2003 Super Bowl commercials—including the one in which a Dodge Ram passenger chokes up a piece of food onto the windshield to the delight of the sadistic driver.

If our decision sounds hysterical, consider this: Late one evening last summer, my family checked into the Comfort Inn in Monterey, California. My 17- and 19-year-old sons headed for their room across the courtyard to watch tv, and I did the same. As I clicked through the channels, a woman holding a life-size model of buttocks caught my attention.

She was espousing the supposed joys of a particular sex act and simulated it with other partially nude people, including a slew of nipple-pierced, bare-breasted young women. What turned out to be an episode of the HBO series Real Sex aired at 11 P.M. and was included in the regular hotel programming. As another dose of glamorized debauchery invaded my family life, I decided that hysteria is entirely appropriate.

James Squire and Jane Smiley, writing in The American Prospect about Viacom's complicity in the Super Bowl farce, said, "No one was even asked to take the blame for the sleazy commercials because the one characteristic of the global corporation is the compulsion to close the sale, whether the product is pure gold, equity, or smut."

Those corporations don't care about my family, so we stopped buying their goods. But after a six-month hiatus, we decided we weren't ready to give up TV completely and decided to limit ourselves to more wholesome fare. The results were similarly mixed.

We hooked up Sky Angel Christian satellite network and a bit of cover-your-ears technology called TV Guardian. We had paid about $400 for a lifetime subscription to Sky Angel and $85 for TV Guardian a few years earlier.

TV Guardian uses closed-captioning technology to replace offensive words. It can make videos riddled with unnecessarily crass language more enjoyable, though it can also be like watching a foreign film with subtitles that don't always make sense. Our TV Guardian is set to replace the words God and Jesus with man. It doesn't discriminate between sacred and profane uses of these words, so when viewing a movie like Wit, in which Emma Thompson's character recites John Donne's poetry about life, death, and eternity, one might think Donne believed man is the author of his own salvation. (By the way, this poignant movie was produced by HBO.)

Bono lamented the concern his conservative friends expressed about his exuberant expression at the Golden Globes, saying profanity is nothing more than the "percussive side of language." Is he correct? Is TV Guardian silly?

Or does the permeation of profanity in our culture reflect the condition of our collective soul? Yeats said, "We had fed the heart on fantasies; the heart's grown brutal from the fare." It's not silly to want to keep some of the brutality out.

In The Paradox of Choice, Swarthmore College sociologist Barry Schwartz asserts that choice overload is turning us into a nation of "maximizers," for whom only the best will do in every area of life. The downside is that we are less satisfied with our choices because the stakes are so much higher than they've ever been in the past.

next page... |  1 of 5

January 2005, Vol. 49, No. 1