Wake Up And Smell The Stupidity

I was actually on the path of least resistance this morning, fighting the good fight against weather that is so appallingly bitter that I momentarily contemplated going back inside, calling in sick and soaking in a bathtub for a few hours. Alas, I should have. All I can say is this: you know it's really cold in New York City when the hookers have started wearing parkas and leggings on the job.

So upon my arrival to work, I read somewhere that the Powers-That-Be at Fox decided to blur a naked ass (a male character's ass, I believe) on a re-run of The Family Guy. If you're unaware of why that statement just blows my mind, let me first state that the show is a cartoon -- they blurred out a naked ass on a cartoon, despite that cartoon not being an "adult"-oriented show but rather a comedy. They are so afraid of the FCC that they, literally, had to electronically blur a collection of pixels which depict a cartoon character's buttocks. WTF?

Any day now I expect to see the coming of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. Either that, or Mike Tyson will start doing Shakespeare in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much the same thing.

I apologize in advance for what will be a brief but emphatic rant, but it is simply beyond my scope of comprehension when a network has such fear of the FCC or any other government entity that it feels the need to censor a cartoon. To expound on this theory, said cartoon was a re-run -- they broadcast the original episode without altering the "naked ass" and they certainly didn't get any complaints then, as they didn't the other night. What the hell are the Fox people thinking? Or are they even thinking at all? Incredible...

Apparently, their fear of the FCC stems from a $7,000-per-affiliate fine the FCC levied in response to a broadcast of a Fox program entitled "Married By America," which depicted men licking whipped cream off strippers' bodies. Now, whether I have or have not personally enjoyed whipped cream a-la stripper, it seems to me that Fox's broadcast of a show whose sole point was to be prurient, to tittilate and to explore the more base, sleazy aspect of life, should never have been broadcast. Slapping a "Parental Guidance" tag at the beginning of an edgy, adult-oriented show (like NYPD Blue, which showed -- gasp -- David Caruso's bare ass -- and I still have nightmares) is a start. But this is beyond stupidity. It's a joke. And this is why, aside from football telecasts, I don't, can't and won't watch Fox anymore.

A large part of what has led the FCC to become so visible in the last twelve months is their focusing on Howard Stern's morning radio program. Howard Stern is a funny, crude, simplistic radio comedian; his humor, however, is so misogynistic that it borders on being anti-woman. Despite all that, he is funny. But he's in the wrong medium, and, frankly, he doesn't espouse the type of listener that can use their imagination. Across the East River, in Queens, Don Imus, another radio/comedy/morning man, associates with politicos and commentators rather than strippers and foot-long sausage-fellaters, and while Imus's humor can also be construed as crude and base (keep in mind Imus and Stern briefly worked together on WNBC in the 80's), Stern goes for T&A and bathroom humor where Imus focuses on cerebral-ish humor. To wit, whereas Imus interviews presidential candidates, Stern interviews porn star of the year candidates. Put another way, Stern does a fart joke (replete with a half-dozen sound effects); Imus will spend five minutes discussing the sounds which emanated from his butt the night prior.

Essentially, the FCC began going after Stern after he began graphically describing and glorifying sex acts on the air -- keeping in mind that he broadcasts from 6AM to 10AM, a time when many parents (and many extremely uptight adults) are listening, with or without their kids, and the FCC received more and more complaints until they fined Stern's parent company, Clear Channel Communications, approximately $495,000, in April, 2004. It's not about fart jokes, and it's not about being gross: it's about being prurient and inappropriate. While I don't support censorship, I stopped listening to Stern a decade ago because it got very old very quickly. But apparently the FCC didn't stop, and walloped Clear Channel. This led to Howard Stern simultaneously signing a huge contract to relocate to Sirius Satellite Radio (ie no FCC, no censorship) and to launch a campaign against George Bush and the FCC and proclaim his First Amendment rights. The problem here is this: he has the right to express himself, as do we all, but it has always been, and always will be, about the value of the one versus the many: just as one does not have the right to shout "fire" in a crowded theater, Stern's caustic descriptions are inappropriate and should be limited. Would I subscribe to Sirius Satellite as a result of Stern's switch? No. Would I listen to his program were I already a Sirius Satellite subscriber? Probably. Do I like fart jokes? Pull my finger and find out.

Ten days ago, in this very space, I decried the phenomenon known as Reality TV for its goal of getting viewers to forfeit their lives (albeit temporarily) to experience the lives of others, and I maintain that this premise is foolish at best. But this new sense of fear that led Fox to cover up a cartoon character's ass just shows that the people who program this crap are as idiotic as the people who (even temporarily) forfeit their lives for the sake of TV, reality or otherwise. And on a lighter note, last night I managed, while doing some cooking, to catch part of Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (the original, not the upcoming updated version starring Johnny Depp). During one of the Oompah Loompah jams (can't think of any better way to describe it), they tsk-tsk people who watch too much TV. As I sadly turned off my own television, I noted that I was in agreement with small, orange-faced dwarfs nicknamed Oompah Loompahs. And I'm not even a vermicious knid.

Not last time I checked, anyway.