Quality and Obscenity

This is a crackpot notion, but here goes:

We have an FCC that bends over backwords to punish broadcasters on the sayso of brent Bozell and his army of tightasses, and of course the reason is obscenity.

Is there, on the other hand, no way of exerting the same kind of (franky quite disproportionate and unfair) power over broadcast content that is merely crappy? Is there?

My concern is that smart, creative, and discerning people in the US have given up on mainstream culture. If a small army of old bitties who pitch a fit everytime someone on TV does something they don't approve of, why should people who like their culture high-quality be so complacent, so tolerant of crap?

Why doesn't someone form an organization with a nice Bozellish name like Families for Quality Broadcasting that sends Michael Powell letters along the lines of:

"I am deeply offended by a program called Fear Factor. In this show, people compete for some significant fee by consuming intentionally disgusting food including animal genitals and exposing themselves to other physical dangers and potential humiliations. This show encourages reckless behavior, greed, exhibitionism, and the pursuit of fame at the expense of human dignity. There is nothing artistically redeeming about this show. It operates through the exploitation of petty desires and stokes the fires of a vacant voyeurism in its audience. Impressionable children who watch this program will come to believe that $50,000 is worth the sacrifice of one's dignity. These are not the values that we want, as a society, to pass to our children."

Now, it's altogether possible that wouldn't work at all, although the fact that folks are made to eat cow rectum and elk penis is certainly at least as objectionable as Janet Jackson's floppy breast.

The actual mechanics of getting crappy, socially irresponsible programming off the air is obscure to me right now. Remember, it's late at night and this is an acknowledged crackpot notion. But come on! There must be millions of folks, including the same old bitties who operate as Bozell's drones, who really hate crappy programming.

People have to remember that that spectrum belongs to them, not the networks or the various advertisers. Network stations are on some significant level a public good. I think bad programming survives not just because of the intellectual and creative bankruptcy of its production, but because people's expectations of it are so low and so infantile. People need first to give a shit about the culture, and then need an appropriate way to act on it.

Happy New year

Let 2005 improve on 2004 in every way.

In Sorrow

I would like to express my horror and sorrow at the massive natural disaster on the Indian Ocean. Tragic events like this have a tendency, when they are as far-off and abstract as they are for Americans like myself, to provoke bewildered emotions.

The figure of over 100,000 dead is so horrific as to be unimaginable, and this unimaginable nature can either render in our minds as meaningless or reinforce our blackest notions of the pitilessness of nature and, by extension, existence.

It is tragic enough when someone you know dies suddenly and violently, when someone is torn from your world with that very cosmic pitilessness.

When one considers 100, 000 of those tragedies occuring almost at once, one can easily succumb to numbness, the same unimaginable numbness that wars and the Holocaust tend to inspire.

I believe the best thing to do is to bear as much of the weight of that pain as we can, and to do what we can to aid and console the survivors. It is important both to help and to feel the weight of our fellow human's suffering. In the words of Goethe, "A man who is unable to despair has no need to be alive." It is our sensitivity to the suffering and humanness of others that makes us capable of an ethical life.