Stuff a gag in the V-chip - censorship of television

Humanist, Sept-Oct, 1997 by Art Hilgart

Of all the crybabies demanding government protection from their own free will, the parents wanting ratings of television programs deserve to spend hell watching The Jetsons. By their standards, Americans are utterly irresponsible parents.

When our elder son was five, we took him to a production of The Three-penny Opera, about a bigamist throat cutter and a prostitute. His younger brother, when he was five, was treated to West Side Story, which includes rape and murder. We didn't lock up our bookshelves, and the boys skipped kiddie lit and went straight from Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak to the great books. They didn't seem interested in Henry Miller, though, preferring H. P. Lovecraft and H. G. Wells. They could see any movie to which they could manage admittance and, as for television, our only warning was that commercials are cleverly produced lies, especially those for toys and breakfast food. We're proud that they ignored the made-for-television cartoons and searched out pre-World War II Warner Brothers material, and that one of them played the Monty Python transvestite lumberjack in his high school variety show. Both boys are grown now, and neither has a criminal record -- one is an English professor and the other studied political economy at Oxford.

The problem with ratings and censorship, in addition to conflicting with the pesky Constitution, is that brains are never part of the equation -- a single formula applies to Fellini, Bergman, and cheap skin flicks. Perhaps you've noticed that none of the women in the classic MGM musicals had navels and that all married couples slept in twin beds. Current rating systems attempt to protect young folks from observing that human female mammaries have nipples. Children are not to know that the word shit is a useful abbreviation of Hamlet's suicide speech, or that the adjectival fucking is a commonly spoken intensifier. Censors believe these words to refer to bodily functions, but even if that were the case -- so what? Would they prefer, "Who the synonym for intercourse left their synonym for excrement on my desk?"

What do the censors find acceptable for children? Violence is okay if it is "clean." In the movie GoldenEye, James Bond machine guns several hundred innocent people, but they die bloodlessly -- and there are no nipples -- so it received a PG rating. In the Home Alone films, a sadistic kid gleefully and repeatedly tortures some bumbling burglars, but the villains survive dozens of seemingly lethal encounters, and it's all in good fun so the films are rated G. Violence perpetrated by "good guys" -- like John Wayne -- seems to be an acceptable moral lesson. The only problem is that each of us, however monstrous, believes him- or herself to be the good guy.

I might approve of video censorship were I the censor. I'd have a truth-chip block news stories presenting as fact the press releases of corporations or politicians. There would be a taste-chip to block any program interrupted with commercials. An ethnocentric-chip would block fiction and nonfiction that implies it's okay for us to kill them but not for them to kill us. And there would be a biology/religion-chip to block any suggestion that humans are not members of the animal kingdom. But if I had the power, I wouldn't use it. Even idiots and advertisers have the right to freedom of speech.