Good column by Frank Rich, TV reviewer of the NYT "On Moral Values, it's Blue in a Landslide"
Sorry kids, I created no links above for strippers, Paris Hilton, or Bill O'Reilly's loofah/felafel fetish. You'll just have to Google those for yourself.If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corporation, and each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest of Fox's very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless to say, Mr. O'Reilly. There are "real fun parts and exciting parts," said Ms. Cosby to Ms. Jameson on Fox News's "Big Story Weekend," an encounter broadcast on Saturday at 9 p.m., assuring its maximum exposure to unsupervised kids.
Almost unnoticed in the final weeks of the campaign was the record government indecency fine levied against another prime-time Fox television product, "Married by America." The $1.2 million bill, a mere bagatelle to Murdoch stockholders, was more than twice the punishment inflicted on Viacom for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction." According to the F.C.C. complaint, one episode in this heterosexual marriage-promoting reality show included scenes in which "partygoers lick whipped cream from strippers' bodies," and two female strippers "playfully spank" a man on all fours in his underwear. "Married by America" is gone now, but Fox remains the go-to network for Paris Hilton ("The Simple Life") and wife-swapping ("Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy").
None of this has prompted an uprising from the red-state Fox News loyalists supposedly so preoccupied with "moral values." They all gladly contribute fungible dollars to Fox culture by boosting their fair-and-balanced channel's rise in the ratings. Some of these red staters may want to make love like porn stars besides. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) An ABC News poll two weeks before the election found that more Republicans than Democrats enjoy sex "a great deal." The Democrats' new hero, Illinois Senator-elect Barack Obama, was assured victory once his original, ostentatiously pious Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race rather than defend his taste for "avant-garde" sex clubs.
Oh, okay, here's a spanking link just to be nice.
Years and years of arguing with fanatics of various stripe have taught me an important principle: you can't quote their rules at them and expect them to live by them.
ReplyDeleteI think it's a matter of how the fanatics view the world, but while EVERY kind of fanatic I've ever met has the same sort of paradox somewhere in their thinking, not ONE ever said "gee, that really doesn't make sense" when asked about it. What they seem to do is either get angry at me for saying it, or expand their theory to include the paradox (usually by saing "well, that doesn't matter", sometimes in an intellectually more appealing manner).
The people who can accept paradox, think about it, and work with it within the framework of their world view are almost by definition not fanatics. (sigh)