Saturday night and Sunday morning in our little town

Recently, my wife and I sat down with our four year old sons to watch a DVD of a recent Hollywood blockbuster. Five minutes into the film, an 80-year-old woman who is watching TV hears a noise and quickly turns to face a prowler. She picks up a double-barreled shotgun with a box of cartridges and blasts away Rambo style. When she runs out of shells, she gets a welder’s torch to burn the intruder into a marshmallow. One of my sons had the good sense to become frightened, so we switched to an episode of Thomas the Train that we have seen maybe 100 times.

Last week, the FCC proposed a $1,400,000 fine for ABC and its affiliates for a brief glimpse of a woman’s bottom in a 2003 episode of NYPD Blue. What does it say about us as a country when brief nudity or foul language generates letters by the thousands and resulting FCC action, while there is not a peep over grisly violence in films and on TV? On an offensive scale of one to ten (a topless Lou Dobbs on CNN being a ten) was a nanosecond of Janet Jackson’s nipple at the 2004 Super Bowl really worth more than a two at most? Was it really more offensive than any scene in CSI, CSI Miami, CSI Newark, Cleveland, etc.? Why is it that Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" is forever burned into our public consciousness? Meanwhile the score of that game has long been forgotten. Football is our true national sport despite Major League Baseball's pretense. And when Keith Jackson or John Madden use phrases such as “aerial bombardment” and “a ferocious defense destroyed their ground attack” to many, it is a bigger turn on than anyone's nipple.

Meanwhile, the violence in Iraq has been filtered and sanitized by network news ever since the first shock and awe. We have been shielded from images of the resulting death and destruction while the rest of the world has seen it in living red. There is a reason they feel differently about us than we do about ourselves.

The next morning, I went to Memorial Park with my sons. On the main field were maybe 30 boys and girls ages 6 to 10 playing with what looked like assault rifles. Adult instructors were giving the little Brandons and Ashleys expert instructions on military maneuvers at a paint gun party. Hopefully there will be more to their future. Oh, and the movie my family sat down to watch … RATATOUILLE. It’s the G-rated Disney flick that just won the Oscar for best-animated movie.