Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

I'm no great fan of random use of four letter expressions.  I'm even prude enough to have posted a diary on how we were using too much loaded language around this place, and not saving up our good meaty Anglo-Saxon expressions for when they can be delivered with the emotional oomph they deserve.  Even so, I think it's admirable that CBS has vowed to go forward with their documentary, shocking phrases and all, in the face of the monster fines now levied by the FCC.  They can't believe that documentaries are immune.  PBS's Frontline series -- one of the few shows that dares to do actual journalism these days -- is already on the hook for millions for a handful of swear words, and PBS is worried that a new Ken Burn's documentary on World War II could leave them with fines too large for public stations to pay.  Heck, these days a single, accidentally uttered four-letter word is enough to end a career.

It's not just the government that's out to protect our delicate sensibilities.  I have a friend who has been lucky enough, and a good enough writer, that after years of struggle she finally broke through and made the big time.  It's not uncommon to find her books perched in the New York Times, Publisher's Weekly, and USA Today bestseller lists all at the same time.  However, one place you won't find them is Wal-Mart.  Apparently making goods in foreign sweat shops where accidents are expected and environmental concerns are a joke is all well and good, but a book with sex is beyond the pale.

In attacking nudity and sex, Republicans are playing to a fear that's all too common in Americans.  We're raised from childhood with the idea that these things are not to be discussed, so naturally we are the most sex obsessed culture on the planet.  In contrast, we think violence is A-okay.  It doesn't matter whether you're sampling Nick at Night reruns or the latest prime time shows, you can be assured of a rich variety of fist fights, gun fights, and assorted heavy weaponry.   Heck, watch an old episode of Davy Crockett, and count the bodies as they fall like snow in Buffalo.

That odd disparity between how we treat sex and how we treat violence is an oft-noticed part of the American condition.  It's what makes us titter over nudity on European television, but yawn over yet another body on CSI.  It's what makes the rest of the world think that we are basically insane.

The real problem of obscenity in America isn't either sex or violence.  The real problem is that we're allowing obscenity to be defined by people who fear sex and glorify violence, and we're allowing them to define the rules in ways that give them more power over public speech.  We remember that Dick Cheney dropped the F-bomb on the floor of the United States Senate, but we forget that the "Defense of Decency Act" was passed on the very same day.

Which one of these things was really important?

Why Fear Sex?
The short answer is, they don't.  They don't fear having sex -- as numerous affairs and a running string of trophy wives among the Republican elite clearly demonstrates.  They don't fear talking about it in private,   Heck, get him away from the cameras, and Bush sprinkles the F-word into his conversation like salt on popcorn.  Off color jokes seem to be a staple of administration events.

What the Republicans fear is open, frank, honest discussions of sex.  Why?  Because understanding how important things work is empowering, and there are few things more important in the lives of human beings than sex.  We're sexual beings, driven by emotions, desires, and urges.  We sometimes act on these impulses, more often we don't, but either way they have enormous effects on how we live our lives.

Republicans have realized that by mystifying sex, they can keep it in their booga-booga magic kit -- another tool for manipulating the public.  They can't allow kids to have adequate sex education.  They can't allow adults to see other adults discussing or engaging in sex.  They can't allow women control over what happens to their bodies before or after sex.  They have to define these things as obscene.  Taboo.  Off limits.

They do this because they realize that keeping control over people's sex lives is one of the most powerful levers they have, and they're extremely reluctant to surrender control.  That's why they seized on something as silly as Janet Jackson's exposed nipple to press for even more control over what people can see and hear.  The new FCC regulations allow they to define almost anything as indecent, and the new levels of fines allow them to wipe away any media organization that steps over their unwritten lines.  It's legislation designed to one purpose: to make everyone afraid.

Why Glorify Violence?
That one's easy.  Quick, go watch a movie, then come back.

Maybe you saw a war movie.  Maybe it was Tom Hanks and his assorted American grunts laying themselves on the line to find that missing private.  Maybe it was Matthew Broderick leading black troops across the Carolina sands to attack a Confederate fortress, or John Wayne struggling onto the beach of a South Pacific Island.

Maybe you saw a thriller.  One of those films in which Harrison Ford or Mel Gibson blows up half of LA in an effort to find out who kidnapped his son.  Or maybe you saw Bruce Willis going barefooted through broken glass to stop the terrorists.

Maybe it was science fiction.  Star Wars or Star Trek or Milla Jovovich with Technicolor hair.

Whatever film you watched, did you noticed what happened during the most violent scenes?  Did you see how the camera swooped and turned to bring you the bullets from every possible angle?  Did you hear how the music swelled and took on notes of brass and thunder?  Maybe they slowed down the action so you could see every ripple in that passing flag and take in the determined expression on each square-jawed face.  Maybe there was even "bullet time," so you could study each projectile in flight and contemplate the awful impact ahead.

This is nothing new.

John Phillips Sousa didn't write all those marches as tributes to passing clouds.  Sun Tzu didn't craft strategies for knitting.  Homer didn't come up with The Illiad to talk about the joys of Trojan cooking.

There's a reason why knights had all those streaming banners and snarling critters emblazoned on their shields.  There's a reason why so many weapons were not just functional, but beautiful.  There's a reason that words like glory, honor, and duty have been tossed around since there were words.  The reason is: people have to be made to forget just how asinine the business of violence really is.

Pick your favorite movie action scene again, but instead of slowing it down so that choruses of angels can cheer on the hopeless charge, imagine it instead sped up to double-time and accompanied by music more common on Benny Hill or the Three Stooges.  If that was the way we treated violence in our entertainment, don't you think we'd have a different feeling about it in real life?

There's often talk about how violence in our television leads to crime, but the reason why violence in our media is not only permitted, but encouraged, is that this celebration serves the purpose of promoting a society that looks to violence for answers.  It's designed to make us have disdain for discussion, negotiation, and compromise.  It's designed to make us think there is "honor" in throwing the lives of our young onto a pyre.  We admire the cop who shoots a suspect more than the lawyer who defends him.  We admire the soldier who rushes into enemy fire in full knowledge that she will die.

It should be little surprise that the country which spends more on enforcing its will through violence than any other in world, needs a media more concentrated on violence than any other nation.  Don't believe me?  Check your TV schedule and let me know when "Law and Order: Public Defender's Office" is on.

The New Pornography
Repression of knowledge about sex serves the conservative goal of controlling people through their fears, and the commemoration of violence promotes the correlation of might with right.  But there's a new breed of language that serves a darker purpose, and the most obscene aspect may be that we refuse to recognize it as obscene.

This obscenity is passed along the television airwaves every day by men like Bill O'Reilly and Pat Robertson.  It's echoed on the radio by Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage.  It's scribbled onto pages by shrill shills like Anne Coulter.  Together, they've served the Republican purpose by making it permissible to utter phrases that should be unthinkable.  They've made obscenity commonplace.

It's obscene to propose that dropping a bomb on the State Department would be a good idea.  It's obscene to suggest the murder of Supreme Court judges.  It's obscene to suggest that half of America is in league with our enemies.  It's obscene to suggest that the same half deserves to die.  It's obscene to toss around terms like "treason" and "traitor" and "appeasement" until these terms lose all their weight.  It's obscene to say that all opposition is the same as "hate."

The words "vile" and "vilification" come from the same root, and Republicans have chosen vilification as their message to America.  They've put pornography at the heart of their politics.

There are several ways we could react to the Republican pornography.  We could seek regulations of our own, or press forward with law suits against the dealers in these obscenities.  However, speech should be protected, and political speech most of all.  Even the perverse political message of the conservative right deserves the full protection of the law.  Just as we can't allow terrorism to drive us to giving up our rights to be secure in our person, we can't allow Republican obscenity to drive us to regulate speech.

We might seek to outflank them, to move around and past them with expressions just as mean and meaningless as those which emerge from Bill, or Anne, or Rush, but why restrict ourselves to fighting on their ground, with their tools?  If we do that, we only confirm that the obscenities they've used are valid tactics.  Besides, they're already strangling on their own filth.

Fortunately for us, the Republicans have decided that they have no message but the same red meat they've thrown to the electorate since 1994.  Only now that meat is as rotten as hamburger left in an alley during a hot summer week.  It's riddled through with maggots of hypocrisy, stinking of lies, and melting into a putrid mass of feeble, feckless hate.   No one wants to eat what they are serving.

Rather than trying to out obscene the Republican pornographers, we need to confront their arguments - and use every word in the language to do so, FCC censors be damned.  While they try to restrict language, we need to re-radicalize the terms the conservative filth-mongers have used.  People already feel uncomfortable with the stench coming from the Republican odium, a fact reflected in the rapidly declining audiences for their big dealers and the crumbling of organizations that represent their street-level pushers.  We need to turn that unease back into the disgust and revulsion for a party that offers nothing but invective in place of policy.

We can't forget to remind people that the Republicans have played a lot of marches and waved a lot of flags while spreading their obscenities, but they've been dead wrong on every issue.  Wrong about the weapons of mass destruction.  Wrong about the after effects of the war.  Wrong about the cost of the war.  Wrong about the effectiveness of tax cuts.  Wrong on Katrina.  Wrong on health care.  Wrong on Social Security.  Wrong on everything of substance from the moment they gained power.  

I didn't vote for him in the primaries, but Richard Gephardt gifted us with a phrase that best describes today's Republican: "miserable failure."  The whole of the conservative movement is one big miserable failure, one that we can't allow to continue.  Though they seek to spread obscenity like a rancid sauce over a sandwich of rotten policies, they can't escape the real effects of what they've done.

Sharpen your pencils, clear your throats, and get after them.  It's time to run the pornographers out of town.