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THE BREAST THAT ATE PITTSBURGH
BY PETER KURTH (published 02.11.04)
Almost 60 years ago, at the
end of World War II, an American journalist in London
asked George Bernard Shaw what he foresaw as the future of the victorious
Allies – in particular, the United
States.
“Three hundred years of
the Dark Ages,” Shaw answered promptly. “After that,
things will be fine.”
I wish I could believe him,
not that it matters; by the time enlightenment hits these shores again,
I’ll have shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the Lord at that
great big Super Bowl in the sky. As Texas
writer Beth Henry remarked last week on the media website Axis of Logic, “Things have
gotten really creepy in the land of the Humvee.”
A
confession: Unless I’m badly mistaken, I’m the only
person living who’s never watched the Super Bowl here on earth.
I’ve never willingly watched a football game at all, so I missed the
colossal misdeed, the unspeakable act, the crude, tasteless,
anti-Christian, anti-American, anti-family “wardrobe malfunction”
that gave an estimated 99 million TV viewers, among them helpless women and
children, a 1.7-second glimpse of Janet Jackson’s nickel-plated
breast.
"Like
millions of Americans," said an enraged Michael Powell, chairman of
the Federal Communications Commission, "my family and I gathered
around the television for a celebration. Instead, that celebration was
tainted by a classless, crass and deplorable stunt." It took
Powell less than 24 hours to order an investigation – the Feds can
move quickly if they want to -- but help came too late for many of the
victims. In Virginia,
Republican congressman J. Randy Forbes was watching Super Bowl XXXVIII in a
hospital room with his “seriously ill 79-year-old father” when Jackson’s
teat hit the screen.
"I felt like they robbed
us of a very special moment," said Forbes, calling the prime-time
display "irresponsible and reprehensible." Even so, Forbes
was luckier than Vivian Mitchell of Modesto, California, who was scheduled
to testify at the Scott Peterson murder trial, if it ever begins, but who
had a stroke in front of her television on Super Bowl Sunday and died three
days later.
Mitchell was the only person
Peterson’s attorneys could find who claimed to have seen Laci
Peterson, pregnant and alive, on the day that Scott supposedly axed
her. And so another innocent life has been lost to tragedy –
and for what?
"It's been a rough week
on everybody," said Justin Timberlake at Sunday night’s Grammy
Awards. With Jackson,
Timberlake is the man who perpetrated this national outrage, and while he
claims, even now, that “what occurred was unintentional,” it
plainly was not. That doesn’t matter either, I suppose. The guilty parties have both apologized,
and that’s all you need to do in this country to be let off the
hook. Just say you’ve “misjudged” something and
they’ll lap you up like mother’s milk, forgiving the
expression.
It’s hard to know, of
course, at this very early stage, if the sight of Janet Jackson’s
dexter mammary posed an “imminent” threat to public morality and
the American way of life, or if it was merely “urgent,”
“immediate,” “serious,” “mortal” and
“mounting.” Like George W. Bush, “I don’t
want to get into word contests,” and it may be that the intelligence
I received about Super Bowl Sunday wasn’t so “darned
good” after all. Certainly, no nipple has yet been found,
despite the best efforts of federal inspectors and the endless replaying of
this gross indecency from the moment it occurred.
Indeed, if it weren’t
for television, I would never have known that Janet Jackson has breasts,
much less that a member of the Jackson
family has parts of her anatomy that are apparently real. I
wouldn’t have seen the willful and malicious destruction of Howard
Dean’s presidential campaign, either, engineered by the broadcast
networks’ incessant repeats of “The Scream,” which aired
a whopping 633 times on CNN alone in the four days after the Iowa
caucuses.
Here, the mind begins to
boggle. Without TV and its attendant publicity, I’d still be
blissfully unaware of Laci Peterson. I would never have heard of
Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears, Beyoncé, the savagely murdered Carlie
Brucia in Florida or that little girl in Pittsburgh, Brandy McKenith, who
last week, at the age of seven, was suspended from school for saying the
word “hell.”
To be precise – because
American reporters value nothing so much as objectivity in the news --
Brandy was expelled from Pittsburgh’s
Sunnyside Elementary
School for telling a classmate that he was going
to hell, after she heard him utter a phrase she considers blasphemous,
“I swear to God.” The Pittsburgh
public school system has zero tolerance for “profanity,”
according to news reports; while profanity isn’t defined in its
“student code of conduct,” it’s forbidden, all the same,
so Brandy was sent home with a scarlet “H” on her back.
“`Hell?’”
said Brandy’s father, Wayne. “She got suspended for
that? `Hell’ is, like, the least of the words in school
today.” What’s more, Brandy learned it in church.
The McKeniths aren’t “religious fanatics,” says Wayne,
but they have “a healthy respect for the Lord. She’s
under the assumption that good people go to heaven and bad people go to
hell.”
And why wouldn’t she
be? TV is how children learn these
days, and now that Brandy’s home alone she’ll have lots of time
to watch. Thank God for President Bush, is all I can say, who
declared last week at the 52nd Annual Presidential Prayer
Breakfast in Washington,
"Let us never be too proud to acknowledge our dependence on Providence
and take our cares to God.”
Domine, Domine – go vote!
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