$#*, drugs, and no rock.

You can have a litttle roll, though.

Hi! How ya been? I was just thinking about you.

Oh no--not those sorts of thoughts at all! Well maybe one or two.

From this site, a crazy thought: "if electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?"

Let us consider the Super Bowl.

Not much of a sports fan am I. I watch hockey when it's the season, and I'll scope out the odd baseball game if the Expos aren't playing too $^!##-ily. But the Supe really doesn't do it for me.

So I missed the exctement of the half-time show, when several million adult Americans almost saw a breast. Just in case you managed to not see the moment in the resultant frenzy, here it is. Clearly miss J. had not planned to show her boob, as the nipple would surely have been better covered--not that the piercing-and-nipple-medallion thing isn't interesting.

It was a revealing moment, and not just for Janet Jackson. What it was revealing was a very schizoid attitude to sex.

Canada was colonized by Catholics originally. The French who first occupied the St. Lawrence and the Irish in Newfoundland both had the healthy and practical attitude that colonists have to have to survive. It may be sinful, but (gallic shrug) eh bien. Later, the influx of English Protestants seems to have somewhat sapped this joie-de-vivre. The perfect example of the Great Divide in Canada (no, no, we'll get to that one later) appeared in the 1990's, in the City of Toronto.

(By the by, that Newfie link is pretty boring, but it was all I could find at the time. So here's the Web site for The Great Eastern.)

Toronto is still regarded by many as the national capital of Canada, although maps cleverly misdirect the visitor into thinking it's a culturally significant bog some hundred miles further North. Toronto made history when the prudes at city hall banned a Canadian group called the Barenaked Ladies from performing at the city's Nathan Phillips Square--not theSkydome (isn't that Web site ₤µ€λin' obnoxious?) for reasons to do with the band's name.

Everybody in Montreal nodded sagely, shrugged gallicly, and said Eh, bien. les Anglais sont fous, ques' tu peut faire? ("Whatever, the Anglos are nuts. Whaddaya gonna do?"). Everybody under the age of six said: Hahahaha Bare-naked Ladies--Funny! Hah-ha! in high-pitched Jerry Lewis voices. Everyone above the age of reason (12 for girls, 21 or so for boys) said What the hell was wrong with the name?, and every male above the age of six but under 21 said: Bare-naked Ladies--Funny! Hur-hur! in breaking Jerry Lewis voices.

Britain came by her protestantism more-or-less honestly, but the political realities of her blended population acted with the weight of history to create (after several dozen massacres of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and anyone else handy) a more-or-less tolerant nation. Thus, after many decades of attempting to regulate pornography, leather perverts and homosexuals, the British attitude to sex became "Well they will do it, won't they? Best not to inquire, really." Even in modern Britain though, sex has preserved a certain almost-innocent "naughtiness", which while it tinges the debate, doesn't poison it entirely, and leaves room for the healthy growth of actively sexual citizens.

The United States was colonized by Puritans, and even today more of her population identify themselves as strongly religious than any other nation. Note--that's strongly religious, not strongly Christian. There is room in modern America for Muslims (and Moslems), Hindu, and Sikh, among others (and there are a great many others).

But America's sexual mores were formed by people who believed that while God created sex, it was the devil who made it pleasurable. At least for women--a lot of folks seem to believe that while women were held to some fictional standard, the men could pretty well do as they liked. Myself, I doubt it. The Puritans were committed to sucking the joy out of life wherever possible. During their reign in England (replacing an admittedly corrupt monarchy with an oligarchic and theocratic republic), this guy banned Christmas. He was later executed--later, in fact, than the day he died by two years. Yep--they hated him so much they dug him up to hang him. Co-incidence? I don't think so.

Yet he need not have been dismayed. His spiritual heirs are out there yet. This man is noteably anti-sex, anti-drug, and anti rock-and-roll. He is also a committed Christian, culturally speaking. He has publicly expressed preference for the teaching of abstinence (exclusively? I don't yet know but certainly primarily) as "sex-education". This would be like teaching people about jumping out of a plane, then letting them figure out the rest for themselves on the way down and calling it "parachute education".

Since taking office, he's more or less torn up the usual Republican manifesto on states' rights to forbid states to assume responsibility for their own moral and legal choices. He's restricted science, gay marriage, pot legalization (even allowing federal agents to violate state laws to do it), abortion and education to the preserve of the federal government.

He's also a big fan of encouraging "faith-based social services". I think this is a great idea--better yet, why don't we move American municipalities toward faith-based emergency services? You know: when you've been hit by a car a crowd gathers around and sings hymns. If God wants you to live, you'll live. Your tax dollars could be directed away from wasteful ambulances and toward those cute little comic books that litter truck stops from hell to Hiaelah--better dead and saved than alive, perhaps?

That may be a bit unfair, I suppose. Not toward the man, but to organizations such as the Sally Ann and Saint Vincent de Paul Society, who do a $#!^load of good work here in the real world. I do but exaggerate for the purposes of illustration and I hope you'll explain that to the Big Guy when you talk to Him next--no, no, not the one occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the other one.

While you're at that last one, check out the masterful budget analysis by Ben Cohen.

Found this while looking. Nice and functional--gets the job done.

But you can see, with such a person as this in a position of presiding over the national conciousness, how the attitudes of the Prurients--sorry--the Puritans are accepted as normal, and tend to act as another element in the isolation of the country.

But this is really a sort of cultural schism: On one hand we have reality TV, wading in the prurient and obnoxious, treating the Sacred Subject with the same depth and respect accorded to it by these two. Flip the channel, and these people (and there are so revoltingly many of them) are telling you how wrong it all is. This is partly the Grand Old Republic's greatest strength at home and one of her greatest weaknesses abroad.

Speaking of a broad. . .who is this woman to be giving advice? 'Specially with this in her past?

(I couldn't find the nude pics--too bad, she looked kind of dishy before she got all sour and no fun to be with.)

Oh no--wait, found 'em. Well I figure if you're busy preaching morality you should be honest about it--I'm certain Dr. laura has told people that they have to face up to their pasts, so I think of this as my effort at helping her confront hers.

Besides--she's kind of dishy.

[Before you click that link--read this: That link connects you directly to nude pictures of someone who crusades for moral virtue apparently celebrating her flesh in unembarassed hedonism (apparently with a married man). If hypocrisy offends you, you may enjoy this site more than average. That's it for the warning. . .what? Too late? Oops. Sorry.]

More important warning: That page is operated by an NRA member. I warn you not because I think the NRA are any more nuts than many other groups, but because their shrillness may irk you.

So here we have an allegedly mature culture in North America (I must include the GWN in this as well, since something approaching 90% of our TV comes from guess where?). A culture in which one may freely show multiple murder in graphic colour at a rate of . . . Yeah. Try to get any agreement from an honest source on THAT question. This site sounds good, and I trust figures from the Kaiser Foundation, whose summation is here.

Shall we say that the number of murders in graphic colour on TV is estimated to be a bunch?

Ugh--ugly Web site. Try this one instead. Not a lot better, but consider who it's about. Be thankful it's not astroturf green. Like their lawn.

Oh--welcome back. While I was searching I found this page, which would be a lot more sincere did it not appear to be sponsored by an ISP.

By the way, check out this site if you're into Australian Jesus. This is kinda interesting too.

But we had reached a point where we were about to agree that there were a lot of murders in graphic colour on television. The dichotomy is that with all the murder on TV, and the correlation between that and, particularly, youth violence, why is sex somehow the greater taboo?

An example. At one time the Fifth Wheel TV program censored instances of two women kissing (They never seem to get two men kissing. Why?). Of course they've since narrowed their target demographic (or perhaps this is a better illustration). Why would they censor this, except either to titillate people who can't get past the idea that a nun is about to happen along and whack their peepee with a ruler (Don't laugh, man--You have no idea how likely that is unless you went to Catholic school!) or because someone or someone else thinks we're morally undermining kids by dragging the truth into moral debate.

And let's face it, is sex more harmful to the well-prepared or the ill-equipped?

Basically what happened last Sunday was that millions of US-ians had their violence interrupted for a second or two of sex, and what's got them so angry is that they didn't get a chance to raid the fridge!

That's gotta be it. I mean, what harm was done otherwise?

Perhaps if more people spent more time ₤µ€λing, and less time fighting the world might be a somewhat better place? At least we'd have some more interesting fodder for reality TV shows.

And maybe they wouldn't censor it.

Imagine



By the way, cool page here.