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Sunday, November 28, 2004

Artest, Sex and TV

Americans enjoy being outraged. We have such a sanctimonious streak as we seek to prevent others from watching what we often indulge in ourselves. The flap over the Housewives star leaping into the arms of an NFL lineman (I never saw the commercial and don't watch NFL either, but it was impossible to ignore the broohaha) was so silly, yet I suspect the real problem, albeit unarticulated, was that the guy was black. People won't say so, but I bet that's the real underlying concern: a white babe going for a black jock. "In fact, it's a pity that Owens and Sheridan didn't lock lips before the camera cut away. 'Nothing's more fun than making bigots stroke out.' " (Leonard Pitts has a fine column about the incident.)

It's a shame that basketball had to intrude on my consciousness, too, leaping away from the sports pages to the regular news(??) as children masquerading as adults got into a pissing contest in Detroit. What do you expect from a bunch of narcissistic, overpaid, athletes are put into an arena with beer swilling rednecks? It was inevitable. Fighting in sports could all be solved by applying the same laws inside the arenas as outside: you slug someone, charge the mound, whatever, and you go to jail for assault. Simple.

And in more evidence that it is impossible to parody anymore, C-SPAN was caught showing porn movies as they broadcast a hearing where the National Institute on Media and the Family showed an ostensibly bored group of Sebators, including Joe Lieberman, precisely what should not be on television. Now we used to think C-SPAN was safe...... Our thanks to the family oriented NIMF for proving otherwise. For the prurient a link to the entire C-SPAN broadcast can be seen at this C-SPAN link.

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