A second-term right-wing administration once again is taking on obscenity, and once again the argument becomes whether or not harm is caused by certain images and words. But is it really the role of government, in a free society, to even consider such questions?
I was listening to the radio the other afternoon- a fairly tame AM talk-show, at that- as they were reporting on some of the more interesting testimony at the Michael Jackson trial. The subject matter itself, aside, the broadcast itself was much more telling about the current cultural state of the country: the hosts could barely make it through reading an article from the New York Times, lest they risk an FCC crack down.
In fact, if someone were to make a radio show out of merely reading their local newspaper from start to finish everyday, such a show would most likely be fined into oblivion by the FCC. Ironic, eh?
The FCC is a strange little department, full of all sorts of these ironies. It's no longer just swear words and the like which earn you a nice, fat invoice from the FCC- its now concepts themselves. Which concepts, you may ask? Well, no one knows.
You see, the FCC doesn't have the authority to set rules on actual content, nor go after offenders on its own. It was created, decades ago, as the geeky subset of the government that made sure radio and TV stations were broadcasting at the right frequencies and the right wattage. Rather than hire thousands of people in hundreds of cities to listen to each radio station, they reactively relied on complaints from citizens to figure out who was breaking the rules.
While a reactionary government is a hell of a lot less dangerous than a proactive government (you know, the ones that decide beforehand how everyone should live, and then concoct policy to fit) in the sheer majority of situations, when it comes to obscenity such an arrangement is, unfortunately, a prescription for mob rules. And this is precisely where the Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr., and now Bush Jr. administrations- all of whom had a strong focus on stomping out "obscenity" got it wrong.
The United States is not a democracy, it's a democratic republic. The few still rule the many- the many just get to hire and fire the few. We all know the dangers of having an unchecked "few" in power- fascism and the like. What many people forget is that and unchecked "many" is just as dangerous. Without some form of guidance, "the many" have constructed all sorts of peculiar approaches to government like racism, sexism, and so on.
- OBSCENITY, RULES AND OBSCENITY RULES -
When it comes to obscenity rules, "rule" is the operative word- a concept that has bastardized whatever protections the government is supposed to be providing under such imperatives.
Government is in the business of setting rules, right? Certainly, as the US Government has grown relatively larger and larger over time, the function of setting rules has been better for business than not setting rules. We've become a culture of "something must be done." The concept of government making sure certain things are not under anyone's control- a concept, by the way, under which The Constitution is mostly written- is a complex subject lost on our culture. And thus, if a good chunk of people have a problem with something being said on the public airwaves- this overly simplistic conception of "democracy" warrants that something be done, lest the public is somehow harmed or slighted.
