sleaze tv

it's official: mtv = "incessant sleaze." you know, i used to watch a lot of mtv for "educational purposes," or so my twisted little mind reasoned. if i actually listen to korn, i queried, should i not be more able to relate to the guys in the youth group @ our church? i should say @ this juncture that i did, indeed, find korn interesting and have a "korn" sticker on my guitar case, but that is quite beside the point. what i'm getting @ is that my motives, @ best, were mixed. maybe part of me watched and listened for the music or to be more "relevant;" the rest of me watched as one watches a vase falling. it's an interesting phenomenon in itself, but it's the spectacle that holds my interest. i honestly couldn't believe some of the things i saw were on the airwaves. christina aguilera grinding on some guy in a boxing ring? come on. to what interest does that appeal if not prurience? (nota bene: if you want a more erudite statement of the question, tom howard asks "what, we might ask, constitutes the watershed between an interest in, not to say a fascination with, the lurid and the titillating and a greater interest in the annals of sanctity?")

cnn reports that mtv spokeswoman jeannie kedas said the network "reflects the culture and what its viewers are interested in," and calling into question mtv's responsibility is "underestimating young people's intellect and sophistication." of course it reflects a fallen culture and holds the interest of hormonally charged teenagers (and inquisitive youth ministers). but intellect and sophistication are not the issue here. lewis lectured about "the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are." (the abolition of man, san francisco: harpercollins, 2001 (18)). and it is incumbent upon parents (not christian parents but parents, for heaven's sake) to teach our children that the tripe masquerading for entertainment on mtv distorts sensibility and sexuality and humanity. lewis continues:

as the king governs by his executive, so reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element'. the head rules the belly through the chest -- the seat, as alanus tells us, of magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. the chest-magnanimity-sentiment -- these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. it may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. (lewis, 24-25).

i defy anyone to curl up to spring break week on mtv and conclude that it is anything but appetite run amok. and appetite, sexual or otherwise, run amok is objectively wrong.

truthfully, i'm not sure why i'm so incensed @ the moment by the sexually graphic programming on mtv, or the gratuitous gore on the practically inane csi, or the rampant narcissism of curb your enthusiasm. but i look @ my daughter -- tiny, impressionable, hungry to engage whatever's out there, whether it's a purple dinosaur or whatever the execs @ nbc decide to throw @ her on fear factor -- and i cringe. am i being overly dramatic? do i see a tempest where there's merely a teapot? maybe. maybe. but i am concerned w/ the degeneration of sensibility that considers who's your daddy? entertainment. if it's paranoid to believe the fox network is out to intentionally undermine what's left of our society's tattered moral underpinnings, then i guess i'm paranoid.

so this was a jeremiad. i'll give you that. but i can't believe i'm the only person who thinks these things. and i don't believe i'm merely succumbing to fundamentalist morality, christian or otherwise. i'm a democrat. i just wonder if anyone else is awake. and on that note, i'll let thom yorke say what i want to say:

it's the devil's way now
there is no way out
you can scream & you can shout
it is too late now
because

you have not been
paying attention

(from 2+2=5)