Mind Your Manners

It is now possible for any of us to be secretly imprisoned without charges indefinitely by making creative use of existing anti-terrorist laws. So what do people worry about? They worry that there's too much obscene language on prime time network television.

For one thing, there can't be too much. That's like saying there's too many Bulgarians. The Bulgarians aren't hurting anybody, are they? So how can there be too many of them?

OK, maybe some Bulgarian has popped you in the nose recently. So then maybe that wouldn't be a good illustration of my point. So instead of talking about Bulgarians, we'll talk about wide ties. Now I understand that a lot of you hate wide ties. Hell I hate ties altogether. But no one was ever injured by a wide tie, at least not by it's wideness. Therefore there is no such thing as there being too many wide ties, even if there may be far too many ties.

Likewise, there may be far too much prime time network television, but there can't be too much obscene language on what there is of it. Because none of it hurts anybody, no matter how much they whine and tell you it does.

Let me put it another way. If any of these prudes who don't like obscene language want television that doesn't have any, let them do what everybody else in this country has to do when they want something they don't have. Let them pay for it. It's called cable, and it's widely available these days.

Hey, I want to watch South Park on free prime time network TV and listen to weird little fat cartoon kids from Colorado talk about unnatural sex. Is Congress going to pass a law so that I can get what I want? No! I have to pay for South Park. So why should these obscenity-hating whiners get free obscenity-less TV? What makes them better than me?

Some of you are probably saying to yourselves right now, "Self, if Dr. Wes likes obscene language so much why doesn't he use it all the time? Better yet, why doesn't he go away to Obscenity Land or Obscenitrovia or whatever?"

Fair enough, except for one thing: this IS Obscenity Land. If you don't believe me go ride a bus. Get out and meet people. And no, it didn't just start being Obscenity Land when Berkeley Breathed started using the word "suck" in Bloom County. People were using a lot worse s-words years before that.

In fact, speaking of worse s-words and foul mouthed little kids, way back when I was 9 years old back in 1958, during the Eisenhower administration right here in Prudezuela, the other little kids on my block promised to beat the crap out of me if ever I uttered any single sentence that didn't at least once use the s-word that signifies "crap." The South Park kids would have gotten beat up all the time in my neighborhood, because sometimes they say sentences like "What?" Where I lived you had to say "What's this [s-word]?" or eight kids spent an hour taking turns scraping your face on the pavement.

So why don't I use the crap-signifying s-word all the time now? I'll tell you. I don't do it because I moved away from that insane neighborhood and those kids didn't follow me, and they all grew up and don't care anymore anyway, so now I don't have to say the s-word if I don't want to. So I don't.

After I moved out of the insane neighborhood I moved into another insane neighborhood. In the new insane neighborhood you were ostracized if you said the words "golly" or "heck" or "gosh darn it."

This is the one constant: wherever I have been in this country, people have tried to tell me what kind of language I could use, instead of being content with controlling their own mouths.

Why is that? And why are we imprisoning people without trials? That's offensive.