Aquarian Weekly 10/4/00
REALITY CHECK

COMPASSIONATE CENSORSHIP

The concept of parenting in America is dead. The government of the United States is taking over the job. It needs to protect your children from your incompetence and allow the rest of us without children to sacrifice our freedom of choice and expression to accomplish it. Publicly funded organizations manned by non-elected officials will judge what is obscene and indecent in the films and television you watch, the music you listen to and the literature you read. It will be done with the best intentions to help protect you from yourself and save children from the increasingly large numbers of people incapable of doing the job themselves.

The entertainment industry, pejoratively referred to as Hollywood among these caring government officials, their wives, their church and whomever might want to join in, is too violent, too aggressive in promoting their product to your children, and far too lucrative in its endeavor. You do not have a clue what is out there ceaselessly pummeling your poor family and is sure to set impressionable, young dupes on a course of ultimate drug abuse, violence and godless acts of antisocial behavior.

These conscientious hard-working watchdogs of our best interest need you to know that although these efforts may cause some diminishing returns on your legal right to produce, write, create, listen, read, or god-forbid, consume this poison, it is all for the greater good. Teamed with our morally pristine government, they strongly believe we have lost the grip to decide these parameters ourselves. We lack the capacity to judge what each of us would like our children to know about this big, wide, wonderfully diversified world or what that small, but incorrigible set of demons are trying to cram down our meager throats. There are limits that have nothing to do with you or your ability to parent your offspring. This burden will be taken from you and be handled by the caring services and public officials you financially support weekly in order to take on this impossible responsibility.

Please do not be alarmed that many of these fine officials and organizations are also partially funded by the same entertainment industry they fight to the tune of millions of dollars a year. This proves they do not serve their masters. And although your hard-earned tax money, and alleged voting rights, puts them in the position to take on this glorious crusade, it is a mere droplet in an ocean of their cash and influence.

To review thus far, you give up part of your weekly pay to a government that needs to control your lifestyle in order to shelter the innocent and attack its ultimate expression, because you have no time or inclination to do it yourselves.

Here are some constants in their theory:

Television is evil. By exposing fragile minds to its brainwashing techniques there are risks to the foundation of our otherwise beautifully structured society. Our peaceful, loving planet cannot be infiltrated by the disgusting display of fictitious mayhem peddled as mere yuks to the great unwashed and poorly educated masses. Remember, you are weak and stupid and instinctively dangerous when confronted by these images and concepts. We must rely on these fine organizations led by our morally bonded government to curb this maniacal march toward certain destruction.

As bad as the insidious television gremlins are, the demons in the film industry are one hundred times worse. Movies are the bane of our republic. The minute they are curtailed the air will be sweeter, crime will diminish and a hug will be so much warmer. It's important to understand that according to our censoring heroes, most films, especially the sex-and-violence ones, can systematically chip away at the spiritual core of this perfectly balanced country of law-abiding citizens and the honest integrity of its civil servants. The criminal element writing, directing, producing, acting, editing and distributing meaningless garbage as art are nothing more than minions of Satan diluting our natural propensity to nurture humanity while polluting our simple minds.

Doubly troubling is the apathetic theater owners and their untrained employees who will now also join our heroes in parenting your children. It will be incumbent on them to follow all minors around multiplex theaters and make sure they enter the movie they paid to see, assuming the new and improved soldiers in the army of righteousness card everyone looking to get into the theater in the first place.

Finally, there is music, especially popular culture music with its loud anti-establishment, anti-authority, free-sex, pro-violence, beat-oriented message of anarchy. If there is one reason your children cannot be controlled it is this corner of Hades. Your kids don't care what you say or think because of it. They do not respect your responsibility to mold them into perfect robots of a society devoid of emotional problems as long as it resonates in their virgin ears. This wondrous land, with its tolerance and empathy, is being systematically punctured by distorted rock bands and hip hop lyrics. This will be a doomed generation of zombies if it continues to be exposed to this cesspool of anger and lust.

The good people running this courageous flag up the pole want you to realize that you can no longer train your children to be normal bastions of the American dream without the deconstruction of every art form available to us. They are animals and brats and aim to injure the other animals and brats with their walkmans and skateboards and loose-fitting pants, their Internet and concerts and wildly available porn. You are incapable of warning them, curbing them, explaining to them the irreversible anguish caused by professional wrestling and video games. God help us all, we need these inexhaustible champions of the vapid throngs to topple the first amendment and bring order to the chaos of this great republic before you people damage it any further.

Thank you PMRC and FCC, Empower America and the Federal Trade Commission, the Gore's and the Lieberman's, Lynne Chaney and Jerry Falwell. And, most of all, thank you United States government, for your discomfort with freedom is only equaled by the size of your misdirected paranoia.

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