Other Columns by Erik Rush
Erik Rush Bio

Printer-Friendly Version

I am the Slime
By Erik Rush
February 3, 2004

I am gross and perverted, I am obsessed and deranged
I have existed for years, but very little has changed
I am a tool of the government and industry too
For I am destined to rule and regulate you.
I may be vile and pernicious, but you can't look away
I make you think I'm delicious with the stuff that I say
I'm the best you can get; have you guessed me yet:
I'm the slime oozing out from your TV set...

I am the Slime, by Frank Zappa

Prophetic, but also a bit ironic, considering that the late avant-garde jazz-rock composer was a pretty libertine guy. As a young bohemian and aspiring musician, I highly admired his talent, intelligence and bawdy lyrics. I say "ironic" because the 1972 song was an anxious warning against the military-industrial complex which artists such as Zappa vigorously criticized during the 'Sixties and 'Seventies and which was perceived by them to be of the right wing. The government and industry that seek to rule and regulate us have of course evolved into entirely different animals.

With the race for the Democrat party nomination, the Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident, several upcoming high-profile criminal trials and the return of Prime Time shows from holiday hiatus, I've been thinking a lot about the whole "influence of the tube" phenomenon. Prime-time major network programming has very obviously determined such things as:

• Premarital sex is not only normal but more or less essential to living a well-adjusted life,

• Children don't really suffer overmuch when their parents divorce;

• Essentially, that "moral objectivity" is the highest virtue to which one can aspire.

They pander to traditionalist types to some extent with quasi-spiritual and "family" (who even knows what that word will mean in ten years) shows on the one hand while tearing down these values and institutions with the other; offerings such as Seventh Heaven and Touched by and Angel are exceptions and still contain an ample amount of moral ambivalence.

And I'm not even going to get into the whole MTV genera of TV shows. OK, I will. These push the envelope even further, going as far as to espouse promiscuity, bisexuality and drug use. Road Rules, whose producers should have skipped the pretense and simply called it Highway to Hell, became the "gateway" reality show and was the first to essentially promote to young people the virtues of being narcissistic, licentious, predatory vermin: in a word, skanks.

A few real quality shows can be found on cable, although quite a bit of the adult programming on the premium channels (HBO, Showtime) is crafted for MTV graduates. Even some of the stations which offer educational programming are guilty of a dangerously secularist bent. On The Discovery Channel I recently watched a show that contained some of the most blatantly slanted junk science suggesting that Noah (from the bible) was probably more hustler than holy; following on the heels of this program was one which (yet again) derided Spanish Christian conquistadors for finding the Aztecs' ceremonial ripping of people's hearts from their chests offensive. It was their religion, after all.

Whether Miss Jackson's Super Bowl revelation was a "wardrobe malfunction" or an intentional publicity stunt, the show was fundamentally disgusting overall. The fact is that Jackson and a number of other pop divas dress like prostitutes, and that something like 50% to 60% of the females I see between 14 to 25 dress like prostitutes because of what they see on television. Lest I wax sexist, this also applies to young men who adopt the mannerisms, dress and attitude of Harlem crack dealers.

I was once part of that prideful lot who believed that although children and dullards might be influenced by what they saw on TV, I was more or less immune because I was well-grounded in my beliefs and aware of the insidiousness of commercialism and questionable programming. I was wrong, of course, which I discovered rather painfully.

Exposure has influence, and inundation has even more. It's simply the way our brains work, to say nothing of the dynamic relative to the metaphysical realm.

I'm not going to tell you to shoot your television. I obviously couldn't keep a handle on a lot of what I write about if I didn't watch any. With young children in the house I do find it damn hard to monitor TV shows, since producers and programmers are intentionally crafty with respect to concealing deviance within even the most ostensibly innocuous material. I will tell you that I deliberately refrain from keeping firearms within close proximity to my television set - but that's just me.

--------------------

Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.