OMT Countdown to Glory: 5 days until Bush is gone
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This past Sunday night’s Golden Globes broadcast on NBC has the FCC all in a snit again, one reminiscent of the conniption fit they had a couple years back when CBS broadcast the Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake “wardrobe malfunction” during halftime at the Super Bowl, in which this country’s nipplephobiacs rose up en masse and demanded CBS’ head.
The scandalous behavior this time stems from an incident near the end of the Golden Globes broadcast, in which director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain) was caught on camera “flipping the bird”, as they say, to actor Mickey Rourke, who was at the time accepting the Best Dramatic Actor award for Aronofsky’s film The Wrestler.
FCC spokesman* Edie Herman said, “We received 18 complaints about the Golden Globes telecast, and the commission is reviewing the matter”.
Thanks, Edie … that’s great.
14.6 million people watched the Golden Globes telecast on NBC Sunday night, and just a little over one in a million complained. So naturally, the FCC springs into action, ferreting out obscenities wherever they may be hiding, and bringing the offending networks to justice.
Meanwhile, in a little over a month, the switch to digital television is shaping up to be a cluster-fuck of the first order, so much so that the incoming Obama administration is looking into postponing it until June because the FCC has run out of discount coupons for digital converters and is unable to meet the last-minute demands of hundreds of thousands of consumers, including the handful who even understand what the whole damn thing is about.
But thank God we’re able to protect all those little urchins out there from seeing on television what they themselves do every day in the hallways of America’s schools … when they’re not smoking reefer, popping pills, huffing, or having sex, that is.
Here at OMT, we think that Araonofsky’s action simply showed what a crude, classless, asshole he is, and is indicative of how far we as a society have fallen from those days when people conducted themselves like adults when in public. But we don’t find it offensive, or scandalous, or, God help us, obscene. Give us a break.
We sleep much better at night, knowing that these FCC protectors of all things decent in America are ever vigilant.
Well, no …
Actually, we don’t …
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* – Yes, here at OMT, we say spokesman, not spokeswoman or spokesperson. In the English language, we have the word spokesman, just like salesman, fireman, chairman, foreman, and all the others. We take a very dim view of these feminist language revisionists who take offense any time they encounter a word that contains “man”, and feel that they must move immediately to render it “gender-neutral”, policing the language in much the same way that those morons at the FCC police the airwaves.
We don’t understand this. The word man has always been used generically in the English language to refer to the human race. Ours is a language without gender, unlike the Romance languages, and unless they are prepared to completely re-engineer the English language, we think that they ought to leave well enough alone.
Besides, if they find the word “man” so offensive in generic use because it also happens to indicate the masculine gender of human beings in our language, then we would humbly suggest that they attack the problem in its simplest manifestation; come up with some word other than “man” to describe the male of the species, and leave the rest of the language stand as is.
But no, they’d rather leave the one offending word “man” alone and then add a couple thousand of unnecessary words to the language, and clumsy ones at that, like “spokeswoman”, “chairwoman”, and “forewoman”. This is tantamount to replacing the engine, all the doors and the fenders, and the front seats in your car when all you have is a flat tire. Meanwhile, the tire remains flat.
And then they compound the madness by not specifying any rules, like, are we supposed to add a feminine gender version of the word, or is it supposed to be neutral? Is it supposed to be spokeswoman or spokesperson? Language isn’t a free-for-all, you know. There are supposed to be rules.
Because they’ve never bothered to answer this question, we were recently watching C-SPAN when a member of Congress, for christsake, a person who supposedly went to college, and is one of the leaders of our country, used the phrase, madame chair-individual. We also recall the time that a United States Senator referred to one of his female colleagues as “the honorable gentlelady from Maine”.
Mother of babbling Jesus …
We hasten to point out that they were both Republicans, by the way.
