Nobody Told Me

"If you are too tense, try reducing it to a fifth"

If people spent as much time teaching monkeys to sing as they do avoiding conflict and blame, you and I might now be selling CDs by the Monkey Tabernacle Choir. There seems to be a disease sweeping the country that causes people to believe that if they don't see or think about something, it really isn't there.

Following in the tradition of that other great American, Dan Quayle, last week Senator Robert "Bob" Dole delivered the following news flash to his future constituents, the American people: Hollywood is producing a lot of crap that includes too much violence, too much loveless sex and is threatening and corrupting the very moral fiber of our great nation.

Granted, some of what ills our country is that our kids can see daily at their neighborhood movie theater, the killing and destruction of hundreds and hundreds of faceless bodies while being taught that the hormones of love are about self gratification and those same beautiful, faceless bodies. But perhaps an even bigger trouble is Washington's denial of responsibility, that it is almost as easy to buy a handgun as it is to buy a box of Jujubees, or that perhaps some of our political responsibility is in figuring out problems of people struggling to survive rather than passing on the blame, honoring the rich for being rich and punishing the poor for ruining a good thing.

What makes Dole's announcement politically cynical is that he criticized Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers while giving his Republican thumbs up to Arnold Schwarzenegger's True Lies. In other words a movie making a commentary about the media's and the public's role in glorifying violence, a movie with ideas is corruptive while a movie comprised scene to scene of cartoon violence that entertains us, is O.K.

This whole notion that we must somehow protect our youth by not exposing them to the harsh realities of life is only adding to the problems. Yes, Hollywood needs to produce better movies, no argument there. But if we were to raise our children to think critically, to see crap as crap, we wouldn't have to try and cover their eyes and ears at the pictures flying from the TV while gunshots and sirens ring outside the window. There are those that truly believe that what someone doesn't know can't hurt them. There is probably something inherently wrong in exposing a young child to a barrage of senseless entertaining violence. Yet there is probably something equally harmful in limiting the thought process by shielding someone from "bad" ideas.

Dole has received a great deal of attention from his "startling" criticisms. Analysis has begun to determine its effect. The dialogue has opened over the role and responsibility of the big Hollywood conglomerates that produce our entertainment in building values we all should share and appreciate. This undoubtedly will be an issue in the 1996 political elections as candidates stumble over themselves criticizing the culture while presenting themselves as the ideal family MAN, the pure, the good hearted.

This mantra of "family values" is what is rapidly becoming the status quo, which is scary enough. What is even more scary however, is that nearly everyone agrees the majority of our entertainment is dreck, and yet we all somehow accept that and enjoy it anyway. Washington is right in pointing a critical finger towards the entertainment industry, while Hollywood is equally correct in pointing the finger back out east and questioning just who is to blame. In between, we are dulling our own senses while raising a generation that is either too dim to realize and demand quality, or too cynical to produce and deliver something better. Instead of avoiding the underlying political and social issues, and trying to figure out who is to blame, perhaps we should ask if the shadowy figures on the screen are corrupting our youth any more than those shadowy (in an altogether different way) people that set and determine our political agenda and environment.