Once upon a time, America went bonkers, all because of a certain wardrobe malfunction.Here's what this writer wrote about that finer moment in American history in Bad Week on the Boob Tube, as it appeared on Outsports.com on February 12, 2004.
Bad Week on the Boob Tube
Damn rock stars. Just when you let down your guard and put your “lock up your daughters”
attitude towards all musicians on the back burner, they go and desecrate the greatest game on the greatest day.How dare that skinny blond punk and that fading Jackson diva infiltrate sex into the Super Bowl? Sex is only for the commercials. Only then should we give our attention to Hooters and erections, and whether or not Levitra, or Cilias is a better Viagra than Viagra.
Sex exists. But not in The Game. Football is about violence, not sex. Football is about taking the human need to bear witness to wars and blood-sports like the Christians and Lions, and channeling that craving into a nice civil game older men can make money off and
younger men can play (that is, until they’ve had too many head-on collisions and the drugs they inject to keep their bodies going no longer work. Thank God there’s an endless supply of wannabe warriors in the NCAA and Pee Wee leagues).Super Sunday is sacred. Sure, we have free speech, or what’s left of it after the Patriot Act, but keep that exposing of the flesh where it belongs, on MTV, on daytime television, on commercials, on that late night Cinemax channel that shows naked men and women having sex but you never see the man’s ass or penis!
This here ain’t Europe, where a woman’s breast is merely a natural, beautiful part of the female anatomy. We say keep the French (and their stinking body parts) and rock stars (and their"Is this some twisted version of National Geographic or what?"
stinking publicity stunts) out of America’s Game.And there’s no two ways about it. We live in a Defense of Marriage Act age. In an Axis of Evil age. You’re either with us or against us. No room for dissenters, vote counters, people who quibble with the meaning of program-related-some-kind-of-mass-weaponry-things-possibly-maybe.
Whatever.
We Americans don’t really care. In fact, we don’t really care about much in the way of making
this world a better place. Run the economy into the poisoned ground. Invade other countries where people don’t look or think like us. Chip away at our first amendment rights, or better still, create a whole new amendment because straight people need all the help they can get keeping the institution of marriage from becoming a relic from the past. Let good ole boy politicians do their Halliburton-type business with their Halliburton-type cronies. That’s what rich sons of bitches do.Just give us our toys and distractions, our Internet, our big cars with cool gadgets. Give us our flat screen TVs. Say the word “plasma” and watch our eyes"Don’t do something stupid like mixing football and sex."
glaze over. Numb us with reality shows that all provide compelling evidence of one major reality: most human beings haven’t the slightest idea how to get along, no matter the circumstance.Give us TV programs about how much celebrities spend on flip-flops, car accessories and personal masseurs that travel the world with them. Numb us with so many images, sound bites and information, we’ll stare back like Zombies in Zombie Heaven.
But ... don’t get your signals crossed, you keepers of the images flickering past our eyes at light speed. Don’t do something stupid like mixing football and sex. (Didn’t you learn from the
just-canceled ESPN football drama Playmakers that sports and real life don’t make good bedfellows?)Don’t give us something we can’t compute. A single breast? In the middle of a green football field? On the greatest day in America? A white boy exposing a single black breast? A bejeweled black breast from that once-pleasant, but now just plain f’ed up Jackson clan? Is this some twisted version of National Geographic or what?
You went too far (all of you--Janet, Justin, CBS, MTV, the NFL--you’re all one big hype machine hawking product). We can take a lot, we Americans, from presidents with vacant eyes to two or"Make sure that Justin kid continues to kiss our asses."
three US soldiers getting blown up every other day in some far away military action. We can put up with the Trailer Park Operas on Jerry Springer and believe that digital cameras really are affordable now (never mind that for some people, rent is barely affordable).But don’t go mixing clean cut boy-band boys and bone-crushing hits to wide receivers and sex-obsessed black sirens and New England Patriots and sex-obsessed young white boys and fake gridiron grass and a naked black boob.
A boob?
What if this makes kids think about sex?
What if this changes the world as we know it?
Never again must this mistake be made, this mixing of football and sex. Have the President appoint a committee. Criticize and hound Janet so that she remains in hiding. Make sure that Justin kid continues to kiss our asses with apologies at every opportunity.
And let this incident serve notice to every celebrity alive that messing with our minds will not be
tolerated. The days that artists stood for something, sales figures be damned, are long gone. That was called the 1960s. It’s bling bling time and we’ll keep bling blinging the elite in this country and letting the keepers of the images running past our eyes at light speed remain on the job as long as it’s on our lazy ass terms: do what you want, just give us our toys and distractions, but in the correct dosages, please.That way we won’t have to think for ourselves and, heaven forbid, actually get off our asses and do something to make a difference in this world. Give us just what we can handle at any given time, because if you don’t, we might freak out and do something crazy like spend endless days talking about a tit.
