Ted Stevens to Sanitize Life

From Reuters:

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens said on Tuesday he would push to apply broadcast decency standards to subscription television and radio services like cable and satellite.

"Cable is a much greater violator in the indecency area," the Alaska Republican told the National Association of Broadcasters, which represents most local television affiliates. "I think we have the same power to deal with cable as over-the-air" broadcasters.

"There has to be some standard of decency," he said.

Stevens went on to say that he would also seek to apply decency standards to Europe.  "They're a bunch of degenerates.  There have to be some standards."  Not quite, but what the fuck is he thinking.  Will this be the latest salvo in the culture war?

The notion that we can extend the sphere of "decency" to encompass more and more of American culture is absurd.  Life is not decent, and any art that ignores this fact is useless.  Instead of trying to smash the mirror that great art holds up to society, how about trying to improve society.  Instead of purifying television of unsightly images, how about dealing with the unsightly image of human suffering every day in this country.  Cutting medicaid is indecent.  Kicking the sick and mentally handicapped out onto the street is indecent.  Fuck Ted Stevens and his phony outrage.  Fuck him and his uselessness.  

Deadwood, possibly the most violent and graphic show ever on television, shows more humanity in one episode then Ted Stevens has probably ever shown in his life.  A doctor who has seen the horrors of the Civil War struggles to bring human dignity to a priest who is dying slowly and painfully of a brain tumor and to improve the ability of a crippled woman to walk.  The priest is later euthenised by the unofficial capo of the town in an act of brutal violence and deep compasion.  There is blood and there is violence and, heaven forbid, there is sex.  But there is decency too.  And that is life.