Going, Going…
Let’s face it, love it or hate it, America - as a culture, as an empire - is not what it used to be. In fact, as a fan of entropy, I have to agree with one - and only one - of the many ranting diatribes that Muslim fanatics spew toward America - that it’s kind of a diseased culture. Consumerism and consumption have reached stratospheric levels, the population consumes insane amounts of prescription drugs that many have no need for, conservatives and liberals alike both embarrass themselves with ridiculous statements on morality and disgusting sex and corruptions scandals, its people voted back in probably the worst president in the country’s history and - as an expat overseas - I’m the unfortunate witness to the ‘ugly, ignorant American’ stereotype all too often. Of course, my home country, Canada, is nearly as ridiculous - those in glass houses…
However, not to say that this applies to all Americans - I’ve met many who are leaps and bounds smarter, nicer, better traveled, more successful, funnier and better looking than I am, so it’s not a totally lost cause.
But the most recent ridiculous piece of time-wasting news has to do with an airing of NYPD Blue in 2003 that showed a brief shot of a woman’s ass. The punishment for that 5-year old transgression? $1.4 million US dollars. I simply don’t have the journalistic capacity to describe how absolutely stupid that is - it rates up there with the whole freedom fries thing on the ‘doesn’t matter in the big scheme of things’ scale. When shit like this starts to happen, you know people in charge have gotten seriously lost along the way.
It reminds of me of a small controversy over the movie 300 here in Thailand, when the film censorship board (an outrageously outdated board staffed by conservative fuddy-duddies with little concept of the machinations of the film industry) decided that slow-mo decapitations, spurting blood and death after violent death were okay - but a quick shot of a woman’s breasts needed a half-screen of blurring to hide it.
It would be funny if it weren’t so stupid. Much like America and, by association, most western nanny-states.
UPDATE: In yet another “are you kidding me?” revelations, a high school security officer is being investigated because one of his friends on MySpace has a link to a porn site on his site. Unbelievable.
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