THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, June 6, 1995 TAG: 9506060270
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
In haranguing Hollywood over violence in films, U.S. Sen. Bob Dole has the ideal political issue in that not a damn thing - pardon me, darn thing - can be done about it except harangue some more.
You know why I dropped that tasteless damn in there and made you flinch?
To remind you that with television and movies running amok with all kinds of violence and excesses of sex, most daily newspapers still can't get away with using that mildest of expletives.
The average daily is practically as much a family newspaper now as it was back in the 1930s.
Some of you - what am I talking about, many of you - were reaching for a pen to write the public editor and complain: ``Guy Friddell said a bad word. Don't let him write about nothing but hush puppies.''
Dole is correct in his assessment of the high sludge content in much of the electronic media's lagoons.
One wire service carried a brief excerpt of gangsta rap lyrics sickening in their gross brutality. Most newspapers wouldn't touch it even though a reading of it threw a search light on the abuse.
Censors can't cut the revolting content any more than they can trim scenes of sexual exploitation from screens. The First Amendment protects all freedom of speech, the scum and the high-toned, not merely that which pleases you or me.
Start letting everybody trim and soon the zealots would be sanitizing nursery rhymes, some of which are loaded with double entendre grown obscure.
So what do we do?
Well, exercise free speech, as Dole has been doing. That's about all. Harangue the board members and stockholders of Time Warner and the record companies until clammy management realizes the shame in putting profits before some regard for ordinary decency.
So Dole will go on declaiming, the Lone Haranguer who gallops by, shouting under the castle walls, and awakens the King of Id in the comic strip.
Dole is selective in his targets. He has not cited conservative Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose action films are as rife with destruction as the busy Visigoths' sack of Rome.
Norman Lear, creator of Archie Bunker, demonstrated the effectiveness of humor in exposing bigotry. And he found something to decry in Dole's crusade.
On the one hand, Dole is bent on doing away with undue violence on film. On the other, he is retreating from his opposition to the sale of assault weapons, heightening the possibility of violence in the street.
Just as gun merchants go for short-term gains, politicians running for office betray what would be best in the long run for the public.
But that Lear is a restless liberal for you, a bird dog pointing at a covey of incongruities in the brush. by CNB