Friday morning the spectacle of Yasser Arafat's burial was all over the cable and network news programs. Oh my God! I don't mean to be too insulting here (well maybe I do) but those people are the closest thing to wild animals we have in our species. Complete and utter chaos. Guns firing into the air. A massive crowd that more resembled a pack of wild dogs than a group of mourners impeded the path of the coffin on its way to burial. And these people want their own country? I understand there is much sorrow over the death of this pathetic old terrorist. But remember back to earlier this year when Ronald Reagan died. There are millions of Americans who have strong feelings about Ronaldus Maximus. He was one of the founding fathers of modern conservatism. There was a lot of sorrow at his passing, but there was no massive violent episodes, no ridiculous scenes as we had this morning in Ramallah. I don't really mean to paint all Arabs with the same broad brush. I know there are plenty of reasonable Arabs in the region who go about their daily lives not hurting anyone. But match them against their brothers who do nothing but shout about death to these people and those people and we can be forgiven for coming away with a less than positive opinion of the people as a whole. Throw into the equation the militant Islamo-fascists throughout the region and you get a pretty ugly and scary culture. (I use the term "culture" quite loosely in this case.) That area is called the Cradle of Civilization. There is no longer any hint of civilization there anymore. And I try not to use the anti-Semitic term too much, but I have to question the position of certain world leaders. Jacques Chirac, Paul Martin and Jimmy Carter to name a few have all sung Arafat's praises as a man who fought for peace. He was pretty much offered everything he wanted on a silver platter in 2000. The man who supposedly represents the struggle of the Palestinian Arabs to have a homeland turned down just that. Why? Because it included the fact that Israel still existed and he cannot have that. The dirty little secret is that he was never really fighting for a Palestinian Arab homeland. They were fighting for the extermination of the Jews in Israel. And to now laud him as some sort of righteous leader of peace is an insult to the very concept of peace. It was Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization who carried out the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. (In fact Arafat called for a boycott of the Sydney Olympics when a moment of silence for the murdered athletes was proposed. Isn't that sweet?) Former Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas was recently named Arafat's successor as leader of the PLO. Abbas was the man providing the financing for the Munich Olympics murders. The PLO under Arafat's leadership developed the brand of terrorism we see around the world today. Fellow purveyors of evil like Al-Qaeda have built upon that base and have wrought even more dastardly and deadly means of murder. Forgive me if I shed no tears for Mohammed Yasser Abdul-Ra'ouf Qudwa Al-Husseini. His death is a good thing. May he burn in whatever level of hell is reserved for such evil.
And another thing...
I started watching the Florida State-North Carolina State football game last night. When I realized that it was going to be the worst football game ever played (and it turns out that it came very close to it) I started flipping channels. I remembered that ABC was showing the much-publicized Veterans' Day broadcast of the unedited Saving Private Ryan, so I turned on our local ABC affiliate. But something didn't seem right. I didn't remember Gene Hackman being in Saving Private Ryan. And I was pretty sure that World War II didn't take place in a high school gymnasium. Hang on a minute, this is Hoosiers! I knew that there were affiliates who were not going to show Saving Private Ryan, but I had heard nothing about Channel 2 in Nashville being one of them. The claim of the affiliates was that they didn't want to run afoul of the Federal Communications Commission because of the language. (Imagine that. People in a war using the '"f" word a lot.) While I think that the stated reason is a little suspect, it does bring up a bigger point. Why in the hell do we need an FCC anyway? It operates on the assumption that the airwaves belongs to the people and therefore must be regulated for content. Well hell's bells! If the airwaves belong to the public, I want my portion to include swearing and nudity. Besides, we've moved well beyond the days when the only source of media were broadcast radio and television. The FCC has no jurisdiction over content of cable television or satellite radio. Cable is just as accessible to the little kiddies we're supposedly trying to protect as the broadcast channels. I am not proposing that the FCC start regulating cable, but they really need to lighten up their grip on what and what is not acceptable for people to see. All of this recent hubbub came out of Janet Jackson's nipple. (Not literally. That would be weird.) CBS was fined by the FCC for that exhibition and rightly so. I'm all for seeing nipples. Not so much with large pieces of metal sticking through them, but anyway. The problem with that is that there was no warning whatsoever. It was the Super Bowl halftime program. Not the time and place for a nipple, especially without any warning. Each of the CBS-owned affiliates were fined $27,500. Now we come back to Saving Private Ryan. The story was that they did not want to open themselves up to a potential fine for the language used in the film that was not to be edited out. I doubt the chance of that happening was all that great, even though the FCC would not state that it couldn't happen. They said they could not grant any kind of exemption because they simply react to complaints. The brilliant part of this is that it once again shines the light of stupidity on the FCC and their current climate of Puritanism. I'm sure that there were plenty of patriotic people who would otherwise support the FCC cracking down on anything not wholesome, family-friendly programming who tuned in expecting to see the war flick. Much to their surprise they ended up with Hoosiers or infomercials or reruns of The Andy Griffith Show. I find it very interesting that the FCC seems to have no problem at all with the level of violence on television but a breast makes their heads spin. A network can air a scene depicting the violent end of a life, but they cannot show the act that begins a life. I can handle Howard Stern discussing anal sex with adult film actresses on the radio. It might be incredibly stupid, but I can handle it. Unlike the Janet Jackson nipple debacle, you know what you're going to get with Stern's program. I used to listen to him when I lived in Pennsylvania. To tune him in is to accept that you are going to hear some adult things. (Ironically, most of the adult things are rather childish.) Parents have to exercise the responsibility to monitor what their children see and hear. It is not up to the federal government. The FCC is not their or my daddy. They do not get to tell me what I can and cannot watch or listen to. There is one reason that cable television has begun to eclipse the broadcast networks for viewership. I can hear people say "fuck" fifty times an hour. I can see tits and ass all over the screen. After all, isn't that what America is all about?
And another thing...