America is a strange place

So the other night the television is on and some show I never watch, CSI: New York appears on the screen. I'm too lazy to turn the damn thing off, and after a few minutes I look up from my newspaper -- for those who don't know, that's something we used to have made out of paper with printed words on it telling you about various goings-on -- and what do I see depicted but a headless torso hanging from a ceiling with blood, spinal fluid and what have you gushing from it like the Johnstown flood.

The rest of the show consisted primary of a camera-close examination of this poor girl's grisly wounds, which they, of course, manage to match to the grisly wounds once they uncover her decapitated head. It was not a particularly appetizing site seeings how it was around dinnertime but, hey, it's one of the top rated shows on TV so, being a First Amendment absolutist, I was content to let it go with my usual shrug.

Later that same evening I turn on Great Performances, a PBS show, featuring "Harlem in Montmarte,'' an interesting story about jazz musicians moving to Paris during the 1920s to escape racism. I'm watching with some interest when we arrive at a section featuring Josephine Baker, the famous ex-patriot chanteuse who, as many know, frequently performed sans blouse.

First, the program shows a poster of Ms. Baker au natural as the French like to say. But it's hard to see anything because someone -- the network, the station, whomever -- has placed a fuzzy image of some sort blotting out the region where her breasts should be. Later, when they show actual footage of Ms. Baker and her bouncing boobs, the view once again is obstructed.

Now, if people want to watch free-flowing innards ooze to the floor ala CSI, that's fine. I don't get it, mind you, but it's fine. But in what kind of world are we living in when gore like this freely disseminated over the airwaves while body parts maintained by a majority of the population must be covered up lest someone gets the vapors?

Then I recall that nitwit congresswoman from New Mexico, Heather Wilson, and others of her ilk, complaining bitterly when Janet Jackson's boob fell out during the halftime show at Super Bowl XXXVIII. Wilson said it made her cry, as if she had never seen any before, for chrissakes, so now no one can see any unless you have pay cable, while free-flowing guts seem to be encouraged. You might also note that the incident occurred at halftime of a game where the general idea is for 11 guys to rip the heads off 11 other guys, but I digress.

I mean, you decide -- would you prefer watching gory dreck or a lovely woman's luscious body parts? Apparently America has decided, but I'll be damned if I can figure out the reasons behind the answer.