A black view. Me? I figure a guy who didn't even know nipple shields existed, ought to ... keep his mouth shut.
Revealing more than a breast
All of the furor over Janet Jackson's controversial Super Bowl performance was a fitting prelude to Black History Month.
No, really. (Stay with me on this one; you'll see.)
By now just about everyone has seen Jackson's "costume malfunction," which lasted barely a second but has riveted the nation in a wave of collective outrage.
(Maureen Dowd of The New York Times called it "a Weapon of Mammary Destruction.")
The brief sight of Jackson's right breast adorned by a nipple shield unleashed yet another round of the Culture Wars, giving members of Old Fogy Nation yet another excuse to rail about a loosened moral climate that pours bad language and sexually explicit images into American households through the media.
The Super Bowl was on commercial TV, which meant this incident was witnessed by an audience significantly larger than the one that saw a salacious encounter between Britney Spears and Madonna during last year's MTV Awards.
Justin Timberlake, as most savvy tabloid readers realize, is the former boyfriend of Spears, who created a similar furor by kissing another fading pop star, Madonna, who, like Jackson, hasn't had a hit record in some time.
(Whew! Sometimes it helps if you diagram this stuff first.)
The Federal Communications Commission has become involved, mainly because the language and nudity you find on shows like "The Sopranos" and "Sex and the City" are acceptable to people who write out a check to the cable company every month but not on free TV.
According to the morality pundits, most Americans watched the Super Bowl with their innocent little kiddies by their side, which is why Jackson's flouting of convention - and Timberlake's flouting of her top - was so poorly received.
Another prominent finger of blame was pointed at MTV, which produced the halftime show, as a corrupter of youth. Which was confusing to me, considering the fact the music video channel isn't exactly some new entity fresh on the scene.
MTV, 23 years old and counting, is an American institution, as revered and influential in its own way as CBS and ABC were two decades ago.
For Pete's sake, MTV is the place where presidential candidates go to rap with the kids, the place where many now-conventional TV personalities, such as Jon Stewart and Carson Daly, got their start.
I'm old enough to remember when MTV was so white, it wouldn't play rap videos, or even Michael Jackson videos.
Just do the math; most 40- and 30-something parents probably watched MTV when it started. Since when did MTV become the enemy in the culture war?
Old Fogy Nation should sit back and examine why, in a Super Bowl filled with ads for erectile dysfunction and jokes about bestiality and flatulence, all of the outrage was focused on a part of the female anatomy most of us have seen at some point.
Maybe we should stop being such prudes, stop protecting children from normal expressions of sexuality, no matter how calculated or self-promoting.
After all, what's wrong with explaining the facts of life to a young child who asks:
"Gee, Mommy, why did he pull her clothes off like that?"
OK, I can hear some of you: "Your problem, Eugene, is you don't have children!"
No; my problem is all of you parents - all of you former potheads, barflies and party girls and guys - who think you can force the genie back into the bottle just because you don't want your kids to grow up too fast.
It's largely an exercise in futility, particularly seeing how we live in an information age with few boundaries or barriers, at a time where most 12-year-olds are savvy enough to find all the stuff you want to keep from them.
Besides, these days there's really not much difference between what you can find on cable television and commercial TV. In fact, with the expansion of multimedia conglomerates, sometimes it's the exact same programming.
OK, how all this connects to Black History Month:
The person who will decide whether Jackson's racy exposure leads to stiffer restrictions is the chairman of the FCC.
His name is Michael Powell, and he's the son of Colin Powell, U.S. secretary of state.
The senior Powell has been suffering credibility problems recently, but he's still an example of a black man who managed to rise to the highest level of society through dedication and perseverance.
And, he never forgot where he came from.
That his son has also achieved a distinguished career is a credit to Colin Powell's abilities as a father, but even more so it's a living example of successful blacks passing down a heritage of success to the next generation.
And there are more black families like this than many Americans suspect.
That this particular African-American family has both a U.S. secretary of state and the chairman of the nation's broadcast watchdog - and they are father and son - is a particularly impressive accomplishment and a Black History moment worth its weight in gold.
Too bad Janet Jackson had to have a costume malfunction for some people to realize it.
jsonline.com
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