My Blog Week: June 27 to July 3

A Word on the Week

Introduction to the Premise

Jerry Falwell, Jr., the evangelist exposed in a third-party marriage arrangement last August, is an apparent hypocrite. Possibly, a foundation somewhere in the world was shaken to learn it. The known takes were either pure comedic sport, or Why Nothing Will Change. From the left, because evangelists are all about money and power; from the right, because nothing should change, Falwell empire-wise, as the fall into sin is the human condition, and we must pray.

Tipper Gore’s 80s campaign against dirty songs, spurred by her reaction to Prince’s Purple Rain and 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be, led to badges of honor, otherwise parental advisory stickers, on CDs, LPs and cassettes. I remember reading, probably in Entertainment Weekly (which I used to read), that rappers came to covet the PAL (Parental Advisory Label); that a sticker was a minimum for being taken seriously by peers and fans. And the same, I would think, with comedy albums.

Time and streaming has changed the value of PAL censorship, now that many music purchasers never touch a physical record. There are parental controls for the internet, but these still require exercising an odd conversance with offensive songs or images. The logistics of chaste media have never been in sync with logic. Here, for a start, is an unexamined premise: that bad language or graphically described sex and violence corrupt…in childhood. And that they corrupt by themselves, somehow with a greater strength than counterable by good example and frank discussion. What the role of the parent is meant to be, if the parent can’t overcome random externals with love, wisdom, and presence, ends up looking a little fuzzy.

While, at some point after the transition from childhood to adulthood, the bad things cease to corrupt. A parent could be supposed to divide the world between the corrupted and the pure, to mold herself into a pure exemplar, keeping her child, though corruptible, safe—so long as the child is exposed to only one kind of thinking. But if the F-bomb can alter mentality in a negative way, isn’t the stronger approach conversation, not a superstitious avoidance?

Then, how would this talk go? “Men and women who are over the age of eighteen, and feel a certain way about each other, will sometimes lay an “F” on their partner, sometimes rip out an “A”, or even throw down an “MF”…also at times, a “C”, though this is more frequent in British usage… When the time is right to swear, God will guide you.”

But jokes aside, only one principle seems reasonable:

People are different, and when you meet people you don’t know, you hold yourself to a standard, so as not to harm someone. That’s because we want to be decent and kind humans, and all sorts of things—swearing, dirty talk, violent ideation, any number of isms, do actually hurt people. When you know friends well enough, you can harmlessly fall into habits with them. When you address the general public on a general basis, the denominator can be lowered, because the rules of creativity allow it. If you grow up to be an artist, you can work blue, because you and the audience are party to a cultural contract, with responsibilities on both sides. With individuals—at school, at work, at church, sports, relatives’ homes—the contract is social, and the denominator is higher.

At any rate, the PMRC didn’t have the influence to stop rap. The problem with larding the world with “rebellious” dirtiness and violence, is as said: that where power is unequally held, dirtiness and violence do harm, and many of those harmed are so powerless they keep silent, leaving ground for a false narrative to grow.

It becomes another dilettantish indulgence of the powerholders to imagine a Church Lady-like prude, who would prevent them from having fun—if they weren’t just so naughty.

As with the PMRC scenario, laughed at and ignored widely (like Falwell), complied with winkingly by the music industry that gained a shorthand for “cool” while losing little…Walmart would not carry labeled records, for example, but record companies put out both original and cleaned up versions, so few artists ended up with career damage (rappers more than mainstream), while a curiosity for “real lyrics” added a market that hadn’t existed.

A similar effect has occurred with movies, as described below:

It is not believable that Falwell and his ilk have power over significant numbers of lives, to control and curtail them (especially the lives of those who cite Christian evangelists as hypocrites, etc.; who give themselves the difficult task of being in thrall to what they hold in scorn). If there is no controlling quality to the imaginary prude (in hard-right Christian guise this time), then genuine rebellion can’t exist. The impulse to be “in-the-face” of a person, designated through alchemy an enemy, could be fair only where freedom of action is being prevented.

When we can have the conversation, buy the record, see the movie, what’s the justification for hitting at anyone? The self-perceived victims turn into the aggressors, as the Fox pundits who find credible actions like discontinuing racist Dr. Suess books no one has been reading, “cancel culture”.

But, being good humans, let’s acknowledge that disliking evangelists shouldn’t mean seeking opportunities to taunt or do (or fantasize doing) harm to them.