Fix the culture. Demand it of D.C.
I would like to just say a few words about these two little sentences and the danger such a position represents.
For lack of a better term, "culture" has become one of those buzzwords in our political landscape over the past couple decades that everyone seems to understand without ever really defining. For the most part, it seems to refer to that cluster of products - television, music, movies, books - to which we turn for entertainment; in also seems to refer to practices in our individual and collective private lives that are not immediately public, such as our sexual habits, our recreational habits, or other behaviors that might possibly be effected by these pop culture products.
The idea that these things need to be "fixed" is one of the most contentious issues on the right. That our politicians should feel an obligation to do so is a perennial demand of the right. To take such a position, however, is dangerous as well as misguided. To take the second predicate first, politics will never be able to catch up to our cultural attitudes. Since much of what the right seems to consider "culture" is, in essence, entertainment that exists solely for our private consumption, it exists across a broad spectrum with little public reference. One can impute all sorts of "politics" to any cultural product without being wrong for no other reason than, for the most part, they are unconcerned with deep, public import and exist, rather, to keep us happy, keep us dancing, get us to smile, laugh, cry, or scream. While it is clear why some people would be offended by some aspects of our pop culture products - I certainly am, so I can see how others would be - to demand that these products be "fixed" by outside forces simply because we might object to their content leads us to the first predicate above: it is dangerous to view ay cultural product as amenable to or within the purview of political pressures.
In the first place, we in the US have this little thing in our Constitution called the First Amendment. The opening words, to which several clauses are added, read as follows: "Cogress shall make no law . . ." In other words, back off, hands off, etc. While some might say "That just means this or that or the other area are off limits. Surely you aren't suggesting the founders meant Vivid Video should be outside the control of the law." Since some of the founders (Ben Franklin is a good example) were connoisseurs of Enlightenment pornography, I doubt they would mind all that much. More to the point, the amendment specifically states "no law", so that cordons off a whole area of culture from political interference. Social pressure is one thing - the demand for a ratings system is a good example - but legal remedies are something different. Whether its hard-core pornography, television that dances the fine edge of good taste and gratuitous nonsense, or music that assaults our ears while insulting our intelligence, we are much better off exercising our personal preference rather than our political powers of coercion to insist that certain elements of our common, not to say public, life clean up.
To make a too-long post much shorter, a politics of culture is a dangerous thing. Politics is concerned with one thing - imposing one's will and preferences on others. Culture is about the million little negotiations we go through each day, collectively, and the importation of coercive power in to this formula mitigates any alleged benefit that might accrue from ridding our cultural space of products that one group or another might find offensive, unwarranted, or otherwise undesirable.
