Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

Ah, thank God for the Parents Television Council. While people such as Sir Bob Geldof and Bono have wasted their time and money campaigning for aid to the poor in Africa, the PTC has taken steps to address the much more serious issue of the word “fuck” being aired on national television - again!

The PTC has filed a complaint with the FCC over ABC”s airing of the unedited line “Who the fuck are you” in The Who”s classic song “Who Are You?”. The highly offensive word was aired about about 8:30 p.m. on a Sunday night to ABC”s audience of 2.9 million viewers (nearly 6 million people were watching rain delay coverage of a NASCAR race at the same time).

The group accurately points out that the show was on tape delay, which means ABC had every opportunity to edit out the word before airing. Maybe the ABC guy said to himself “You know, this song is 27 years old, radio regularly leaves the “fuck” line in it, so don”t worry about taking it out.”

Little did he realize the wrath of the morally superior he was inviting. Oh my God, some child out there might actually hear the word “fuck” on television.

As everybody knows, “fuck” is a gateway word often leading those who hear and repeat it down the path of much harder and more dangerous phrases such as “motherfucker” and “well, fuck my ass with a pine cone.”

One of the peculiarities of growing up in Louisiana is that I know when (and moreover, what) Bastille Day is. And since escaping moving away from Louisiana, I”ve learned that most of the rest of America has no idea what or when Bastille Day is.

It”s kind of like how I was surprised to find out that in Atlanta you can”t buy generic store-brand liquor at drug stores.

In any case, happy Bastille Day!

Just over a month ago, I wrote a bland little piece noting that CNN was casting off Bill Hemmer and Jack Cafferty from American Morning [editor:s note: as predicted, the show now sucks dog].

Nobody seemed to care, which is fine. It was just a vent.

But then, about two weeks after Hemmer left, The Wisdom began getting a lot of Googled traffic for “Bill Hemmer” (smart URL naming can do that …). And then one day, one of these visitors left a comment …

Now that little nothing of a piece has become a sounding board for people pissed off at CNN for ruining one of their two really good shows (Anderson Cooper 360 being the other). There”s 88 comments there right now, and several are still added each day.

Anyway, interesting how this stuff spreads.

- original Hemmer piece.

Real quick, because this isn”t hard to understand:

In the wake of today”s subway bombings in London, CNN is focusing on how this attack could happen when England is supposedly so well-prepared for terrorism and what U.S. cities are doing to improve transit security.

The fact is - you can”t stop this kind of thing. If people want to blow something up, they will. Maybe by searching everybody getting on a plane you can secure air travel, but you can”t reasonably expect to search everbody using mass transit. And even if you could secure the mass transit systems, you can”t secure shopping malls, busy sidewalks, gridlocked highways or other “soft targets” that terrorists would turn to.

But in the wake of these attacks, the U.S. will spend millions on extra police patrols to make us - the weak, stupid people of America - feel like we”re “safer”.

And this is how the terrorists are succeeding.