my life as a nomad

speech ain't free...

but it should be

pardon me while i rant momentarily...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush on Wednesday signed legislation aimed at helping parents keep their children from seeing sex scenes, violence and foul language in movie DVDs.

The bill gives legal protections to the fledgling filtering technology that helps parents automatically skip or mute sections of commercial movie DVDs. Bush signed it privately and without comment, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.

The legislation came about because Hollywood studios and directors had sued to stop the manufacture and distribution of such electronic devices for DVD players. The movies' creators had argued that changing the content -- even when it is considered offensive -- would violate their copyrights.

(you can read the rest of the article here)


i know that it borders on heresy to disagree with anything that our current champion of christian conservativism, President Bush, approves of, but so be it. this is a prototypical knee-jerk reaction that fails to take into account the broader implications in an attempt to provide a quick fix for a touchy situation.

do movies today have too much sex, violence, and profanity? of course they do. it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. and it's a fairly straightforward no-brainer that hollywood's morally corrupt state has influenced our culture in a negative fashion, to at least some degree. but dooes that mean that the answer is to provide a filtering device for the content that hollywood produces? i'd say emphatically no, for three major reasons.

first, this doesn't even begin to address the real problem, which is that the content is still there to begin with. is our society going to improve one iota by allowing consumers of this new technology (the majority of which are most likely going to be conservative christians) to filter out offensive material? of course not. and what sort of a message is this going to be sending to hollywood, when christians start buying movies that were previously on their black list? once they realize that their market base for this material has actually expanded, they'll continue to produce and develop media that stoops to the lowest common denominator, as long as they know it will sell. if you really want to see a change in the content of the media put out by hollywood, you have to go to the movies. how does that help? by showing them that good, family-friendly, quality, redemptive movies have a market. people give the film industry too much credit by assuming they have this grand plan to morally bankrupt america. sorry to inform you otherwise, but america is perfectly capable of corrupting itself... hollywood is just looking to make a few bucks along the way. they listen far more to how loudly the almighty dollar talks than they ever will to any boycott or demonstration. you think nobody noticed how much money the passion, the incredibles, or the lord of the rings made, and made the connection between their draw for the whole family (conservatives included) and their payday at the box office? if we support quality media, it will be made and produced, no question about it

second, this is another example of wal-mart using their brute marketing force to shoehorn something into the public market. they are able to dictate the content of the various media they sell to such a degree that popular artists are forced to produce a "family-friendly, red state appeasing, wal-mart approved" version of their music. does this really change the message that is being sent out by the artists, though? of course not. it's simply a PG-rated view of life, instead of R. do we really want our kids to be able to listen to an artist simply because he doesn't drop the f-bomb in the wal-mart album, regardless of his worldview and overall message that he's promoting on the album? that's just a rediculous idea. you wouldn't edit out ethinic slurs from a hitler speech and call it "clean" and sell it at wal-mart, so why do we think we can do it with music? and this doesn't even touch on the copyright and free speech implications.

in a related article, wal-mart is listed as the first major retailer to offer this product. you can bet that their lobbyists played no small part in prodding the bill which was recently signed into law through congress. the legal issues were cleverly avoided by circumventing the courts and heading straight to capitol hill. as much as i love the low prices, i have a serious problem with the way wal-mart uses their massive leverage to further their goals and agendas

finally, the clearplay tehcnology appears to me to be a blatant first amendment violation. when you start imposing public opinion upon an artist's work, you interfere and obstruct the intended effect they wished for the film to have. there will always be material that is objectionable to someone, but that's not the point. the point is that the artists (the screenwriters, directors, actors, etc) had a vision and an idea for how their film would come across, and when you tamper with that you taint their original vision and impose your will upon it. would you walk into a museum and sitck post-it notes onto paintings with objectionable material to cover up all or part of them? of course not. we should be equally hesitant to tamper with content in the medium of film as well. if you don't agree with what someone has to say, or with the material in a movie, then it's quite simple: don't watch it. novel idea, i know. but that simple act of not viewing it will have a far more profound impact than any other act you can think of. it's a matter of christian liberty, personal freedom, and the power to choose. you know better than anyone what you can or can't, should or shouldn't see. so don't go rushing to support some new device that allows you to watch movies that, even without swearingsexviolence, you probably still shouldn't be watching. ideas and dreams are far more powerful than images or words ever have been or will be, so be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that just because something is "clean" that it's ok. not always so. and who says that this technology is going to stop there... how long until you can filter out any "objectionable" material from anything? and who defines what's really "objectionable" and what's not? it doesn't take more than a cursory examination of history to reveal that the gospel message has been deemed offensive more often than not... who's to say that with these new limits imposed on the freedom of speech that the message of christianity won't one day be filtered out of society? it's already happening/happened in our schools, courtrooms, workplaces, and community. the media is one of the last places where any voice can be heard, and where any message can be sent unfiltered and unfettered, and yet here is conservativism rearing up to support a device that could very well be a harbringer of their downfall.


john milton wrote a seminal defence of the necessity for the freedom of speech in his 1644 work, Areopagetica. he argued, among other things, that by imposing restrictions on speech that we belittle the power and value of truth, and thus weaken our ability to discern. i'll close with a quote from his essay:

"And though all the winds of doctring were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do her injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth to be put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?"



don't ever limit the power of Truth. it's strong, it's powerful, it cuts to the quick like a two edged sword, and all the lies that this world has ever produced will never overcome or even cloud it. don't taint it's potency by trying to help it... Truth doesn't need our aid. all it needs is for people who know what it is to seek it.



the end.

posted by Patrick @ 10:00 PM