In my mind hypocrites are the worst sinners.
Whited sepulchers is what I believe George W. Bush's alleged personal Savior called them back in the day when gods walked the earth and Brittany spears were weapons for the then-feisty Gauls.
According to a reader's letter in The Seattle Times, local television traveler Rick Steves, whose trips to Europe are among the brighter spots on local PBS, told an audience at the University of Washington that some dim bulbs are rating his shows according to how much nudity (in ancient statues and post-medieval art museums) he's foisting upon the American public.
After all, Jerry Springer doesn't show naked statues. Montel would never stoop so low. And Pat Robertson doesn't show naked women cavorting on cracked old canvas either. Some of the female hairdos on his show border on obscenity, but taste is personal when it comes to golden locks.
Who knew?
And it's not just Rick. Recently, a PBS documentary about our brave lads in Iraq was censored (that's right, a show about freedom-fighters in the new land of the sorta free, Iraq) was unpalatable because - you won't believe this - the Americans under fire from "insurgents" don't always talk nice. They cuss and curse. Oh no!
So PBS stations - those brave few that decided to air the program uncensored - face possible whopping fines for "indecency."
What I find indecent seems to be slightly different from what the hypocrites at the FCC (and if Steves can be believed, somewhere in the gardens of PBS) get their knickers all twisted up over.
The naked body can be beautiful. Artists since the time of Aristotle have agreed on this.
Soldiers, facing death, don't always talk like Granny Jones up at the assisted-living place.
What kind of people send their sons to die for what in the Middle East, at least, is a very nebulous concept, but attack the language of their fellow citizens whom they put at risk so they can feel safer after 9/11 while making a profit here at home?
A waste
Indecency in my book is wasting time and money and thought on rating a middlebrow television travel show on nudity. As long as Rick Steves doesn't take off his clothes (although, to be fair, maybe the camera makes him look heavier), I'll watch his program occasionally despite a high nude-statue count.
As for the soldiers in Iraq, I'd like to hear them talk without censorship concerning the lack of adequate body armor many of them were forced to accept while fighting in Iraq - including, of course, the lack of armor for their desert Hummers, which evidently, until very recently, were armored to keep you sort of safe on I-5, but not against mortars and high-powered weapons.
It is obscene, and the ultimate in hypocrisy, to censor combat soldiers' speech while allowing them to risk, and in many cases, lose their lives, so that big corporations can save a few dollars.
Hypocrites are people who are always telling you what to do.
Our fearless president, talking endlessly of sacrifice, was unable to find his way to Vietnam despite many military flights going there daily during his time of service.
It is galling to be told about bravery by a man who has never proved himself to be brave.
It is also galling to learn that cowardly executives, influenced I'm sure by their attorneys, are watering down PBS to meet some alleged moral standards so that their programming won't offend citizens of rural Texas and other places of that ilk.
Since hypocrisy often leads to obscenity of a sort, that to my mind, is much worse than a bare marble breast or concrete genitalia, I'll end this screed with a news item I find truly obscene.
Big Medicaid cuts scheduled for July 1 in our fair state - you know, the place where the citizens pay for billionaires' sports palaces ("Let's raise some taxes for Key Arena's expansion, it ain't big enough yet!") - are threatening mental-health services for thousands of emotionally and mentally ill patients.
According to the Associated Press, "hundreds of mentally ill people" have been turned away from community treatment facilities.
Many, if not all, of these mentally ill will wind up on the streets. And they won't stay in their little towns, most of them. They'll be coming our way. To a place where people with the most stuff fight like cats and dogs to keep the growing ranks of homeless out. Take your tent cities and go!
A real obscenity
Paying rich men to build stadiums, and helping other rich men expand auditoriums where millionaires frolic for the pleasures of billionaires, while letting the poor and mentally ill live in the street, is obscene. Not to mention the height (or depth) of hypocrisy.
If I had my way, we'd tax to help the people who can't help themselves. We'd let Paul Allen and Howard Schultz fend for themselves. They've proved they have no trouble surviving, which is something many of the folks stranded on our streetcorners and under our viaducts have not managed.
Jesus, whom these alleged conservatives are always mentioning, said, "Blessed are the poor," not "Blessed are the billionaires." But then, if the New Testament can be believed, Jesus wasn't a hypocrite.
Freelance writer Dennis Wilken's columns appear occasionally in the Capitol Hill Times. He can be reached at editor@capitolhilltimes.com.
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