SAVING YOU FROM PRIVATE RYAN

I'm sure all three of you saw the news clips regarding ABC and some affiliates deciding not to broadcast Saving Private Ryan on veterans day. Fearing major fines from the FCC because of content and language (Speilberg wouldn't allow it to be altered for TV broadcast, apparently, and good for him...it's his movie after all). My initial reaction to this was "Man, that Janet Jackson has a mighty influential tit"
and I thought nothing more about it because I have cable, and a DVD of this film and I don't watch network TV because it sucks. If I want to watch something like "Survivor" or "Fear Factor" all I have to do is go hang out with the drag rats on a friday night. I can tell you from experience, they WILL eat bugs.
But on the way home, the Jeff Ward show on my AM dial was taking calls on this "controversy" and the callers, quite frankly, made me want to go home, load up my gun and go hunt them down.
As I understand it, the main issues were the amount of profanity and the violence. OK, I can pretend that there are people in the world who have never said the word "fuck" or thought about it and then fell into a prayerfest to be forgiven for thinking about the word "fuck"...or "damn" or "shit" for that matter. Actually, now that I really think about it, the latter makes a kind of perverse sense to me considering the current spiritual terrain we find ourselves deployed on in this country.
Back to the movie for a minute...I think this film is the perfect one to be shown on veterans day. You have a veteran returning to the scene of the crime and his memory of those events follows. Here's an old man that's been trying to live his life since the war ended suddenly thrown back to the horror he was a part of, and a survivor of. War is not pretty...I've never been there, but trust me, from everything I've heard from people who have been down that road, it's ugly...and violent and people use bad language when it's ugly and violent and people are trying to kill the fuck out of you.
From this we can say the quest for freedom is often ugly and violent and in response to that people cuss...alot. But religious conservatives in this country (based on the calls I heard on the radio) would prefer you to believe that war is akin to flag football...that is, no one gets tackled and the highest score wins. They want to sanitize everything for our viewing enjoyment.
You can pretend it's not what it is and it's still what it is...a well placed mortar will still blow you and yours to bits stuck on the remaining walls no matter how much TV ignores it or redirects you to that pleasant but obese woman with dreads selling pinesol.
And you will still say "fuck" when it happens...the mortar or the pinesol, you pick.
And all of this triggered by a titty...amazing.