Posted 3:52 PM by Gene

Imagine STERNO's worst nightmare comes true: his buddy HOWARD can't say so much as a gosh-darn. Suppose every P&GUnileverCoca-ColaKelloggNestleGMFordDaimler-supported shock jock couldn't utter bad adolescent dirty jokes about big bazooms and peepee. It would reveal them for what they are: no talents with nothing to say.

And because our movies and TV rely so heavily on Grand Guignol and soft-core porn, if they too were subject to regulations, they too would find themselves with nothing to say. For four decades, thanks to the Nine Fingers in the Wind and the IMMORTAL JACK, our entertainment impresarios have abandoned thinking for whatever is easy and cheap and vulgar. And now, four decades later, we're stuck with the inevitable result: a culture of mind-deadening stupidity. We have the Hitler chants of rap; holy slasher pictures; bubble-gum sluttery, two-hour cinematic eulogies to bad TV programs, every tawdry PR stunt imaginable. This is what happens when we abandon any pretense of excellence and thinking for the cheap effect, the easy thrill. Only the NEWS HACKS and the STERNOS (and let us not forget, before he became THE RAGE OF BLOGGING, STERNO too was a NEWS HACK) can find gold in the endless dross, given their trendiness and their cash-register-ringing sycophancy to the gods of media, and after Jayson we have no reason to accept them either.

There is one possible solution on the cable end. Though our tax -- uh, SUBSCRIBER dollars finance huge amounts of junk we never (or wouldn't want to) watch, while a la carte would be a customer boon summarily putting a big chunk of the biz out of biz might not be in our economic best interest, so much does the AMUSEMENT ECONOMY dominate us. Here's the deal: Congress will keep quiet on accepting a la carte, and in exchange, the cable industry accepts decency regulation. It's not the best of solutions, but if we're going to pay for lousy cable channels we may as well make sure there's a limit to HOW lousy.