Sunday, November 28, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

JOHN BRUMMETT: RED AND BLUE: Does TV show reveal conservative hypocrisy?

Desperate housewives for Bush

Indulge me, please, as I continue to obsess on red-state hypocrisy and America's cultural contradictions.

With nothing else to do, the New Yorker having been read and the puppy put through her training lessons with mixed results while the computer was occupied by my better half, I tuned in the other Sunday evening to a network television program.

There was a hot young married woman who was having an affair with a teenage gardener. When her mother-in-law found her out and ran into the street with a camera containing a snapshot of the carrying on, the mother-in-law was run over by a neighbor's kid who had been drinking and was operating the sporty new car his divorcing father had given him in exchange for the kid's agreeing not to bother daddy by residing with him.

Then, in the snippets touting next week's episode, the father was hiding said car, presumably to help cover up the boy's hit-and-run criminality.

Through it all, another woman was stealing mood-altering pills from a hyperactive child to get through her preparations for a formal dinner. And an aging blonde real estate saleswoman was doing an imitation of Debra Winger on the big screen, simulating sexual motion astride a mechanical bull.

I knew from news events of the previous week that this woman on the bull had gotten naked on Monday Night Football.

The next morning I read in The New York Times that this show, "Desperate Housewives," is the hot new hit of the season and ranks at the very pinnacle of viewer ratings in such markets as Atlanta, which gave 58 percent of its vote Nov. 2 to George W. Bush, in part because of "moral values."

I know why I watched the program. I was tired and lazy and, anyway, I voted blue. I'm supposed to be immoral. But I wondered what the red-staters' excuse was.

A sociologist was quoted in the Times' article as saying that people felt that since they lived by sound moral values themselves, they could enjoy looking down for an hour a week on these characters who didn't.

This is closely akin to the rationale by which others avail themselves of more direct and less pretentious pornography: They're not hurting anybody; they are harmless; they can compartmentalize their lives to distinguish any brief voyeuristic appreciation of unseemliness from their general societal responsibilities and moral pursuits.

It seems to me to be simple and unabashed hypocrisy, made more glaring and vexing by the fact that this same network airing the housewife pornography on Sunday evenings contained many local affiliates who fearfully declined to broadcast a powerful and engrossing war picture called "Saving Private Ryan."

That's because some of the warring soldiers used profanity. This very Bush administration of such widely extolled moral values contains regulators who might have levied fines for realistic combat-zone language, you see.

So, anyway, after the desperate housewives completed their hour in prime time, there came this program in which Captain Kirk was in the slammer for having solicited sex from what had appeared to him to be a one-legged woman -- this being his fantasy -- but who in truth turned out to be a two-legged police officer. This was in Boston, which explained everything.

Still, I can't help wondering, red-staters, if you're not just little Peyton Places and Harper Valley hypocrites.

Finally, there's the possibility all this may simply represent America's oldest heritage. Another sociologist told the Times that the Pilgrims preached one thing while filling Plymouth Rock's court docket with fornication, adultery and bestiality.

John Brummett, an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock, is author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. E-mail to jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.