‘We Don’t Care What You Do in New York’
America, Noonan says, has always valued compromise among politics and culture:
One of the compromises we’ve made in the area of arts and entertainment is captured in the words “We don’t care what you do in New York.” That was said to me years ago by a social conservative who was explaining that he and his friends don’t wish to impose their cultural sensibilities on a city that is uninterested in them, and that the city, in turn, shouldn’t impose its cultural sensibilities on them. He was speaking metaphorically; “New York” meant “wherever the cultural left happily lives.”
If you want garbage in your house, pay for it, Noonan says. That’s what cable is for. But the networks belong to the people. Presumably, because the “whole family is watching,” programming should be held to a higher standard, which means no homos — they’ll infect the children!
And it’s all about the children, isn’t it? The Right constantly crows about how endangered children are by the euphemistic “cultural left,” but their protection doesn’t seem to extend far enough to support funding education to the degree where the United States can produce high school graduates on par with their peers in the rest of the developed world. Indeed, the scientific method is considered by the Right a direct threat to American children’s very souls.
No, the real threat to America is embodied by a homosexual singer — Adam Lambert, the runner-up in the most recent American Idol. Noonan presumes that the American Music Awards broadcast has heretofore been nothing but clean family fun. Please. Rock artists are by their nature controversial, always pushing the envelope of acceptable behavior. Any parents of impressionable children who expect different from this show are fooling themselves; they should stick to the award programs on Nickelodeon.
