“Where's the late Frank Zappa now that we really need him?”

That line from this excellent article by Dr. Carl F. Horowitz says it all. Horowitz takes the right wing cultural warriors to task for their shameless opportunism, intellectual bankruptcy, and utter disrespect for Freedom.

The article sheds some insight on what is going on with the upcoming “crackdown” on indecency:

“The point is this: The FCC's sudden desire to issue fines, and Congress's sudden desire to raise the limits on them, did not happen in a vacuum. These things happened because the agency is facing demands by certain members of Congress, the Bush administration, think tanks and the media to 'do something' about the alleged coarsening of our culture. Ideas, bad ones included, do have consequences. And in their desire to placate cultural conservatives, the FCC apparently is taking its cue from the state attorneys generals' holy war against the tobacco companies. In short, hit 'em in the wallet.”

Here is my favorite passage from the article:

“The American Enterprise Institute's Michael Novak, writing in National Review Online (February 4), referred to the Super Bowl halftime performers – all of them – as ‘seemingly drugged, indifferent, writhing pagan figures…not living human beings in action…sacks of flesh, writhing, grinding, pawing, acting out no higher appeal than bodily functions.’ He added: ‘It is as if they mean to corrupt, seduce, degrade. A more radically anti-Jewish and anti-Christian assault, embodying the sort of Wagnerian images of pagan disgust and decay that enraptured Hitlerian audiences, would be hard for them to produce.’

Silly me. I always thought it was Kiss who portended the end of Western civilization.”