TV infection has no vaccine

Unless you are one of those rare people who is willing to risk social opprobrium in order to remain sane, you probably have a TV in your house - or two, or three, or (like me) four.

Which means you probably have your thinking skewed everyday by people like Oprah Winfrey, Jon Stewart, Anderson Cooper or Bill O'Reilly, and by shows like "Desperate Housewives," "CSI," and "Real Sex" (which is apparently what passes for reality TV on HBO).

And that means you have learned that "sexual intimacy" is an oxymoron. Sex is not a private matter, but rather something to share with an audience of millions. Sex crimes are not offenses against nature, but rather a symptom of a troubled childhood. Violence is not a moral error, but rather a carefully choreographed and scientifically comprehensible biological reaction to social pressure.

In fact, market-driven television seems to reduce all human life to its lowest common denominator - "What's good for me is good for me; what's good for you is irrelevant."

The seductivity of such a moral code is undeniable, and we have all fallen prey to it to a lesser or greater degree. Indeed, anyone who grew up watching TV probably accepts unthinkingly that we humans are all selfish louts who will do or say anything to aggrandize ourselves and to avoid responsibility for our behavior which hurts other people. Furthermore, they likely also believe - based on good evidence - that life itself is a random, ruthless swirl of information with no organizing principle. It is amazing how many murders, assaults and attacks take place hourly in television dramas without anyone ever once calling upon their God for strength or praying to their God for forgiveness.

In fact, you might well conclude based on the programming found on television 24 hours a day that a committee somewhere had been charged with coming up with some way to convince people that life is meaningless, chaotic and unfair - and that they started with "Gilligan's Island" and then worked their way up to cable news.

It's almost as though television were designed to overwhelm the human psyche with information designed to break down our instinct to find meaning and purpose in our lives and leave us with nothing but hopelessness and despair.

Do we really need a summit on violence to tell us that the root cause of the epidemic of violence in our schools and elsewhere is a growing disconnect between morality and action, and do we really need to look any further than the pandering, slobbering flat-screen hyena in the living room to find out what's chewing at our innards?

Indeed, it would be interesting to know how many people who grew up in a house without television ever picked up a gun and killed someone in a senseless act of random violence.

I suppose there is a study somewhere. There is a study on everything, isn't there?

The problem is that even if we had conclusive proof that the barrage of death and destruction on television, both in "entertainment" and "news" (it's funny that both of those have to go inside quote marks, isn't it?) were responsible for a tenfold increase in murder in the United States and a 20-fold increase in rape, nothing would be done about it.

Suppose you could conclusively demonstrate that at least 5,000 people a year were dying needlessly as a result of society's failure to regulate the moral content of the junk that is force-fed to us 24-hours a day by NBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX, MS-NBC, HBO, MTV and most of the other networks. Suppose that the glamorization of sex crimes on TV had led to the rape of 5,000 women over the past year, and you could prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Would you take action to change the content of television? To regulate the steady stream of violence and sexuality in order to provide our society with a more healthy cultural model of what is right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, good and evil?

Probably many of you actually think you would favor such action, and we may accept your belief as well-intentioned, but it is also hopelessly naive. The fact of the matter is that your instinctive belief in protecting life would stand no chance of accomplishing anything. As soon as such regulatory action were proposed, the mass media would start to massage your brain with the following messages:

1) You are an adult. You should be able to watch anything you want to see.

2) If you don't like it, just change the channel.

3) Those shows don't glamorize violence; they are realistic depictions of our society.

4) You are an uptight prude; the human body is beautiful.

5) Ditto human sexuality.

6) What kind of a parent are you anyway? It's your fault that your child doesn't know how to cope with the sex and violence he or she sees on TV! And why are they watching anyway? Can't you control your own children?

7) Don't try to force your religious values on someone else. What gives you the right to tell anyone else what is right and wrong?

8) If you try to regulate television, you are an evil Republican/conservative/Bushie who wants to tear up the Constitution and deprive us of our life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

After about two weeks of that, you would be one of the majority of citizens saying something like this: "Well, I'm against smut and violence on television, especially during the family hour, but we can't do anything about it because we don't want to mess with the Constitution."

Ay, there's the rub. Freedom of speech. Freedom of press. Freedom to be offensive. Freedom to exploit. Freedom to commit social suicide.

Because that is where we are ultimately going. Our cultural decline is almost a natural result of our unwillingness to defend the moral values that made us great in the first place. Can you imagine any other society in history which would have allowed its values to be so openly mocked or subverted as ours without any repercussions? The only value we seem to value any more is tolerance - and the more we tolerate destructive influences on the minds of our children and on ourselves, the more we step closer to the cliff that inevitably awaits us.

Indeed, this plunge to destruction may be programmed into us with the same inevitability that is found in Shakespeare's Hamlet or Macbeth. In those fictional heroes, the tragic flaw of the protagonist is both the cause of greatness and the cause of decline, despair and death. And no matter how much Hamlet, for instance, was aware of his own march to doom, he was unable to halt himself short of his unhappy destiny.

It may be so today for a whole society which values its man-made Constitution more than its God-given values. Perhaps it was something like the First Amendment which God had in mind when he cautioned us, "Thou shalt have no gods before me."

If we make an idol of the First Amendment to the point where we will tolerate filth and inhumanity in its name, then perhaps we deserve what we get.

But do not accept the argument that you have to choose between the First Amendment and decency. That is a false argument foisted upon us by the courts and lately the court of public opinion. Somehow, for the first 150 years of our Republic, we the people were able to regulate our public morals without violating the First Amendment.

If at some point, our nation decides it wants to do something to make our schools safer for our children and to make our streets safer for all of us, it could make a good start by restoring some balance to the notion of freedom of speech. Freedom of political speech is one thing. The freedom to corrupt is quite another.