Kathleen Parker: Blast poor taste, don’t muzzle it
One thing we can conclude from David Letterman’s bad jokes about Sarah Palin: He hasn’t flown commercial in a while.
Letterman’s “slutty flight attendant” remark about Palin was in poor taste, we can all agree. But it was a joke and Letterman is a comedian. The joke probably would have been shrugged off and forgotten if not for Letterman’s sexually suggestive “joke” about her daughter.
Everyone knows by now that Letterman quipped that Palin’s daughter got “knocked up” by Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez. Unable to stop his slide into the gutter, he said the hardest part of the visit was keeping Eliot Spitzer away from her daughter. Alas, the only daughter with Palin was 14-year-old Willow.
Sorry, Dave, not funny.
The flight attendant line was about an adult voluntarily in the public arena and, therefore, clearly of a different order than suggesting sexual relations between a child and a man. We call that rape. Letterman was way off base and should apologize sincerely. But, please, may we stop there?
Calls for censorship or worse are far more dangerous to the land of the free than any inappropriate one-liner.
The Palin jokes, for lack of a better term, were merely the latest in a string of recent hostile treatments of women – conservative women in particular. The Playboy magazine Web site listing conservative women whom men would like to have “hate” sex with was beyond the pale. The harsh treatment of poor Miss Runner-Up California when she expressed her opinion that marriage should be between a man and a woman was simply unfair.
But we do have a problem, don’t we? Simply put, the Zeitgeist has become mean and nasty, and we’re at a loss as to how to fix it. Here’s one thought: The Internet – which, ironically, contributes to the problem – may be the best solution possible.
Both gift and curse, the Internet has been so revolutionary and its gifts so immense that we’ve been like inmates in sudden possession of the keys. Instant access to a bullhorn and the world as one’s stage has unleashed a monstrous id, that undisciplined, infant part of the human psyche that wants what it wants when it wants. Multiply that by billions and civilization is one harried nanny.
Thus, we have hate-sex Web pages and millions of others that degrade women, sexualize children and leave man- and womankind to their basest instincts. Such is the profoundly messy, sometimes frightening, part of free expression.
On the other hand, we also have the passionate voices of sensible Americans who won’t let a comedian get away with trivializing rape. Which suggests that the best defense against rude comics is not “some kind of protection,” but the rallying cry of people who demand more from their society and themselves.