There Is No V-Chip For Reality
Last week a pinstriped brigade of boob tube honchos huddled with President Clinton for an ever-so-momentous gabfest meant to save our children from the oily clutches of television. For two hours the likes of Ted Turner and Rupert Murdoch nodded amicably and flinched inwardly as our prez whose own life should have an NC-17 flapped across it rambled on about family values, parental empowerment and V-chips.
The wire service photos that provided glimpses of the summit should have run on the comics page. Grim-faced megamen, seemingly numb with concern over their role in the breakdown of the American family, sat in their neat little rows while Clinton wagged his finger in their direction. In terse statements, they reluctantly vowed to do anything in their power to stop young access to morality’s downward spiral, as evidenced by the sensually suggestive flip of Jennifer Aniston’s shaggy-dog ‘do and the bucket-of-blood himbos passing themselves off as television cops.
But you and I know that Rupert and crew really don’t give a high hoot if little Billy tunes in to the occasional decapitation, ear-sizzling expletive or orgasmic whoopee wail. They’re just trying to make nice before the government makes nasty, which the Telecommunications Act gives it the perfect right to do. They’re gritting their teeth and sitting still for a slap on the wrist to keep Washington from getting really angry and lopping their heads off.
With that high-caliber governmental gun at their backs, it took a mere 120 minutes for the TV heads to approve a clunky rating system that promises to confuse and confound. I doubt if the majority of parents will pay any attention to it at all. And as Ted Turner ruefully observed, getting down to the real reason behind the many grim countenances: “It’s going to cost us quite a bit of money.”
On the same day in St. Louis, the doors of a school bus hissed open and a teenage boy asked a seemingly innocuous question: “Is this the bus to Beaumont?” When the driver nodded yes, the young man sprayed the bus with bullets from a semiautomatic weapon. Four of those bullets hit Kyunia Mills, a 15-year-old pregnant passenger. She bled to death, wedged on the floor behind the driver’s seat, and her killer disappeared into the concrete throat of the city. Kyunia’s baby girl, delivered by emergency Caesarean section, weighed 3 pounds and was trapped in that fever between death and life, clinging inexplicably to the latter. Her name is Diamond.
Because the shooting took place within eyesight of Kyunia’s home, one of the first people to see her body was her 11-year-old sister, Tonni. “Momma, Momma, Kyunia got shot,” she screamed as she raced away from the scene. “She’s bleeding all over.”
The sight of network execs in their twisted think tank and Kyunia’s body on the floor of the school bus are inextricably linked in my mind. On the same day the “historic” meeting took place, an early-morning flurry of bullets hundreds of miles away served as a perfect example of why the highly publicized summit was a misdirected waste of time and brainpower. Why wrangle about giving us control over our televisions when we’ve already lost control over so much of what happens to our kids in the real world?
Remember those days when Desi and Lucy couldn’t even sleep in the same bed on their TV sitcom? Maybe that was the time when network heads and the government should have decided where television was headed and whether it was going to take our children with it. But now it’s too late. It’s too easy to point at the glowing box in the living room and label it demon.
It’s also too easy for kids to open their windows or step outside their homes and tune in to a world that makes anything on television look tame. And not just “those other” kids existing outside of Wellesley and Weston. At any moment, your kid could find himself tangled in a real-life drama where no one yells “Cut!” and no one can rewind the film.
Television doesn’t need a bandage; the world needs a new heart.
In the life they negotiate daily, there’s no rating to warn our kids not to look. No chip can block out their view of a world spinning out of control without sense or direction. It’s a picture they can’t turn off.
No V-chip could stop Tonni from seeing her sister Kyunia crumpled on the floor of the school bus, her belly tight with new life. And nothing those television bigwigs can dream up could stop the little girl from running home to her momma on wobbly legs, screaming about the blood.
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