The Suburban Panic! hostel for the slightly deranged is happy to welcome another long-term guest. Waldorf Van Buren is an old friend and sometime artistic collaborator, as well as a contributor to a previous iteration of this website. He also has a paralyzing fear of llamas, which I can’t stop myself from bringing up every time I have to describe him to a third party.
The trauma a ten-year-old experiences watching a bear attack - even a fictionalized account on screen, stage or page - is enough to send the child into a mild form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is what I believe I have, no matter how many doctors tell me it’s all in my head. The “learned professionals” are constantly bandying about words like “psychosomatic” and “hypochondriac,” but they still charge my insurance for services rendered. (more…)
This morning, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a $550,000 fine against CBS, levied by the FCC after the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show that ended with Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction.” The flash of Jackson’s right breast (bane of millions of TiVOs and delight to developing boys everywhere) lasted 9/16 of a second, yet the FCC felt it warranted the maximum fine of $27,500, imposed on each of the 20 network-owned stations that broadcast the game.
Federal agencies usually have a lot of latitude to operate without judicial oversight. Like a 1950s father, they set the rules, and the rest of us have to mind them, or risk a spanking. And just because FCC needs to have a drink or two after work doesn’t make me an alcoholic, damn it! Why isn’t dinner on the table? FCC works hard all day to put a roof over your head! WHY DO YOU MAKE FCC SO MAD?
The ruling in this case turned on the way that this particular incident fit into the FCCs history of fining broadcasters for fleeting moments of partial nudity during live broadcasts. Particularly important was the fact that FCC doesn’t have a history of fining broadcasters for fleeting moments of partial nudity during live broadcasts.
The Commission’s determination that CBS’s broadcast of a nine-sixteenths of one second glimpse of a bare female breast was actionably indecent evidenced the agency’s departure from its prior policy. Its orders constituted the announcement of a policy change - that fleeting images would no longer be excluded from the scope of actionable indecency. Like any agency, the FCC… cannot change a well-established course of action without supplying notice of and a reasoned explanation for its policy departure.
So, dig it kiddies. If the FCC had said all along that less than a second of a covered nipple was a fining offense, CBS would have been on the hook for half a million dollars. If the FCC had sent out a memo explaining its intention to add brief glimpses of not-really-nudity to the Naughty List, same result. Because the FCC indulged its knee-jerk boobphobia “arbitrarily and capriciously,” the court decided it was out of line.
“Arbitrarily and capriciously” seems to be descriptive of a lot of executive action in the last seven years. It’s symptomatic of an administration that has wantonly and nakedly amassed as much power as it could. It appointed loyal party wonks and sycophants to agency positions, and then accepted their reality-blind opinions as evidence that it could do whatever, to whoever, with whatever sharp instrument, in whatever sensitive orifice, that it thought was appropriate.
Congress - that’s the Democratic majority Congress - recently passed new FISA legislation. It expands warrantless surveillance powers to unprecedented levels, and grants immunity to the telecom companies that colluded with law enforcement to break the old laws. It’s nice to see that the courts are still willing to stand up to an executive that imagines itself unaccountable to mere mortals.
As a total digression, how is it possible that the female breast is indecent? Doesn’t the phrase “Equal Protection” seem to suggest that, if a man can prominently display his nipples on national television, a woman should have the same right? Talk about systemic, paradigmatic sexism. It’s not ladies’ fault that men have sexualized their breasts to a brain-hemorraging extreme. I say either let everybody go topless, or immediately pass a law that requires everyone on Big Brother to wear a shirt.
