dlmCommentary

Anybody who was alive in the vicinity of Earth two weeks ago and had a television, got to see the pre-Monday Night Football promo of "Desparate Housewives" - complete with current conventional outrageous athlete and current conventional blond B actress - replayed at least a thousand times. Why? Because somebody, no doubt a bunch of those Fundamentalist Conservatives - and what the heck were they doing watching MNF with their kids anyway? - were offended. As usual, everybody *except* Bill Clinton, the Unibomber and France, felt they needed to offer hypocritical apologies and hand wringing condemnations.

But none of that was the real show. The real show came afterward, when everybody and his or her favorite token illegal alien used the stupid thing as a Rorschach test for their own pet agenda addictions, as follows:

If you see everything through the eyes of racial prejudice, it was all about a white woman's involvement with a black man.

If you see everything through the eyes of gender politics, it was all about (choose one): a. an empowered woman in a male-dominated locker room, or b. sexual exploitation of the female form for the brutish football fan, or c. both.

If you see everything through the eyes of sports, it was all about delaying the start of the game.

If you see everything through the eyes of thinly veiled Marxism, it was all about using popular images to get more money out of the poor.

If you see everything through the eyes of alcohol consumption, it was all about getting the audience's attention away from the athletes and poorly clad female bodies in beer commercials.

If you see everything through the eyes of Left Wing ideology, and if your pet agenda has not yet been covered, it was all about recruiting more poor soldiers for the Republican military machine. (How, you ask? When did logical connections matter to these people?)

If you see everything through the eyes of Right Wing ideology, and if your pet agenda has not yet been covered, it was all about the ridicule and destruction of traditional and/or family values (even though the two participants were clearly on their way to starting a family. O'm'gosh! Do you think it might have been about mixing the races? After all, aren't all conservatives just Nazis who hate everybody except other Nazis? What the heck were they doing watching MNF? And what team were they rooting for?)

Finally, if you see everything through the ideas of an ugly underachieving middle-aged fan of good literature, unconventional Christianity and post-modern philosophy it was all about being fustrated that my beloved Buffalo Bills hardly ever get to be on national television, or deserve to. I guess I was just being shallow.


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