Come on, give me a bleepin’ break! Did Fox TV really bleepin’
censor Sally Field at the Emmys? You know we’ve got problems when
not even Gidget is bleepin’ safe.
Come on, give me a bleepin’ break! Did Fox TV really bleepin’ censor Sally Field at the Emmys? You know we’ve got problems when not even Gidget is bleepin’ safe.
In case you missed it, at last Sunday’s TV Emmy Award, “you really, really like me” Field received a gold statue for her role in the family drama, “Brothers & Sisters.” During her long and winding road of a speech, towards the end she makes a shout out to mothers of the world, especially those waiting for their children to return from war. She wraps up the speech by saying, “If mothers ruled the world, there wouldn’t be any goddamned wars in the first place.”
Of course, viewers at home only caught the first half of that sentence because Fox, the network that broadcast the awards, cut to another silent shot of the awards, while Field dropped the GD bomb.
A couple days later, and talking heads are still postulating on whether the network, run by infamously conservative mogul Rupert Murdoch, censored Field because of the obscenity – which could carry a steep fine from the Federal Communications Commission these days – or because it was a “political” statement.
But you know what, it doesn’t matter. When it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter who’s wielding the big, black “censored” stamp or why, because we’re the ones that gave it to them.
Essentially, we sort of bleeped ourselves here.
See, somewhere in the last few years, “bad words” really started to bug us. Truthfully, we’ve never allowed carte blanche to utter a stream of profanity on live TV, but I can’t recall a time in my life where the bad words seemed to eat at our core so much. The FCC fines for swearing were definitely kicked up a notch under former chairman Michael Powell, but we were the ones who helped shepherd the fines through with our outrage over the presumably obscene language.
Many times, the outrage came loaded with a “won’t someone think of the children” argument, but then the idea of pottymouth expanded to include anything vaguely anti-religion or tinged with politics. This has become especially noticeable at awards galas where the bleep and time delay have earned lifetime achievement awards.
Now, I’m throwing around the collective “we” a lot right now, but I want to clarify that I actually love to swear, as do most adults I know.
Yes, when used too frequently, the constant repetition of a swear word can make you look somewhat vocab-challenged, but it’s pretty bleeping wicked we have manmade words at our disposal that remain so potent that we refer to them as “profane;” as an affront to god.
Yet they are Man’s words, and like the best words, the dirty ones can help to convey something important like frustration or anger – albeit colorfully and often using a scatological detour. But when I stub my toe and shout out some of my faves, it’s not so much the sound those random strings of letters makes that matters, but the power of them that counts. The same goes for the word “bleep.” It is supposed to be an innocuous word used to clean up language, but did you miss the meaning each time I used it in this column?
Now, although I would bet Oscar The Grouch would sound awesome if he popped out of that trash can and let loose with some smoky-voiced swearing, I’m not suggesting it’s a good idea for him to be teaching kids about the versatility of the letter “F.” But there are plenty of grown-up words, that aren’t considered obscene, that kids shouldn’t have to be bothered with.
But maybe it’s time for us adults to relax a little bit and not be so appalled by the words we choose to be “dirty.” Let’s let the words, all of them, do their job and maybe then we can pay more attention to what’s being conveyed. Let’s take back that censor stamp we gladly handed over, and open up the conversation to a little more passion.
After all, I think we can handle it if the Flying Nun of all people uses a couple to convey frustration over war.
