Wednesday, August 08, 2007

A New Low in American TV

I've been gobsmacked twice in the past year or so by the CBC website. The first was the ad for Little Mosque on the Prairies; the second was the waist-up-nude photo of David Suzuki holding up the world. Both times I thought I had been re-routed to a CBC satire site, that this couldn't be real.

Well, it just happened again, but this time it was an American TV network.

A&E just aired an ad for a new TV series called Californication.

I couldn't believe that American culture has sunk so low that fornication would be dismissed as a clever joke.

Fornication is at best a short-term pleasure that leads to sexual diseases, emotional impoverishment, and bars one from an inheritance in the kingdom of God. It is not a term that is used in popular culture; it is a term that comes from the Bible, one which echoes biblcal morality.

So the fact that the creators of this new show would choose to use it is telling.

Apparently, there no "fear of God" in the eyes of pop American culture.

If God judges America (or Canada), who could blame him? He is holy; we are not. This is his world, not ours. It's not as if, for those who know the term and where it comes from, we haven't been warned.

As Bob Dylan put it,

"When ya gonna wake up -- strengthen the things that remain."

And that's the way the Ball bounces.

2 comments:

GDW said...

I had the same reaction you did when I heard that the CBC was making something called "Little Mosque On the Prairie:" I thought, no way, not even they could be that crassly unctious. But this is the network that gave us the still unended career of Ralph Benmergui and... a semi-nude Beaker holding up the world.

The dumpster is about twenty feet away from my balcony and a little to the right. It's time to relocate my TV.

BallBounces said...

GDW -- Sounds about right. At least it's not in HD?!

"... nothing intellectually compelling or challenging.. bald assertions coupled to superstition... woefully pathetic"