Svenja came to America from Germany as an au pair who didn’t like children. We met in a Bennigan’s restaurant in Springfield – she was blowing cigarette smoke into a Marlboro wrapper and pushing the smoke out through a hole she’d burned in the plastic – and we became friends. One day we went to a video store to rent a movie and Svenja asked what was in the screened off area toward the back of the store. I told her that was where the porno was. She wanted to take a look, so we walked to the back of the store.
A sign hung near the entrance that said, “You must be eighteen years of age to enter this section of the store.†Lining the walls were six-foot tall shelves jam-packed with hundreds of plain brown videocassette boxes. On the spine of each box was a piece of tape with a handwritten number on it, for example 612 or 916 or 703. The original box covers had been flattened and put into plastic sleeves and fitted into in large binders which rested on podiums set in the center of the floor. Each box cover was tagged with a number that corresponded to one of the brown cases on the shelves. There were two binders in the store and that day there was a man hunched over each, silently flipping pages, searching for that perfect piece of erotica to get him through the night.
Eventually one of the men found something intriguing and walked to a shelf, scanned the numbered boxes, and then took his selection from the wall. Svenja opened the recently abandoned binder and flipped disinterestedly through several glossy pages of naked people engaged in all manner of gymnastics. Then she shut the book and wandered out of the porn room and into the Horror section. Among the horror flicks she picked up one box after another and looked at them, each box plastered with gruesome over-saturated images of severed heads, dismembered corpses, reanimated corpses, and women being stabbed, chopped up, and chainsawed.
All this chopping and stabbing got Svenja thinking.
She went to the checkout counter and got the clerk’s attention. The clerk set down a stack of 3×5 notecards she was filing and looked up.
“I have a question,†said Svenja.
“Ok,†said the clerk.
“Why do you have to be eighteen years old and go to a special section of the store in order to watch a sex movie, but any child can look at pictures of chopped up people in the Horror section?â€
Obviously not a philosopher, the clerk shrugged and asked Svenja if she was going to rent a movie. Svenja told her no and the clerk went back to filing 3×5 index cards. We left the store without a movie and as we crossed the parking lot Svenja said to me, “This country makes no sense.â€
I tell this story because as I drove to Wegman’s with La Raymunda for our weekly grocery binge I heard the local classic rock radio station censor the Rick Derringer song “Rock and Roll Hoochie Kooâ€. Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo!
“You’ve GOT to be kidding me†I said to La Raymunda. “That song’s been knocking around the air waves unmolested since 1973!†The irony is that the censored lyric doesn’t actually say what people think it says, so Clear Channel, which owns the local classic rock radio station, is not really censoring a naughty lyric at all, but instead is censoring people’s mistaken idea of what the lyric says. Way to go, Clear Channel!
I suppose it’s the FCC that’s got everybody’s knickers in a twist. As I said, this is a song that has been broadcast as-recorded for over thirty years. At this juncture, what’s the point of censoring it? After thirty years, I’m sure Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo has served its insidious purpose to turn Americans into depraved sex addicts.
To take things one step further, is our government so out of touch that it feels it must safeguard the moral turpitude of our nation by blipping a lyric that doesn’t even say what people think it says? All the while blowing people up in foreign countries and turning a blind eye to horrific genocides in Burundi and the Sudan and the continuing catastrophe in our own backyard down in New Orleans? While I’m not saying that children should ogle “Nympho Cheerleaders, Volume VIâ€, does it make sense that kids have easy access to the slasher flicks? This confuses me; the Great National Moral seems to be: Sex bad! Violence good! Don’t screw it if you can kill it!
And that takes me back to crossing the parking lot outside the video store with Svenja. She’s right, you know: This country makes no sense.
Then Debra, mortified, “Um…no…no no no. No amigos de Bush.”
tamales and beer. I didn’t care for the tamales much, but then I don’t really care for tamales in general. The empanadas, though, rocked.
would take a lot more than a nasty little pilsner to sour the mood.
