Right in the middle of an entertaining sword fight, pirate Jack Sparrow — excuse me, Captain Jack Sparrow — pulls out a pistol. His indignant, clean-cut opponent charges, "You cheated."
Sparrow shrugs a sort of "and-your-point-is?" and replies, "Pirate."
It isn’t a morality play, after all. It’s "Pirates of the Caribbean: Legend of the Black Pearl."
I remembered that pirate scene when I watched the indignant "you cheated" responses to what’s her name’s bare breast during the Super Bowl halftime show.
When parents cried, "You cheated," a good response would have been, "Pirate." It could have been MTV. If you saw the sunburst-adorned breast, you had just watched 20 minutes of MTV entertainment that left no sexual innuendo unexpressed.
Whether parents knew or not, they have been dueling MTV for the minds and values of their children for more than a decade. Thankfully, many of those who didn’t know that before the Super Bowl, now do.
Another retort might be "NFL." The Super Bowl is well past the point of being a big football game. It is not even just another professional championship football game.
It is a major annual event in the American entertainment industry. Sponsors can’t afford to depend on the quality of the game to hold the attention of the audience.
That’s why Super Bowl halftimes have been extended to 35 minutes and crammed as full of excitement as time allows and audiences will tolerate. You don’t need any more evidence than the cheerleaders to know that the NFL has long used sex to help hold audience attention.
The retort could be "Networks." A network desperate to attract males aged 18-24 contracted with MTV and the NFL. The ruckus about a bared breast and the hope for another one will keep many from that market segment coming back for some time.
The only meaningful measurement of the halftime striptease will be sales. The temperature that will be taken is whether it heats up any corner of some market or creates a new one.
The question is not whether it sells more CDs or concert tickets. The question is whether a bare breast helps sell products that sponsored the game and the halftime show.
It is like Neil Postman wrote in "Amusing Ourselves to Death": TV used to say, "This program has been brought to you by My Brand Underwear." It should say, "You are brought to My Brand Underwear by this program."
The whole point of the Super Bowl, like any commercial TV program, is to get viewers to buy products. The final moral measurement of the Super Bowl halftime show will be whether it helped sell more pop, beer, cars or trucks, potato chips or cellphones.
In this case, morality is about sales. If what’s-her-name and her partner help sell more of anything, there is more of the same in our future. "Sales" rather than "Pirate" is the retort to indignation over the Super Bowl halftime show.
It’s reasonable to ask why any of this is important to parents. Mine is not a wish for the good old days; we still live much of our lives in a wilderness.
And I don’t nourish the faintest hope that some sort of economic boycott of certain products would change the direction in which this bare breast points.
My hope is that parents are wise enough to know that the larger community does not value their children more than making money. My hope is that parents don’t depend on the global neighborhood to support their home-based values.
My hope is, parents, that your children hear your values from you and see them in you. My hope is that when commercial programs try to seduce your children in different directions than you want, you know you’ve warned them about that.
Bill France, a father of three, is a child advocate in the criminal justice system and has worked as director of clinical programs at Luther Child Center in Everett. Send e-mail to bsjf@gte.net.
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