From today’s TFN News Clips:
“Even though it’s my job to be an actor, I have given my life to God. I am very comfortable and firm in that, but I still have to be on this show. It’s the No. 1 comedy, but it’s very inappropriate and the themes are very inappropriate. I have to be this person I am not.”
— Teenage actor Angus T. Jones of the comedy Two and a Half Men, who has called the sitcom for which he is reportedly paid $350,000 per episode “filth”
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Hmm, while this comment reeks of buffoonery, I fail to see how it applies to religious freedom, civil liberties, or public education.
Cry me a river.
A very large number of Americans, even multiple generations who have passed it down from one to another, have long believed that the PRIMARY PURPOSE of all communications media is to TEACH US THE PROPER WAY TO LIVE OUR LIVES. This is especially a concern of those who live in Christian fundamentalist La-La Land. The kid is concerned that the show is teaching (or modeling) for millions of Americans how they should live their lives. Turn on the show, watch the Charlie Sheen or Ashton Kutcher character, go out into society in Miami, Indianapolis, Missoula—and you behave just like that too.
I think this is a leftover thread from the time long ago when the Bible was the ONLY form of communications media in the American home, and its primary purpose was to teach people how to behave and live their lives. Whenever another book showed up in the house, the people thought it must also be designed to teach them how to live their lives. Then a comic book showed up. Then a radio showed up. Then someone went to their first movie. They looked up at the silver screen and said, “Mae West. She is teaching me how I should live my life. I need to go out and do that.”
This mistaken idea is one of the great, long-standing cultural delusions in American life. Sensible people say, “It’s just a story—for entertainment and nothing else—fantasy—a momentary journey into imagination. Millions upon millions of other Americans have looked up at the silver screen and said, “What I am seeing now is teaching me how I should live my life. All too many of them apparently took this movie as a textbook. Give it a watch, and you’ll be pleased with the ending:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYr0Jz-rTY0
Pity that.