It was the middle of the night when I awoke from a sound sleep. Not an unusual occurrence since I have a guilty conscience which precludes me from staying asleep all night long. Well, that, as well as a bladder the size of a garbanzo bean which necessitates me visiting the bathroom keeps me awake beyond normal.
But enough of that. I usually return to bed and quickly head back
to the
Smokey the Cat joined me for a cup of Sleepytime Tea and a brief look at what was on television at 1:53 AM. My best guess was nothing. I was wrong.
Surfing through the 400+ channels certainly put a drain on the remote control batteries, until I reached the series of commercial channels. It seems as though there were copious amounts of channels on which people hawk all sorts of things.
Pressure washers, shoes, knives, vitamins, adult diapers, and spatulas, were everywhere in a time frame called “safe harbor” hours. Safe harbor hours are when all sorts of “things” are promoted for those people who have everything except a place to keep it.
You know the kind of stuff I’m talking about. The magic pills that former professional athletes – those you never heard of – are now reduced to trying to sell as “male enhancement” in a pharmaceutical.
That’s the same crap they tried to sell you six-months ago with similar results, but before the Food and Drug Administration filed a lawsuit against them to cease selling a modern version of snake oil.
As luck would have it, I stumbled upon an hour-long commercial selling sex toys.
What should have appeared on the TV
In case you think you misread that last sentence, feel free to go back. I’ll wait for you.
In an attempt to satisfy Smokey’s curiosity – he is a cat, after all – I, too went back for more research.
Here’s some middle-aged woman, not unattractive, fumbling with a sex toy. It was gyrating much like a freshly caught trout trying to escape into the cool, clear brook from which it was pulled moments ago.
A couple of furtive glances between and betwixt Smokey and I cemented the fact we had stumbled upon something that appeared to be questionable, or at least suitable, for television.
It really didn’t take long for me to skip ahead and find a sports channel that was showing competitive sweeping on ice. They called it “curling.”
In any case, my already overactive mind shifted into overdrive and took me back to 1992.
Back then, the country was
waist-deep in presidential elections. To
keep you here, William Jefferson Clinton was elected president after defeating
George H.W. Bush, making him the first Black president of the
During the months leading up to those contentious elections, the proverbial gloves came off to create a more-than-festive atmosphere of politicking.
One issue that was on the horizon was abortion. Abortion is the taking of a life by women; that life is an innocent, helpless baby that has been redefined as a “choice.”
Republicans are traditionally anti-abortion, a contorted way of intimating that saving lives of children is somehow detrimental to selfish, uncaring women. More on that in a future article.
Republican candidates were running graphic television ads for candidates who both wanted to save babies, as well as against candidates who saw babies as disposable.
Those graphic ads showed how an abortion on a fetus in the uterus is killed, and then violently removed from the womb, to make women happy.
The commercials were banned as being offensive to young viewers and older viewers who found this actual procedure offensive to their sensibilities. Oh, my.
The Federal Communications
Commission decided to move these offensive commercials to those handy safe
harbor hours, effectively precluding most of
It may have been the Sleepytime Tea, but my mind immediately headed toward last week. It was then when I saw an equally distasteful commercial BY THE FEDERAL GUVMENT to get people to stop smoking cigarettes.
That commercial featured a woman lying in a hospital bed dying of lung cancer because she smoked since her high school days, some 30-years ago. This pitiful woman was gaunt, drawn, wrinkled, and clearly surgically manipulated, in efforts to save or prolong her life. The end of this 30-second public service announcement declares how this woman passed away two-weeks after its filming.
Censorship was needed during international wars and terroristic attacks to permit the guvment’s use of propaganda. But it remains alive an well directed by those in guvment power to control and manipulate our collective behaviors.
Too bad censorship doesn’t apply to safe harbor hours, or the fabricating mainstream media.
