FCC and Saving Private Ryan

I am settling down to watch a good movie that seems appropriate to the times we live in. It's Veterans Day, and I'm a little worn out. Watching a movie seems like a good idea. I turn the TV on and get a message that the FCC has deemed, what is one of the better war movies, 'too harsh to be shown in primetime while children might be watching'.

Should children see it? No. Children need their own world. The best world. A child's world of imagination and possibility. I thought that is what parents were for. Aren't parents responsible for their children? When did TV networks or the Federal government become responsible for our children and our lives? Maybe Howard Stern is right (may I be forgiven, 'cause I don't agree with the man's methods much). Satellite and cable are becoming the options in which people will retreat to in order to numb out or experience art. (when did I start calling TV art? Doesn't matter movies can be art.)

Now I'm fundamentally against war. Not a real good idea if you like the idea of living. But, humans have been at it, war, for far too long to have the radical idea of 'live and let live' become a part of the genetic make-up just yet.

For those of us who will never go to war, movies sometimes give us a glimpse, a sliver, of what it is we are not experiencing. Saving Private Ryan is such a movie. A better adaptation than many other movies to show war and how humans interact in one.

Maybe the FCC is practicing yoga because it somehow gained the flexibility to effectively screw itself with this new position.