Remember early 2004? Those heady, optimistic days? Sure, we’d just discovered that there were probably no WMD’s in Iraq, but at least we were winning, or at least we hadn’t started losing, or at least most people didn’t think we were losing. It was only two years after 9/11, and although we hadn’t quite recovered, we were hot on the trail of Osama bin Laden. The presidential campaign was beginning to heat up, and, in a completely unrelated story, the debate over gay marriage had come out of absolutely nowhere to dominate our national dialogue.

It all seems so quaint now. But in some ways it seems recent, because of the way that major events tend to define an era, making everything else “pre-” or “post-.” Back in early 2004 we were, like today, in the post- stage of the event that has defined our era as surely as other eras have been defined by Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination or the stock market crash of ‘29.

I’m talking, of course, about a lot of the nation seeing most of Janet Jackson’s right boobie. For almost 2 seconds.

I bring it up today not to reopen old wounds. I know that some of us are still in the healing process, and many of us will never, ever be the same. But I need to bring it up because today, after several investigations, fines, committee meetings, and internal polls, the United States Congress has finally done something about Janet Jackson and her rogue breast. [By the way, her left breast, by all reports, is far more conservative and thoughtful, and really wants to put this whole incident in the rearview mirror.]

I guess if you’re “cynical,” or “worldly,” or even “conscious,” you might question why it took our Congress 28 months to finally get around to doing the wrong thing. You might wonder if after more than two years of indecency failing to spread across this land and blot out the public airwaves, after two years of that crisis not ever happening, if it was therefore necessary to increase the fines tenfold.

We’ve had a Presidential election and two more breastless Superbowls. We’ve watched nearly 2000 more of our soldiers die. Michael Powell is no longer the chairman of the FCC, and his dad is also out of a job. But it still feels fresh, and the mammary lingers.

I remember how I felt in those first days after It happened. First I was dismissive:

“While the nation recovers from Super Bowl Sunday and discusses the crucial issues of which commercial was best and whether our children will ever recover from being exposed to 1.5 seconds of Janet Jackson’s breast amid three hours of ritualized violence, there is a lot of actual news taking place.”

I was in denial, I admit it. Worse, I compounded the problem by then implying that perhaps the FCC and Michael Powell ought to focus less on accidental indecency and more on his own march towards deregulation, giant media consolidation, and the giving away of bandwidth.

jackson redux
[Powell and CBS President Les Mooves share an
intimate moment (FA file photo)

In time, though, I came to see how deeply traumatized I’d beem. Two years of therapy helped me recover the memory of that Superbowl halftime show, and I’m well on my way to dealing with my feelings of shame and powerlessness. I only fear for our children now, the thousands who are pretty sure they saw something on Ms. Jackson’s chest and stiill don’t - could never possibly, really - understand. The best we can do for them is pray, I suppose.

So what have we learned, after all of this? A couple of things:

- The nearly half-million dollar fines will help a little bit. Nothing makes for great television like an industry terrified of risking real money for taking chances.

- We can rely on future TV references and visuals involving breasts to be comfortably limited to the crime investigation genre (as they have been for the past couple of years). As in, “Look, this is where he sliced her breast after raping her but before strangling her.”

- We can breathe a sigh of relief that our children won’t be forced to know what a breast looks like or how it functions until they have to use ‘em to feed their own unexpected children.

- Knowing that it took Congress only slightly more than two years to tell a pop singer to keep her brassiere on just instills more confidence than ever that they’ll be able to deal with smaller crises like the war in Iraq, nuclear proliferation, the torture of prisoners, soaring gas prices, and global warming.

- The FCC will stay engaged with crucial issues like this rather than frittering their time away debating who should be allowed to own what and for how much money. Those kinds of things take care of themselves, after all; but experience has taught us that left unattended, there’s almost no limit to the trouble that boobies can get into.

Knowing that the Senate wrote and passed this bill, a form of which the House already passed, and that both houses will now work long and hard towards reconciling the bills so that the President can sign it into law, and knowing that all this work has been done in the complete absence of a similar incident since the beginning of 2004… well, it’s a proud day for all Americans. We have remained vigilant, and our vigilance has now been rewarded. Remember - you never read about the breasts that you’re NOT forced to see. And that’s the point. It’s what security is all about.