Pubdate: Sun, 29 Jul 2001
Source: Herald, The (WA)
Copyright: 2001 The Daily Herald Co.
Contact:  http://www.heraldnet.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/190
Author: David S. Broder, Washington Post Columnist

AMERICANS ABSOLUTELY MIXED UP ABOUT THEIR MORAL VALUES

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- The largest city in the Granite State is blessedly free 
of presidential candidates this summer, but it is not devoid of 
controversy. A rock concert that drew an estimated 10,000 young people to a 
city park last Sunday night produced more than 80 complaints to police and 
touched off what Mayor Robert Baines told me was, for him, an unprecedented 
furor.

As late as Thursday, the front-page headline in the Union Leader, New 
Hampshire's biggest paper, read, "Concert War Rages." A day earlier, when I 
came to town to do some totally unrelated political reporting, the paper 
ran two separate editorials denouncing the event.

Publisher Joseph McQuaid declared on Page 1: "Manchester should do whatever 
it takes to put a quick and decisive end to the kind of filth that 
masqueraded as a 'music concert' at Singer Park last Sunday evening." On 
the editorial page, editor Bernadette Malone Connolly agreed that "what 
happened at Singer Family Park on Sunday cannot happen again."

"Manchester residents," she wrote, "should not have to hear the 'F-word' 
repeated throughout the evening over a rock band's amplifiers, nor should 
they have to put up with young girls ripping off their shirts and bras and 
couples indulging in bedroom activities out in the open."

But when I asked Mayor Baines if he was considering shutting down the 
concerts, he said, "Absolutely not. I'm planning to be there with my 
daughter at one of the September dates." The mayor said, "I'm trying to 
work with the promoters" to adjust the sound system, so people with nearby 
homes along the river are protected. "The series is very good for the 
community."

The promoters of the event sounded unrepentant. Bud Comstock, president of 
the company that booked the heavy metal bands called Slipknot, Disturbed 
and Mudvayne, was quoted by the Union Leader as saying, "We're trying to 
appeal to a wide variety of people with each show. The attendance speaks 
for itself on what people want." A rock radio station organized a 
demonstration at City Hall to keep the concerts going.

This is just a small skirmish in the culture wars that increasingly 
dominate our politics. Look at the controversies in Congress, the courts 
and the White House in just the past few weeks over flag burning, school 
prayer and stem cell research. But it is hard to figure out what Americans 
really want their government to do about such issues.

On the flight to Manchester, I read news reports about a Kaiser Family 
Foundation survey indicating that the V-chip, which Congress and President 
Clinton insisted was vital to enable parents to control their children's 
television viewing, is used so rarely it might as well not exist.

Five years ago, when the law was passed requiring this electronic censoring 
device to be included in all new TV sets, it was asserted that families 
were desperate to protect youngsters from violent or suggestive shows. 
Guess what? The survey of 800 families found that 40 percent of the parents 
have bought TVs recently enough that they include V-chips. But half of them 
didn't even know the V-chips were there. And of those who did, barely 
one-third said they had ever used them.

Those same parents still claimed to be very concerned about sex and mayhem 
on the tube, the survey found. So go figure.

Yet another case. In the current issue of the American Prospect magazine, 
California journalist Peter Schrag argues that the federal government is 
"out of sync with voters" in pursuing the so-called war on drugs. He says 
that the success of all but one of 15 ballot initiatives allowing medical 
use of marijuana or decriminalizing drug possession and diverting users 
into treatment programs demonstrates that politicians who promise to "get 
tough" on drugs just don't get it.

Having covered some of those initiative battles, I know that George Soros 
and the two fellow multimillionaires who have financed these efforts 
generally have outspent their opponents by a wide margin. But it's hard to 
maintain that the voters in all these different states have been duped or 
brainwashed. Yet candidates who take a hard line on drugs win at the polls 
- -- even in the same states where these initiatives have passed.

People just refuse to be as consistent as either the moralizers or the 
civil libertarians wish. Drugs and sex and violence are bad things -- to be 
denounced. But do we really want to close them down? As Mayor Baines says, 
"Absolutely not." Condone them? "Absolutely not."
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens