| Zhaba Zhournal | |||||
|
Saturday, December 11, 2004
Am I blue? Okay, we get it: there are some conservatives who just don't want anyone to ever hear The F-Word, or ever see The Naughty Bits of a Lady, and all those other things that get the FCC petitioned and TV stations fined and department stores sued. (The most recent examples: the FCC has been badgered into investigating the broadcast of the Olympic opening ceremonies, and Wal-Mart is being sued for selling a CD with the word "fuck" on it.) I was idly turning this over in my mind while mostly paying attention to something else, until my train of thought arrived here: "No nudity, no implied nudity, no profanity—do they just want to reinstate all the blue laws?"* And then I wondered, with the current political associations of the color blue, would we have to start calling them red laws? After all, I bet the people who are proud to be red-staters wouldn't want the word "blue" anywhere near their holier-than-thou legal actions. (Also appropriately, it's a very short conceptual step from red laws to scarlet letter laws; although it was the extremely puritanical legislation of morality in colonial New England, memorialized in "The Scarlet Letter," that got the name "blue laws" in the first place.) (Yeah, it's just my brain playing with words again, I'm not saying it actually means anything... but it was just one of those "changing times, changing meanings" moments that stuck out in my mind and stuck to it like a burr. [I had to come to the office today; my brain needs something to do when I'm working on a Saturday.]) *I know there are still some blue laws on the books, mostly regarding commerce on Sundays; by "reinstate all the blue laws" I don't mean to imply that I think all of them have been uninstated, but that the whackjobs might want all of the ones that have been uninstated to be reinstated, right down to "no spitting on the sidewalk." [ at 5:32 PM • by Abby • permalink • ] |
|
||||
© 2003–05 Zhaba Productions, so don't steal anything.