Here is a simple example of something that highlights some substantial flaws in American culture.

Generally speaking, I don’t watch much TV over here because of the outrageous number of commercials. I just can’t bear it. But today, I noticed that the SyFy channel (formally “Sci-Fi”) was going to show the first “Saw” film at 4:30 in the afternoon. I don’t like horror films, especially nasty ones but I wanted to see it out of a morbid curiosity.

So I flicked over to SyFy to be confronted by a woman repeatedly stabbing a burned corpse in the face. It’s 4:25pm. This is the end of the movie “Autopsy”. Cut to a 7 minutute commercial break. Back to Autopsy. A two minute scene, bypassing the credits into a “viewer discretion warning”: “parental discretion is advised”. Yeah well it’s R rated so I imagine it would be.

After around 40 minutes of movie, and about 20 minutes of jocular Christmas commercials, we witness:

• A man cutting himself to death escaping from a razor-wire mesh.
• A woman with a steel contraption attached to her head that would rip her mouth open 180 degrees if she doesn’t find the key in one minute.
• The woman extracting the key from the stomach of a drugged up guy in the same room, with a big knife.
• A naked man, covered in flammable paint trying to find the combination to a safe in the middle of a floor covered in broken glass.
• The violent kidnap of a mother and daughter where the kidnapper listens to the heart rate of the child while he waves a gun at the mother.

Yeah, maybe some parental discretion would be prudent, especially at 5pm.

But there’s saving grace in all of this. OK, the scenes may contain some potentially disturbing material, especially for faggy liberals, but the word “shit” was blanked when the soon-to-kidnapped mother said the word “bullshit”. From past experience I also know that any immoral nudity and sex will be removed too. So in fact it’s all a bit of harmless fun for the kids after all!

I’m going back to the family Christmas entertainment now; some bloke’s about to have two electric drills driven into his skull.

[an explanation for the ironically challenged: I have no problem with gruesome films any more than I do with roller-coasters. Some people like them, fine, I don’t. Enjoy. But I do have a problem with them being shown in the name of science fiction. I also have a problem with them being shown at 4pm. But the biggest problem I have is that what’s considered dangerous and immoral is not the brutal violence, but some arbitrary words like “shit”, “fuck” and “cunt”, and even implications of sexuality.]