First Amendment First: Why Hollywood should be left alone.

On September 9, we had our annual block party in my suburban, lower-middle-class street. The event's centerpiece was a talent show, the brainchild of our 10-year-old neighbor Siobhan. She herself performed three songs: "It Was Our Day," from the group B*Witched, and the Britney Spears numbers "What U See (Is What U Get)" and "Lucky."

For readers not au courant with the pop-music scene, the first of these songs is a mawkish elegy for a dead friend: "Heaven, heaven was calling you/ Heaven, heaven needed you I'll lay a rose beside you for ever ." The second is a girl's protest against her boyfriend's possessiveness: "I know you watch me when I'm dancin'/When I party with me friends/I can feel your eyes on my back, baby/I can't have no chains around me ." The third is about the inner loneliness of a Hollywood star: "She's so lucky, she's a star/But she cry, cry, cries in her lonely heart ."

So there I was, sitting on a plastic chair on my neighbor's lawn, watching a 10-year-old girl singing about grief, sexual jealousy, and the hollowness of success. As I squirmed, I sank into reflections of the curmudgeonly kind: Is this all kids know nowadays? There used to be innocent songs that preteens could sing-I can remember a hundred of them: "Green Grow the Rushes-O" and so on. Now there are no topics, for anyone of any age, but sex and death.

Miss Spears had been in the newspapers that very morning; at the MTV Music Video Awards two nights before, 18-year-old Britney had taken off everything but a few strategic spangles and performed the kind of dance for which lonely men in soiled raincoats used to pay extravagant door charges to ill-lit basement clubs. If I were to tell you that I switched the thing off in disgust I should be guilty of a falsehood; but I am awfully glad my daughter Nellie (a 7-year-old whose contribution to the talent show was a faultless performance of Dvorak's "Humoresque" on violin) didn't see it. Yet even she already knows some Britney lyrics. They all do, preteens and pre-preteens. As parents say with a sigh, when you bring this up: It's the culture.

The culture came up often over the next few days. The following Monday the FTC released its report on the marketing of violence in the media. Meanwhile, the Senate Commerce Committee was holding hearings on the issue. Lynne Cheney showed up to urge show business to police itself, and to quote some lyrics from hip-hop star Eminem, who had won a major award at the MTV bash. One of Eminem's songs expresses the satisfaction a man feels at having raped and murdered his mother. Joe Lieberman went further before the committee, urging the FTC to step in and regulate media companies who would not tone down their products. Al Gore, on his way from one showbiz fund-raiser ($800,000) to another ($6.5 million), agreed.

What to make of all this? So far as public policy is concerned, there are three possible positions, identified here by those who take them.

My neighbors: It doesn't matter much, so there's no point getting steamed. As an influence on the development of my children, my words and my example outweigh by a factor of hundreds anything Britney Spears does.

Mrs. Cheney: The media companies that promote creatures like Eminem should be shamed before the public, and thereby persuaded to mend their ways. Gore-Lieberman and their trial-lawyer pals: Legislate, regulate, intimidate. Sure, there'll be some grumbling from Hollywood; but they will never defect to the party of the dreaded "Christian Right."

Most conservatives would sympathize with Mrs. Cheney; I greatly admire her myself. If, however, my neighbors are representative of the larger American public, as they probably are, then her program is a non-starter. We must therefore choose between the first of the above options and the third. Can there be any doubt which poses the greater threat to our ancient liberties?

What we are talking about here, remember, is sex and violence. The second of these gives me no trouble. I have never had much patience with the idea that children should be shielded from fictional violence. I would much rather my own children discover The Hunchback of Notre Dame as I did, in the thrilling sado-necrophiliac original, shot through with cruelty and lust, than via the lame jollity of the Disney version. Here I can appeal to the wisdom of great storytellers from the past, who spared children very little. Check out the original "Cinderella," in which the ugly sisters get their eyes pecked out. Children take this stuff in their stride. They may even, as Bruno Bettelheim argued, be helped by it. Certainly the evidence that exposure to graphic violence causes violent deeds is highly suspect: "Shooting the Messenger," a recent report by the Media Coalition (available on their website), persuasively refutes the kiddie-see, kiddie-do arguments.

Sex is more worrisome. As the doting father of little Nellie, I naturally spend a lot of time fretting about this. How will the vulgarity of our public entertainment shape her personality?

Our September 9 block party came on the anniversary of Elvis Presley's first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show 44 years ago. The following January, Sullivan had Elvis on for the third time; it was then that he issued his famous order for the singer to be shown only from the waist up, in order that younger viewers might not be inflamed by the sight of his hip movements. We have traveled an awfully long way from Ed Sullivan to the MTV awards show. What is really surprising, though, is how little harm has been done. It needs some effort of imagination now to recall the alarm that Elvis raised at that time. Frank Sinatra called Elvis's music "the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear." This comment reflected a widespread public attitude.

If, in 1956, you had asked any thoughtful American what consequences might follow from the abandonment of all customary restraint in entertainment, and from related phenomena like the attempted normalization of homosexuality, he would probably have said that the Republic could not survive such a transformation. Plainly these good people believed something that was, in fact, untrue: that the stability of society depended on the exclusion, by common consent, of certain things from the sphere of public display.

The insouciance of my neighbors in the face of today's popular culture is, therefore, quite sensible. It's the culture-but it doesn't matter; it does no great harm.

To be sure, much mayhem has passed before our eyes since 1956. We have gone through Francis Fukuyama's "great disruption" with all its attendant phenomena: soaring rates of crime, bastardy, divorce, and so on. But we have come through to the other side at last; as Fukuyama himself points out, the indicators are trending downwards now, toward "re-normalization." And in all that happened, which was cause and which effect? Did Elvis-or Madonna, or Howard Stern-have one-thousandth the influence on our culture that (say) the Pill had?

The world changes. As a conservative, I shall conserve what I can; but if I am to keep any influence over my children at all, some measured degree of acceptance is called for. There is a price to be paid for liberty, and Eminem and Britney Spears are the current coin in which that price must be paid. They will not be shamed, and they ought not be banned: for if the guardians of our public virtue can outlaw hip-hop lyrics, you can be sure that "hate speech" will be their next target, and it is all too easy to imagine where that will lead. With the Second Amendment swirling down the drain, the survival of the First can no longer be taken for granted.