| 4-14-98
By Luke Ford
Dennis Prager asked if Titanic was the first family film with
nudity. P obviously goes to few movies.
A school teacher phoned: A second grade teacher, says her kids
are obsessed with it.
P says it is not appropriate material for children. Titanic depicts
the greatest maritime tragedy in history. P - taking kids to this
would be a form of child abuse.
P feels powerfully about protecting childrens' innocence.
P seems incredibly square and out of touch at times. And he may
be totally right as well.
A mom says her little girls wanted to see "the naked lady part."
Mother told them the nude scene was artistic and nothing was wrong
with it. P - that the kids wanted to see the naked lady part, shows
that they knew it wasn't totally innocent.
Mom says her kids were playing Titanic…including the "artistic"
nude segment.
Last night Prager heard from many parents whose daughters, as
young as ten, wanted to pose nude for a man to draw them. P hates
that and wants to preserve childrens' innocence.
Only one caller agreed with DP.
Dennis thought Titanic deserved the Best Movie award at the recent
Oscars. P is a sucker for simple, homey uplifting stories, like
Good Will Hunting, Titanic (and perhaps Dangerous Beauty). He hates
more realistic, experimental, challenging and gritty films like
Boogie Nights.
Prager calls Dr. Steve Marmer his resident psychiatrist. Dr Marmer
is in private practice in Brentwood.
Dr. Marmer thinks Titanic a great movie, whose greatness will
only be fully realized twenty years from now. Steve agrees with
Dennis that kids should not see it. No one younger than eleven.
Steve Marmer is one of DP's closest friends, perhaps closest.
Dr M said that Jews and Terminator had a cartoonish quality while
Titanic is supposedly disturbing because of its "realism."
Dr M was not as bothered by the sexuality in the movie as the
tragedy - the drowning.
At 1:25PM, a mother said that many kids came away from the movie
thinking how romantic. While adults think - how tragic.
P: I want my kids to be able to cry at tragedy, as I do. I do
not want to become jaded to it.
P: Parents should make no decision based on - Do other kids do
it. My five year old Aaron just saw the movie Barney with his 'aunt'
[DP's assistant Laurie?]. And he loved it. But the thought that
he would see Titanic horrifies me.
Prager agreed with a caller that there is a decline in modesty.
DP did not want his 15-year old to wear a cut-off shirt. P has less
problem with movies because they are private affairs in a darkened
theater.
Prager's show was brought by a law firm…Moscowitz…1-800-Taxdeal…which
advertises easy terms for bankruptcy.
Then he read another commercial from Duxsiana Beds… www.dux.com
In his third hour, Prager discussed Lawrence Singleton, who was
sentenced to death for murdering a prostitute. In California, Singleton
hacked a woman's arms off. That woman is now married.
Prager asked: What if Larry murdered a waitress or lawyer? Why
the emphasis on prostitute? Is "prostitute" the only defining element
to those women? P believes that deep in the recesses of the newswriter's
mind was the belief that prostitutes had less value than other types
of women.
A caller pointed out that it was common for the media to describe
people by their profession, be it lawyer or advertising executive
or jailer.
A caller found it comforting. Prostitution is a fringe activity.
Not an ordinary person was murdered. Just like finding out that
a man who died of a heart attack was a heavy drinker.
What about all the ex-Marine and hitchiker references? Only murderers
and criminals are referred to as ex-Marines.
Camille Paglia wrote in her internet www.salon.com column about
Clinton's cigar smoking. Prager and his son David also enjoy cigars.
" American politics has certainly degenerated into "I Spy," with
temperature readings of the presidential brain pan taken by voyeuristic
snapshots of probably staged tableaux. "Sometimes a cigar is just
a cigar," tartly replied Freud to a suggestive query about his omnipresent
phallic stogie.
Stuffing a cigar in one's mouth does seem an odd way to celebrate
being freed from litigation over a charge of Invitation to Fellatio.
"Don't ask," say conservatives to Bill, and "Don't tell," say liberals
to Paula Jones.
There are plenty of red-blooded, lavender-livered guys standing
in line to give Bill his orality fix. But his liberality is just
for public consumption: no gays need apply, and neither should blacks.
The big racial healing and tolerance czar craves only white meat.
When the ever-astute Joan Rivers raised the issue of Bill's all-vanilla
tastes with me last month on her radio talk show (nationally broadcast
from New York's WOR), I was so startled I could only sputter, "Yeah,
the Clinton White House is too white!" Clinton's memoirs should
be called "Apartheid of Eros."
Clinton's crew loves to shut women up -- by bullying, threats,
ridicule or defamation. They take their cues from the boss man,
whose obsessive scenario is plugging up the menacing mouths of white
gals -- all of them shadow images of nagging, razzle-dazzle Mom
and strident, all-biz Hillary. On Bill's menu, for all his vaunted
feminism, the best woman is a silent woman: a cod in the head trumps
a bird in the bed.
From
Prager's Web Site:
Tuesday, April 14, 1998
The first two hours of this show was on the subject of whether
or not kids should be seeing the movie Titanic. All the polls show
that millions of children are viewing this popular film. Dennis
brought up two points. One, an erotic scene ( approximately a half
minute in length) that included showing breasts, and the tragic
death scenes. Dennis asked parents in particular to call in who
have taken their young child to this movie to justify their action
and to describe their child's reaction to the movie. Several women
called in saying that they are glad they took their kids to the
film because they want their kids to learn history. Others said
that the erotic scene was too short and most little kids don't know
it's erotic because they don't posses the maturity to understand
it as such. Still others called in to say that they wouldn't take
their kids to the movie. Dennis emphasized his believe that kids
have such a short window of opportunity to be innocent and that
adults have a responsibility to protect the children against forcing
them to lose that innocence too quickly.
Dennis had on the show Dr. Stephen Marmer, MD, a Brentwood psychiatrist
and professor of psychiatry at UCLA Medical School, who said that
it wasn't so much the erotic scene that troubles him, but rather
that children under the age of 10 shouldn't see the movie because
the death scenes are too disturbing. Dr. Marmer, who also saw Titanic
and said that he thought it was a great film, said that the scenes
of people freezing, entire families drowning, etc. were so disturbing
that even he had nightmares over them. He said that children cannot
process such disturbing scenes in a healthy way. Again, Dennis emphasized
the responsibility adults have in preserving children's innocence.
He said that there is no reason for a young child to learn such
history, they have the rest of their lives to learn about it. Dr.
Marmer agreed.
In the third hour, Dennis told his listeners that he was disturbed
over a news report he heard on his station about a woman who was
murdered. They described the victim as a prostitute. Dennis said
that he almost only hears professions of murder victims when they
are prostitutes and drug dealers and he says that such information
in wrong. We don't need to know what she did for a living. She is
someone who had her life taken from her. Dennis asked his listeners
if they felt she was described as a prostitute because our society
is obsessed with sex. Many called in to voice their opinions. One
caller tapped into something that interested Dennis. He said that
maybe the news media do this to take fear away from the listeners.
That this murder is not a random case that could happen to anyone
but rather to someone who placed herself in harms way through her
profession. Dennis asked his listeners if they feel less sympathetic
to a murder victim if they learn that the victim is a prostitute,
drug dealer, etc.?
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