An open letter to FCC Chief Kevin Martin:

Hi Mr. Martin,

How the fuck are you? I’m writing this letter because I just finished reading that fucking article that Forbes magazine published late last March ‘ the one about how you and your commission are trying to gain a whole bunch of motherfucking ground in your struggle to regulate basic cable.

Well, slap me with cow shit and call me a mud-pie, how did I not see this coming? Fuckwads in this country are constantly trying to dam up the flow of free thought and language, tenets of our society which were established in the motherfucking Constitution. I suppose it was only a matter of fucking time before they tried to put the reins on non-network television. From what I hear, though, you’re having a fuck of a time getting these regulations through the courts. It sounds like people are getting pretty motherfucking tired of being told what they can and cannot watch in the privacy of their own fucking homes.

Normally, I’d have let this shit slide. People like you are a dime-a’fucking-dozen, and you multiply like rabbits. Replacing you wouldn’t do jack-shit; if you cut off the head of the FCC, another one grows in the same spot, right? No, Mr. Martin, this is a battle that has to be won among the people, in their motherfucking hearts, and in their motherfucking minds.

I do worry, though, what the great glorious fuck my generation is going to do about this issue. We’re some of the first motherfuckers to fully experience the awesome power of the World Wide Motherfucking Web as a tool for the exchange of ideas. Never before have we been so free to express ideas in such a massive forum. It’s a shit-fucking-ton of responsibility and I, for one, am going bat-shit wondering how we’ll try to fulfill it.

I have to tell you, Mr. Martin, that I’m lacking a comfortable fucking degree of confidence in my peers at the moment. We’ve got this guy here, Alex Rosenthal, who wrote a column in last week’s paper about how our motherfucking campus newspaper editors should ‘create a formal code of taste, and enforce it’ among the staff. I can’t describe the motherfucking shiver that ran down my motherfucking spine when I read that. ‘Code of taste???’ Holy shit mountain, Mr. Martin, he sounds just like you.

And that is exactly what I’m worried about. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think you’re a bad man. I’m sure you’re a man of conviction, a man of principle, who feels as though he’s doing a service to this country by making sure that ‘Dick in a Box’ becomes ‘Bleep in a Box’ by the time it reaches the airwaves. I can promise you that you’re not. This residual motherfucking puritanism from a bygone era of sexual repression and cultural manipulation just isn’t cutting the motherfucking mustard anymore. People like Rosenthal might not fucking believe that decency regulations, or ‘tastefulness,’ are good things, but they’ll sure-as-shit mimic your words if they think it’s going to get them a spot at the Big Boys Table, and that’s how assholery like this is perpetuated.

You and Rosenthal both talk about the ‘responsibility’ that media outlets have to their audience. I’m here to tell you that the only motherfucking ‘responsibility’ they have, as a business, is to entertain and maintain that audience without grossly misrepresenting the truth or slandering motherfuckers. Everything else is an expectation to be met ‘ or not. Forcing us to adhere to some ‘code of taste’ is absurd, and a blatant attempt at imposing some arbitrary moral standard that defines what media is ‘supposed’ to do, or what they shouldn’t say. If people are too motherfucking stupid to tell the difference, and make a choice between good television and bad television, or informative newspaper writing and fluffy newspaper writing, then that’s their problem. Not motherfucking yours.

Sincerely,

Matt McFadden

‘ Matt McFadden is a senior English and Arabic major. If you understand the subtle nuances of this column, he’ll give you a cookie.