| Summary: | 6 Cfoncordian Opinions March 26, 1999 MTV: More than just music videos Erika Mikkelson Editor-in-Chief I am not the kind of person who is easi-ly shocked or offended. It is one of the things I pride myself upon. People with pink hair or pierced tongues, noses, eye-brows or chains hanging two feet down from their pants pockets are things that I understand express who that person may be on the inside. Personal expression takes on many forms, going beyond just clothing to the way a person speaks or lives his or her life. I am not offended by the words people use or the way they act. I have lived by the motto 4To each their own/' But this past weekend I found myself offended, shocked and disgusted by something that could be viewed as this same freedom of expression. It came at a time when I thought I had seen everything possible on cable televi-sion. There was nothing more that could be alloAved on television stations, or at least that is what I thought until MTV began air-ing its annual Spring Break marathon of drunken exploits, beauty contests and plain and simple programming displaying more stupidity than one could ever imagine. It shocked and appalled me that a cable tele-vision station which children under 18 may have open access to in their own homes would air such shows. They not only border on pornography but display intensely pri-vate moments stolen from people so inebri-ated they have no idea of the exploitation they are experiencing at the hands of MTV. Most of the programming is staged by MTV in order to place spring breakers into situations which will encourage them to act in ways they never would normally act. Women clad in nothing but swimsuits made out of a material resembling dental floss arc shown parading down a runway while drunken co-eds on spring break in Cancun flail their arms in the air just to get noticed by the MTV cameras. Other highlights of MTV's programming include the whipped cream fashion show where men and women model nothing but whipped cream. Another feat of the cable channel which used to play music videos is its ability to videotape a man and woman switching swimming suits in the backseat of a car. And the display of drunkenness and nudity does not end there. The producers of MTV programming have gone beyond any line of decency with their ingenious "Spring Break Undercover" show. This is MTV at its best or, I should say, its worst. This year they chose to fol-low two male friends and two female friends on their spring break trips to New Orleans. The half-hour segments contain nothing more than clips of these four peo-ple making complete idiots out of them-selves for all the world to see. Of course MTV has their consent. Try to imagine the Erika Mikkelson "The producers of MTV programming have gone beyond any line of decency/' reaction the parents of these four college students would have if they saw their chil-dren drunkenly stumbling through the streets of New Orleans or shoving dollar bills in the string bikinis of strippers. That is what put me over the edge more than any other gross display of near-pornography. The scenes of these two college men sitting at a strip club with women dancing naked in front of them and touching them and doing whatever else made me want to throw up. Here were the faces of four or five women who dance in these nightclubs in order to pay their rent and have food to eat, and MTV was glorifying their job and the actions of the men as something that is completely acceptable. The show promoted the activities of the spring-breakers as something which every person should do on spring break. Alcohol added to a night on the town added to a loss of all inhibi-tions equals a great show and high ratings for MTV. While I do not endorse any censorship or stifling of free expression, I do believe that MTV is airing nothing more than pro-grams exploiting college-age men and women. Sure what MTV is showing is real-ity, but what is the point of television rat-ings at the expense of drunken college stu-dents? And the exploitation of these stu-dents will probably not end until people who watch MTV allow themselves to be offended and disgusted by the activities so proudly displayed on MTV's spring break programming. In Hollywood time suddenly rain planes as computers stop thinking because they're confronted with a scenario for which they are not pro-grammed, much like partisan politicians, the Christian Coalition, and the average Marine? Do property owners files erase themselves, leading to anarchy and, eventu-ally, martial rule? Will records of my loans mysteriously vanish? More importantly, how can I arrange it so that the computer, when it is restarted, mistakes Bill Gates' account for mine? Hollywood lawyers and agents certainly had this one worked out Watching some of the Academy Awards e a r lyi n ^ vear 2 0 0 0 ' r m s u r e ^ ™>n't show on Sunday night, I was struck by one mind s h a r i ng w i t h me- As f o r ^ rest of alarming thing: Hollywood is on a different vou' v o u ' r e o n v o u r own* calendar than the rest of us. While we're Ooh! O o h ! Does the year 2000 mark the mired in the BCE/CE (or BC/AD, for you long-awaited and oft-misprophesied Second non-inclusivites out there) frame for under- Coming o f The L o r d Jesus Christ? And if standing chronological time, Hollywood is Jesus c o m e s aSa i n ' d o e s the Antichrist a year ahead. I don't know what label they escaPe his b o n d s a n d m n a m o k on the use for their scale, but I bet it's attractive, thin and makes tons of cash for adding crap Staff Columnist • ' . . * • > . - < . • Leif Fedje to the world. Whoopi Goldberg said it sev-eral times - for Hollywood, this is the last year of the twen-tieth century! For the ^Wf'^:}^':^^'::^'^-^:^ rest of us hacks, we / / L J .^^:^: ' fr -. x have another year to M3S [COPan \J go but for the rich b e c o m e a |a t ter-day. and famous, this is it! ^i ;v •{•: Come December 31, " r^s " NoStradamUS?" as the rest of us party like it's 1999, Hollywood will have its "Goodbye Second Millennium, Welcome Third!" party. And surface? Admittedly, this is a reach, but bear with me—was Jerry Falwell right, too? Is the Antichrist a Jewish male? And does he just appear, or does the Evil One pos-sess the body of an already living Jewish male, like Woody Allen or Jerry Seinfeld? Hollywood, we turn to you for most of the other answers in our meaning-less and pitiable lives, so hear our plea! Answer our call! Foretell! Give us Truth! Furthermore, if this represents an odd we have to continue in our dumb century for flux ye a r ' i n w h i c h Hollywood has entered another year. Lucky actors. the y ^ 2000' but t h e rest of us sorry This twist in time has several ramifica- s c h m o e s «« s t i l i in 2000 minus one, what tions. For instance, since they've turned the haPPens when Conan O'Brien does his "In century already, does Hollywood know how the Y e a r 2 0 0 0 " b i t ? H a s h e ^come a latter-the Y2K drama works out? Do anti-govern- day Nostradamus, a prophet of laffs who is mental nuts skew the canned-food industry not Just speculating humorously about the into oblivion by stockpiling massive caches future> but actually revealing it to us of hyper-preserved goods, sending the rest ^cause it's his present? Or does he pur-of us normal folk into a starvation panic that P°sefiilly avoid making revealing jokes in results in destructive riots at DelMonte, order to keep us from forbidden knowl DuPont, Hormel and Campbell's? Does it •see FEDJE on page 9 I am all egged out Staff Columnist Eric Weathermon Easter isn't a good holiday to criticize. For some reason, people get touchy about it. I want to take this chance to say that I don't hate Jesus. I'm just fine with Jesus. The following is solely based on my expe-riences with secular Easter practices. So there's no confusion, to sum up: Jesus' Resurrection is good; all the other stuff is . you'll see. I've always felt that Easter is a let down, when it comes to the Hallmark end of it. Maybe it's because I never owned an Easter bonnet, or because the Easter Bunny really hid those eggs well. Hallmark makes us feel guilty for not giving them money for Christmas, New Year's and Valentine's Day, but runs out of steam for Easter. I was conditioned to not like Easter by aversion therapy when I was young. I was at a hotel in Iowa, swimming in the pool, and the Easter Bunny showed up. This was cute, because it was fun to watch him jump around and slip on the wet cement. I fol-lowed him around, trying to soak him with pool water. I thought this was what he wanted. He was by a pool. The Easter Bunny got so mad at me, he actually pulled his head off to yell at me. Seeing the Easter Bunny pull his head off to chastise you is a traumatic experience for a young child. The Easter Bunny is a cop-out holiday superhero. I can understand a guy who lives at the North Pole, who rides in a sleigh pulled by magical reindeer, slides down chimneys, and gives strangers presents, but am I really supposed to believe in a bunny that goes to houses hiding eggs? Santa has elves for help, but bunnies can't do that by themselves. They're vegetarians. You at least have to have a big steak in your belly to travel around the world in one night. I also don't understand why we are sup-posed to visit the Easter Bunny. I can understand going to see Santa; you don't want to get the wrong gift, so there's a big agenda there. But what do you say to the Easter Bunny? No matter what you ask for, you are just going to get those stupid eggs. Santa can give you whatever he wants, but you can't fit anything good into those eggs. Also, Santa can talk back. All the Easter Bunny can do is nod its big furry head at you. That gets old really quickly. Easter candy is a big disappointment, too. The Mars company will suddenly re-label their peanut M&M's, and they magi-cally become eggs. That marketing idea shows about as much effort as a Wellness paper. About 10 years ago, Cadbury came out with another poor excuse for an Easter candy: the Cadbury Cream Egg. These just don't taste good. They are a layer of choco-late covering about three ounces of this yel-low gooey stuff. Once you bite into the chocolate, you get to find yellow goo all over your clothes, which isn't very nice. When I was a kid, I loved the marshmal-lows in the shape of bunnies, covered with yellow or pink sugar. I thought these were the greatest idea ever, because they usually got me hyper enough to defy gravity for about an hour. I recently tried these candies again, remembering how much I loved them in the past. I couldn't even swallow them. This was probably because they tast-ed like marshmallows with sugar on them. I think the most noble thing we can do is set a trap for the Easter Bunny and leave the eggs in their hiding places. We need to remember what Easter is all about-the res-urrection of Christ, and good buffets. The resurrection was probably the greatest mir-acle of all time, but I must admit that you just can't beat a good buffet. That's what Easter is all about.
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