|
As Marjorie Heins adds, with the communist
menace gone, it was tempting to find new demons
'among any group that challenges the imagined
"traditional values" utopia of our
mythical past: sexual nonconformists,
provocative artists, pornographers...' (p.188).
It was the course followed by the Washington
Wives who tried to rally a majority of Americans
around the defence of the family and the race
presented as threatened. Subtle mix of moral
concerns and political interests on a
fundamentalist backdrop, the PMRC crusade was
indeed a reactionary form of censorship.
Aftermath
Today,
April 1998, the potency of the PMRC has
dramatically declined. The impetus generated by
Ronald Reagan's moral struggle has begun to
recede, and rap and heavy-metal music have
gradually entered mainstream American tastes,
making their repression harder. The PMRC is
still kicking but no longer with the same
conviction. Despite recent agreements with the
American Medical Association, the American
Academy of Pediatrics, the National Parent/Teacher
Association, law enforcement agencies as well as
numerous churches and schools nationwide, and an
aborted attempt in January 1998 at changing its
name from the Parents' to the Partners with the
Music Resource Center (to tone down the emphasis
on the family, I assume), its days are gone. As
explained in a recent personal letter, 'due to
limited funding and staff', it can no longer
afford to publish its Newsletter.
It
has accordingly altered its goals, claiming
today to serve as a resource center to 'educate
and promote public awareness of the positive (my
emphasis) long term effects of music on health,
analytical and creative thinking and self-esteem'.
Nevertheless, the threats of censorship are far
from being removed as recent speeches, not only
in France, seem to prove: in the preliminaries
of the 1996 presidential campaign, former Senate
majority leader Bob Dole declared 'we must hold
[...] the entire entertainment industry
responsible for putting profit ahead of common
decency', while William Bennet addressed Time
Warner officials with an 'Are you folks morally
disabled?' and House Speaker Newt Gingrich
proposed a boycott of radio stations playing
obscene music.
'...it's
all just a little bit of history repeating' (Propellerheads).
Claude
Chastagner Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier
III |
