Recently, in a Clarksburg, West Virginia, town meeting beamed around the world via the Net, President Clinton said he wants to develop a V-chip device for computers, to block out pornography and other material inappropriate for children.
Clinton told a parent worried about what his child might see on the Net that the V-chip is the answer, just like it'll solve all of our problems with kids, sex, and other nasty stuff on TV.
"We're working on it," he reassured his global electronic audience. "I think it's a serious potential problem myself."
When it comes to children, President Clinton has mastered the time-honored American political skill of invoking morality without really achieving much. He hasn't made as much money at it as William Bennett has, but he's used it to enormous political advantage.
The V-chip must indeed be a miraculous bit of technology, maybe one of the best placebos ever created. It hasn't done a single thing to protect kids, or clean up violent or sexual imagery anywhere, yet it's continuously invoked as the answer to all the fears parents have about the junk being beamed out of screens at our children.
The V-chip has always been a bizarre phenomenon, both a fraud and a joke. It will be decades before the chip inhabits a majority of US television sets. Besides, many American communities receive up to 800,000 hours of TV content a week, the programming changing every single day. In a country where hardly anyone can work a VCR, and busy parents are eager to turn their responsibilities over to blocking software and books about hard-working bumblebees, the notion that most parents will reprogram their chips constantly is ludicrous.
Programming a chip to patrol the entire content of the Net is even more remote a prospect.
It's hard to imagine the president doesn't know better.
But when it comes to children and morality, hypocrisy in the pursuit of votes and book-sales is not only no vice, it's an epidemic.
Of all the dangers facing American children, pornography and the other "inappropriate" things on the Internet and TV should rank close to last on any rational list.
In l995, more than three million reports of abuse and neglect in the United States were reported; in l996, the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse counted just two million such incidents.
The committee reported 1,215 abuse-related fatalities involving children - more than three a day. The same three syndromes are generally associated with these deaths, according to child-welfare agencies and voluminous governmental and academic research: single parenthood (especially very young single parents), poverty, and substance abuse.
Those figures don't include the thousands of children who will be killed or maimed by guns.
There is no report of "inappropriate" or pornographic imagery killing a single child in America last year, on the Internet or as a result of watching TV. Yet if you follow political and media rhetoric about kids and new media, you could easily believe these figures were reversed - that three millions kids were harmed by pornography or violent imagery, and hardly any by anything else.
Hysteria about sexual imagery reaching children via new media has become so pervasive, it was among the most frequently invoked moral and political issue of the l996 presidential campaign. And there is hardly a library or school in American connected to the Internet that didn't endured outrage and controversy when Johnny got onto the Playboy Web site.
The president has offered no major initiatives to combat abuse or neglect that would cover American children. Neither has Congress. This is not a serious "potential" problem involving "inappropriate" material, but a well-documented real one involving actual dangers; it's occurring right now.
Nor is Clinton's administration working on any major initiatives to hold parents responsible for the children they bring into the world, to teach them morals and values, and treat them safely.
Clinton told his Internet audience that these dangers shouldn't be used as an excuse for not following through on his goal - also believed to be cheap and unattainable rhetoric - of linking every classroom in America to the global computer network by the year 2000.
We don't need V-chips there, Clinton opined. Because kids in school are normally under supervision, he said, "you have a far less likelihood that the Internet will be abused or that the children will be exposed to something they shouldn't see during the school hours ... than at home."
Dear parents: Don't buy this claptrap. This is a political form of pocket-picking, taking money you can't afford out of your pockets for things that are promised but can't possibly be delivered. Like blocking software, the V-chip is censorship technology. It doesn't provide safe environments for children, merely unworkable illusions of safety for harried parents. It doesn't protect children; it simply forces them to turn elsewhere for the information and imagery they want. If one kid on the block has access to an uncensored TV, your kid will, too.
And the networks aren't even required to program their content for the V-chip. It's voluntary. Even if it weren't, kids have to be taught to deal with vivid imagery in the modern world. Would any V-chip or blocking software have anticipated an LA bank-robber's brains getting blown out on live TV a few months ago?
Save your money. Teach your kids how to choose programs wisely and deal sanely with the sexual and violent imagery that is now, sadly but irrevocably, a part of all our media lives. Don't leave small children alone with big new media. No blocking software or V-chip will control a fraction of so vast and diverse a universe. Anybody who tells you otherwise is not telling you the truth.
Clinton's speech was profoundly cynical, appearing to express concern about children's moral development, but actually exploiting the volatile subjects of sexual imagery and new-media technology to avoid dealing with kids' real problems.
Note that the president's speech provoked remarkably little outrage on the Web and the Net. Maybe that's because children are the last group in America that is considered to have no rights.
Or perhaps the constant invocation of porn as a serious menace to the young has been raised so often by journalists and political leaders that, even here, we have forgotten it's a lie.
