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In his attack on purveyors of offensive pop culture, Dole took pains, at least for now, not to hit some prominent Republicans. When he cited a list of recent family films that were also sizable box-office hits, Dole included not only The Lion King and Forrest Gump but also True Lies, a movie that reduced a small army of bad guys to blood-splattered pieces. Then again, it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger, a G.O.P. muscleman. Another sometime Republican, Bruce Willis, is the star of Die Hard with a Vengeance, one of the many brutal-fun action pictures that escaped Dole's wrath. So did the gleefully smutty-minded Fox television network and its contributions to the history of crotch-grabbing, such as Married ... With Children. Fox is owned by Rupert Murdoch, a major contributor to conservative causes.
One day after the speech, which was written largely by Mari Maseng, wife of conservative columnist George Will, a Dole aide admitted that the Senator also had not seen most of the movies he talked about, nor had he heard most of the music. On Friday aboard his Gulfstream jet, Dole finally popped Natural Born Killers into the VCR. "Probably ought to take a look so I can say I've seen this thing,'' he joked to a TIME reporter over the phone. "Then we can always throw it out the window.''
Count on it to keep coming back. The violent and raunchy streak in civilization runs deep and long into the past. More teenage boys might be attracted to the classics if they knew about Homer's graphic descriptions of spear points ripping through flesh in The Iliad or the quarts of stage blood needed for any production of Titus Andronicus. As for sex, the lewd posturings in some paintings of Hieronymous Bosch would be rated NC-17 if they showed up at the multiplex.
But the rise of capitalism over the past two centuries has meant that all the resources of technology and free enterprise could at last be placed at the disposal of the enduring human fascination with grunt and groan. By the early decades of the present century, there had emerged in the U.S. an entertainment industry that would eventually prove to be all-pervasive and ever more given to decking out our base impulses with sweaty and imaginative detail. It awaited only the youth culture that began stirring and shaking in the 1950s to take full advantage of the possibilities in rock, films and TV. The result was a pop culture more pointed and grown up, but also more shameless and adolescent; sometimes both at the same time. The great skirmishes against the blue-nosed guardians of culture-the Hays Office that policed movies in the '30s or the network censors who tormented the Smothers Brothers in the late '60s-became the stuff of baby-boomer folklore.
The complications set in during the '90s, when the boomers who were once pop culture's most dedicated consumers became the decision makers at media companies-but also the parents of the next generation. Pulled one way by their lifelong instinct for whatever is sensational, unsanitized or unofficial, they find themselves dragged in the other direction by their emerging second thoughts as citizens and parents.