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Of love and war.

A favorite New Yorker cartoon once showed a stooped and wizened old judge slouching out of his chambers while scowling to his clerk, “All I know is, if it turns me on, it’s obscene!” The cartoon, like all good humor, speaks truth through anxiety. For if there is anything more difficult to define than public indecency, it lies beyond our legal and societal horizon. In the aftermath of the Super Bowl halftime wardrobe malfunction and the election-year ascendancy of evangelical Puritanism, debate over the public treatment of sexuality yet festers in the crucible of contemporary political debate—abetted mightily by the current tilt of the Federal Communications Commission. How different it is across the Atlantic where public nudity and sexuality are much more comfortably tolerated. Even the staid British are no longer exercised by the front-page bosoms of the daily tabloids—and this from the nation whose Lord Chesterfield once observed of sex, “The pleasure is momentary, the expense is damnable, and the position is ridiculous.” Even the recent announcement that the BBC would telecast the salacious musical, “Jerry Springer: The Opera” in prime time raised few eyebrows. This is not to say that the public decency donnybrook does not rage in Europe as well as the US—for it surely does. But it instead rails over gratuitous displays of violence where our cousins’ sensibilities are far more acutely focused. Whether the roots of this are embedded in the lingering memories of wartime slaughter in the homeland can be debated. (After all, we in the US have the luxury of fantasizing war as a perpetual away-game.) But it would seem to be one for the Europeans if it is to be a choice between censoring the beautiful beginning of life or its unseemly end. Some European nations, such as Russia, have approved bans against televising “dead bodies, scenes of murder, beatings, the infliction of serious, medium and light injuries,” and other violent acts. And in response to a school massacre, Germany has formed a commission to create standards against violence on television and the internet. But some of the greatest public revulsion in Europe has been registered against, of all things, televised depictions of plastic surgery. In Germany, a regulating agency has ordered the local version of “The Swan” to be relegated to an 11:00 PM slot because of what the program’s message says to children about human worth. According to a recent Associated Press story a new Italian television show entitled, “Bisturi! Nessundo e’ Perfetto” (“Scalpel! No One Is Perfect”), provoked startled viewer reactions. When the surgeon’s knife first drew blood in advance of breast implant placement, the network’s switchboard was reportedly overwhelmed with a spontaneous outpouring of protest. As a result Rome’s prosecutors are apparently under siege to file obscenity charges against the network—not for the “Janet Jackson” exposure but for the bloodletting. In contrast, a recent controversy in Montana featured a billboard company that refused a cosmetic surgery ad picturing a young woman in tank top yearning for larger