I have been following the disputations arising from the Broadcasting Commission's latest interventions in the public media with more than avid interest. I will attempt to contextualise the inherent fallacies in reason and judgment that I see by making three personal observations.

Way back when, my then wife and I used to speak in codes about subjects we thought was not for our young son's ears. We would spell words we thought he should not hear. Naturally, if we spoke of sex, we would spell that too. We learned very quickly that this had a very short shelf-life. And it happened when in one such conversation, he blurted out, "Are you talking about sex"? He was then just a toddler.

Fast forward now to when he is about eight years old. The kid is a digital native so he was online as soon as he could pilot a mouse. He was by now showing a pronounced interest in the nude female form. It was his mother who discovered him browsing websites that offered this treat. Naturally, she became alarmed and demanded that I do something.

In keeping with its responsibility to shield children from the predators of the Internet, the Internet service provider, America Online (AOL), gave parents a method to oversee the online browsing of their children; every time the kid signed on, the parent was required to also sign on and co-pilot. Otherwise, the kid may not move from the log-on page.

Abandoned aol

When we instituted it, I gave a bet at good odds to his mother; if the boy was as sharp as I thought he was, he will simply abandon this account to access the Internet. True enough, as soon as he saw what was happening, he abandoned the use of his AOL account for Internet access, never to return to it. Perish the thought if you think he gave up accessing and using the Internet. But to be perfectly honest, I could not have been more proud of him.

Now to a contemporary situation. The censors were hard at work recently (11:30 p.m., Saturday, March 14) on the telecast featuring a comic named Rodney broadcast on the Comedy Central channel. He was singing what might be termed a praise song to sex in which he refers to the vulgar term mostly by asking the audience to figure it from word rhyme. If you were up and about at that hour, tuned in to that channel and about as sensate as a small pet rock, you could have figured it out. If you were a little slower, he attempted to implant it by using at least three referential couplets. If our sensors were offended by the double entendre embedded in the rhyming words of the song, it never showed. He also used the 'f' word a few times. And for everytime he plainly did, our ever-alert censors bleeped the word! Note well, the time of the broadcast.

Survived early brushes

I learned some valuable lessons from these behaviours and confess an ordinary prejudice. You know there is not a parent who doesn't think his or her kid is way above average. I am no less so. But for what it's worth, my son seems to have survived his earlier brushes with the nude female form. For he is now a well-balanced 20-year-old sophomore in engineering and a track athlete at a reputable North American university.

Here's the thing. If you deign to make public policy that beggars reason and good common sense, it invariably undermines positive behaviour models and weakens the concept of law mediating in the public good. There is no good end to censorship, however it is packaged or raised. Its future shall always be ignominy, as it deserves.

I am, etc.,

CARLTON A. SAMUELS

28 Seymour Avenue

Kingston 6

If you deign to make public policy that beggars reason and good common sense, it invariably undermines positive behaviour models and weakens the concept of law mediating in the public good