Beavis vs. Humorless Drones

Letter to the Editor - October 28, 1993

Background:

This was my first published letter to the editor. I no longer have a copy of the original, so this is the letter as printed in the San Antonio Express-News, under the heading "Beavis No Threat To Modern World". They also stuck an annoying hyphen into the name "Butthead" (mercifully removed here).

Note: The Express-News was at one time a pretty good newspaper. Since its purchase by the Hearst Corporation, however, the paper has shifted so far to the right that old-fashioned American concepts such as "tolerance" or "free speech" are considered controversial.

To the Editors:

I am concerned about the current hysteria over the MTV show, Beavis and Butthead.

Judging by all the media coverage, the program must be one of the signs of the apocalypse.

Learned experts bemoan the "dumbing down" of America and wring their hands over the "glorification of underachievers" while high school administrators ban Beavis and Butthead T-shirts from campuses.

Most of the furor has arisen from an incident in which a 5-year-old boy burned his sister to death, allegedly in emulation of the show. It was a tragic, isolated event.

I refuse, however, to believe that broadcasting Beavis and Butthead will result in the complete destruction of Western civilization at the hands of match-wielding toddlers.

The show is satire. I realize that this is a difficult concept for some people to grasp. Recently, the Express-News printed a letter from a woman who seemed unable to understand that the Doonesbury character "Mr. Butts" is actually an attack on the tobacco industry. She stated that if it was satire, then it was in poor taste. Sorry, but satire is not meant to be in good taste.

Surface appearances to the contrary, these are fast becoming very repressive times. The forces of censorship are lurching about again, frantically trying to bury anything that doesn't conform to a particular view of what America should be.

David Bryant

The letter was pretty heavily edited, but in fairness I must admit my prose style had not fully matured. Still, there were some ideas in the original I wish had survived. I was trying to point out that the people who tend to be in favor of censorship also seem to be deficient in some basic human qualities. My final sentence was:

Ask yourself, who is it that never seems to get the joke?
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© 1993, 1998 by David Bryant.
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