I love this: from Scalia's ruling, yesterday, on whether or not to uphold the FCC fine on "fleeting explitives", we can see that Scalia really has his finger on the pulse of small-town America:
We doubt, to begin with, that small-town broadcasters run a heightened risk of liability for indecent utterances. In programming that they originate, their down-home local guests probably employ vulgarity less than big-city folks; and small-town stations generally cannot afford or cannot attract foul-mouthed glitteratae from Hollywood.
Oh my, Tony, have you got a lot to learn about small-town values. Yep, them farmers and factory workers are real prissy about their speech. Not like those foul-mouthed big-city Hollywood "glitteratae".
I know we joke about conservatives pining for the fictional days of Leave it to Beaverland, but this hearkens back farther... maybe a Lassie episode? A wonderful, colorless world... you'll never see Lassie humping anybody's leg, or Timmy's dad coming home drunk from one of the seven bars in town, and Timmy's mom never hauls off and hits him with a sack of fresh peaches just picked from the orchard as her own personal revenge for having a kid that apparently can't figure out, after the umpteenth time, to stay out of the damn well / abandoned mineshaft / collapsing barn.
In my own small town, of course, some of the phrases my daughter has brought home from from the other kids in her one-school rural district would make your hair curl. And anyone who has ever worked on a tractor has violated the english language more creatively in the span of five minutes than Bono could ever hope to; anyone working in the local lumber trade could burn your ears off in the span of three.
But no, we wouldn't have cussin' if it weren't for the glamour-riddled Hollywood types. Our comedy is Scalia's reality.