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4-14-98 Dennis Prager asked if Titanic was the first family film with nudity. P obviously goes to few movies. A school teacher phoned: A second grade teacher, says her kids are obsessed with it. P says it is not appropriate material for children. Titanic depicts the greatest maritime tragedy in history. P - taking kids to this would be a form of child abuse. P feels powerfully about protecting childrens' innocence. P seems incredibly square and out of touch at times. And he may be totally right as well. A mom says her little girls wanted to see "the naked lady part." Mother told them the nude scene was artistic and nothing was wrong with it. P - that the kids wanted to see the naked lady part, shows that they knew it wasn't totally innocent. Mom says her kids were playing Titanic…including the "artistic" nude segment. Last night Prager heard from many parents whose daughters, as young as ten, wanted to pose nude for a man to draw them. P hates that and wants to preserve childrens' innocence. Only one caller agreed with DP. Dennis thought Titanic deserved the Best Movie award at the recent Oscars. P is a sucker for simple, homey uplifting stories, like Good Will Hunting, Titanic (and perhaps Dangerous Beauty). He hates more realistic, experimental, challenging and gritty films like Boogie Nights. Prager calls Dr. Steve Marmer his resident psychiatrist. Dr Marmer is in private practice in Brentwood. Dr. Marmer thinks Titanic a great movie, whose greatness will only be fully realized twenty years from now. Steve agrees with Dennis that kids should not see it. No one younger than eleven. Steve Marmer is one of DP's closest friends, perhaps closest. Dr M said that Jews and Terminator had a cartoonish quality while Titanic is supposedly disturbing because of its "realism." Dr M was not as bothered by the sexuality in the movie as the tragedy - the drowning. At 1:25PM, a mother said that many kids came away from the movie thinking how romantic. While adults think - how tragic. P: I want my kids to be able to cry at tragedy, as I do. I do not want to become jaded to it. P: Parents should make no decision based on - Do other kids do it. My five year old Aaron just saw the movie Barney with his 'aunt' [DP's assistant Laurie?]. And he loved it. But the thought that he would see Titanic horrifies me. Prager agreed with a caller that there is a decline in modesty. DP did not want his 15-year old to wear a cut-off shirt. P has less problem with movies because they are private affairs in a darkened theater. Prager's show was brought by a law firm…Moscowitz…1-800-Taxdeal…which advertises easy terms for bankruptcy. Then he read another commercial from Duxsiana Beds… www.dux.com In his third hour, Prager discussed Lawrence Singleton, who was sentenced to death for murdering a prostitute. In California, Singleton hacked a woman's arms off. That woman is now married. Prager asked: What if Larry murdered a waitress or lawyer? Why the emphasis on prostitute? Is "prostitute" the only defining element to those women? P believes that deep in the recesses of the newswriter's mind was the belief that prostitutes had less value than other types of women. A caller pointed out that it was common for the media to describe people by their profession, be it lawyer or advertising executive or jailer. A caller found it comforting. Prostitution is a fringe activity. Not an ordinary person was murdered. Just like finding out that a man who died of a heart attack was a heavy drinker. What about all the ex-Marine and hitchiker references? Only murderers and criminals are referred to as ex-Marines.
Camille Paglia wrote in her internet www.salon.com column about Clinton's cigar smoking. Prager and his son David also enjoy cigars. " American politics has certainly degenerated into "I Spy," with temperature readings of the presidential brain pan taken by voyeuristic snapshots of probably staged tableaux. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," tartly replied Freud to a suggestive query about his omnipresent phallic stogie. Stuffing a cigar in one's mouth does seem an odd way to celebrate being freed from litigation over a charge of Invitation to Fellatio. "Don't ask," say conservatives to Bill, and "Don't tell," say liberals to Paula Jones. There are plenty of red-blooded, lavender-livered guys standing in line to give Bill his orality fix. But his liberality is just for public consumption: no gays need apply, and neither should blacks. The big racial healing and tolerance czar craves only white meat. When the ever-astute Joan Rivers raised the issue of Bill's all-vanilla tastes with me last month on her radio talk show (nationally broadcast from New York's WOR), I was so startled I could only sputter, "Yeah, the Clinton White House is too white!" Clinton's memoirs should be called "Apartheid of Eros." Clinton's crew loves to shut women up -- by bullying, threats, ridicule or defamation. They take their cues from the boss man, whose obsessive scenario is plugging up the menacing mouths of white gals -- all of them shadow images of nagging, razzle-dazzle Mom and strident, all-biz Hillary. On Bill's menu, for all his vaunted feminism, the best woman is a silent woman: a cod in the head trumps a bird in the bed. Tuesday, April 14, 1998 The first two hours of this show was on the subject of whether or not kids should be seeing the movie Titanic. All the polls show that millions of children are viewing this popular film. Dennis brought up two points. One, an erotic scene ( approximately a half minute in length) that included showing breasts, and the tragic death scenes. Dennis asked parents in particular to call in who have taken their young child to this movie to justify their action and to describe their child's reaction to the movie. Several women called in saying that they are glad they took their kids to the film because they want their kids to learn history. Others said that the erotic scene was too short and most little kids don't know it's erotic because they don't posses the maturity to understand it as such. Still others called in to say that they wouldn't take their kids to the movie. Dennis emphasized his believe that kids have such a short window of opportunity to be innocent and that adults have a responsibility to protect the children against forcing them to lose that innocence too quickly.
Dennis had on the show Dr. Stephen Marmer, MD, a Brentwood psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at UCLA Medical School, who said that it wasn't so much the erotic scene that troubles him, but rather that children under the age of 10 shouldn't see the movie because the death scenes are too disturbing. Dr. Marmer, who also saw Titanic and said that he thought it was a great film, said that the scenes of people freezing, entire families drowning, etc. were so disturbing that even he had nightmares over them. He said that children cannot process such disturbing scenes in a healthy way. Again, Dennis emphasized the responsibility adults have in preserving children's innocence. He said that there is no reason for a young child to learn such history, they have the rest of their lives to learn about it. Dr. Marmer agreed.
In the third hour, Dennis told his listeners that he was disturbed over a news report he heard on his station about a woman who was murdered. They described the victim as a prostitute. Dennis said that he almost only hears professions of murder victims when they are prostitutes and drug dealers and he says that such information in wrong. We don't need to know what she did for a living. She is someone who had her life taken from her. Dennis asked his listeners if they felt she was described as a prostitute because our society is obsessed with sex. Many called in to voice their opinions. One caller tapped into something that interested Dennis. He said that maybe the news media do this to take fear away from the listeners. That this murder is not a random case that could happen to anyone but rather to someone who placed herself in harms way through her profession. Dennis asked his listeners if they feel less sympathetic to a murder victim if they learn that the victim is a prostitute, drug dealer, etc.?
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