CULTURE WARS: WHERE DO WE STAND?

The largest city in the Granite State is blessedly free of
presidential candidates this summer, but it is not devoid of
controversy.

A rock concert that drew an estimated 10,000 young people to a city
park last Sunday night produced more than 80 complaints to police and
touched off what Mayor Robert Baines told me was, for him, an
unprecedented furor.

As late as Thursday, the front-page headline in the Union Leader, New
Hampshire's biggest paper, read, "Concert War Rages." A day earlier,
when I came to town to do some totally unrelated political reporting,
the paper ran two separate editorials denouncing the event.

Publisher Joseph McQuaid declared on Page 1: "Manchester should do
whatever it takes to put a quick and decisive end to the kind of
filth that masqueraded as a 'music concert' at Singer Park last
Sunday evening." On the editorial page, editor Bernadette Malone
Connolly agreed that "what happened at Singer Family Park on Sunday
cannot happen again."

"Manchester residents," she wrote, "should not have to hear the
'F-word' repeated throughout the evening over a rock band's
amplifiers, nor should they have to put up with young girls ripping
off their shirts and bras and couples indulging in bedroom activities
out in the open."

But when I asked Mayor Baines if he was considering shutting down the
concerts, he said, "Absolutely not. I'm planning to be there with my
daughter at one of the September dates." The mayor said, "I'm trying
to work with the promoters" to adjust the sound system, so people
with nearby homes along the river are protected. "The series is very
good for the community."

The promoters of the event sounded unrepentant. Bud Comstock,
president of the company that booked the heavy metal bands called
Slipknot, Disturbed and Mudvayne, was quoted by the Union Leader as
saying, "We're trying to appeal to a wide variety of people with each
show. The attendance speaks for itself on what people want." A rock
radio station organized a demonstration at City Hall to keep the
concerts going.

This is just a small skirmish in the culture wars that increasingly
dominate our politics. Look at the controversies in Congress, the
courts and the White House in just the past few weeks over flag
burning, school prayer and stem cell research. But it is hard to
figure out what Americans really want their government to do about
such issues.

On the flight to Manchester, I read news reports about a Kaiser
Family Foundation survey indicating that the V-chip, which Congress
and President Clinton insisted was vital to enable parents to control
their children's television viewing, is used so rarely it might as
well not exist.

Five years ago, when the law was passed requiring this electronic
censoring device to be included in all new TV sets, it was asserted
that families were desperate to protect youngsters from violent or
suggestive shows. Guess what? The survey of 800 families found that
40 percent of the parents have bought TVs recently enough that they
include V-chips. But half of them didn't even know the V-chips were
there. And of those who did, barely one-third said they had ever used
them.

Those same parents still claimed to be very concerned about sex and
mayhem on the tube, the survey found. So go figure.

Yet another case. In the current issue of the American Prospect
magazine, California journalist Peter Schrag argues that the federal
government is "out of sync with voters" in pursuing the so-called war
on drugs. He says that the success of all but one of 15 ballot
initiatives allowing medical use of marijuana or decriminalizing drug
possession and diverting users into treatment programs demonstrates
that politicians who promise to "get tough" on drugs just don't get
it.

Having covered some of those initiative battles, I know that George
Soros and the two fellow multimillionaires who have financed these
efforts generally have outspent their opponents by a wide margin. But
it's hard to maintain that the voters in all these different states
have been duped or brainwashed. Yet candidates who take a hard line
on drugs win at the polls -- even in the same states where these
initiatives have passed.

People just refuse to be as consistent as either the moralizers or
the civil libertarians wish. Drugs and sex and violence are bad
things -- to be denounced. But do we really want to close them down?
As Mayor Baines says, "Absolutely not." Condone them? "Absolutely
not."