CULTURE WAR MIXES UP AMERICA

MANCHESTER, N.H. - 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 on Sunday, July 21 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 Page 1 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 last 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.

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."