NOTE: This column was written nearly a year ago and submitted too late for publication. Since then I’ve made my peace with this TV series, even though I still don’t think the episode I described was a good idea.

I’ve just undergone a radical transformation; it’s one I never expected to happen to me. All my faithful readers (whose last meeting was held in a booth at Cici’s Pizza with room to spare) know me as the man who faithfully defends the right of any and all comers to spew whatever pornographic filth their heart desires in whatever medium is available to them. Don’t like it? Don’t listen/tune in/read/etc. Yep, Mr. First Amendment, that’s me. All those people who mouth pious platitudes about the need for censorship for the sake of “the kids” are just looking for an excuse to rid the world of everything they themselves don’t like. Nowhere in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights does it say you have the right to not be offended...

The incident that shook my foundations like a bomb in a railway station occurred between 9 and 10 PM CST on Thursday, March 11, 2004. It was an episode of Without a Trace, broadcast over the CBS television network. A husband and father had gone missing following the revelation that his teenage son was using heroin. Two FBI agents were interviewing the son, and he started remembering an incident from when he was about six years old. As in all of Jerry Bruckheimer’s family of hit shows (CSI, CSI Miami, CSI Wichita Falls, etc.), the screen suddenly changed to grainy, filtered black and white for a moment to indicate that a flashback to something extremely revolting was about to happen. I didn’t take the hint this time. I wish I had.

What happened next: the lad heard a noise and got out of bed in his jammies to check his parents’ bedroom. His father was bound in the corner, with a piece of duct tape over his mouth. His mother was lying on the floor, knees bent, while a knife-wielding intruder was moving up and down atop her. For at least a minute, we were treated to a repeated montage of shots: the silently terrified boy, the helpless father, the mother with blood on her cheek and the knife being held to her neck, the intruder’s requisite dark, untrimmed beard and his broken-cross tattoo, and a pullback shot of their bodies moving. The remembrance ended with the kid ducking out of the way as the dope-crazed thug staggered down the hall and out of the home.

As I write this two days later, the memory still chills me and makes me tremble. I’ve been fortunate enough to have not experienced any crime more violent than a schoolyard mugging back in the time when no one carried weapons; I can only imagine what someone whose home and/or person has been violated felt watching the scene. I don’t have to imagine what a six-year-old would feel; part of me (and you as well) is still that age. As e. e. cummings used to say, “Ask Freud; he knows.”

So, am I calling for the government to step in? Not on your life. I won’t be transformed that radically even when my cable service starts featuring the Signal 30 Channel. (All car wrecks! All real! All the time!) Have I turned into the person I’ve been ridiculing all along? Perhaps. My wife wasn’t particularly bothered by the show, suggesting that if they had shown the rapist breaking in, tying up the father, etc., it would have been much worse. I’m only asking for two things: I’d like Mr. Bruckheimer, his fellow producers, the media honchos, and the sponsors whose advertising helps finance these torturefests to display a little corporate responsibility. Anyone with even minimal knowledge of psychology could see how irreparably damaged a child who witnessed such a crime in real life would be. Do you want a whole country full of children like that?

Here’s the other thing: I’d like everyone who said anything publicly deploring Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl halftime show to apologize to me personally for being so @#$%ing STUPID. It took a while for that other shoe to drop, didn’t it?