[Edited and Cross-posted from Aiken Area Progressive]
NEW YORK CITY -- "EliteXC Saturday Night Fights" as you all may well know aired on CBS on Saturday night and I have to say that it was very inappropriate to air an event that violent on broadcast TV before 22:00.
And it seems like some people agree with me on this one. Brian Burwell has an editorial up blasting the program's airing on broadcast TV. Here is some of what he wrote:
The MMA apologists call that its appeal. I call that its fatal flaw. Mixed Martial Arts wants the world to sanction its underworld barbarism as legitimate. But no matter which form of this "sport" you look at, it ought to be hard to stomach for anyone with even the faintest grain of civility.
This crazed, unrestrained violence allows men with thinly padded leather on their fists to pummel each other nonstop, even when your opponent is on the ground. It allows you to knee your opponent in the groin, then while he's prone on the ground, pound him in the head, choke him, or squeeze his torso with your legs locked around him, attempting to rupture kidneys and squeeze the air out of lungs.
I've complained about this before, and predictably the MMA loyalists say I'm a hopelessly behind-the-times boxing apologist who couldn't stand the idea that the sweet science had been replaced by a better action sport.
Not exactly. Boxing's decline has nothing to do with a lack of raw action. It has more to do with a void in the great talent that once dominated the sport. All I want is for someone to realize what a distasteful freak show mixed martial arts is in this bastardized form. What I want is for sane folks to slow down this gradual slide into a post-Apocalypic haze in which the worst elements of human nature are sanctioned and celebrated. What I want is for us to stop glorifying the most deviant aspects of our own personalities, the ones in which pit bulls, roosters and human beings can be gored, gouged and brutalized for sport, and where intelligence is a fault and the dumbing down of our society is considered a point of pride.
But sadly, instead of halting the slide, CBS is driving the bus directly into the cultural abyss by putting this on national television for the first time, instead of allowing it to wallow in a corner on cable TV with all the other cartoonish "reality" fare.
Ultimate fighting and all the other ultimate fighting leagues want the world to embrace their bloody human cockfighting as a replacement for boxing as a real combat sport, and now they have CBS as a co-conspirator in this fraud. They reason that the world has proclaimed them as legitimate, simply because their barbarism is now on network television.
Television doesn't automatically legitimize you. It's the electronic version of the ladder. The higher you climb, the more of your rear end we can see.
Mr. Burwell described society's problem exactly down to the nitty-gritty: blatant violence on TV. Which is why I have a problem with CBS airing this. Which is why I have an even bigger beef with people who complain about the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show -- a very harmless fashion show -- yet they don't have a problem with stuff like this. How many people have died during the six VS Fashion Shows? Zero. How many men have been stilettoed in the nuts by the VS supermodels in the six airings of the fashion show? Zero. How many people have died from MMA in the last 12 years? Two. Go figure.
Viacom could have done better by airing this on MTV, BET, Spike or CMT. But by choosing CBS to air this, they have lost all credibility.
Unlike the Janet Jackson Super Bowl from four and a third years ago, this is definitely deserving of an FCC fine.