WHOLE NEW DEFINITION OF OBSCENITY?

A famous jurist quipped, "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it." The same may be said for obscenity. Defined as "repugnantly indecent," it usually has something to do with sex. Here I'd like to make a case for how it also has to do with spending.

Money and how we spend it is culturally significant. It helps define our status, our role, our very value. And so we celebrate wealth. The tycoons who have it, the celebrities who flaunt it, and the ambitious who earn it. Like 23-year-old Maurice Harary of New York who made $120,000 in just 48 hours by selling a line of T-shirts featuring the death of Bin Laden.

Americans' facility for making money helped give birth to what many call our Exceptionalism. With the first 17th C colonists there began the national myth that we were blessed by God to give humanity a new beginning in a new world. Today that same case is emphatically made by politicians and pundits "tired of the negativism from social secularists."

What nourishes that negativism...? Often it circles back to how we spend what we make. Americans continue to spend more on cosmetics than new hospitals, more on vacations than new schools, and staggeringly more on entertainment than any other field of discretionary spending. Movies, sports, cable channels and websites consume billions each year. The very same years we bicker over the millions being proposed for wiser energy policies, wiser infrastructure, wiser market regulations, wiser teachers.

News flash.

As we speak, TV sponsors in New York are lining up to eagerly pay a 10% hike in fees for the fall's new network season. A season promising more night-time sedation via time-tested cop & doc shows, vampire & violence episodes, along with a whole new brew of raunch & reality programs. OK, lets be fair, you can see the appeal here to both the sponsors and the sedated alike. But then -- in a land seething with so many needs -- you can also see the obscenity to it.

What would be truly exceptional about us is if we could still remember how needs always trump wants.