The furor over Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl nipple exposure seems to have died down. I personally thought that the reaction was overblown.  Once you’ve seen one nipple, you’ve seen them all. The rest of the half-time show was much more offensive to me. However, I don’t see any part of the show as reflecting the decline of civilization.

To see an example of the decline of civilization, one needed only to read Sunday’s New York Times for April 4. There on the first page of a back section was a color photograph of three Iraqi boys either pointing to, or cheering because of, a human penis hanging from a telephone line. The NYT helpfully informed us that it was a “body part” removed from one of the four Americans whose death in Fallujah last week was the opening round in the current Iraqi counterattack against their American occupiers.

Remembering the NYT motto of “All the News that’s Fit to Print” and remembering that during Europe’s Dark Age, Baghdad was a world center of learning in medicine and mathematics, I find it hard to determine where civilization has declined the most.

It’s not that the NYT doesn’t have the right to publish the picture (they do), it’s that the publication adds nothing to our knowledge of Iraq, the insurgents, or anything else while being offensive to the relatives of the deceased. It’s not illegal. It’s just not a decent thing to do.