United States Court of Appeals and the FCC

They had me going for a while. I thought I would be fined $325,000 each time I used the word shit in my book On Being a Shit. My gosh! I use it hundreds of times in the book. Imagine if the Federal Communications Commission had gotten wind of that.

I would be in the hole for at least $65,000,000. I would have had to take that job I got offered last week as CEO of a health care organization that only paid $100,000,000 a year, but I could get by on that. I think.

I turned down the CEO job because the salary would compromise my values. But if the FCC had fined me, I would have had to shelve my higher self and stoop to take that job.

I’m off the hot seat now. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in favor of the plaintiffs that included Fox News, NBC, CBS, and others and against the FCC.

Until the ruling, the FCC was poised to fine the utterance of shit and fuck $325,000 each. This is a way for the FCC to “clean up” the networks, another brilliant initiative of the Bush administration. What did former President Carter say recently about this administration?

The court’s opinion cited Bush’s use of shit at a meeting of world leaders last year and Vice President Dick Cheney’s suggestion to a U.S. Senator: “Go fuck yourself.” The court reasoned that neither of these words referred to sexual acts or bodily excretions but were "fleeting expletives" of frustration.

I believe that deleting shit from my book “would have altered the nature of the … work and diminished the power, realism and immediacy of the [book’s]… experience for..[readers.]”

This quote is adapted from the FCC’s ruling to allow the film Saving Private Ryan to be shown complete with its use of fuck, shit, and other such words.

My argument indeed for my use of the word shit.

When someone dumps on us and then tries to cover up, a typical reaction is "You shit!"

What’s good for king shits is good for the rest of us. Heaven forbid that we use those words to refer to sexual acts or bodily excretions.