POSTCARD FROM TOBY

With so much focus on the commercials that aired during Sunday's Super Bowl, I thought I might focus on commercials in Toobworld for the coming week.

And why not start with a barn-burner?


Daddy is reading "Little Red Riding Hood" to his daughter. Providing the commentary and atmosphere for the tale are such PBS stalwarts as Jim Lehrer and Charlie Rose, and luminaries like Josh Bell and Bernadette Peters. Even kids' fave Arthur gets involved.

Susan Savage provides the PBS mantra: "There's more than one side to a story and you deserve to hear them all."

It's a great commercial for its crossover potential. It's also heart-warming, inspiring, and patently false.

If PBS truly believed that we as its audience deserves to hear all sides of a story, they would have stood up to that Puritanical witch who's in charge of the Department of Education. She complained about an episode of 'Postcards From Buster' in which Buster Bunny visited a family on a Vermont farm, where he learned all about collecting sap from maple trees and how to transform it into syrup.

What problem did Witchie-Poopoo have with the episode?

The family Buster visited had two mommies. No daddy.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings denounced an episode of children's TV series "Postcards from Buster" in which its rabbit star Buster Baxter is shown visiting a lesbian couple and their children.

"Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the lifestyles portrayed in this episode," Spellings wrote to the president of PBS, shortly after her appointment. The secretary was previously an adviser to the White House.

Never mind that the kids in that family, and families like theirs all across the country, must feel as if had no worth in the eyes of their own government.

And then, like an ayatollah who would charge the families of those executed for the bullets, the Wicked Witch of the West Wing demanded that PBS pay back the money used to underwrite this episode.

The PBS logo shows a humanized letter "P".... It should be shown bending over and ready to take one for the President up the backside. PBS had no problem becoming Bush's bitch - even before the witch complained, Public TV pulled the episode. (But they did offer it to any station that requested it.)

This was just the opening salvo, tele-folks; just to see if they could get away with it. Ultimately I'm sure they'll put more pressure on PBS to censor other programs not to the likings of the far right hard-line whack jobs intent on forcing their narrow-minded fundamentalist views on everybody.

What I'm hoping for is that the people involved in this commercial will speak out against this campaign by the Bushies. Let's hear Jim Lehrer and Charlie Rose speak up for the diversity of America before some functionary in the Bush Junta comes after them.

Or have they already spoken out, but the press didn't cover it because it wasn't as "newsworthy" as the original story? Is it already too late? Will Norm Abram be rebuilding prisons for the PBS revolutionaries?

Am I too much of an alarmist over a cartoon bunny show?

It's only the beginning, pal. Stay tuned; it ain't th-th-th-that's all, folks!.

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

PS - If they're so concerned over the decline of "moral values" when it comes to Buster Bunny, then how come they never demanded that Donald Duck should put on pants???