What? No Hollywood Bashing?

America’s culture wars have been raging for years, whether you date their origins to Elvis Presley’s hip gyrations or the first time someone driving to work heard Howard Stern recounting his sexual fantasies about a topless babe on morning radio. But oddly, the battle cries have faded in recent months. The foot soldiers are tired, and the generals are keeping their powder dry.

How else to explain the eerie quiet in Washington at a time when movies have become raunchier (take “Scary Movie,” please!), hip-hop more foulmouthed (thank you, Eminem, for sharing your gay-baiting fantasies) and reality TV more nauseatingly explicit (coming soon to Court TV: true police confessions from rapists and murderers). Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s selection as Al Gore’s running mate prompted a flurry of Hollywood hand-wringing, but so far the vice presidential nominee has spent more time attacking George W. Bush’s tax-cut plan than the way women are tortured in “The Cell.”

Gore’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention targeted “big tobacco, big oil, the big polluters,” with only a passing reference to Hollywood excess. Likewise with Lieberman, whose acceptance speech took a one-sentence swipe at pop culture without even mentioning Hollywood by name. Otherwise, the recent conventions were a virtual pop culture love fest. The Democrats had a speech from Jimmy Smits and performances by Stevie Wonder, Melissa Etheridge and Los Lobos. The GOP had Jon Secada, Lee Greenwood, the Delfonics and the WWF’s The Rock, who introduced Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert.

How times have changed. Four years ago, if someone had said that Lieberman, Tipper Gore and Lynne Cheney would all be in the election spotlight, you would have expected some real fireworks. It certainly worked for Bob Dole, who made headlines by lambasting the movie industry for making such violent films as “Natural Born Killers” and “Money Train” when he was running for president in 1996. (Dole urged a boycott of “Money Train,” claiming--inaccurately, as it turned out--that the film had inspired a copycat incident involving the firebombing of a New York City subway tollbooth.)

After all, Tipper Gore catapulted to prominence in the 1980s as head of the Parents Music Resource Center, which pressured record labels into slapping warning stickers on albums with potentially objectionable lyrics. And if she loathed Twisted Sister back then, what on Earth does she think of Limp Bizkit or Lil’ Kim? She’s not saying.

As head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, wife of GOP vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney, pulled the NEH’s logo from a series called “The Africans,” condemning it as “an anti-Western diatribe” and charging that left-wing academics were producing a “generation of American ignoramuses.” She probably wouldn’t think that Americans are getting any smarter after watching the scene in “Scary Movie” in which an erect penis penetrates a man’s ear and comes out the other side.

During the 1990s, Lieberman was an outspoken critic of what he called Hollywood’s “increasingly toxic popular culture.” He suggested that TV shows like “Friends” and “Seinfeld” only be aired late at night when children couldn’t watch. During a debate over adopting a ratings system for TV programming he said, “You can put a label on garbage, but it is still garbage.” Joe, here’s a tip: If you think “Friends” is ribald stuff, definitely stay away from “Undressed,” MTV’s new nightly sex soap opera in which the teen characters are apparently contractually required to fondle each other every five seconds.

So why are politicians keeping mum at a time when pop culture seems to have reached new lows in raunchy humor and mean-spirited indecency? A few plausible theories:

* The attacks haven’t hit pay dirt. Politicians do issue-oriented polling the same way studios do test-screening research of their movies. And the public has voted--with their wallets. At the box office, raunch and rudeness are king. Eminem’s CD has sold 6 million copies. Outrageous youth comedies like “Scary Movie,” “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps” and “Road Trip” were all big hits this summer, just as “American Pie” and “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut” were last year.

* Move over, soccer moms. Eighteen-year-olds are the ultimate swing voters. Polls say they have no established party allegiance. So who’s going to woo the MTV Generation by attacking their favorite movies and hip-hop artists?

“People in America identify with entertainment more than they do with politicians,” says Danny Goldberg, head of Artemis Records and a veteran political activist. “In fact, far more people will watch entertainment TV, movies, pop music and video games each week than the amount of people who will vote in the November election. So if you’re talking about who’s out of touch with reality, it’s the people in Washington, not Hollywood.”

* You don’t have a hot political issue when both sides agree. In 1996, Dole went after the movie industry as a way of highlighting his differences with Bill Clinton, who had been the beneficiary of so many hefty Hollywood campaign contributions that he sometimes seemed like the fourth partner in DreamWorks. But with Lieberman on the ticket, Gore has been inoculated against being painted as being soft on Hollywood, especially with his wife’s past record as an opponent of objectionable music. Any big-time Hollywood bashing might also undercut George W. Bush’s efforts to moderate his party’s image.

“If there’s no differentiation, the attacks don’t play, because you don’t score any points if you can’t say that I’m different than the other guy,” says Recording Industry Assn. of America chief Hilary Rosen, the music industry’s leading defender in Washington. “This is one election where everyone who’s running for office seems to agree that in terms of entertainment standards that we’re not doing a very good job on this issue.”

* Washington has already won a partial victory. Even though Congress never passed any legislation, the threat of government scrutiny in the wake of the 1999 Columbine high-school murders put Hollywood on notice: If the industry didn’t make some attempt at self-policing the rampant violence in films, TV and video games, government might do it for them. And, in fact, violent films have been relatively few and far between this year, replaced in large part by raucous youth comedies.

“You could say Hollywood is in the post-Columbine era,” says Miramax executive Mark Gill, whose studio made “Scary Movie.” “Violence hasn’t completely disappeared, but there’s an increased sensitivity. You don’t see filmmakers going around screaming about NC-17-rated explicit violence scenes as often as they used to. People can debate the merits of youth comedies, but when you’re dealing with sex in an obviously comic context, it’s hard to say that they pose a dire threat to the culture.”

A lot of politicians have taken a cue from exasperated parents; they’ve turned their backs on pop culture. Lieberman has acknowledged in recent interviews that he rarely watches television. His criticism is largely based on staff summaries. Bush told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd last fall that he hadn’t been out to see a movie in five years. He listens to “quiet jazz on the radio” and ignores entertainment TV, preferring to watch baseball, which he called his favorite “cultural experience.” He says he liked the Beatles “before their weird, psychedelic period.”

The candidate who seems to have the most familiarity with pop trends is Al Gore. He’s still as square as a ‘50s TV dad, but he regularly rents movies, can croon George Strait songs and recently tried to give his image an injection of cool by hiring filmmaker Spike Jonze (“Being John Malkovich”) to make an informal documentary that aired at the convention.

For now, politicians seem to be handling Hollywood the way they handle regulating plane fares or long-distance phone charges--that is, letting the marketplace take care of itself. It’s an attitude that plays well in the entertainment business. One top record executive, asked about the homophobic and misogynistic lyrics on Eminem’s “Marshall Mathers LP,” responded by saying: “Hey, 6 million people can’t be all wrong.”

Eminem’s defenders have a point: He is to pop music 2000 what the Rolling Stones were in 1966 or Prince in 1982 or Nirvana in 1991: He’s the provocateur of the moment, a talented, inflammatory artist whose cartoonish misogyny is unsettlingly in sync with the spirit of a time when our most heralded film comedians--the Farrelly Brothers--can get a laugh out of showing a guy with a chicken stuck up his butt.

With a free country comes a free market. You hate MTV’s Tom Green, I’ll hate Dr. Laura. In today’s Hollywood, where a run of money losers will cost a studio chief his or her job, corporate responsibility isn’t to parents or politicians, it’s to the bottom line. Maybe our politicians have realized that the entertainment business is simply America at its most democratic extreme: the sugary-sweet Backstreet Boys sell as many CDs as Eminem; “Toy Story 2” was a huge hit--as was “Scary Movie.”

A lot of those pop-culture consumers are still too young to vote. But when they do, they won’t be looking for leadership from a candidate who trashes what comes out of their CD player or TV screen. Label it offensive or inspiring, but in America, people are pro choice about entertainment.