Aging Madonna still too damn scary for TV

I was so pleased that NBC saw fit to run the full 2-hour video of Madonna’s Confessions Tour on Wednesday night. Even I was surprised that I attended this music spectacle a few months ago when it rolled through Boston and certainly felt I got my money’s worth when among other things Madonna:

1) Arrived on stage inside of a giant
disco ball that dropped from the
ceiling,

2) Did an erotic bump and grind on a saddle suspended in mid-air to "Like a Virgin"
and

3) Made a bunch of political statements with her music that probably aren’t really
quite as deep as she thinks they are. But hey, she’s Madonna, what do you want?

The downside of seeing the show on network TV however, was realizing how American culture has become so lame that even a 48 year-old married mother of two (three?) can be easily judged as far too scandalous for the common viewer. The network apparently were the ones who made the decision to not show Madonna rising from the stage nailed to a giant disco ball cross while singing “Live to Tell” and later in the midst of “I Love New York” also cut out her comment which replaces the lyric “Just go to Texas, isn’t that where they golf?” with “Just go to Texas, and you can suck George Bush's dick”

It’s lame enough that NBC is so afraid of some kind of Christian backlash that they knocked out Madonna’s big fat crucifixion scene (as if any of these people had tuned in to begin with?), but why is a network deciding to chop out Madonna’s comments on Bush? Would Fox be so quick to cut out the political views of any of their ultra-conservative commentators (no matter how profane)? Or is that kind of language only OK in Girls Gone Wild ads? Obviously the lady herself doesn’t much care if anyone knows her politics – she changes this lyric at every show she does. Regardless of NBC's censoring, some markets were still just too plain scared to show the show. In Chattanooga, Knoxville, Reno, Ft. Wayne, Bloomington, and Atlanta TV bigwigs too offended by a number of “questionable scenes and content” opted instead to go for footage of the local aquarium among other sure-fire ratings getters.

At the end of the day I guess we can all thank NBC’s censors to be there to save us from Madonna being... Madonna. Even approaching half a century, there’s still something about her that scares the hell out of people. Well that sounds like something to be admired.