April Fools Day

I only listen to a few radio stations. On April Fools Day I listened to three, WXRT, a rock station, Howard Stern on my way home from dropping off Vickei at work, and NPR. Of these three stations, XRT and Howie were doing jokes based on the idea that the FCC was going to start massively censoring their shows. Howard Stern didn't even go on the air for the first hour and a half. Two purposefully lame DJ's took his place. XRT's normal tag line is the "Chicago's Best Rock." They changed it to "Decent Rock." Everyone was saying it all of a sudden. You gotta be decent, they kept playing songs with swear words. They either bleeped the words out or a guy would say some random word that didn't fit with the rest of the lyrics. I don't know if other radio stations also made April Fools jokes along these lines but I'd be willing to bet there were quite a few.
Both of the jokes were funny. But they were scary too. I guess a whole bunch of people went apeshit, flooding both shows with angry and/or frightened calls. This is very telling.
How a society reacts to sarcasm is a good measuring stick of how bad things are. In this case I think it's obvious people are REALLY nervous about what lengths these Bush folks are willing to go to enforce their minority beliefs on the population as a whole. It didn't seem impossible at all that they would pull Howard Stern without so much as a warning. It's happened before. We're all so inundated with news we'd be pissed for a week and then something else insane would come up and we'd all forget. I think we were right to be worried, Powell's kid is a nutball. The President is so stupid he won't come in front of the 9-11 commission, even in closed session, without his puppetmaster Cheney. This is not the kind of man who's going to go to the mat for free speech, indeed, if the senate passed a bill turning over total control of all TV to Karl Rove, I have no doubt Bush would sign it.
I really have one thing to say about all of this.
"Four legs good. Two legs better."