NEW YORK - More evidence of the centrality of "the children" in American life comes from the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA, pronounced "nit-suh"and run by nitwits), which recently
announced new regulatory standards for producing three-year-old crash test dummies, and just in time,
too. "The new dummy," the Federal Register notice reads, "part of the family of Hybrid III test dummies,
is more representative of humans than the existing Subpart C 3-year-old child dummy in our regulation."
How the new dummies will be tested "will be addressed in separate rulemaking proceedings."

They might be best used as an audience for the TV networks, who need all the help they can get to prop up
their sagging ratings. Now I don't watch much prime time network TV - I couldn't tell you the difference
between an Ally McBeal and an alley cat, though I am told there isn't much difference - because long ago it
became evident that the average network show is written for dummies, and probably by dummies.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the networks will try shore up their sagging rating by dishing up more
sex and raw language in the style of cable. It seems they are jealous of the popular success of HBO's "The
Sopranos." The Journal had to resort to ellipses and dashes to convey some of the dialogue now coming over
the network air waves. The president of CBS TV told the Journal that "The Sopranos" "goes places we would never go in a million years." No, it will probably just take five years, at the rate the networks are going.

Amazing as it seems today, in 1972 a network canceled "Bridget Loves Bernie," a situation comedy about an
Irish Catholic girl married to a Jewish boy, because of protests against inter-religious marriage from
religious groups. It was the highest rated show ever to be canceled after just one season. But the stars of the
short-lived show, a Jew and a WASP, then married in real life, with their marriage lasting about four times
as long as the average Hollywood marriage.

In 1979 Johnny Carson trumped the NBC network censors by telling the story of Jimmy Carter saying that if Ted
Kennedy ran for President, he (Carter) would "whip his ass." "There's no punch line," Carson followed up. "I
just wanted to tell the story because the network censors can't stop you from quoting the President."
Especially at 11:30 p.m. Today, of course, the networks can say they're only following the example, and not
just the words, of the President.

Certainly censorship is not to be embraced, but self-government requires that people be able to govern
themselves with some degree of responsibility, and if the networks lack any principle of restraint, the
support for censorship will steadily grow. One of the ironies of the liberal leanings of Hollywood is that
censorship is more likely to come from Democrats than Republicans. It was Senator Al Gore, after all, who
held hearings deploring how TV "strip mines the minds of our children." Maybe he'll propose back-door
censorship: If we equip TVs with air bags, then only three-year-old crash test dummies can watch safely. It
is the audience the networks deserve.

-- Steven Hayward