TV makes CBers look like hicks 4.29.02

Today's column is a rant at DefCon level three. It's a mid-level spiel where five represents absolute fluff and one is the equivalent of thermonuclear tantrum. If I were to color code this column, I would have to give it kind of an orangeish/burnt sienna hew. So fair warning if you don't like to see people get all excited, turn away now.
Ready?
Wednesday night, I was cruising the "local" television news channels for mention of a young black girl from Kirn Junior High School girl whose locker was vandalized with profanity and epithets by slack-jawed racists who should be hunted down and rooted out of the Council Bluffs Public School system like the poisonous boll weevils they are.
I will not repeat their pin-headed, hate-soaked scribblings, it was the standard backwoods Neanderthal fare one expects from genetically-deficient bigots. Though I should apologize to Neanderthals because all evidence suggests they were smarter than this.
I won't, but I will acknowledge how cool 13-year-old Danyelle Lippert was for deciding to go back to school the next day to show everyone what a tough, smart Council Bluffs girl looks like. Good for you, Danyelle. I for one am glad to count you among the number of C.B.'s finer residents and I know too that many C.B. citizens, the one's who can actually stand upright, are equally proud of you. You are not alone so never surrender.
Rumor had it that one or two of the Omaha TV stations had been to Kirn after the Nonpareil's intrepid school reporter Paula Beebe and her flouncy sidekick Courtney Brummer.
So there I was switching back and forth between one story about swans eating Christmas lights in a park to another about the vague connection between the World Trade Center and the company hired to light the new First National Building wondering what kind of treatment this story was going to get.
It is a widely held belief among Council Bluffs residents that only the worst possible view of our city is ever given attention by our good neighbors and a hate crime at a junior high school surely qualified as the worst.
This story did not make the TV news and I was not sure whether to be relieved as a C.B. resident that my city was not made a goat over the issue while the Nonpareil had the story or to be offended that the issue was, by some rationale, deemed less important than swans eating Christmas lights in a park.
Here is where the real rant begins.
A Council Bluffs story did make the Channel 7 broadcast Wednesday night. One of our own, Marla Camerlinck, was so upset that our public library allowed her son to check out "American Beauty," an R-rated film, that she just had to get on an Omaha television station to make sure that all parents who are too lazy to go to the library with their kids know of this shocking state of affairs.
Marla said she thought her 13-year-old son was supposed to be at the library "to learn ... not to learn how to have sex," which I would describe as merely another kind of learning, but I digress.
Oh, where to start. First off Marla, any 13-year-old who HAS to learn about sex from a movie because he hasn't had "the talk" yet has bigger problems than watching a movie for grownups. Even without movies, there are books, National Geographic Magazines and my favorite growing up, the Sears catalog.
I grew up in a moral household isolated from the sins of the world with no cable OR a library card and still managed to figure out more about sex than appears in "American Beauty" by the time I was 12.
This issue is not about your kids mind being poisoned, Ms. Camerlinck. This issue is about making your hometown look foolish.
To start with, the world is not designed to make your job as a parent effortless. Every indication of sex in the world is not necessarily evil and our library IS a place of learning. Great films are a part of that process. If you had watched "American Beauty" with your kid you would have seen how advanced its multi-layered narrative structure and symbolic depiction of American culture through the eyes of diverse characters at odds with each other as well as themselves really is instead of jsut being shocked at the big "R" on the back of the tape.
Omaha TV stations will jump at any chance they get to come into our town to make us all look like a bunch of wicked, backward hayseeds who sit around stupefied and perplexed, pondering in our filth, hoisted on the petard of our own immorality.
People like Marla Camerlinck are willing and eager to appear on camera and make fools of themselves rather than attach a note to a library card. They make it easy for our friends across the river to do their nasty, little stories on us thus humiliating and degrading all of the good and moral people of Council Bluffs including a certain 13-year-old boy whose mommy went on TV because he might see a nipple.
Omaha TV stations will always carry these stories, especially with May sweeps coming up. Stories demonizing Council Bluffs make Omahans feel better about living in a third-rate Cleveland that's only claim to fame is meat they don't produce, their many telemarketing firms and the record number of over-the-road truck drivers who call Omaha home.
Do yourselves a favor, folks, and think about how bad you make us all look before you take your troubles across the river to get on the TV, 'kay?
- Greg Jerrett is a Nonpareil staff writer. His column runs on Wednesdays and Saturdays. He may be contacted at 328-1811, Ext. 279, or by e-mail at gjerrett@nonpareilonline.com.