Get the angle La Vanguardia takes on this particular pair of stories from Wednesday, April 14. The first one is about a new DVD player that can be programmed to cut out or bleep over scenes of violence, sex, or bad language from the movies it plays. Sounds fine to me. If you want this kind of DVD player, you can buy one. If you don't, you don't have to. Nobody's forcing anything on anybody. In fact, this ought to be good for the movie business, because now conservative parents will allow their kids to see PG or R DVDs in the knowledge that the unpleasant stuff has been cut out by this new player.

So Alex Barnet's headline is "USA introduces DVD with digital censorship". Here we go again. It's that stupid but oft-repeated meme that Americans are rigidly Puritanical. Says Alex:

The product reflects the worries of some parents about some content, even in movies directed at a family audience, tolerated by the industry. It arrives on the market at a time when there is an obvious offensive in the United States in favor of the censorship of audiovisual products. One only needs to remember Janet Jackson's flash during the broadcast of the Super Bowl or the delay with which the Oscars were broadcast in order to control it.

Oh, jeez. Everyone's already forgotten about Janet and the Super Bowl--the Vanguardia must be the only news medium in the world still trying to keep that story alive-and as for the five-second electronic delay, it's widely used on almost all radio and television broadcasts to make sure nobody on Al Franken's talk show calls anyone else a fucking son of a bitch on the air.

Look, people, this is not censorship. Censorship is the exercise of what they call prior restraint. That means if you want to say or write or broadcast something, you have to submit it to a government censor, who can then eliminate the parts that are not permitted. You do not have to do this in the United States. The government cannot stop you from expressing your ideas except in certain very specific and narrowly defined cases (e.g. you can't advocate the armed overthrow of the government of the United States, you can't make false advertising claims about a product, you can't lie under oath, you can't incite a riot, you can't make a bomb threat whether true or not, you can't spread insider information in the financial markets, you can't maliciously publish or broadcast a false story that damages someone's reputation, you can't threaten anyone with violence, et cetera.) These cases are also generally reflected in the laws of other democratic states, often with certain local exceptions; for instance, in Germany you can't spread any sort of Nazi ideas and propaganda, while in the US you can as long as you don't openly incite people to violence. British libel laws are considerably more restrictive than their American counterparts.

Anyway, now get this one. The headline is "Beckham's affairs endanger his image in the US."

Sorry, but 98% of the American population has never heard of either David Beckham or his wife, and frankly there's no reason for them to: Beckham plays a sport we don't like or care anything about (imagine Barry Bonds endorsing a product in France and you'll see what I mean), and his wife isn't particularly attractive or interesting, nor has she ever done anything to become well-known in the States, since the Spice Girls went over like a lead balloon over there.

This is going to sound very arrogant but I think it's true: in the show business world you're not a real big star until you've hit it big in the States. That's why no soccer players or formula one drivers are really big international stars. Other examples: Kylie Minogue, the Pet Shop Boys or whatever the latest British pop music fad is, Oasis, Cliff Richard, all French, Italian, German, or Spanish pop bands. Catherine Zeta-Jones had to marry Michael Douglas to get her chance; Penelope Cruz had to be Tom Cruise's beard for two years; Antonio Banderas had to start something up with Melanie Griffith, of all people.

An orchestrated publicity campaign against the Becks or a sex scandal of surprising proportion. This is the question that millions of people in the United States are asking about the great media star of world soccer, David Beckham.

If you substituted the word "thirty-eight" for the word "millions of", or the words "Great Britain" for the words "the United States", that might be fairly accurate.

During a period in which tolerance in sexual matters is below minimum in the United States, and censorship clamps down on anyone who forgets, the scandal of Beckham and his alleged lovers could leave him out of the game before it even starts.

Huh? There's NO censorship and the attitude toward sexual matters has been becoming freer, more open, and more tolerant in the United States over the last hundred years, with big jumps in the Twenties, the Sixties, and the Nineties. In fact, the US led the way in the Sexual Revolution, and sixty or seventy years ago many Europeans and especially Latin Americans were criticizing us for being too sexually open, and especially for the degree of power that women had in the US.

Jeez, the big political question now is whether gay marriages should be legal, with lots of people arguing on both sides. There are countries where the big political question is whether gays should be stoned to death or not. Also: in the United States the divorce and abortion laws are much more liberal than those in many European countries, and Spain is the prime example. Abortion on demand here is technically not available, though it is widely practiced; you need to get a doctor to certify that you will have psychological problems if you have the baby. That's not real hard to do. Divorce is technically available but in practice is difficult to get; it requires a long legal process and a lot of money. That's why so many forty-fiveish people around here are "separated" but not legally divorced; "separated" is a fairly easily obtainable legal status available here which means you can screw around again and not be cheating, and that some court has divided up the property and the kids, but you're still legally married. Talk about societal hypocrisy. Jeez. Just legalize abortion and divorce if you're going to permit them de facto.

The story goes on to say that Beckham is going to appear in the new version of the movie "The Pink Panther", though the deal hasn't been signed yet. Aha. Now let's put two and two together and play conspiracy theory. This story is bylined Maria Ortega in Los Angeles, which means that she was fed the idea for this piece from Beckham's and/or "The Pink Panther's" LA publicity people. The problem is that nobody has heard of Beckham in the US; he's not a big star there. As the story says, Beckham does advertisements for Pepsi, Adidas, and Vodafone. I know Adidas doesn't do much business in the US (it's Austrian, I believe) and I don't think Vodafone is there at all. As for Pepsi, has anyone in the States actually seen Beckham in a Pepsi commercial over there?

So what they want to do is make him a big star in the States. Step One is get him heard of. A good way to get lots of publicity is to cook up a sex scandal; it doesn't even have to be true. But people might care if they can somehow get the story to actually break in the US. Then Step Two is get him in a movie that American people might actually go see. That'll establish his name, at least sort of, and if the movie does well Beckham might get a shot at another, perhaps a starring role this time. His people are thinking Arnold Schwarzenegger here, turning his sports career (which will be over in 5-7 years) into a movie career. I'll bet Step Three is dumping his wife, who just is not going to make it in the States, or even in Spain, and picking up a Hollywood actress. Expect this within 1-2 years; Penelope Cruz would be an excellent choice, because she's popular in the US and in Spain, and it would definitely be in Beckham's interest to stay with Real Madrid for a while.

In the United States the sexual slips of show business stars are not forgiven, and proof of that is what is happening to Kobe Bryant, the star of the LA Lakers basketball team, who has seen all the companies he advertised for break off with them after he was accused of rape by a young woman in Colorado.

WHAT? Is this woman crazy? Sexual slips are a great way to get publicity and attention, especially in the US. As long as your practices don't include dead people, animals, or kids, you'll have no problems. Look at Madonna or Britney Spears or Jennifer Lopez. These women are notorious for their bedroom antics and they're also extremely popular (well, Madonna is getting close to the has-been level). Look at Hugh Grant and his experience with the hooker (played up; Hugh needed publicity) or Eddie Murphy and his deal with the transvestite hooker (hushed up; too weird; Eddie got away with it) or George Michael and his getting busted for soliciting in a public bathroom (played up; George needed publicity and was a has-been among straights anyway). Look at Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston, for God's sake. Harrison Ford and Clint Eastwood and I don't know who else have traded in old wives for new ones and nobody cares. It's rumored that Cruise and Kevin Spacey and whoever are gay and that doesn't hurt their careers; hell, Ellen and Rosie and Anne Heche got lots of good publicity for coming out as lesbians.

Here are the only people I can think of who got in real trouble and why:

Michael Jackson. People are not fans of repeat child molesters, which is what the cops say Jackson is.

Kobe Bryant. He's not in trouble for having sex with some girl. He's in trouble for allegedly raping her. There's a minor difference. See also Tyson, Mike.

Woody Allen. Everybody was creeped out by the Soon-Yi thing. The universal reaction was, "That's just gross".

Pee-Wee Herman. He creeped everyone out, too. What a freak. First public masturbation and then kiddie porn.

Roman Polanski. Uh, people, the girl was thirteen years old. There are three words for that: Statue Tory Rape.

Ted Kennedy. Drove drunk off a bridge and drowned a campaign worker; attempted cover-up for several hours. Expelled from Brown University for cheating. Notorious for throwing drunken parties after which women claim to be raped. Oops, sorry, what am I saying? Massachussets, home of Representatives Barney Frank, whose roommate was running a gay prostitution ring out of his house, and Gerry Studds, who got in trouble for seducing male congressional pages--both were reelected--loyally elects Big Ted to the Senate every six years anyway.

Last paragraph.

The press, nonetheless, has not ceased its attacks. "Bla Bla bla", said the Daily Express, and the Daily Mirror said, "Bla bla Bla".

Uh, yes. Those are British tabloids. No one in America reads them, absolutely no one. The question is whether Beckham is going to make his way into the American market or not. To do that he needs to get into the American supermarket tabloids. That, of course, is what this is all about. It's a nice publicity strategy by Beckham's press people: get yourself accused of a minor sex scandal that's not really damaging and parlay that publicity into a movie role.