America. Laughingstock.

According to some, "Saving Private Ryan" is nothing more than a cursefest. That's all. Nothing more. Apparently no redeeming quality. Just a cursefest. More disturbingly, Oklahoma's newest Senator found Schindler's List to be ... ...titillating. You can't make this stuff up, people.

“ABC crossed the line by airing at least 20 ‘f’ words and 12 ‘s’ words during prime-time viewing hours!,” says the evangelical group American Family Association, which claims it has 2.3 million members and is one of the groups leading the revamped charge against “immorality”. “We believe ABC should have aired their salute to heroes without violating broadcast decency laws,” it said. Each TV station could face a fine of £18,000 if found to have aired “indecent” material. Under long-standing guide lines, profanity is banned from 6am to 10pm on America’s publicly owned broadcast channels, but not on cable channels. “It would clearly have been our preference to run the movie,” says Ray Cole, president of Citadel Communications, which owns three of the stations. “We think it is a patriotic, artistic tribute to our fighting forces.” Senator John McCain, a one-time POW in Vietnam, introduced Saving Private Ryan on Thursday. A maverick Republican and a former presidential candidate, he spent much of Thursday trying to stem the desertions. The film is nowhere near indecent, he says angrily. *** Another indication of the red culture scare is the action of one of the US’s newly elected politicians, Tom Coburn, a senator from Oklahoma, says Rich. As a state-elected politician, he attacked NBC in 1997 for encouraging “irresponsible sexual behaviour” and for taking “network TV to an all-time low with full-frontal nudity, violence and profanity”. His anger was prompted by the prime-time airing of another Spielberg film, Schindler’s List, about the Holocaust.