Decent Man in an Indecent City

By Joel Stein

In high school, I was in the Key Club, the national Honor Society, the Thespian Society, the science club, the French club and a very small, special club that hung out in my basement on Friday nights to do secret projects like pressing those two buttons on the cable box to try to unscramble Cinemax, which wound up leaving me with damaging, Picassoesque concepts of the female form. My hard work helped get me into college. So when I heard New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was organizing a Decency Commission, it sounded like the kind of resume padding I could finally use to score a job at Newsweek and get out of this hellhole.

The idea for the committee began because Giuliani was disgusted by a photographic interpretation of the Last Supper that depicts Jesus as a topless woman, on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Giuliani is right to seek out decent New Yorkers to determine what art is appropriate for our city-run museums. One man cannot make these decisions alone, especially if he happens to be a married man with a girlfriend, went to the Sopranos premiere party last Wednesday and often shows up in drag at public events. I, on the other hand, take the lint out of the Laundromat dryer after I use it.

My mind was teeming with suggestions I could offer the committee. My first idea was that we should call it the League of Decency and get cool names, spandex outfits and a hall with a giant videophone wall. My second idea was that we get paid lots of money and watch porn all day and complain about how indecent it is. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was the kind of person who could make New York a more decent place, with fewer pictures of naked women as Jesus and more pictures of naked women as cheap whores. I called the mayor's office. Seven times. And no one there was able to give me any information, though they kept promising to call back and never did. I think I know the first task for the League of Decency.

So I did what all smart high school kids do when they can't win the presidency of an existing club: I started my own. Figuring the best place to begin cleaning up is your own home, I decided to start a committee to decent-ize my own columns, which might, for example, get rid of "whores" in the middle of the preceding paragraph. And the "watch porn" thing in that same paragraph. And the Cinemax stuff up top.

I appointed four founding members: Nancy Kelem, a reader who canceled her TIME subscription owing to the indecency of my columns; Nancy's 87-year-old mother, who, not knowing about her daughter's feelings, keeps clipping out my columns and mailing them to her; Sandra Bernhard, who hung up on me during an interview and then called my boss demanding I be fired; and my mother, because she totally freaks every time I mention her.

As of Friday, none of the committee members, not even my mother, had called me back. But I hope, within just a few weeks, to deliver a cleaner, decenter column, perhaps about Bush's tax proposal or the dangers of putting Q-Tips inside your ear. But until then, I'm going to the museum. I hear they have pictures of naked chicks.