The American Spectator

p> BIMBOWATCH br> I have been waiting, the forty years that I have been in Italy, to read something like Francis X. Rocca’s article (“That Idiotic Television”) about the bimbomania of Italian TV. I have, in vain, encouraged friends who are Rome correspondents for American publications to write about the bizarre Italian quiz shows in which as many as eighteen semi-nude, mindlessly smiling, mute bimbos are on stage from the beginning to the end of the show. They neither sing nor dance; they just stand there. The government-owned TV, one suspects, is paying them for more than just standing there. The Italian TV bureaucracy obviously enjoys fringe benefits. Italian taxpayers apparently have nothing to say about their squandered contributions to bimbomania. /p>

Years ago, when Richard Gere appeared on national Italian TV to make an appeal for Tibet, a horde of nearly naked, mindlessly smiling, bimbos flooded the stage. The stunned and overwhelmed Gere exclaimed “What is going on here?” to the embarrassment of his Italian interpreter who was accustomed to Italian TV bimbomania. Gere continued, “I have come to make a serious appeal, and unless you get these people out of here, I am leaving.” That was the end of the cheesecake spectacle. The overkill of Italian bimbomania appalled a leading world sex-symbol!

When an Indian actor, most popular in Italy, and his English wife were interviewed on Italian TV, the interviewer insisted that after their high praise of Italy that they also express what they disliked. Only after considerable pressure, the English wife reluctantly stated that she could not understand how in an allegedly Catholic country national TV could reduce hordes of women to ridiculous sex objects. She implied that the harems of the Muslim world seemed to have spilled over into the Italian mass-media.

The English-speaking world has nothing like the mute, do-nothing, Italian TV bimbos, because, I suspect, that the women of this cultural world would not accept such demeaning treatment.

p>In a country where the Catholic church has something to say about everything, one fails to understand the absolute the silence of Italian prelates and clergy about the degrading role of Italy’s TV bimbos. The most charitable assumption is that they have no time for watching TV, or are too poor to afford TV sets. br> Sincerely, br> — John Navone , S.J. /p>