Bottoming out

Those who worry about the depths to which this thing called modern culture can sink need worry no more. Rock bottom has been reached. From here, there’s no place to go but up.

This epochal event occurred Monday night, 9 p.m. (8 Central), on the UPN television network, on the premiere of a new sitcom called “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer.” Those who missed it should count themselves among the lucky, but they also, as members of this society, should be deeply embarrassed that the latest from TV land is a parody — hard as this is to believe — of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal set in Abraham Lincoln’s White House.

See the Great Emancipator portrayed as a buffoon, more concerned about the on-line sex chat he’s having via the telegraph than he is about the Civil War and the fate of the Union. See the tragic yet devoted Mary Todd Lincoln presented as a depraved harpy with hairy armpits. See both of those numerous times. Ulysses Grant as a besotted pervert. Stonewall Jackson as a dimwit with latent homosexual tendencies.

Worst of all, see the title character, Desmond Pfeiffer, the largest, laziest, most conniving yet cleverest black man since Amos and Andy split up. Hear the gags about that funniest of subject matter, slavery. “Get your feet off the table,” a smug White House staffer tells Desmond. “The slaves haven’t been emancipated yet.”

What’s worse is that this half-hour of dreck isn’t United Paramount Network at its most abysmal. The original premiere episode was yanked at the last moment after numerous civil rights groups and the Los Angeles City Council protested its even higher slavery-as-humor content. Yanked, but not killed; UPN is considering rescheduling it.

It’s tempting to just ignore this, to say it’s just a question of the nation’s No. 6 network wanting to be No. 5 and being willing to take the low road to get there. After all, Hollywood has been pumping mindless sex and violence into the American home for years. Now it’s just moved on to trashing this nation’s greatest president, trivializing its greatest crisis and snickering at its greatest shame. Switching channels provides immediate relief, but there’s no comfort, knowing what lurks in these newly plumbed depths.