It’s day nine of America’s titty crisis, and the country remains on high alert. Award shows and other celebrity events are being guarded by SWAT team snipers and broadcast on a five-second delay in case another pop diva or publicity-hungry actress decides to whip out a breast in mixed company. Immigration has closed the border to anyone traveling from Brazil, France or other boob-friendly nations. Attorney General John Ashcroft was last seen cowering in a closet, asking his mommy to “make the bad brown nipple go away.”

Despite these precautions, I’m afraid the damage has already been done. There’s no denying that the festivities and seasonal cheer of Groundhog Day were dashed by the previous day’s Half Time atrocity. The financial market fallout threatens to throw America’s economy back off the rails just as it was recovering from the disastrous effects of George Bush’s election in 2000. And millions of decent, law-abiding, church-going, beer-soaked, injury-list-gambling Super Bowl fans will be forever scarred by their two-second exposure to Janet Jackson’s right-hand knocker.

Reaction in Canada has been typically muted, as it always is in these moments of international calamity. Once again, the silent neighbour to the north has refused to step up to the plate and take part in the panic mongering and histrionic overreaction like a good citizen of the world. Instead, Canada spent the entire morning of February 2nd doing little more than debating the merits of Jackson’s choice in nipple ring before returning its attention to self-centred local issues of the day like hockey, Belinda Stronach’s money, hockey, Paul Martin’s money, hockey, and of course, whether the Liberal and the New Conservative parties can settle their differences by playing a game of hockey. For money.

Oh sure, Canada may point to how their broadcasters offer unbridled cussing on prime time television, or how you can hardly flip past the French stations at any hour of the day without seeing a tit. But that sort of smut isn’t going to fly with the FCC, whose job it is to make sure the public airwaves are safe for parents and their children to gather together in front of their television and spend some wholesome quality time watching Paris Hilton suggestively milking a cow, Richard Hatch picking sand out of his optically blurred foreskin, and thousands of Iraqi civilians being bombed to mush in the name of a little White House fib. Yes, the FCC will save us all, because they’re our front line of defense in this war on basic human anatomy.

They know, as I do, that this world will never be safe for our children until the only breast they see is the one stuck in their mouth when it’s time to feed the baby. But we’re working on a way to optically blur that one as well.

While you weather the crisis, enjoy some damn dirty apes.