If I wanted, every week I could tell you some new story about the latest skirmish in the culture wars. There is an endless supply of mischief-making artists desperate to offend the easily offended -- and an endless supply of moral guardians desperate to take offense and smite the offenders.

But just because the thrusts and parries are entirely predictable doesn't mean we should ignore them. Consider the latest battle.

In this corner, the rapper Eminem, whose dense, funny, foul-mouthed song ``The Real Slim Shady" was on an album that won three Grammys and sold many million of copies during the last year.

And in this corner is the Federal Communications Commission, with its new Bush Administration chairman. A couple of weeks ago, the FCC effectively declared it illegal for radio stations to play "The Real Slim Shady" -- even the bowdlerized, sanitized version of the song that a radio station in Colorado did play. The FCC wants that station, KKMG in Colorado Springs, to pay a fine of $7000.

It's not the money that concerns me - KKMG FM is owned by a $2 billion, 200-radio-station company, which is in turn part of even larger company.

It is, it really is, the principle of the thing.

An FCC fine for a single broadcast to which a single listener officially objected in Colorado means, of course, that now no radio station can afford to risk playing that record. In other words, a ban.

In its ruling, the FCC declared: "The edited version of the song contains…sexual expletives that appear intended to pander and shock."

There's no question that many of his lyrics - variously profane, misogynist, homophobic, and violent -- are shocking. And, like a lot of art during the last century and or so, intended to shock.

And intended to pander as well? For Washington politicians to condemn popular entertainment for pandering is just about as disingenuous as it gets. Pandering - to sentiment, to myth, to stereotype, to fantasy -- is what nearly all pop entertainment does. Just as pandering is what nearly all politicians do.

But principle aside, the ludicrous thing about this FCC indecency ruling is that in the age of the internet, where every song is available online to every kid 24/7, any broadcast ban of a hugely popular tune is futile.

In short, government censorship is not just wrong, it doesn't work. It didn't work when I was a little kid in 1964, and the governor of Indiana tried to ban the song "Louie, Louie" because he thought it was obscene. Nor did it work when I was a teenager, and the governor of Ohio ordered the radio stations in his state not to play "Ohio," the song about the killings of Kent State students protesting the Vietnam war. That only made Crosby Stills, Nash and Young and their long-haired devotees --like me -- feel even more counter-cultural, more righteously on the side of freedom.

And now that the FCC wants to ban Eminem's song from the airwaves? Sales of "The Real Slim Shady" are, of course, on the rise.

This is Kurt Andersen, in Studio 360.