Last fall an Ohio woman blamed Besvis and Butt-head for her 5-year-old son's setting fire to their trailer home, killing her 2-year-old daughter. Neighbors say the family did not get cable, yet Beavis and Butt-head was widely reviled as evidence of TV's corrupting influence on the young and its supposed role in promoting violence.

In February a New York-based watchdog group, Morality in Media, said Beavis and Butt-head might be responsible for the death of an 8-year-old girl, killed when a bowling ball was thrown from an overpass onto a New Jersey highway and struck her famity's car. The group cited an episode of the show in which Beavis and Butt-head loaded a bowling ball with explosives and dropped it from a rooftop. "We're not saying there is a connection", said Betty Wein, a Morality in Media spokesperson, saying there was a connection. "But certainly the coincidence is difficult to ignore."

Newspapers report this "coincidence" prominently, and CNN and local TV stations ran clips from Beavis and Butt-head next to photos of the child before she died. As it turned out, the 18-year-old arrested for throwing the bowling ball didn't get cable, either. It was only when the local prosecutor announsed there was no evidence of a connection between the killing and the programm that the media withdrew.

"It saddens and amazes me," sais the show's creator,Mike Judge. "To link the program to a tragedy like that with absolutely no evidence - it's just ubelievable."

"It gets into your head," Judge sais. "You get an idea that you think will be funny, and then you think, 'But look at how they'll react to it.' I've gotten so tired that I don't feel like fighting big battles."

The voices in Judge's head are precisely what civil libertarians call the "chilling effect" - fears and pressures that dull or still a creative or reportorial voice. MTV and its parent corporatio, Viacom, have contributed to this. After the Ohio controversy, the network moved the show to a later time slot and muted it's content. "Some of MTV and Viacom's top people are scared to death," says a producer connected to the program. "People have no idea how many episodes have been altered by network executives, toned down. And the creepy thing is that lots of the attacks come from the press, the people who are always yelling about freedom." Even the liberal weekly The Nation, in an editorial agaist government censorship, called the show "repulsive" and essentially blamed it for the death of the child in Ohio.

Judge says he can't figure out what makes adults - especially those who can remember their own parents panicking about Elvis or long hair - so hostile to his program. For many baby-boom parents, it seems, Beavis and Butt-head is not just another dumb show they can't stand but a symbol of all the dumb stuff they can't stand that pours into the house through these wretched TV and computer screens.

The most striking thing about the furor over the program, however, is that it's supposed to be funny. It gives kids an opportunity to laugh at themselves and us. Grown-ups don't get that this programis unique and valuable precisely because it brilliantly lampoonns the qualities it is accused of propaganding - stupidity, sexism, the simple-minded, macho-rites of adolescence.

Accusations like those against Beavis and Butt-head make life easier for politicians and journalists who don't know or want to know how to tackle the real issues that affect children in America. The program is currently unavailable to younger children, driven off its earlier time slot to protect them from its bad influence. Guns, drugs, overcrowded schools and homes without parents are still plentiful and accessible.