Imus In The Boring

Well, sooner or later, it had to happen: the imbeciles who dither for a living noticed that Don Imus has a gutter mouth.

Frankly, I'm sick to death of it. Not merely because it's completely disproportionate, but because we've managed to take the "Free Speech" movement of the 'Sixties and turn it into a bizarre joke that makes our children sneer and giggle at us.

P.C. and Tokenism are dead, kids. Face facts. The meaning leeched out long ago, and now they're just accessories in the Politics of Personal Destruction Toolkit. (tm)

When the most vicious, anti-human group of "Republicans" ever seen this side of a lynching in Alabama manage to hypnotize a moron-suffused national media with tokens like Condi Rice, Alberto Gonzales and, yes, Colin Powell, one can only shake one's head in disgust.

Don't we "get" that they have ZERO interest in the human rights, equality and meritocracy that their token minstrel show is allegedly broadcasting as a metamessage?

Come on. Are you stupid?

So, too, when a PC firestorm erupts, like a drunken Mel Gibson maundering on about Jews, or Michael Richards calling his black hecklers 'niggers,' (and no, not the "N-word." Jesus. Are we three years old, here?) one has to ask: what the hell was the point of Lenny Bruce dying for your sins? What was the purpose of "expanding" the language? So that we could listen to fart jokes on TV?

Bravo. (Insert the sound of a sarcastic single clapping in a very large and empty gymnasium or auditorium.)

And doesn't it ever occur to anyone that this brouhaha over nothing neatly whitewashes far uglier crimes of privilege and prejudice?

Yes, Imus is an offensive asshole. All you have to do is listen to the pompous prick sometime. But The Usual Suspects are out in force because he called the losing team in the women's NCAA basketball championships "nappy headed 'hos."

And not ONE of the assholes even manages to figure out what's ACTUALLY offensive about the comment. I'll tell you: It is utterly beyond the pale to make fun of the vanquished, to denigrate, belittle or otherwise stomp on someone who's made it to the championship level, only to lose to a slightly better team. Fine, it wasn't their night. That's one of the tough lessons that we all learn in life.

But sportsmanship is important too. In fact, it's one of the building blocks of civil society. But in THIS "civil society" we are, instead, obsessed with Don Imus' theft of derogatory language from Black culture, and how "racist," it is. NOW has jumped into the fray, as well, upset that a Man has denigrated Women.

OK. Do ANY of you assholes ever listen to the 24/7 hate radio that wafts across our airwaves? The Rush Limbaughs, the Glenn Becks, the Sean Hannitys, the Michael Savages?

On ANY given day, Michael Savage dishes out more hate-filled derogation than Imus, Richards and Gibson could manage in a year. Put together.

So WHAT the hell are we defending?

The only issue here that OUGHT to be under discussion is the increasing coarseness of a society whose basic rules of fairness are under unrelenting attack, not what classification has derogated which classification using which slang argot.

[Parenthetical: How incredibly unimaginative are non-Blacks in America that we collectively steal their every subcultural fad, music and/or slang term? And why do they never make any money off the deal? Why is "Black Street Culture" the vehicle that buys Rolls Royces but rarely for Black street persons? Hmmm.]

So, Don Imus tried to talk Black, and managed to sound like an insensitive imbecile? Wake up and smell the coffee. Meantime, the minstrel show of the Maladministration continues. And the scandals disappear from the front pages, and the children die vain and pointless deaths in the streets of Baghdad, and Fallujah, and a hundred other places in a country that most of us couldn't have pointed out on a globe in 1989.

I have to think, at times, that the "gotcha" press is being manipulated with this crap as another smokescreen for yet another crime. Certainly there is no proportionality to it. We can't even get the press corps to print FACTS, but suddenly America is RIVETED on the BURNING question of whether Don Imus should be FIRED!?

Of course they won't fire him. Even if they did, he'd be back after a short hiatus, like Marv Albert after his little sex-and-hooker scandal a couple years ago.

Why? Because significant numbers of the selfsame self-appointed prudish pricks LOVE the asshole and can't live without hearing him sling the auditory equivalent of feces at the high and the mighty every morning.

And today, as he cried crocodile tears ("I'm a good person," he said. He just did a baaaaaaaaad thing. Sniffle. Sniffle.) MsNBC announced that there would be a 'two week' hiatus for the early morning simulcast of his reptilian creepfest ... BUT they had to delay the "suspension" for a week because of a planned charitable fundraiser already scheduled.

So, the Bad Boy must do his Good Thing, and THEN we slap him on the wrist.

Gotcha.

And we play this moronic race card dancing down the same road that made Clarence Thomas the cascading disaster that he is. Hell, even the Catholic Church has gotten into the act, screaming ANTI-Catholic! And the Mormon Church (the Scientology of the 19th Century) screams "Anti-Mormon!" and O'Really (sic) screams about the "War On Christmas!" and fundies scream about discrimination against Christians, and the only losers in this vast circle jerk are the gays who are still the objects of murderous hatred, and the First Amendment, still enshrined in the American mind as:

"I believe in the First Amendment, BUT ..."

Well, fuck you, children. Fuck you all. The PRICE that we pay for freedom of thought and expression is that we have to endure fart jokes on TV. That we have to endure idiot skinheads yelling "nigger!" (and that we think it's OK for blacks to yell "nigger!" with just as much hate, but it's OK because ... ). No. As that Hate Poster Child of the Mindless Right, the ACLU, still remembers, it is UNPOPULAR speech that must be protected.

And, if Don Imus is unpopular speech, kiddies, he'd have been cancelled long ago. We WANT Imus, just as we want Rush, and Savage and Medved and all the other haters, and the PeeCee Prudes, as well.

But PLEASE don't pretend that you're protecting anybody's rights by banning words and thoughts and speech. (Trust me, sending it underground in the Seventies engendered the KKK version of the GOP that we suffer under today). You cannot live in a society that savages anyone and anything with a feral glee that no prior society advanced beyond troglodyte would endure or accept and THEN turn around and say that Don Imus has gone "beyond the pale." That Mel Gibson is "beyond despicable" or that Michael Richards is a raving Klansman.

Either commit yourself to civil society and civil discourse (with the understanding that we will have to endure the rude, the crude and the hateful, rather than endure the monsters that censorship spawns) or else shut up. And get the hell off my airwaves.

If there was one thing that I've learned about censorship in the last thirty years, it's this: Censorship is ALWAYS done in the name of somebody else. It is NEVER done based on what the Censor thinks. "What if CHILDREN should hear this?"

Etcetera. You cannot maintain a society that believes in freedom of speech and constantly crucify anyone who says a naughty word. You cannot behave like the non-green monkeys in the experiment and then pretend that you're "standing up" for decency.

Imus is an idiot and I tuned his nasty form of vicious character assassination out a long time ago.

And so I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone with a clue would be shocked, SHOCKED to hear that Don Imus says really hateful, hurtful vicious things. And why there would be such a HUGE reservoir of virgin ears out there in Media Land playing "monkey-see, monkey-do" all day, trying to top one another in their condemnation of WHAT was said, without ever getting the CORE of what was said.

Had he denigrated those basketball players without referring to their gender or their race, that would be OKAY??!??

God what a damned and useless generation of vipers we are.

But at least nobody can call us "nappy headed 'hos."

Courage.