Hilary Needs a Veep

I got an email from Babe the Blue Ox recently, and he said:

I write about the fatal weakness in the hillary candidacy. My thinking is that people really will vote for a woman, and the opponent will be weak, and everybody in America wishes her husband was still president. But, there is one potentially insurmountable obstacle: she has to have a running mate, and the public is going to experience deep mental trauma at the prospect of a man, any man, playing #2 to a woman. The juvenile american mind will see them as a kind of "couple," and in that context she will be cemented as a ball-busting battle-axe, and the VP will carry a mantle of shame, and people will have a secret revulsion that will result in a last minute inability to pull the lever in the voting booth.

But I think the solution really is Obama. The reason is, his blackness, jackie robinson-ness, his "rock star-ness" (why does everyone say this "rock star" thing about him? Does it just mean he's hot? He does have a kind of balls, I mean really in a sexual sense, that we haven't seen since Kennedy. But mainly, I think there is a subtle displacement here, where "rock star" stands for the real referent "sports star." The concepts of "Tiger Woods" and "Barack Obama" have secretly become confused in the collective psyche.), these category memberships overwhelm and obscure his "maleness," so that hillary can get away with it.

Imus is a *&%#!

Kinky, don't make me come kick your ass. Sorry you're close and personal with the big jerk there, but if you won't let sleeping dogs lie, I gotta come after ya. First of all, I view your charactarizing the name-calling of the Rutgers University black varsity basketball team as "nappy-headed hos" as ridiculous is the very problem we're trying to address here. They made it all the way to the finals on hard work, scholarship, integrity and guts. It's way beyond ridiculous. It's a national dialog we're in, we are trying to say it is not OK to knock people down like that. I don't care a whit about whatever extraneous information you're about to impart on me on what a righteous dude Imus really is, he's made a career of being a shock jock, and he was an asshole for doing what he did and you're one for trying to minimize it. It's not ridiculous to synthesize the key problem this country has in one offhand comment; it's criminal. And don't excuse it as an accident. The guy's a pro. It was calculated to hurt and to be funny, and it did and I'm sure to a few Bubba's it was, but the bottom line was that it revealed more than the guy bargained for. Don't make light of it. It made reference to a major belief in this country, that black people are scum. Remember Earl Butt's comment, which really was a joke, about black men wanting loose shoes and a warm place to take a dump? Or Buzzy Bavasi's comment that black people lack the fundamentals to be baseball managers? They both deserved to be fired for those comments, and were, but they aren't nearly as harsh as Imus's. Butt's was referencing an already existing joke. And Bavasi said he meant that blacks never got the education or training to be managers, which considering that he's the guy who brought up Jackie Robinson, I believe him. But tough; he still deserved to lose his job. Why? Cuz white people brought hundreds of thousands of black people over from Africa on slave ships, and you gotta deal with that fact. Whitey whipped and beat and sold human beings as property for hundreds of years, then treated them literally as 2nd class citizens for most of the remaining time. Once you've got that kind of a track record, you gotta skate on thin ice for awhile. It's only right. It's not ridiculous; it's deadly serious. And it's exactly what we don't need. It fuels the flames of hate, and it's not OK.

Your next point, that rappers make similar references, is actually not quite true, but anyway, so what? Two wrongs don't make a right. Who cares if there's a double standard.

Now on to your last point, raging against people (who are trying to protect people) as being PC. You write: "Political correctness, a term first used by Joseph Stalin, has trivialized, sanitized and homogenized America, transforming us into a nation of chain establishments and chain people." I beg to differ. I think political correctness, Stalin notwithstanding, has saved this country. Political correctness says it's not OK to rip people apart in public and deny them their humanity based on the color of their skin. America was created for the sole purpose of what today we would call being politically correct. Politically correct is one of those funny Republican words, like pro-life, or right to life, that makes you think you don't want to be on the wrong side of it. PC makes it sound like it's a sissy thing. An uptight thing. Freedom on one side -- PC on the other. But let's really look at what PC means.

Thanks to the constitution, and supreme court rulings upholding it, it's politically correct not to torture people. Also not to wiretap people, or search their homes without a search warrant. The Miranda Act, that forced cops to read people their rights before beating the shit out of them was one of the great politically correct acts of this country. Outlawing hate sppech: policitally correct The Emancipation Proclamation, saying black people were't actually 3/5ths a person: a great act of politicaly correctness. Giving women the right to vote: politically correct. Not calling Japanese people Japs, or outlawing signs that said: no jews, no dogs, no niggers, which my father remembers seeing all around Florida. That's the Policitaly Correct police doing their job. The voting rights act, saying you couldtn't administer a test to black people to see if they were allowed vote, also politically correct. It goes on and on. All the way back to the Pilgrims, coming to a new land where they could be free to worship as they wished, is really a desire to live in a land where there was respect for others, which is all the PC thing really amounts to.

See, PC is not about intolerance. It's about ensuring conditions where we actually can and do tolerate each other. PC is not about stopping people from being free. It's about stopping people who want to stop people from being free. To be PC is to question when we allow it to be OK to oppress each other. "The PC police are telling me I can't go fag bashing!" Yes! Exactly! They are limiting your freedom to be intolerant! This is a very complex notion in America, but it has a long philosophical background: you're free except to the extent you limit others' freedom. Or stating it backwareds, the only thing it's OK to hate is hate.

Kinky's piece to me really misses the point. There's nothing in it that addresses the core issue: There are some lines that when you cross them, they stay crossed. My grandpa used to always say: you can't take back something you said. True enough.

Hoe-Headed Shock Jock

You know, I've never liked the shock jock world. Insulated as it is from the real elbow jabs of mixing it up that harshly in person, the radio version of being the biggest loudmouth is kind of like the raging drivers who only act that way because they're behind the wheel. No one can hit you back. And if there's one thing in the world of media communications that's consistently underestimated by those of us who lament the passing of planet earth, it is the degree to which all of us human beings continue to be operated by our lizard brain.

I'm not saying we have to run the world from the brain stem, it's just that without a lot of yoga and massage, in one form or another, that's where things normally end up. Not that it's all Lord of the Flies, but we better be honest here: we're capable of being the most horrible and brutally monstrous animal of all the animals. Slapstick, practical jokes, insult humor, mob mentality, lowest common denominator, the rat race, dog eat dog, the world is really not funny. Why? Because we so easily can put our whole brilliant apparatus - and by default usually do - at the service of a largely fear-based, dinosaur-style brain. So there's a lot at stake in stoking those fires.

They're cheap laughs. Hit 'em when they're up. Hit 'em when they're down. Just hit 'em. Me, I learned early on to check myself. What's so funny here, I would ask. I get no pleasure from seeing the kid end up crying and run off alone. I feel something really hollow inside when I join the bully on the block. I don't like Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly or Newt Gingrich or Jim Scarborough, and I'd even be willing to exile Howard Stern if I could lose the rest of them. I just think once they're gone we won't miss them. And while I'm still a few One-A-Day vitamins away from being a true blue-haired old lady, I am starting to agree with my Grandma Pearl that the biggest problem facing America is a lack of civility. We're just not nice. Whether it's the jerk who just stole my parking spot, or all of us collectively and how we act abroad, the image of the American as a total jerk is not doing hardly anybody much good any more. Like I say, we have to check ourselves.

So when this hater Imus spiels his spleen like he did, I am already predisposed to rule: "Dude. You are fired." But when I think about this country even a little, and think about what Rosa Parks or Jackie Robinson were able to accomplish, there is nothing I am more proud of America for than how our country managed to honor these heroes (except perhaps what they did in the first place). And there is nothing I am more ashamed of than how much racism has existed and continues to exist. It's a 300+ year old scandal and what we continue to see and see amplified is that it's killing our country, both figuratively and literally. And when you think of what it must take to be a young black girl in this country, and make it to the college basketball finals, only to have one of the most well-known, talented, articulate, highly-paid radio personalities call them "nappy headed hos (whores)" - well! It blows my mind that the discussion is about whether to fire this man! The discussion should be about whether to lynch him.

I know. Lynching is bad. Bad for black people. Bad for white people. OK. But at least somebody should hit him. I mean physically hurt him somewhat. He has a total bully pulpit, millions of dollars, he's king of the talkers, and this is what he uses his super powers for. That's a special violation. So please understand that it's for those reasons, in addition to the fact that he's made a career of being mean, that I say: Hang him! Exceptions are OK once in a while. It's fair turnaround.

Anyway, whatever, I give up on the physical violence. But he should pay for it, and we should not let him or the cultural zeitgeist move on until he does.

And what the hell is going on anyway? What evil voodoo are these old hippie-like pseudo-cool white men channeling?

Speaking of which, here are my votes on four public comments today regarding this issue:

YES = Hillary: 'I've never wanted to go on his show and I certainly don't ever intend to go on his show'...

YES = Obama calls for Imus to be fired...

NO = Rosie on Imus: 'Thought police' are coming...

NO = Edwards On Imus: 'I Believe In Forgiveness'...

And here is a transcript from a 60 minutes Mike Wallace interview:

MIKE WALLACE: You told Tom ANDERSON, the producer, in your car coming home that Bernard McGuirk is there to do "n-----" jokes.

DON IMUS: Well I've n-- I never use that word.

MIKE WALLACE: Tom?

TOM ANDERSON: I'm right here.

DON IMUS: Did I use that word?

TOM ANDERSON: I recall you using that word.

DON IMUS: Oh, okay, well then I used that word, but I mean-- of course that was an off the record conversation-- [LAUGHTER]

MIKE WALLACE: The hell it was!