That Shit is Crazy

I think the Imus flap is pretty funny. In a very real sense, the mass media has nothing else to talk about. With no room to grow upward it MUST bitch about others.

The number of viewers is fixed, and the amount of time they have to consume media is limited. With fixed prices--set by either ad rates or fixed content charges--media either creates car wreck drama or dies. There's no other way to reach enough people otherwise.

Even ostensibly "good" shows like Oprah and Extreme Makeover Home Edition have to go out of their way to create victims to hold enough peoples attention to turn a profit.

Which is why I felt sorry for those poor women of the Rutgers basketball team. Not for what Imus said--he's so spiritually compromised that he even looks like the walking dead--but for what all the people closer to them who ran in to make points insisting they were victims.

I was fine until someone said (after Imus' firing); "Now the healing can begin."

Good lord help us.

The black women I have had the pleasure of knowing, and especially those who have achieved any measure of success, are pretty fucking strong. And took fewer shorts than most folks. And could easily hold their own in just about any discussion.

Where some old white codger (and god bless him, for I'm sure that if we knew his whole story, we'd have some serious compassion for him as well)--where some old white codger's poor sense of humor has any actual power over this obviously successful team of strong, straightforward women, I'll never know.

It was strange to see them sitting on stage looking downtrodden knowing that they had just achieved what must have been a highlight in many of their lives. They seemed suppressed.

As for all the people calling for Imus' firing.. Do you see them outside the offices of major label rap artists? Hell no you don't.

It's not a black and white thing: If you are for equality then you apply standards of conduct equally--without regard to race. If a white woman murders someone it's the same as if a black man does, right? This whole nonsense of Snoop saying that he's talking about low-class women in the hood and therefore his "ho, ho, hos" are better than Imus' is wack.

I'm not sure it's my place to say, but looks an awful lot like black folks have bought in to the white notion that playing the victim is their path to power. Certainly whites have been rewarding victimization through social programs for years.

I know the intentions are usually well meant, but it's awfully hard to reward something without stimulating and re-creating it. The guy at the stoplight looking for change--it he gets what he wants he'll be back the next day guaranteed.

And as the sorrier he feels for himself the more he gets, he's gonna be one sorry-assed motherfucker, guaranteed. His livelihood will rely upon his inner death--his spiritual depravity if you will.

If he does really well he'll have company. And franchisees.

Because it works. And what we pay attention to multiplies.

The same is true for heavy metal bands. Or indie rock. And hip-hop. And junk mail. And divorce. What we pay for with our attention and dollars, we get. Guaranteed.

What we don't pay for we don't get.

I haven't seen anyone link the Imus thing and the Duke case, so I'll take a crack. It's the same thing. This whole notion of a victim being holy and an oppressor being evil is so appealing that we're stuck on it like crack.

I imagine it's a white thing. I don't imagine that folks closer to physical and financial harm can afford to glorify such "woe is me"-ism. It seems to be an offspring of white self-disregard, magnified by outdated Christian notions of charity, perhaps.

Being a slightly arrogant lacrosse player isn't a sin. Nor is hiring a stripper and getting drunk. And working your way through college doesn't necessarily make you a better person than having it paid for by your folks. The world is bigger than that, my friends. Much, much bigger.

I've never seen a bigger rush to crucify than with those men--among whites especially. (Whites will give up anything but control, I think you'll find--even if it means they have to administer punishment on themselves.)

I imagine it's like the treatment blacks received from whites in the 50s and 60s--only they didn't have proper representation or as fair a legal system.

White men aren't victims, but we are fair game. I took entire classes on how fucked up we are as a specific race and gender in college. You couldn't do that to black people or women anywhere in our society. As witnessed by recent comments about "nappy-headed hos".

But all of this is nothing. no thing. Literally nothing happened in either of these cases. Nappy headed hos is a lame attempt at humor for a white guy. But it's spiritually no different than the Kelsey Grammer produced "Girlfriends" tv show that called one of its actors a "nappy-headed heifer" the other day. They routinely refer to each other as heifer on the show, by the way.

And our public conversation has gotten so guarded and afraid that we pay black people to say it on tv and fire white guys for mentioning it once on the radio.

That shit is crazy.