"Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Off The Air We Go!" (Updated)

"My goal is to goad people into saying something that ruins their life." -- Don Imus

I can’t imagine myself ever writing or uttering the phrase “nappy-headed hos” except, as here, in quote marks. Not that I’m all that pure and punctilious when it comes to insensitive or offensive speech or comments, mind you. Say only that it isn’t my style personally and draw whatever conclusions you wish as a result.

Much ado has been made already about Don Imus and his latest failed witticism, but I don’t listen to Imus in the morning or at any other time or to radio much at all except for XM in the car, and then it’s either one of the jazz channels or the comedy channel where the programming would make “nappy-headed hos” (there, I wrote it again!) sound like I accidentally tuned to one of the kids’ channels. But then, that’s comedy.

We essentially empower or give comedians permission to say things on stage they could not get away with saying as private individuals. Not that he seemed to have much talent as a stand-up to begin with, but it was obvious from the Michael Richards video that he was no longer "on" but had lost it emotionally and was merely ranting and reacting as just another jerk, having lost both his comedian persona and control of the audience.

Even when a comedian doesn't lose control, how the audience might react to a racial joke can be risky business. Sarah Silverman, doing a bit about getting out of jury duty, said (not verbatim) "A friend said put something racist in the juror questionnaire and they won't take you, so first I wrote 'I hate chinks,' But that sounded mean, so I erased it and wrote 'I love chinks.'"

She caught some flak for that joke and responded beautifully. (Again, not verbatim) "I got criticized in the press for using the word 'chink' and, speaking as a Jew, I just want to say that I find it deeply disturbing that we may be losing control of the media."

Now, that's funny.

Imus, on the other hand? [shrug] Under the “First they came for the Jews” line of reasoning, I should probably rise to his defense at least as far as noting that people should have the right to make jackasses of themselves in public without being forced to go to reeducation camps. Then again, that freedom of speech thingie also entails the right of the annoyed, insulted or supposedly injured to respond accordingly. (Today's Washington Post article on Imus reports Rutgers Coach C. Vivian Stringer as saying, "We have all been physically and emotionally spent and hurt" by Imus's remarks. Physically? Sheesh!)

And, yes, this isn’t about government censorship but about public opinion, a vastly different kettle of fish, and more to the point about Imus keeping his overpaid job. But I’ll come to Imus’s defense this far: the man had to spend an hour with Al Sharpton. Surely, that should be punishment enough no matter how big a jackass he is.

Truth is, Imus and Howard Stern and most other so-called shock-jocks and, for that matter, Ann Coulter and Mike Adams and most other so-called pundits are, just like Silverman and Chris Rock and Sasha Baron Cohen, in show business. There is no bright line or at least none worth drawing between, say, Lenny Bruce (whom Nick Gillespie finds less than funny) and Ann Coulter (whom I find less than insightful) however they may be categorized by others. They’re selling a product. Some are profiting handsomely from it, which means they are selling a product people want; but the market tends to sort that sort of thing out nicely, if not the way you or I would sort it out, ourselves.

I’m all for civility, though I have my own lapses now and then; but what I find mind-boggling is the endless torrent of self-indulgent righteous indignation and alleged aggrievement these petty incidents invariably arouse. Can we really have become such thin-skinned hothouse flowers -- how’s that for a mixed metaphor, by the way? -- that the national psyche must be purged over and over again via Mao-esque show trials of public denouncement and contrition? Or are such events, as some cynics might suspect, merely opportunities for posturing and preening identity politicians to capitalize on?

I don’t care whether advertisers decide to disassociate from the likes of Don Imus or not. They will, in any case, be making a business judgment, not a moral one. Crude and tasteless as his comments were, if the worst thing in life that happens to the women on the Rutgers basketball team is that they were insulted by a guy who himself looks like the Marlboro Man ten years after he died of lung cancer, they should consider themselves blessed.

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UPDATE: No, not about Imus getting sacked. A New York Daily News blog reports that Hillary Clinton plans to visit the Rutgers woman's basketball team on Monday. My God, haven't those young women suffered enough already?