Get on the Dialogue Train.

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I prefer not to see the patient until they are dead – it prevents me from making diagnoses that might later seem wrong. My skills at prediction are about on par with those of a cranky old goat trying to work the controls to a nuclear-powered, super-colliding grain elevator. I shake my head and ram things with my horns but my record for success is poor.

Speaking of a cranky old goat rendered insensible by baffling progress, let’s talk about Don Imus.

A little bit of personal context; In January of 2005, on a completely unrelated site, I stated that;

“All media is a hideous, corporate whore in service of a political pimp.”

Who says that the sublime is dead?

My good friend Paul over at Gor[b] gave me an intellectual snap in the plexus for being such a bloviating monkey and stated quite rightly that such a ridiculous statement of hyperbole could certainly not be made to all media. Given that Paul was obviously correct and has ties to the shadowy death squads of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, I relented;

“I have to admit - this was in reference to American media.”

My view of the American media was eaten and excreted during the discouraging scandal over Imus and the Rutgers women’s basketball team. This is a story that has no upside; this piglet hangs from the teat from start to finish. There are plenty of villains, a tedious plot and good guys who really aren’t. There is also no real importance to Imus himself – he is a just a scraggly, disoriented, mumbling dinosaur who stepped on the land mine after missing it a thousand times before.

When Imus made his remarks, the uproar was not immediate but it finally hit, maybe because it was a slow news cycle. The Leatherface of talk radio apologized serially, but this was not enough to save him from the most upstanding duo of the Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. That chill you feel down your spine is entirely normal – please don’t be alarmed.

Well, be alarmed, but don’t be alarmed about that.

In the second-most depressing chapter of this, The Reverends have managed to be further legitimized as voices for moral outrage regarding race. Both of The Reverends have said ridiculously incendiary things about race; Jackson called New York City “Hymietown” and claimed that he was “tired” of hearing about the Holocaust. Reverend Sharpton complained about “white interlopers” and was a central figure in the lethal Crown Heights Riots. Most famously, he stoked racial tension all across New York when he rabidly went after the white police officers that (it turns out) had done absolutely nothing to Tawana Brawley.

Jackson apologized for his remarks and Sharpton never really did. Now that Sharpton has eclipsed Jackson in representing their constituent communities, you need to wonder who made the better deal. However, I begrudge neither of them the right to rip Imus to dusty shreds. Those whom they unofficially represent were slurred, and in as much as The Reverends have an obligation, this would pretty much be it. Even if they didn’t mean it, they’d have had to show up for this one.

NBC News and CBS Radio both fired Imus, but only after suspending him, only after sponsors vanished like White House emails, and only after employees within both companies complained. Personally, I have no issue with any of this – a company should be able to fire whomever they wish. NBC News has a long and proud reputation to preserve, apparently, so good for them. However, I doubt they would have gone from nothing to suspension to termination had there not been a heavily publicized backlash.

The Left complained that Imus was getting off too lightly because he’s in bed with Big Media. The Right claimed that Imus was getting off easy because he’s in league with the Liberal Media Elitists. Colleagues of Imus supported him, ignored him or vilified him with varying degrees of sympathy. Others bathed in self-doubt about having appeared on his show so that he could help them sell their books. Still others, like the increasingly ego-maniacal Keith Olbermann, smugly pointed out to us that they had objected to Imus all along. Again, they did not seem to notice Imus’ super-offensive shtick as much as they reacted to other people noticing.

We don’t even need to discuss that most people reading this only know who Imus is because of the scandal, and have only been exposed to the remarks in question because of YouTube.

Inevitably, the media, The Reverends and even the Conflicted Colleagues found a silver lining to this when they remarked that it would lead to A Very Important Dialogue reinvigorating the issue of race in the America.

I’m not saying that everyone involved is full of yak poop (but I am thinking it). The people describing The Very Important Dialogue sounded a lot like the guys I knew in university who got back together with their girlfriends after getting caught sampling the nectar of another flower. They knew that they had to talk about it, and they knew that it was important, but you also knew that if no one ever brought it up again until next spring they’d be pretty happy about that as well.

Whatever you do, do not take note that if all the people involved really found Imus that offensive, his bony ass would have been out of business in about 1983.

When the Very Important Dialogue happens, I hope it’s held in the warm green glow of that nuclear-powered, super-colliding wheat conveyor. That way, we can all be goats together.

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