I'm really glad I wasn't planning to blog this week, or I might have made the mistake of writing something about Imus. Way too much has been written about Imus, and I'm exhausted from reading all of it, every last word. And the truth is, I have nothing to say. Not that that would have stopped me from writing -- after all, it doesn't seem to have stopped anyone else.
I was never a guest on Imus' show -- so I couldn't have written that what Imus said was inexcusable but on some level I enabled it. Of course I could have written the opposite sort of thing -- a blog in which I confessed that although I knew Imus was nuts, I nonetheless would have been happy to have been a guest on his show because (who are we kidding?) I too had a book to sell; and then I could have gone into some sort of stream-of-consciousness run-on sentence about the bully on the playground and how everyone wants to be friends with the bully on the playground because it's like bearding the lion, until it all turns into Lord of the Flies....
You can see it was a good thing I didn't write about Imus.
And then there's Al Sharpton. I would pretty much have had to deal with Al Sharpton. Who needs it? And gangsta rap. Don't get me started. And it's a good thing I didn't get started, because what do I know about gansta rap? To my knowledge, I have never heard gangsta rap in my life. The word "hypocrisy" would have cropped up somewhere in this self-important piece of twaddle I'm not writing, for sure. And the words "nappy-headed hos" -- which would, of course, have been a way of compounding whatever injury existed in the first place. And I deeply hope I would not have used the expression "Does the punishment fit the crime?" but who knows? I might have.
Another reason I didn't write about Imus, incidentally, is that by mid-week, the entry level into the Imus-commentary sweepstakes changed, and since I do not have two daughters, much less two beautiful black daughters, I was ineligible to comment on how Imus' remarks would deeply affect them (if they were old enough to read) or had already affected them so much that they would probably never recover. I might even have made the mistake of talking about Imus' "victims," when actually the victims were the only true winners of the week, and by the way, how bad can it be for the victims that they were insulted by a lunatic but then got to be on Oprah?
Incidentally, late in the week I developed a theory about how Imus could have avoided the whole mess, but since I wasn't going to write about Imus I instead told it to my friend Arianna Huffington and she stole it for her blog. How could I possibly have worked it into anything now that she'd run off with it? Although I suppose I could have put it into parentheses: (My theory: Imus should have walked into the studio Monday morning, apologized, suspended himself, walked out, checked into rehab, and shut up. But of course he can't shut up. Because he's a talk show host. And he can't stop talking.) (This theory might have led me straight into a sentence about the perils of being the kind of narcissist who loves uproar.) (Which might have led me to ruminate about Imus' mother.) (Which would have been a mistake, because it's not her fault.) (It's never the mother's fault.)
So you can see for yourself -- it's just as well I didn't write about Imus.