Prejudice. Wrote A Post About It. Want to Read It? Here It Goes.

I've been away the past few days. Did I miss anything? Oh, I see that Don Ho died. And apparently Don Imus got fired for talking about him. And for saying something about basketball. I didn't even know Don Ho played basketball.

Nora Ephron's right. As far as the Don/Ho matter is concerned, the ratio of commentary to meaningful commentary is woefully inadequate. Ms. Ephron may have acquired wisdom in this matter because she has many sisters, and sisterhood is not only powerful but observant.

Ms. Ephron has, in fact, as many sisters as there are members of "En Vogue," the singing group from whom I stole today's title. Remember that song? I like all the Ephron sisters, and I like En Vogue. (Well, not every song - but I like the one I quoted, and "Giving Him Something He Can Feel" is good too. The great Curtis Mayfield wrote it.)

I am going to continue my practice of not writing about the Don Imus matter. I will, however, write about the people who wrote about the Don Imus matter. I will therefore now assert that "this is not a piece about Don Imus." Think of it as my Magritte moment.

It's all so 2007, so meta.

So without considering Imus qua Imus, but instead merely contemplating those who have commented on him ... I've observed the formation of some common (dare I say hackneyed?) tropes. Let's review a few of them:

He was an 'equal opportunity' abuser. So what? Abusing the comfortable and the disadvantaged equally has the net effect of hurting the latter far more than the former. Rain may fall on the just and unjust alike. But these days the Just are probably standing in the street getting wet while the Unjust glide by in well-appointed limousines.

Everybody's a hypocrite in this controversy. The unspoken second half of this statement seems to be ... so now it's my turn.

"First they came for Imus ..." Alright, that is a great gag line, even if he stole it from me when I used it for my Aqua Teen Hunger Force piece. Oh, wait. He wasn't kidding. Ouch. Well, let's follow that thought to completion: Then they came for the other professional haters, all those who use bigotry to push the conservative agenda.

When they finally came for Rush, there was nobody to speak for him.

I don't know what you call that. I call it a happy ending.

Let's not silence the bigots. Let's answer them with our righteous and superior speech. First of all, everybody tells a foulmouthed bigot to shut his pie-hole. That's the proper response. Telling a jerk to stuff a sock in it is righteous speech.

Secondly, we're not proposing they be sent to a gulag. We're just suggesting they not continue to be paid enormous sums to broadcast right-wing hate messages on worldwide broadcast networks that we indirectly subsidize.

And how are we supposed to answer their speech, anyway, without the vast networks and resources at their command? Which leads me to the next Imus-related cliché ...

What are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton doing in this? I'll tell you what they're doing. They're using a time-honored form of protest employed by the voiceless: the consumer boycott. That's not suppression of speech. It is speech. It's also called 'voting with your pocketbook.'

Don Imus is free to say whatever he wants. People who listen to Al Sharpton are free to buy - or not buy - whatever they want. Or to not listen to CBS if it pays a guy millions of bucks to say vile things about their children. That's one way people can level the playing field between themselves and those who seek to exploit and control them.

You're not endorsing the Tawana Brawley incident if you agree with Reverend Al that CBS should stop its corporate practice of paying somebody big bucks for hate speech - or else look for a new audience that finds that behavior acceptable.

You're repressing humorous and satirical speech, like Borat and South Park. But Borat and the South Park guys, besides actually being funny, are clearly humorists. None of them has ever - in their own persona - said anything racist. Imus speaks as Imus, representing his own positions. That weakens the "humor" defense.

A demagogue who tells jokes is a funny demagogue, not a comedian or a satirist. Somehow the public's been able to tell the difference for the past hundred years or so. They've enjoyed South Park and the like without bringing back blatantly racist humor.

(There is something called the "Jackie Mason" exception to this rule, but he's been coasting on the work he did many years ago when he was still living.)

He shouldn't have picked on innocent people who aren't public figures. True, Imus was way out of line to go after these young women. But what are people really saying with this statement? That it would have acceptable if he had called Oprah Winfrey or the Secretary of State "nappy-headed hos" instead of the Rutgers students? Do they really think so?

We're ignoring the really important stories. Try telling a 10-year-old black girl that how she sees herself as she grows into womanhood - and how others see her - isn't an important story. And the media propaganda machine, with its anti-minority and anti-poor agenda, has radically altered our political landscape. What story is more important than that one?

He said the same things they say in gangsta rap. Hip-hop is black music whose primary consumers are white males. There's an argument to be made that 50 Cent as his ilk are the cultural descendants of Bert Williams and other black entertainers who stereotyped their own people for white audiences. But that's no defense for some cracker who spews racist venom, even if - as may be the case with Imus - he's a good guy in some ways. Which leads my to my final Don Imus editorial cliché ...

Don Imus is a good guy. Let's say he is a good guy. He may be. His wife's done a lot of good charitable things, and so has he. That only goes to prove my point: Imus was rewarded for feeding this beast, the one called Hate Radio, and they encouraged him to follow his worst instincts. It only stopped when he became so visible that he started drawing too much attention to the calculated and deliberate role hate speech plays in today's media empire.

Which leads me to the point that I'd like to see become the Don Imus editorial cliché:

We have a media system that wraps right-wing talking points in cheap appeals to bigotry, then spends billions selling it as "entertainment." That's more important than Imus, whose hate speech was being used to ensure a welcome climate for theirs. The non-ideological Imus probably didn't even understand the purpose he served for this Conservative Hate Machine.

Oops. Was I just editorializing? I'm such a hypocrite. I wanted to keep this on the ironic "meta" level, reflecting on the reflections of Don Imus visible in those who have commented about him. But I guess I got carried away by all those glittering, intoxicating reflections. In fact, they remind me of the "tiny bubbles" that made me feel warm in the song of the same name. The Don Ho song.

But hey, if I had been asked to be on the Imus show I would have said ...

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