Meanwhile, the Top 40 "artists" and other American Idol rejects get to make all the inconceivably stupid racial remarks they want, because people keep buying their stuff, and the "unattractive" girls on the lower end of the socio-economic ladder get killed in anonymity and without fanfare.

GOD, it makes me weary.

I see your racial slur and raise you one disappearance from the night club scene due to "exhaustion."

In fact, I think I feel a spell of exhaustion coming on myself (most decidedly NOT from the night clubbing).

Unfortunately, the real issue with this in my opinion is the continuously plummeting intelligence levels of the audience who not only read, but demand this pap in the guise of "news"!!

The "people" surrounding these celebrities wouldn't orchestrate this garbage if it didn't get coverage for their idiotic clients. I just finished a book about Lincoln and his "Team of Rivals" and I couldn't help but be struck by the difference between intelligent, honest, committed people who made hard decisions often to their personal detriment, and shallow, self-absorbed people whose only interest seems to be how many minutes Entertainment Tonight covers them for!

My prayers routinely include "and please could you have at least SOME people born who actually care about something other than Britney's hair, Lindsay's breakdown, or Imus's ignorant rants?!?!" I'm not though, foolish enough to actually expect that to happen. Once the standards drop into the toilet, fishing them back out is usually a great deal harder than just flushing. Sigh...

Kristen

Amen and Amen, Kristen!

Somehow I suspect this will not be remembered as one of the "Greatest Generations."

Kristen, this also has much to do with the news operations, and their need to make a profit. News divisions traditionally were loss-leaders, run by serious news people who truly wanted to fill the half-hour of nightly news with The Most Important Stories In the World Today.

They were expected to lose money. And they did lose money. But they added to the prestige of the networks (indeed, may have contributed all of the prestige to the networks), and nobody bothered Walter Cronkite about playing to the lowest common denominator.

I honestly don't know that people are shallower now than they were 30 years ago. (For instance, it's probably true that Cronkite could have gotten better ratings had he led the news for two months with gossip about the death of Marilyn Monroe, rather than news reports from Vietnam.) But I DO know that news stations play to our shallowest instincts now--for ratings and for money.

P.S. Robert, my 83-year-old, WW II veteran dad wrote a funny piece once in which he worried he might be a little embarrassed being introduced in heaven as a member of The Greatest Generation, walking past Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln .....

Good point, David. In fact, let us not forget that each generation has had its own version of populist pabulum. One of my favorite historic dudes, Benjamin Franklin, was not above appealing to the lowest common denominator in his day.

I think it's just a false sense of hope that draws us to these celebrities/personalities. It's that part of us that wants to say, "At least my life isn't that screwed up." But the reason it's a false sense of hope is that their imperfections don't change our own at all.

I love how G.K. Chesterton addressed this: When The Times invited several eminent authors to write essays on the theme "What's Wrong with the World?" Chesterton's contribution took the form of a letter:

Dear Sirs,
I am.
Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton

Chesterton is great on these kinds of issues. Recently read a wonderful essay he wrote about people's obsession with physical health over intellectual and spiritual health--FROM THE 1920s!

My dad is a Don Imus devotee. I recall buying him an Imus in the Morning t-shirt a few Christmases ago.

When the show started airing on television it was like a dream come true for my dad who would listen to Imus as he worked out in the morning. Now he could WATCH the show.

When my pops got TiVo he started recording every episode of Imus in case he missed a single moment, which means every time I visit my parents I'm forced to watch an Imus in the Morning segment.

I like Don Imus. My dad loves him and my dad--who, by the way, is not a racist--is devastated. Not by what Imus said, but the fact that he is off the air for two weeks and when he returns to the air Imus will, per my father, "have no fucking balls."

And that's exactly what news organizations once possessed ... balls ... or, if you prefer, intestinal fortitude.

Amen to the selectivity of people getting offended. Apparently America doesn't seem to care that Mel Gibson is--per his remarks--an anti-semitic male chauvinist because the guy makes entertaining films.

I could go on and on about this topic ...

Michael,

Let me just say, I was a fan of Mel Gibson's early movies, but I have no interest in his recent perspectives - in either his movies or his personal opinions. I won't be spending any of my future movie dollars on anything he makes.

I'm also a big fan of balls, but two things:

1) As David already pointed out - TV success requires ratings which lead to ad dollar profits and the many groups who get offended on both the left and right and organize boycotts make consistent ballsyness too expensive for the dollar driven industry to accept.

2) To me ultimately this all comes down to whether you can live with the likely consequenses of your choices. If you can (without whining) I say go for it! But don't be surprised if your bosses shut you down for a couple weeks. In my experience, bosses are notoriously lacking in "intestinal fortitude" unless they own the business and don't have any shareholders to report to.

Jumping in late on this one, I see, but here's my take: The real culprit is in-your-face, 24-hour cablecasting of "news." The only saving grace on the Imus thing is that it has taken SOME of the emphasis off of the Anna Nicole debacle.

Here's a quiz related to this: What was the burning issue "Anna Nicole" type 24-hour cablecast that got completely forgotten on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. My guess is there are enough smart folks here to remember, but most people cannot answer that question, which just goes to show how fleeting, fickle and stupid is this 24-hour news thing.

Will

And another thing...

I've asked this question of all races of people. Across racial boundaries about 50 percent answer yes, 40 percent no, and 10 percent not sure:

"Are you prepared to accept the possibility that the Michael Richards thing was a setup for publicity purposes in the Hollywood no-such-thing-as-bad-publicity school of thought?"

Will

It was that thing with that congressman and that missing girl, what was her name?

See, I knew there were some smart folks in here. Yup -- Chandra Levy was the missing girl. Congressman's name was Gary Conduit, I think, and he never did get re-elected. The nation, although completely consumed by that case (or so the media thought), forgot all about it on that morning.

Will

Will,
Now that Imus has been canned, we can safely assume that it wasn't a publicity stunt.

This Imus thing reminds me of the old story of the bitter old Greek villager named Dmitri.

He says:

You see all the boats in da harbor? I build all dese boats. Do they call me Dmitri The Boat-Builder? No.

You see all the houses in da village. I build all dese houses. Do they call me Dmitri the House-Builder? No.

You see all da roads up into da hills. I build all dese roads. Do they call me Dmitri the Road Builder? No.

But you fuck one goat ....

Imus is simply past his prime. What worked for him well in the 1970s will not work at all today. Yeah, I agree this one wasn't a publicity stunt. It was just Imus doing what he's always done, but this time he didn't see the train coming.

Here's a bit of trivia for you. Imus invented the word "wuss." We all know what that means, and here's how it came about. Part of his trailblazing shock jock routine in the 1970s was to abuse callers he didn't agree with. The FCC and his employer wouldn't let him call those folks "pussy" on the air so he started calling them "wussy." Wussy got shortened to "wuss" and is now deeply embedded in our lexicon.

Will