When That Third Strike Comes Out Of Nowhere

Anybody up for another Don Imus thing? I promise not to cry if you skip it. In fact, let me offer you something else to do: Go make fake paper sushi.

Okay, musing forward. Nothing especially coherent, no moral. Just some observations. You've been warned.

It's kind of an interesting thing to watch, though. I mean, Imus probably doesn't, sincerely doesn't, think he deserves all this. And in a way he's right. It's not the most important way, in the most important ways he's absolutely wrong.

But I'm sure he really doesn't think he's a bigot. I'm sure it's never crossed his mind that he might be racist. And not in the way that Confederate flag wavers don't think they're racist but just think they're defending their culture from the minorities the government is giving special privileges to. He probably just doesn't think he's a racist at all. He probably is convinced he likes black people and gets along with them fine.

Why? Because no one's ever told him this before, at least no one with the power or voice to make him listen. So I imagine he sees this all as hitting without warning, and I bet he thinks it's unfair. I know he's supposed to have said he saw this coming, but I bet he hadn't a few days ago. I bet when he said it it didn't even occur to him that there was anything particularly objectionable about it, he sure wouldn't have thought it would cost him his job.

And that's where he's sort of right about it being unfair. He's said this shit all along, and so have all his colleagues, and aside from screaming and yelling from the "special interest groups", which are almost by definition people nobody in power takes seriously, there's been no consequences to it.

So it probably never occurred to him that there ever would be, and now that there are, he might be wondering where the hell that came from? This isn't an argument for not treating these things as serious because we don't uniformly do that. Limbaugh getting a pass doesn't mean Imus should. Rather, Imus having to deal with the reaction to his behavior means that Limbaugh should as well, and Savage, and Beck, and all of the rest of them.

It also means maybe the rest of us need to take a fresh look at our own assumptions about ourselves. Am I a "good person"? Would anyone tell me if I wasn't? Or do I wake up one day and realize that what I assumed was a tolerable sort of low-level assholism has suddenly landed me in a lot of hot water and, not incidentally, hurt a lot of people I didn't really mean to hurt.

I suppose it's just a human thing, or maybe I just like to think so because I've already had more than a few of those moments. Where you go from them probably has something to do with whether you can look back and realize that you *did* have some warning, and whether you recognize that you should have seen it, or instead just blame others for not making you listen.

I don't know that I would say Imus is blaming others for what's happened, but he sure seems to be regarding himself as something of an innocent victim who was just having some fun.