You’ll notice that I don’t have a picture of Don Imus up. He’s just too ugly for anyone to ever have to look at again. Although I’m fairly accustomed to looking at ugliness, his cracked and hideous face is just too much. I’ve decided to concentrate on his cracked and hideous words instead. They are perhaps even harder to look at.

I’ve never heard this fellow’s radio show but I’ve heard about his most recent vile and hateful remarks. I can’t say that I’m surprised. I have heard other radio shows. They make remarks just as vile and just as hateful but they’re more polite about it.

I once heard CFRB hosts Paul and Carol Mott speak about racial profiling. Sounding very reasonable, certainly not calling anyone names, they said on their show that they were in favour of it. If black people were responsible for most of the shootings that summer, they said, of course the police should pull over black people at random. It just made sense.

Well, I thought, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

I wrote them a letter and said that since white people were responsible for most child killings and pedophilia, it only made sense for the police to break down every white male’s door, seize his computer and have a look at it. Every time someone sees a white man anywhere near a kid, hanging around in a park or in a school, we should hold our children close until he goes away. If he does not go away, we should chase him off with pitchforks, torches and bludgeons.

I mention this because I think that people like The Motts, with their little dog and pony show masquerading as a reasoned approach, are much worse than people like Imus. People like Imus make their stupidity blatant. At least with Imus, it’s clear that you’re dealing with a stupid cunt. With the Motts you may think you’re dealing with the reasonable folks next door.

But they’re the same fucking people. And they need to go. And they were created by the same stupid system. And that needs to go. Imus seems a bit like Katrina. He’s not the problem, he just makes the problem very clear. That obviously wasn’t his intention. He’s no Lenny Bruce. But still, you have to look at what he said and has said in the past. Then you have to realize, people listen to this garbage. Advertisers pay to be associated with this man.

You see, I don’t know how racist these radio hosts are. I don’t know if Ann Coulter even believes half of what she says. But it doesn’t matter. Whatever they tell themselves when they go to sleep on their silk sheets, they know, as well as Goebbels, that there’s a lot of money to be made by spouting hatred. The problem isn’t that Imus said some stupid shit but that, from his point of view, it wasn’t a stupid thing to say. He has made a fortune saying things like that.

A lot of people do.

That’s why this is not a freedom of speech issue. Imus does not speak for free. This is about what people get paid to say. Firing one radio host will not solve that. He never should have been there in the first place. There never should have been a market for this sort of shit. But there was. It would be better if we could fire the market.