A visitor from Venus drops down to Earth last month right in the middle of the Don Imus conbobulation. And since someday he’s thinking he’d like to run a 30-minute talk show here on Earth, he’s wondering about the protocol. What’s the rule? Like on Venus radio it’s acceptable to refer to Martians as bug-eyed bellicose guys with zap guns who want your women.
Like Imus, he’s a large-mouthed spewer of rodomontade. Yeah, he uses words just that long and just as hard to spell.“Well, it’s simple,” an earthly informant tells him — “really, really simple. You can’t denigrate, flagalate, or even deprecate minorities. We got a thing about minorities.”
“Minority? What’s the precise meaning of that word?”
“Simple again. It’s any group smaller than the majority. Like on your planet, it would be the 45 visitors from Neptune. You just don’t criticize them — it is considered tasteless — even if it’s true.”
Well, our Venusian friend checks out the situation and finds that this Imus guy called some female minority members — nappy-headed hos, which is not a compliment and furthermore may not be true of the minority subset that the spewer of rodomontade was addressing; i.e. not only insulting, but maybe untrue.
Hmmm — makes sense. The rule is as clear as the rings of Venus — you don’t criticize minorities.
But just to double check, our ambitious Venusian reviews the day’s media — newspapers, TVs, magazines — wherein he encountered tons of hostile remarks about professional, religious, national, occupational, governmental, and educational minorities. In fact, the news of the day concerned scandals or flawed behavior of a) Bulgarians, b) government-sponsored mortgage administrators, c) Catholics, d) Wall Street stock traders, e) United Auto Workers Union, f) murderous militants in the Sudan, g) Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq. Some events were factual, some were prejudicial, some were rumored, some were incorrect. All about minorities!! “That’s traditional and totally acceptable — media wise,” stated his earthly advisor. “We do it all the time.”
True, no one was accused of being a nappy-headed ho, but a group of immigrant Russian Moscovites were accused of prostitution.
But what was most amazing was that none of the authors of this welter of insult, fact, ruinous rumor, and verbal sewerage had been fired. I think I forgot to tell that the talk show host, the garbage man called Imus, was working his Venusian network — looking for a job. Maybe the rules were clearer up there.
One of the rules seemed to be; you can write it, but you can’t say it. Hmmm — if I was one of those writing guys, I’d be worried that they were coming after me next. I’d certainly want to get those rules straight.
