VDH:

The Cowardly Way

This Michael Richards mea culpa about his racist outburst against hecklers is pathetic—mentioning Katrina and war as he tossed out banalities about the nation’s “hate” and “rage.” The outburst and the apparent apology are right up there with the Judith Regan creepy confessional about her grotesque O.J. non-book event.

Let me get his Seinfeldian logic: a hip, sort of leftist cynic unloads on some impolite blacks in his audience with language right out of the Ku Klux Klan lexicon, and then tries to weasel out of it by suggesting some rage unleashed by things like the Katrina diaster? Apparently he thinks that hip nihilists like himself can’t be redneck racists. And if they slip up and show that they are, then it’s only because they suffer from a temporary sort of Bush-derangement syndrome brought on by the general “rage” unleashed in the country.

We need a new word in the vocabulary for this increasingly common syndrome where a liberal spouts far right nonsense that no conservative would utter and then blames his outburst apparently on the conservative climate. We all thought that the apology would be the alcohol or abused childhood common refuge, so surely “rage” is something new. Do we all suffer from it, or just Richards that evening?

And what is this new throat-clearing about the “war made me do it” (e.g. Richards’ reference to the “rage” between “this country and another nation”)? Even Mel Gibson sought cover in that idea of global conflict when his anti-Semitic rage boiled over in his cups (“The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”). Apparently he thought the Iraqi and Lebanon fighting was both “the world” and were caused by the “Jews.”