Well, we can all breathe a sigh of relief.  Osama’s still on the loose, the Green Zone is under attack, the Governor of New Jersey is in critical condition, Larry Birkhead may actually be permitted to have a child in his custody, but the good news is that a one-foot-in-the-grave old white dude has been hauled out of town on a rail thus making the airways safe…for what?  The always politically sensitive Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh, who have five or six times as many listeners as Imus had?  Or, how about stations playing delicate ditties by the gentlemanly Nelly or Snoop Doggy Dogg?  Or John “Frizzy Haired Old White Dude” Gibson and Al “Change Oil Twice Daily” Sharpton.  Thank you, Jesus. 

Those poor maligned 20-year-olds from Rutgers no doubt face years of counseling–probably with Dr. Phil on the Oprah show–so we can all participate in this period of national healing.  Within five minutes of meeting Imus 30 years ago he had informed me that I was ugly and had bad breath.  Somehow I survived and managed to like the guy a lot.  Ah, but times have changed. 

But, now that we’re on a roll why should we stop with Imus?  We have an opportunity folks to clean up public discourse once and for all.  Tim O’Reilly’s proposal for a Blogger Code of Ethics is not nearly ambitious enough.  Here are five people I suggest who really have to go.

I was going to lead off with Def Jam founder Russell Simmons who has parlayed gansta rap racism, sexism and anti-semitism into a multimillionaire empire and polluted the nation’s airways with a steady stream of untreated sewage but then it occurred to me that he’s one of Arianna Huffington’s bloggers so why not go for his enablers?  You’ve got to cut these things off at the source. Sorry, Arianna.  I love you, I have hot dreams about you, but you’re got to go.

And, while we going down that path, how about Black Exploitation Television   founder Robert Johnson (shown at left with a good buddy) who built a trashy, mindless cesspool of an ”entertainment’ network on the backs of the black community and sold it to CBS for $3 billion.  Johnson actually had the temerity to call MSNBC the other day to whine about Imus and to get offended when someone suggested that maybe he might want to take a look at some of the crap coming out of his stable.  “Apples and oranges,” he sniffed.

Where shall we begin?  How about the most recent episode with John Edwards?  What?  That was only about “faggots” so it doesn’t count?  Somehow I thought you’d say that.  I hear General Pace loves it when he comes over to the house and you put on your darling little girl scout outfit.

Nothing wrong with being gay, but fat, mean-spirited and obnoxious are choices.  Maybe Rosie and Bernie McGuirk can get together and start a radio show.  Sure now, top of the marnin’ Cardinal Egan.

And, finally, at least for today, a big adios to Eugene Robinson whose “tough shit white boys” column in today’s Washington Post struck exactly the right concilatory tone that the nation needed in a moment of hysteria like this.  Nice going, Gene.

Lest any of you out there lack a sense of humor, let me say that I don’t think of any of these people should be fired for what they say.  Not rapsters, not Ann Coulter, not Eugene Robinson.  I believe in censorship only when it saves lives.  

My point is where does this kind of assault on free speech end?  A couple of nights ago, a reviewer for my classical music blog Sequenza21 attended a concert in Disney Hall in Los Angeles featuring music by a wonderful, now deceased, gay, black composer named Julius Eastman.  It was a long overdue recognition of his extraordinary talents.  One of the pieces that was played was titled (by Eastman himself when he wrote it 30 years ago) ”Crazy Nigger.”  There are such things as art and nuance and context and it would be an enormous loss to all of us if the words themselves disappeared simply because they are sometimes, in some contexts, offensive to some people.