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Sticks & Stones

So, what about this Kramer (Michael Richards) thing? If you’ve been living in a cave somewhere, playing Yahtzee with Osama bin Laden, you might not have heard about the little comedy stage overkill retaliation fit he opened up on a couple of African American hecklers in his audience. During the heretofore unexplained rant, Richards made some unfortunate and ill-advised verbalizations of the old “N” word, and media hell opened up and swallowed him. Since then, he has humbly apologized to everyone from Jesse Jackson to God, but apparently that’s not enough. A transgression as monumental as this can be rectified by only one thing. Money.

The two victims of this verbal holocaust have retained the services of a high profile LA attorney. “Why”, you may ask, “would these young men need an attorney?” They haven’t been charged with any crime. Heckling isn’t against the law. Perhaps Richards’ words carried with them some invisible daggers that twirled stealthily above the rest of the crowd, striking these innocent hecklers, slicing open their jugulars, allowing their blood to spill out in buckets. As we all know, there’s only one thing that can heal one from such massive wounds. Money.

Maybe these young men, having grown up in such a gentle and enlightened age, have never heard the “N” word used before – and it created in them such psychological trauma that only a big stack of G-notes will come close to paying the bills for all the psychiatric treatment they’ll surely have to endure for the remainders of their suddenly worthless lives. Apologies can’t do that. Apologies are only words.

One thing is for sure. Fifty years from now, those of us still walking this previously gentle and enlightened earth will be able to tell our grandchildren exactly where we were and what we were doing at the moment Michael Richards, on a comedy club stage where nothing profane had ever been said, uttered those fateful words. It was an end of the innocence, my friends – when the global peace and harmony we had so enjoyed for centuries was shattered like so many Molotov cocktails against some forgotten American Embassy wall. In the blink of an eye, white folk began to fear and look down upon black folk. Blacks began to distrust and resent whites. Muslims declared war on Christians. Genocide occurred in Africa. Conservatives blamed Liberals. Liberals got high. And people began to cheat on their taxes. And turmoil and anarchy was born in the world. Even rap music took on an anti-social and violent tone.
If only Michael Richards had possessed the foresight, grace, and wisdom to walk up to those innocent hecklers, kiss them on the lips, and hand them each a thousand dollars, instead of succumbing to the Klansman within, we’d all still be living in the Garden of Eden. After all, none of us had ever before used a racial epithet

But he didn’t do it that way. So now we must live in the world Kramer made for us.

© 2006 Rick Baber
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LOL! Good piece, Rick. I've always liked the Lenny Bruce take: maybe if people say "nigger, nigger, nigger" enough, the word will lose its capacity to upset.

Lenny Bruce wrote:Are there any niggers here tonight? Could you turn on the house lights, please, and could the waiters and waitresses just stop serving, just for a second? And turn off this spot. Now what did he say? "Are there any niggers here tonight?" I know there's one nigger, because I see him back there working. Let's see, there's two niggers. And between those two niggers sits a kike. And there's another kike— that's two kikes and three niggers. And there's a spic. Right? Hmm? There's another spic. Ooh, there's a wop; there's a polack; and, oh, a couple of greaseballs. And there's three lace-curtain Irish micks. And there's one, hip, thick, hunky, funky, boogie. Boogie boogie. Mm-hmm. I got three kikes here, do I hear five kikes? I got five kikes, do I hear six spics, I got six spics, do I hear seven niggers? I got seven niggers. Sold American. I pass with seven niggers, six spics, five micks, four kikes, three guineas, and one wop. Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness. Dig: if President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, "I would like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet," and if he'd just say "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" to every nigger he saw, "boogie boogie boogie boogie boogie," "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" 'til nigger didn't mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school.

I don't think it was because he used the "N" word, I think it's more because he said something about how 50 years ago "we" would have strung them up by their feet and stuck forks in their rear ends. (Although, really, I've never read or heard of anyone sticking a fork in a rear end, at least not as a racial thing.) THAT is what is the problem. He went way over the line.

I've heard enough Richard Pryor, Chris Rock and numerous other black comedians use the "N" word to know that it's not a rare thing in comedy. And what you, Baber, left out of your thing, and I'm surprised you did, is that the black hecklers were calling Richards a "cracker" and telling him to shut up and go sit down. Which was also very racial and rude. But Michael Richards' brought up the day when the torture (and killing) of black people by white people merely because of the difference in their race, as if it was what we should do today.

All that said, I totally agree that the whole aftermath of Richards' ignorant and hateful comments is RIDICULOUS. In the video I saw, most of his audience simply got up and left the club while or shortly after he said it. That's all that needs to be done in a situation like that.

Upon receiving this, my son was afraid I'd be immediately pelted by PC folk, accusing me of racism; or hailed by rednecks thinking the same. I assured him that, while that would no doubt happen, there were "freethinking" people in the world who would understand that I was only trying to illustrate the absurdity of the hype around this, that there were other more important issues being neglected because of it, and Kramer didn't invent the word or the underlying racism that still exists in more of the population that anybody is willing to admit. As my buddy Colbert says, "you guys GET it".
Thanks.

DOUG "AD MAN" KRUEGER says:
Here's what Michael Richards ought to do.

Currently Geico has a commercial about a caveman feeling insulted because the Geico people are saying that their website is so easy a caveman could use it. For months, these caveman ads have been taking advantage of the insulted cavemen in various situations.

SO: The next commercial should show a caveman storming out of a Michael Richards act, insulted by something he said.


Hey, it's funny!

I just e-mailed this idea to Geico...

The lawyers and the money are simply because words are so easy. You don't drive a point home about inappropriate behavior in a child by letting them off with a grudgingly mumbled, "sorry" and it's the same with adults. Unfortunately, you can't turn Richards black and have him live in a ghetto for a month, and violence has never changed an opinion yet. In our society, that leaves money. Hopefully, they will not win "big", because (as with kids), they started it - but some restitution for the "over the line" part is appropriate. What's even more appropriate, of course, is for the courts to deal with it and MSM to get on to more important things - but they won't.

It's a "given" that Richards' rant was wildly inappropriate, and obscene. But I don't see where any monetary damages are in order, from a legal perspective. How were these men "damaged"???

especially since they started it with their own racial epithets and by being rude. In fact, Michael Richards has a better counter-claim against the guys, since they interfered with his work and instigated the act that has ruined his career.