...of blowing Don Imus' career out of the water because we've suddenly decided his free speech has crossed the line (nevermind the other 29 years of his career where we tolerated him just fine), is precisely what happens when the country gets polarized.

"Us" versus "them" is a bullshit excuse for creating and then galvanizing an angry mob to do your bidding.

Either your position is rationally justifiable, or it is not.

I blame the neo conservatives who've been trying to whip this shitstorm up since 1980. They weren't satisfied with simply declaring social welfare programs flawed, they had to completely destroy them and create corporate welfare programs, instead.

Either you believe in giving a hand to those who have been wronged by our past democratically established mistakes, or you do not. You can't reasonably steal the welfare from one place and put it in another.

I believe in a certain amount of social or corporate welfare, but with a nod towards what my conservative fellows have taught me about the danger of too much of a "good" thing. I think moderation is important.

Swinging from one extreme to another just keeps us all off balance and unfocused as to where the problems actually lie.

The problem is not that Don Imus showed his racist ass off in public; the problem is that the rest of the country fails to accept their own racism unless they are somehow a favored race du jour. It's easy for white people to accept their racism because it's like acknowledging that you've won a stupid argument. Minorities of any stripe who are oppressed by a strict majority rule system, have the dual problem of first legitimizing the argument and then acknowledging that they've lost that same argument.

Until an individual knows what it's like to try to legitimize their point of view whilst also acknowledging that their point of view establishes that they have lost the argument before they have even begun, you need to sit down, shut up and listen.

Societies can be fractured and fragmented into two or more pieces along any number of fault lines, race just happens to be the favorite of a few agitators at the moment.

I'd like to know where these agitators stand on the issue of young versus old, mentally ill versus mentally healthy, war versus peace, rich versus poor or victims versus victimizers.

Hypocracy abounds in the human condition. Don Imus made a good living exploiting these fissures, but now he has had to pay the piper as things have swung in the opposite direction.

You can't buy low and sell high all the time. Sometimes you just get it wrong and the higher up you are in society, the higher the price you pay for your mistakes. Knowing when to quit or get out is an art form.

So be careful about nurturing your own ambition. The balance is not harder, but you do have farther to fall. As Karl Rove and Dickless Cheney are about to learn the hard way.

...I guess we can actually communicate together. What fun we will have!

Whether or not Eric Schaeffer acknowledges my existence is immaterial to me.

What matters to me is that people who are unwilling or unable to emphasize the positive attributes of a person, or artist, over the negative attributes of the same are given second-rate status as communicators and writers.

If the best you can say about Charles Manson is that he was a deranged killer, you are simply building a case for the power deranged killers have over all of us. But that's not what's true about Charles Manson.

What's true about Charles Manson is that he was sickened by his own life experience, alienated by the artistic community of southern California, and unable to release his resentment towards those who had rejected him. He was a survivor, if barely, of a horrible childhood, and no one was willing to give him a voice with which to speak about what it feels like to be alienated from a world that speaks about peace and love in one breath, and acts just as cravenly and miserably as ever.

What's true about Eric Schaeffer I do not know, but I do know that his work has been poignantly flawed to an artistic degree. He purposely and purposefully emphasizes the character flaws of his main characters and illustrates how those flaws can become the source of great strength. All of the characters he's written and portrayed share this perspective and I find it uniquely inspiring. Dickensonian, in a way.

Now that Salon requires me to use either anonymous or my real moniker, I'll stick with the real one for now. I think a point was made and acknowledged, changes ensued, and I am content about those changes. It doesn't matter who REALLY fomented those changes. I wanted something done to shift things around, something was done, and I am open to seeing what changes.

Why don't you decloak, anonymous, so that everyone can see who the "projectionist" in this argument really is?

...but it isn't entirely me. I'm not even a little bit responsible for any of it.

The only thing worth seeing in any of the diatribes directed against Eric Schaeffer were the lurid projections of sexual deviance of his critics and the simultaneous denial of who the owners of those projections were.

By now anyone with a lick of sense and a hint of spiritual maturity can clearly see how you see yourselves: sexually deviant, irretrievably lost in a sea of intellectual and artistic mediocrity, hopelessly dishonest with yourselves and others and miserably unrepentant and unforgiving of your every flaw of character.

You are trapped in a double bind that you, yourselves, establish and refuse to take ownership or responsibility for.

Emotionally retarded doesn't begin to describe the abyssmal depth of your projected self-dismissal and self-condemnation.

Please do leave. I can only see my failures of decades past in your constant attempts to be glib about your own ignorance.