All of these music critics seem pretty disconnected from the world at large. No big surprise there. A lot of people fall into the elite-intellectual mode to avoid dealing with ordinary life and people in general. As a result, they've ignored what's really going on.

This Ann Powers, for instance, thinks that people could actually organize and fight the Bush Family Evil Empire. But most ordinary citizens don't believe such a thing is possible. Nobody has stood up to say it's possible, especially not the Pink Tutu Democrats. And for the average citizens to organize for such a serious cause might make them question why they voted for Bush in the first place, and nobody wants to admit that they've ever been a fool. But at the same time, they're unhappy with the way things are.

So they vote for the worst candidate on American Idol. They throw Simon Cowell's bitchiness right back in his face. He deserves it. And he can't take vengeance on them like auditing their taxes, sending them to Iraq without proper equipment or publicly call them supporters of the terrorists.

It isn't Howard Stern, who has one-tenth of the audience he had when he was on genuine, free radio. The "VoteForTheWorst" web has more influence than Stern at this point. But the biggest influence is the late Howard Beale. It's everyone who's lost his job to a foreigner like Sanjay, or lost his son to Karl Rove's mad dreams of empire, opening up his window and sticking out his head and shouting, "I'm mad at Cowell and I'm not gonna take it any more!" It may not be the socialist revolution and mass execution of the rich that so many on the left are hoping for, but it is a protest, and deserves respect for that.

It's tempting, especially for typical Salon readers, to relate this to bigger causes; megacorporate ownership of media, political correctness, race relations, et cetera. But I believe you don't have to go further than Imus himself.

Whatever entertainment value and humor he used to possess disappeared over the years. I understand he made a lot of enemies in the broadcast business, but given what I heard of his on-air performances, he must have made enemies wherever he went. He believed being snide and hostile was his key to success. Given this kind of attitude, it only took one focussed incident to make his audience turn, and picking on some young women whom he had never met and for whom he never had any reason for animosity was that incident.

In the last few years, other comics have had their careers nosedive because of the same factor. Dennis Miller was unfriendly even during his rise on Saturday Night Live, he proved he couldn't even pretend to friendliness on his brief talk show, and his sudden conversion to right-wing snottiness looked too much like desperation. Bob Goldthwait used to be sympathetic with his audiences, but slowly turned more and more hostile. His famous "couch fire" incident was the tipping point. With his firing from Jimmy Kimmel Live (a "producer" position where he produced nothing, that looked like a mercy booking) he finally dropped off the radar.

There was very little political about the decline of Miller or Goldthwait. They just became intolerable as people, and the public only needed one toe over the line (sweet Jesus!) to reject them. I think the same is true of Imus. There's no need to read any greater significance in his firing than his finally making our gorge rise.

This show was designed to entertain college students, trying to keep the weekend alive by staying up late Sunday night, and the vast audience of stoners and druggies who can't watch anything more challenging. These two apparently disparate groups actually have something in common; absurdity and irrelevance.

The junkies have no future, and so rejecting rationality makes a great deal of sense to them. They can laugh at Master Shake's conceit taken to the self-destructive level, and Meatwad's just plain retardation, because it confirms their view of the universe.

The college kids suspect they have no future. Those high-paying computer and tech jobs they trained for are being given to Indians at one quarter the salary. They have the sinking feeling that they'll never pay off the immense debts of their college education, and that their lives will be summed up as a string of goose eggs. ATHF expresses that absurdity, as do several other Adult Swim Shows: Tom Goes to the Mayor and Tim and Eric Awesome Show: Great Job!

I suspect this movie will bring an end to the Aqua Teens. Once this movie explains them, there'll be nothing else to do the regular shows about. For the Dorm and Bong Water Crowd, there'll be another series expressing absurdity and futility with a whole bunch of new characters, unrelated to the Aqua Teens. (Ask the voice artists of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, several of whom are chronically out of work, about what happens to the hot cult performers of yesteryear.)