Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Kane on Senior McGee

And while we are talking about Gene Kane, he is not upset about Michael McGee's jokes using the "n-word" and suggesting that persons of Mexican descent are too dumb to know where to pay their phone bill.

I will agree with his comment that black people are allowed to call each other the "n-word." That doesn't bother me. The "Taco Bell" joke, however, is the kind of thing that would have gotten Belling fired. The difference is the NOV doesn't really care what anyone outside its target audience thinks. It considers itself under absolutely no obligation to be responsible to the larger community or to abide by any standards of professionalism. In that sense, the difference between it and WMCS (from which I am not paid to be occasionally on the air) is light years.

That's why Kane is right when he says McGee has the most outrageous show around. I have heard him do far worse than last week's tastelessness. I have heard him describe how to make a molotov cocktail and use it in a way that would actually burn down a cosmetic store with a wooden roof during controversy in the black community over a Korean beauty supply store in which an African American woman had been allegedly mistreated. I have heard him broadcast all sorts of information about a college columnist who wrote a column he didn't like, implying, if not suggesting, that listeners go over to the guy's house and beat him up. We all know about his calls for a race war.

But is Kane saying that he is so contemptable to be beneath condemnation or using the "old story" trope to duck an issue that he obviously felt compelled to write about?

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