Crushing the Enemy, PC style.

I thank the dreadlocked gods in heaven that I am not Don Imus' publicist. The only upside of being his PR man this week is that you could pool resources with Shaq's publicist with one joint press conference, "C'mon, did you really think our guys meant what they said?"

Beyond that, allow me to take the Imus discussion in a different direction. Demands for swift, harsh retribution remind me of why we do not have peace in our society. I am (well, was) a pacifist, a relentless peacenik who decried all forms of violence. Then I realized I am very prone to righteously dangerous anger against various stripes of nitwits. I will not bomb them, but I will often look for other ways to hurt those who offend me.

That is what society's most PC elements do, with increasing frequency and effectiveness. They decry distant wars, yet delight in crushing the careers of nitwits and rednecks who clumsily wander into an ever-expanding web of rules about what you can think or say about race, gender or morality. In terms of building a decent world, I am no longer certain that threatening to incinerate the livelihoods of fallen human beings is any better than threatening to bomb them.