I know I'm a few days late and so I've now passed into the realm of "are people still talking about this?" but this is still on my mind, so I'm going to talk about it anyway. Apparently Dog the Bounty Hunter is a racist meathead. I really could not care less about that. However, I do care about his crucifixion. That part is fascinating.

Do you know the story? I've only skimmed articles, because it's really not that interesting, so I only think I know what's going on. As I understand it, Dog's son has/had a girlfriend who just so happens to be black. This displeases Dog. In a telephone conversation (tape recorded and released to the public by Dog's son), Dog told his boy he had to break up with the young woman because she's black.

And Dog dropped the N-bomb.

Gasp!

Before going farther, let's clarify. Dog is a racist meathead. That much I do not dispute. But who cares what the hell he thinks? The guy has a hair cut that screams "I own every Great White album ever made, even the Japanese imports." I'm not going to hang a whole lot on his opinion. Besides… he's allowed to be racist. It's distasteful, but everyone is allowed their own opinions.

It doesn't bother me that A&E yanked his show over the incident. They're protecting their brand image. It's their right to yank any show at any time for any reason.

What gets under my skin is the attention paid to The N Word. Playing a frantic game of CYA, Dog himself said:

My sincerest, heartfelt apologies go out to every person I have offended for my regrettable use of very inappropriate language. I am deeply disappointed in myself for speaking out of anger to my son and using such a hateful term in a private phone conversation. It was completely taken out of context. I was disappointed in his choice of a friend, not due to her race, but her character. However, I should have never used that term.

 
I am so sick of this convoluted set of rules we're all trying to follow. Who can say nigger? When can they say it? In what context? To hell with it all.

Why is it ok when Ludacris says it, but not ok when Dog says it? And don't think it's because Ludacris is black and Dog is white. If Ludacris called Dog a honky or a blue-eyed devil or "The Man," no one would care. No one would care if Dog said those things either. It's all about The N Word, but only when a person who is not black says it.

Think about the movies you've seen, the books you've read and the songs you've heard. It's not unusual to find The N Word thrown around quite a bit by black people. It's socially unacceptable for any non-black person to ever say nigger, in any context. And yet it's ok for every black person to say it, in every context? That makes no damn sense at all.

If we have two sets of rules, one for black people and one for everyone else… isn't that the opposite of racial equality? Why does no one lose their mind when Luda says " 'cuz these niggas all up in my shit?" If it's ok for Luda to say it, it should be ok for Dog to say it too. If it's not ok for Dog, it shouldn't be ok for Luda either. Anything less than one single set of rules that applies to everyone is an impediment to true social justice.

Perhaps the most important element of this is one I've not yet mentioned. It's. Just. A. Word. Words like "nigger" continue to have power because we all choose to give them power.

During my lifetime, the word "bitch" has slowly evolved from a hateful term to one used as an all-purpose exclamation and even a term of endearment. If Archie Bunker had said bitch in 1973, there would have been an uproar. 30 years later no one cared how, or how many times, Matt LeBlanc said it on Friends.

We took all the power away from the word "bitch." The word has been completely emasculated, simply because we've all decided it doesn't hurt us anymore. Isn't it about time we do the same thing to "nigger?"

So have you been following any of that ominous news about Turkey and the Kurdish Workers Party? In case you haven't, I'll give you a brief rundown. And by brief, I really mean not at all brief.

There probably should be a country called Kurdistan, but there is not. The Kurdish people occupy the northern parts of Iraq and the eastern parts of Turkey. They've lived there a very long time and they're pretty much the only people living there. It's a natural ethnic division. Some of the Kurds in those regions identify themselves first along nationalist lines, as either Iraqis or Turks, but still others identify themselves first along ethnic lines. Some Kurds really want a Kurdistan, and some are willing to fight for the idea.

The Iraqi government doesn't have all that much control over their Kurdish region. The Turks mostly have control over theirs, but often keep that control in unsavory, "oppressing a minority" kinds of ways. Rabble rousers from almost-independent Kurdish Iraq are shooting things and blowing stuff up in not-even-close-to-independent Kurdish Turkey. As you can imagine, the Turks don't like this.

The really ugly thing is that no one's in a good position to do anything about it. Kurdish Iraq is semi-autonomous. The central government in Baghdad has little real control over the region. American occupation forces are a little busy trying to keep themselves from getting blown up on the road from the green zone to the airport. So the Turks are beginning to take military action.

And it's entirely reasonable that they do that. We invaded Afghanistan because the Taliban wouldn't/couldn't do anything about al Qaeda. Why can't the Turks do the same thing with the PKK in Iraq?

But it would be really nice if they didn't. Given the history of the region, the Turks are pretty unpopular in Arabia. Almost as unpopular as… uh, us. Full scale military action by Turkey in Iraq could be very bad for the future of Iraq and could have a halo effect on the whole region.

But, what can you do? This is kind of our fault. Maybe. Saddam Hussein was definitely a bad guy. It's good that he's gone. But our actions to correct some of his atrocities have helped set the stage for what we're seeing now.

One of the biggest arguments for both Gulf wars is that Saddam gassed his own people… the Kurds in northern Iraq. After the first gulf war, when (surprise!) we did not topple Hussein, the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south needed a little bit of extra protection. So we created the possibly illegal "no fly zones," where American airpower helped keep Saddam's influence and aggression in check.

In the years between Gulf wars, Kurdish Iraq slipped more and more out of Baghdad's control. And hey, guess what? They're still mostly out of Baghdad's control. Now, militants are going to be militants no matter what we did then, and no matter what we do now, but I can't help but wonder if the aftermath of Gulf War I didn't play a huge part in setting the stage for this problem today.

But I think I'm going to take a different view.

It's all Monica Lewinsky's fault.

Hussein was a pain in the ass from the moment he invaded Kuwait until the moment he died. He was a particular pain in the ass in the late 90s when UN weapons inspections failed. President Clinton decided something had to be done. But there was a problem. The Lewinsky scandal was unfolding. Basically it went "I did not have sexual relations with that woman. Now let's talk about dropping bombs on Iraq…"

Nobody wanted to hear that. Everyone said "No, no, no… you're not changing the subject that easily." There was no new round of airstrikes then. And what's to say that wouldn't have changed everything? There's no doubt that a new conflict with Iraq would have changed the political climate, and possibly had an impact on the 2000 election and who knows what else. It's one of those "a butterfly beats its wings in Beijing" kind of things. Who knows how far the ripples would have traveled? It's possible there would not have been a second Gulf War, or that it would have been delayed, or the course of the war would have been different.

Who knows? I'm just speculating. The only thing I know for certain is that we should all blame Monica Lewinsky. And Michael Douglas.

From an ABC News article titled "Swastikas, 'KKK' Written on Deaf Student"

A group of students at a Washington [D.C.] high school for the deaf scrawled "KKK" and swastikas on a black student's body with a marker while holding him against his will, police said Wednesday.

District of Columbia police are investigating the Saturday night attack as a possible hate crime, Chief Cathy Lanier said…

 
Wait, hate crime? What on Earth would give them that idea??

I could do without the endless TV and print news coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre. I stopped paying attention on Monday. I've gone numb. But I can't stop thinking about this photo.

Image credit: Win McNamee, Getty Images