What Have We Learned?

"Oh, THAT'S what he's writing about tonight."

About Kanye

Big surprise - an international superstar in a field where humility is not encouraged is actually a huge asshole. Who saw that one coming? This is the guy who has referred to Jimi Hendrix and Paul McCartney as “those artists in black and white photos,” has labeled himself the voice of this generation, and is on the record as saying that if the Bible were to be written today, he’d be a character in it. No, I was not surprised in the slightest when it turned out that he was a rampaging douchetruck.

Seeing him up there grabbing the microphone and completely taking a dump on the greatest night of Taylor Swift’s life was classic Kanye. When you type “Kanye West asshole” into Facebook, 43 different groups pop up. If being an asshole was basketball, Kanye West would be Michael Jordan.* By that logic, then, this VMA debacle would have gone down in history as one of the most astounding and incredible moments in basketball history – if asshole basketball were college football, it would be The Play.

*I would be Clyde Drexler. Mike would be Superman.

None of this makes what he did okay, of course. Being generally accepted as a gigantic asshole does not make it okay to be one (something Saddam Hussein figured out the hard way). Kanye apologized on his blog (available here if you like caps lock and questionable grammar) and then did the talk show circuit to further apologize. He’s been playing it out as one grand social faux pas, which might work when you double dip at a Super Bowl party and give everybody your cold but is less effective in the face of wrenching a microphone out of the hands of a 19-year-old girl to brown nose Beyonce.

Sources say he was drinking beforehand,* which is still no excuse, but I really think the whole thing was a publicity stunt that Kanye concocted on the spot. It sure as hell got his name in the papers, but I don’t think he anticipated quite how many of his followers were going to turn on him.

*And just why would you get sauced at the Video Music Awards? I understand why people show up drunk to the annual Oregon Marching Band Banquet, but the VMAs are a multimillion dollar event specifically designed to be incredibly entertaining.

Also, Kanye was wrong - this is the greatest music video of all time.

About America

I feel certain that if I were to travel through time and grab an 1840s plantation owner, a turn of the century Klansman, and a Nazi storm trooper and then show them the comments section for any YouTube video involving black people, all three would be thoroughly shocked and disgusted by the abundance and potency of the racism contained therein.

I’m serious – look for a video of Barack Obama, or Samuel L. Jackson, or a video of Phillip Seymour Hoffman at his nephew’s bar mitzvah where there’s a black guy walking past in the background and I guarantee you there’ll be at least three posts making heavy use of the N-bomb, coupled with suggestions of long term vacations to Africa.

So imagine the Internet’s reaction when a muscular black guy jumps onstage and impugns the honor of a cute, innocent 19-year-old white girl.

Well, at least he said please.

It’s been pretty well established that Kanye is an asshole, but the Internet reaction shows that a prominent opinion is that Kanye is an asshole because he is black, not because he’s just an asshole. In this case, the racial hatred spread from YouTube all the way to Twitter, which tends to be less racist in favor of simple inanity. So many people uploaded violent and racist remarks after the VMAs that one blogger went to the trouble of tracking all of them, which after the first few lynching threats became a lot like trying to track every drunk person at an Oregon football game.

To my knowledge, this is the same America that was thrown into a moral outrage a few years ago when Michael Richards started threatening to lynch a bunch of black people at one of his comedy shows. This leads me to wonder if the thousands of racist Tweets and YouTube comments come from people who are, in fact, ardent Michael Richards supporters – people who look at the video of him threatening to stick a fork up a black guy’s ass and say, “Fuck yeah! You tell ‘em! Lousy black people!”

The other possibility is that they’re flip-floppers in the worst sense – they’ll be more than willing to publicly crucify a public figure’s racist tendencies while simultaneously harboring the same ones. I agree wholeheartedly that everybody has some prejudice, but there’s a difference between a secret, deep down distrust of people of another race and the willingness to post Internet bulletins attached to your name declaring that Kanye West is “yet another nigger with a chip on his shoulder” who should “go back to the slime pool he crawled out of.”* It implies that there’s a lot of people out there who are either adverse to introspection or think they’re immune from the laws of common decency.

*My personal favorite is steverock100’s comment: “kanye is a dirty nigger. no offense to anyone else.” This forever illustrates that no matter how heinous your statement, “no offense” absolves you from any responsibility. Joseph Goebbels actually added the words “no offense” to the end of every one of his propaganda films.

Again, Kanye West is a huge asshole. Really huge. He’s sorry now, but he’s probably going to do something assholeish again in the future, because that’s just his way. He’s drunk on massive celebrity, and for that we have free reign to make fun of him and his ego. But folks, he’s just an asshole. He doesn’t deserve to be lynched or killed in a drive by, like a lot of Twitter subscribers suggested.

About Jay Leno

In the aftermath, Kanye appeared on Leno to further apologize for what he’d done. However, this apparently wasn’t good enough for Jay, who proceeded to ask Kanye if he thought his late mother would be proud of his actions, prompting one of the awkwardest silences in late night television history,* followed by tears.

*At least since Michael Richards’ apology on Letterman – and the parallels continue.

Fuck you, Jay Leno – Kayne did a stupid, nasty thing, and while in so doing he totally opened himself up for jokes for years to come, it doesn’t justify seizing on the emotionally traumatic death of his mother to humiliate him on live television.

Perhaps Leno’s logic was that since Kanye humiliated Taylor Swift, he deserved to be humiliated himself. I think he failed to realize that an asshole for an asshole makes the whole world stink.

Truman Capps knows Styx never would have pulled a stunt like this.