Category Archives: News and politics

Air India Flight 182 was a 747 flight that was blown out of the sky June 23, 1985, killing all 329 people on board, many of them Canadian citizens.  As time progressed, it was determined that a bomb on board had gone off, blowing the aircraft to pieces.

Air India 182 was, until the 9-11 slaughter, the largest terrorist act involving aircraft in the world.  The reasons for the bombing?  Depending on who you talk to,  it was Sikh extremism, demanding a homeland called Khalistan in the Punjab region of India.  Let’s just call it religious intolerance and extremism, as the whole Sikh rights, Indian rights and religious follies of India are incomprehensible to Western brains at the best of times.

Since the flight started in Canada, the Canadian Aviation Safety Board was involved from moment one.  There were arrests, then trials and in March 2005, a not guilty on all counts which sent many eyebrows straight up in the air.

The judge, Justice Ian Josephson said, "I began by describing the horrific nature of these cruel acts of terrorism, acts which cry out for justice. Justice is not achieved, however, if persons are convicted on anything less than the requisite standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Despite what appear to have been the best and most earnest of efforts by the police and the Crown, the evidence has fallen markedly short of that standard"

With the formal trials over, the Federal Government could now investigate exactly what went wrong in the investigation.  The list is reading like the Three Stooges in an airport.  There was no positive bag match of passengers with luggage.  Air India had received numerous threats against their aircraft, not just in Canada, but around the world.  Bomb detection equipment was either not working, or couldn’t detect a sample of gunpowder when the sniffer head was put right on the sample.  Police bomb dogs were called but the flight was released to fly before the dog and handler could get to the airport. There was economic pressures from the airline to get back on schedule.

To add to the muddle, it has finally come out that the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (we call them Spies Canada) had solid evidence that something serious was up but either didn’t, or didn’t care enough to act upon the evidence to lock down Air India 182.  Wiretaps were erased, documents disappeared and now, 22 years after the event, memories are shaky.

We have to be careful that we don’t look at the whole sequence with our post 9-11 eyes, as that is Monday Morning Quarterbacking of the least useful type.  However, it looks very bad for the RCMP and CSIS.  CSIS had an explicit warning that something bad was planned for that week in June, involving an Air India flight from Canada.  Air India asked for extra coverage, but still let their aircraft fly without following protocols.  The RCMP didn’t act on what looks like a solid intelligence lead.

The families of the victims have been pushing for a formal, comprehensive investigation since June 1985 and each time there has been a reason or two why the investigation can’t go ahead.  First it was before the courts, then it was internally investigated, then it was before a Crown Enquiry.  Nobody could comment, or release the information, as other group took precedence.  This is called ‘pass the buck’ in bureaucratese.  As well, some of the information and sources of information are listed as secret, so they can’t be questioned in open court.

What we can tell, even deducting fifty percent for the passage of time and a lot of groups having axes to either grind or hide, is that the RCMP, CSIS and Air India collectively botched it.

As a consequence, Air India Flight 182 became aluminum rain over the Atlantic, south of Ireland. Three hundred and twenty nine people lost their lives.   

The owners of Daimler Chrysler have decided to not sell it to Frank Stronach and Magna, instead the successful suitor is Cerberus Capital Management for $7.4 billion US.  Now, Frank Stronach is in very large trouble, or not. 

Magna, for those who don’t know it, is one of those anonymous companies that make subassemblies for auto companies.  For example, Chrysler doesn’t make seats.  There is no seat upholstery department at Chrysler and hasn’t been for decades.  It is cheaper for an automaker to job it out to another company to make that component. 

Remember "Body By Fisher" on GM products?  Fisher Body started out in the late 1800’s in Ohio, building horse-drawn carriage bodies, then auto bodies when they moved to Detroit in 1904.  GM recognized the special skills at Fisher and contracted Fisher for the bodies of the earliest Cadillac Osceolas and some Buick models. 

Magna, has expertise in things like seats, instrument panels, powertrain systems, mirrors, electronics, exterior trim and ‘closure systems’ which you and I would call door latches.  About 25% of Magna’s income comes from Daimler Chrysler.  Magna makes the components, then ships them Just In Time to the assembly line and they get installed in whatever product is being punched out that hour.

Frank Stronach wanted to buy Chrysler.  He wanted to buy it so much he reached out to a Russian Billionaire named Oleg Deripaska.  Deripaska bucked up to the tune of $1.54 Billion for more or less half of Magna.  Then, Chrysler was sold to Cerberus and the dream of owning one of Big Three went into the dumper for Frank.  Yes, Frank Stronach is Belinda Stronach’s dad. 

Not getting Chrysler is only part of the story.  Magna is changing their focus to the European market.  They already have big contracts with BMW, Porsche and VW, as well as an engineering development centre in Graz, Austria.  With a Russian partner, Magna will expand, but not in Canada, which will cost a lot of jobs. 

Following on, one can bet that Cerberus, now owning Chrysler, will gut as many jobs as they can possibly get away with.  Expect the Canadian Auto Workers union to howl mightily, as the majority of the jobs that will be canned will be good paying union jobs.  Regular people doing the real work at Chrysler will be out on their asses.  Expect the pension and benefits for retired workers to be "refocused" or "streamlined", meaning, cut to nothing. 

But shed no tears for Frank Stronach not being the successfully buyer of Chrysler.  He gets a $150 Million dollar payday to his personal consulting firm, just for the sheer gratitude of doing the deal with Oleg Deripaska.  Plus stock dividends, the share price is up and so on. 

Cerberus Capital gets the smallest of the Big Three and Daimler gets rid of a company they had no idea how to run.  Wall Street and Bay Street?  They’ll do fine, as the share price for both companies will dip, then spike as the gutting progresses and three guesses as to when Wall Street will sell off their interest in Chrysler?  Right at the peak. 

Chrysler will die a lingering death, but Cerberus will be fine,  Magna will be fine.  Frank and Oleg will be fine.  The only ones who are going to hurt are the thousands of employees who will have a pocket full of nothing to show for 25 or 30 years of work. 

In the previous post of Party Like It’s 1984! I detailed several of the things wrong with how our global society is going.  We haven’t done that well, if that is the only scorecard in play.  Depending on your personal state of chemical imbalance, you could fall into a cold, damp pit of darkest despair about humans.

Like most things, there are other sides to the story that do give you hope if you have the right eyes to look at it.  When the light is right and the planets line up properly, humans are stumbling along approximately forward. 

North Americans have a better life than 90 percent of the rest of the world.  Nobody shows up in our neighborhoods with machetes and starts killing everyone in sight because we’re Anglicans or aren’t the proper colour of white, brown, red, black or yellow.  We don’t have dignity battalions, death squads, guerrillas and rebels roaming the countryside near Toledo, Ohio terrorizing farmers and offering to slaughter whole extended families in exchange for political support. 

The vast majority of North Americans go to sleep with a roof over the heads and a full belly, reasonably certain they will wake up the next morning without a volcano, earthquake, monsoon or tsunami wiping them off the face of the Earth.  We have flush toilets and clean water that we don’t have to walk 11 miles through an unmarked minefield to obtain.  Our offspring can go to school and get an education that is at least adequate.

I have personally waved over a Washington DC cop and asked for assistance without fear of being shot, robbed, kidnapped, gang raped or disappeared.  The Fire Department will come if you have an emergency and not demand payment up front, in cash.  Ambulance service does not consist of a wheelbarrow and eleven well-meaning strangers who rob you, while taking you to a public toilet for medical care. 

Cars, trucks and pedestrians do not regularly explode on downtown streets, scattering nails, screws and body parts everywhere.

Our stores have food all the time, 24 hours a day.  The lights are on.  We can drive, fly or take the train just about anywhere our means, money and whims will let us.

The worst thing most of us in North America will face tomorrow is a snotty attitude from a barista at the coffee shop.  We’re damn lucky here.  We don’t appreciate it, but we are damn lucky.

This also explains why everyone else wants to come to North America:  To get the hell away from all that other madness.  Yes, we do have problems in North America, serious ones at that, but with a pittance of planetary perspective, we’re doing very well.

I think our biggest problem is we have forgotten how to be civilized to each other and find simple pleasures in uncomplicated things that are all around us.  Here’s some of the things I did or saw in the last few days and a suggestion or two.

I watched a beautiful sunrise this morning.  I sat here and watched it unfold for twenty minutes without answering email, reading the paper, or text messaging someone.     

The trees are budding furiously, waking up from winter.  I heard geese yesterday flying back north for the summer. 

Two evenings ago a family of new Canadians in the apartment building were struggling with the clutter of kids, groceries and strollers, while getting on the elevator.  I helped Mom with some bags and held the elevator for them.  She said thanks and I said you’re welcome.  It was a very simple act of helping another human.  It costs nothing, takes very little time and makes a small, imperceptible deposit in the bank of personal karma.

Wave someone into traffic in front of you, or let a pedestrian cross without trying to kill them.

If you must talk on your cellphone constantly, please lower your voice.  Nobody else wants to hear about Joanne’s yeast infection, thanks.

Spend some time looking out the window while on the bus, subway or streetcar.  See what other people are doing.  You might find they are just like you. 

Read something that will stretch your brain.  This does not include "People" or the "National Enquirer".

Take guilty pleasure in Paris Hilton getting 45 days in the L.A. County Jail.  You are allowed to laugh at others’ misfortunes, but try to laugh at your own foibles more often.

Answer a question with "I don’t know", then find out what you don’t know.  You’ll be amazed at the depth of your ignorance.  We know so little about so many things. 

Look a squirrel, bird or other animal square in the eye and say "Hello".  They’re just as confused as we are, except they cope with it better.

And, my personal favourite, from Warren Zevon, when he found out he had about six months left to live having been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer:

Enjoy every sandwich.

Will those suggestions or ideas make everything better overnight?  No, of course not.  However, a bit of civility, some laughter, a dash of gratitude and the occasional effort to improve will make our passage through the days a little less fraught. 

There is hope as long as we keep some perspective.

There are times when someone finds a nail, has a big hammer and just drives the sucker a good one.  Cheryl, who is one of the regular readers of the blog, posts comments from time to time.  She found the 10 inch rafter spike and was packing a 20-pound sledge,  Cheryl hit it so hard, I can’t find that nail anywhere in our known dimensions.  Here’s the quote:

"We no longer think for ourselves and just watch the tube to do our thinkking for us.  1984 Orwell is upon us…."

By way of disclosure, I have no idea who Cheryl is, except she lives in Houston, is involved in the mental health industry and is a pretty good photographer. Check her comments on some of my ramblings and you can get to her site.

1984, George Orwell’s seminal 1948 work of fiction painted a hideous future of DoubleThink, continuous warfare and constant monitoring of all aspects of life by the authorities.  Her comment got me to thinking, which is not always a good thing, but it got me thinking nonetheless.

DoubleThink:  America is the Shining Beacon of Liberty to the World:  Our People are Free.  Homeland Security is protecting us.  Kidnapping and torture are illegal, unless you are the CIA.  We’re so free that we’re holding people in cages without charge or warrant for extended periods of time in Camp Delta and Camp X-Ray.  The War in Iraq was to liberate the Iraqi people from the yoke of Saddam Hussein and help them become a model of Democracy in the Middle East.  Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction. 

The Five Minute Hate:  We don’t have to meet in a public hall to express our hatred of Goldstein.  We have FOXNews doing it for us.  For a while it was Osama Bin Laden, then Saddam Hussein, now Iran, with a side of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Il or Democrats in general.  This week it is Hilary Clinton, last week, Don Imus, next week it will be those with mental illnesses and guns.  There is always the fallback position of the "Unidentified Black Male" to scare us silly.

Surveillance:  A rich area here.  The Patriot Act, Echelon, DCS-1000 and The Department of Homeland Security don’t require warrants or judicial oversight.  Britain has 4.2 million known Closed Circuit TV cameras run by the police watching your every move, in case you are a terrorist, or a litter bug.  Britain has just under 61 million people.  That would be one camera per fifteen citizens in round numbers.

China might well be just as bad, but nobody can talk about it.  However, we do have historical exhibits, like the Terror Haza in Budapest, or the Stasi Museum in Berlin.  Everyone was being monitored, around the clock, in the fun days of the Soviet Union.  We simply call ours Homeland Security or Public Safety.     

Food:  Melamine in pet food, E.Coli in salads and hamburger, Fire retardant in mother’s milk.  PTFE in just about everything else.  Tomatoes that don’t taste like tomatoes, but ship really well.  Oranges with a half-life and trans-fat in toothpaste are probably next.  Taste, quality, safety and nutrition doesn’t matter.  We have industrialized everything we eat because someone can make a profit on it.  Evian Water is $6.40 per US Gallon.  Gasoline is $3.05 per US Gallon. 

Sex:  Well, we still do that.  Except we videotape it and post it on the web as "Girls Gone Wild" or "Latina Black DP Vol. 4"  Erotica is dead, replaced with an unimaginative, poorly shot, poorly edited, visual documentation of mechanical actions.  Doesn’t anyone have fun while fucking anymore?  Obviously not. 

Social Stratification:  We have poor folks.  We have rich folks.  The middle class is on the Endangered Species list and one paycheque away from being on the street.  Sympathy consists of "It’s their own damn fault!"  The social safety net is one strand of dental floss and you had better apply now to get the instructions as to where to find it.   

NewSpeak:  The undocumented, The Economically Disadvantaged, Rendition, Non-succumbing insurgents, air sanitization, and the rest of our nanny-society politically-correctspeak.  We have huge legal warning labels on step ladders, computer keyboards and take-out coffee, but none on handguns or rifles? 

Perhaps the most indicative piece of NewSpeak is "If it can save just one (state name of group, species or thing) then we’ve succeeded in this difficult job." 

I call that setting very low standards.  Why not "We’re going to make sure that every citizen has good, effective, free healthcare."  Or, "We’re going to stop treating the planet like our personal toilet to save all of us, including the spotted owls, whales and humans"

Room 101:  Not yet, unless you count waterboarding, rendition flights, CIA interrogation safe houses, Guantanamo Bay and the Amnesty International list.  The Number One country for the state execution of children under the age of 18 is:  Iran with 22. 

The Number Two?  The United States of America, with 19.     

Deviation from the norm is suspicious.  You must wear your smile, but not your turban, or hijab, unless you’re also wearing a crucifix, as that’s ok.  

Put another magnetic ribbon on your SUV. 

Be a team player, especially when the employer relocates your job to Mexico, to "realign the global supply chain." 

Be sure to cry if the TV cameras focus on you at a disaster scene.  Then sell your cellphone photos or video of the carnage to a media outlet and post it to the web.

Conversely, wear a rainbow fright wig, paint your face in team colours, while screaming We’re Number One! and not wearing a shirt.  Well, 49% of the population can do that.  Drunken Man Tits are OK at a sporting event.  Janet Jackson’s covered nipple for less than 10 frames is a scandal of global proportions.

Learn these sound bites:  "He was just a quiet neighbour who kept to himself until the shooting started" and "If it saves one (state name of thing or group) then we’ve succeeded in this difficult job."  Plus "Why isn’t the government doing something about (issue)?"

Cheryl is right in many ways.  1984 is here and has been for a while.

The Virginia Tech tragedy is playing itself out in a way that is showing us exactly what kind of media we have at our putative service.  All the cable news networks have been wall-to-wall covering the killings.  Newspapers and radio are giving the story feature status with long-winded explainers as to why and how the shooter did what he did.

Yes, it is the biggest shooting in American history.  Yes, the victims were almost all young people in the prime of their lives.  Yes, it looks like the shooter went nuts after a love affair went sour, combined with some very serious pre-existing issues.  Yes, we do not have the full story or the results of a comprehensive investigation and yes, the media are speculating like mad.

Those are all things we knew in the first four hours.  Nothing new has been added except some ‘stories of individual bravery and sacrifice’ along with photos of as many of dead as the media can find, preferably from Facebook, or LimeWire.  Naturally, President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy showed up for the press conference to help console the various families and students and he should have, so I’m not going to nail him for it.

Let us have some perspective here.  Thirty-two people killed in a violent, bloody way.  This sounds like, well, Baghdad on a busy day.  Or Darfur during a shift change.  For those killings, of the same or worse scale, the media limits itself of a line or two. 

The rationale for marginalizing the same kind of tragedies elsewhere is what?  That the victims elsewhere are less valued?  It is ‘away from here’ so it doesn’t really count?  It’s just a bunch of crazy tribal folks settling scores?  We got no pictures and no uplink?

If the importance of the story is predicated on good satellite truck bandwidth, then Virginia Tech is this weeks’ circus.  Next week?  A newborn racoon in Newark is being nursed by a Rotweiller in the backyard of a Convent.  Plus, Knut the polar bear cub is having his first live salmon for lunch.  

Family and friends of victims cry the same tears worldwide, not just in Virginia.  I’m turning off the TV for a couple more days.

Belinda Stronach, the Member of Parliament for Newmarket-Aurora is hanging up her Parliamentary ID card and going back to the family business.  The family business, Magna International is quite possibly going to buy all of Chrysler from Daimler, so the business is going to be busy and as a former CEO of Magna, she’s needed back to live over the store, so to speak.

Stronach’s political arc has been interesting.  Originally a member of the neo-con Canadian Reform Alliance Party under Preston Manning, she ran for office and was elected as a Conservative federal MP for Newmarket-Aurora, a suburb of Toronto. 

About a year later, the Liberals under Paulie ‘Walnuts’ Martin, got her to change party affiliation and cross the floor.  In exchange for selling her political convictions, she was made Minister for Human Resources and Skills Development, then minister responsible for Democratic Renewal.

Unfortunately for Belinda Stronach, the Liberals were tossed out of government in 2006 and Stronach became a regular MP.  There was a change of focus from wielding insane amounts of power and authority as a Cabinet minister, to the mundane committee and constituency office plodding that faces the other 280 or so regular members of parliament who are not in cabinet.  All reports indicated she was a fair to good Minister and a fair to good MP.  Competent and skilled, but nothing stellar or cellar, which is fine.

Where things got stupid was in the media coverage of Stronach.  I wrote in a previous article that if Belinda had been a man, the crossing the floor furore would have been consigned to a Page 23, below the fold five-line story.  But no, Belinda Stronach is a woman, therefore subject to all kinds of bullshite scrutiny. 

She changed her hair color a couple of times and it was front-page news across the country, as well as her wardrobe choices.  Then there were the boyfriend things.  One liaison was with a fellow Conservative, Peter MacKay.  When Stronach crossed the floor, she kicked MacKay out to the curb on blue box day and in a moment of candor, MacKay remarked that he was upset and hurt by it.

Later, there were whispered suspicions that she was involved with a married hockey player, Tie Domi and was the ‘other woman’ in his marital woes.  True or not, who cares, but the media was all over it like a dope smoker on a bag of Doritos.

I actually found her a touch refreshing, as she is intelligent and has serious business acumen, as well as being easy on the eyes.  Hey, there’s nothing wrong with being good looking. 

The part that I liked most of all, was the disquiet she brought out in the media as a bunch of sexist boors in the Old Boys Press Club.  Here was an accomplished person, in the prime of life, in the public eye, who was not staying at home on Friday nights working on needlepoint anti-macassars.  If the boys can go out and chase some, why can’t the girls?  This bothered the media to no end.

With a very good potential that Magna will bid for Chrysler and quite possibly win, she can now go from back-bench opposition MP, to head of one of the Big Three car makers.  

Paper-pushing vote drone, or Captain of Industry?  The phrase ‘tough call’ does not come to mind.

Funny how we haven’t heard that much from President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy and the rest of the Homeland Paranoia Duo of Kousin Karl and Shotgun Dick.  The reason is the Idiot Boy Administration is disintegrating faster than your $9 umbrella in a monsoon.

Rove is embroiled in a controversy right now regarding emails that have magically disappeared from the computers of the Republican National Committee.  This ties back to Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales’ former Chief of Staff.  The story is that Kousin Karl sent some email to Kyle identifying Bush-friendly replacements for the eight US Attorneys fired in 2006 for not being as Bushy as Kousin Karl would like. 

This is not the first time email is from Kousin Karl has gone AWOL.  There are others, regarding the Valerie Plame mud job that have also found the bit-bucket.  It would seem, at least according to AP that Kousin Karl thought everything was being saved in accordance with the law and, well, oh my, it seems the email wasn’t being archived. 

Shotgun Dick Cheney is making sure he only appears on FOXNews, the last safe harbor where his bomb-them-back-to-the-stoneage demagoguery will get a pass.  Yesterday, his official aircraft ate a bird coming into Chicago and had to land carefully.  If you remember on his Asian travels a few months ago, his aircraft had to divert for another mechanical anomaly.  Shotgun Dick has to stop doing his own maintenance please.  Either that, or he has to stop trying to open the door on the aircraft to go hunting from Air Force Two.  Dick, it isn’t like jacklighting deer from the back of the pickup truck.

Meanwhile President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy is on autopilot, bumping into the furniture like a Presidential Roomba vacuum.  He droningly reads from the script and gets the Stepford Audience to stand and applaud.  I suspect the Secret Service flies the same audience in for all his appearances.  The audience is not human, but seven hundred very expensive animatronics from a defense contractor who also makes some of the Predator drone components.  A traveling troupe of technicians unloads the pallets, dresses them in the appropriate garb and props them up in the chairs for the $1,000 a plate Republican Dinners.

US A-G Alberto Gonzales has as much influence on the law these days, as I do on Czech Republic monetary policy.  He seems intent on waiting for the 40-ton weight to drop from the ceiling, or the duck hunting invitation from Shotgun Dick.

Tony Snow, unfortunately, is fighting a recurrence of his cancer and that is not good, nor the subject of jocularity, so I won’t. 

As for the rest of the Idiot Boy Administration?  I defy you to name more than four cabinet level members.  There’s Chertoff and, um.  Chertoff and.  Well, there are others, I’m certain.

Paul Wolfowitz, one time Bush acolyte and Iraq War mechanic, who is now President of the World Bank, is up to his armpits in his own scandal.  It would seem that he obtained a large pay raise and promotion for a World Bank official whom he was ‘ romantically involved’ with. 

If you want to see the definition of a Republican losing his mind consider this.  Wolfowitz is described by others as a conservative hawk Republican Jew.  His romantic connection is with someone described as an Arab feminist Muslim.  We will overlook the fact that Wolfowitz, while separated from his wife since 2001, is not divorced from his wife.  Wasn’t Family Values a core Republican tenet from the Right Hand of God to President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy?

As for Condi Rice?  She was racking up the frequent flyer miles in the Middle East for a while, but that seems to have tapered off.  She’s smart enough to know when the party is over.  The last time she was seen, was at a Falls Church, VA, FedEx/Kinko’s lugging out a box of photocopied resumes.

Meanwhile Don Rumsfeld is where?  As best anyone can tell, he’s at home, watching Dr. Phil and tuning into the Ultimate Fighting Championships on Spike-TV while dining on Easy Mac and quaffing a Diet Dr. Pepper.  

Under the heading of hyper-trivia, this entry in wikipedia,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agathidium_rumsfeldi lists several species of slime mold beetles, Agathidium of the family Leiodidae,  named after Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.  You are cordially invited to make up your own jokes now.

Can someone please get this collection of lame ducks out of the pond?  If we can juggle Daylight Savings Time, why can’t we just move the calendar ahead to 2008 and be done with it.

Don Imus got the gate from Les Moonves, prez of CBS today.  Don’s comments on the Rutgers’ Women’s Basketball team, as well reported and not worthy of repeating anymore, did not go over well, so Imus is gone.

Good, bad, indifferent, Imus’s firing is more of a caution to anyone to not cross the line into something that is nasty.  But the argument still remains, what is nasty, or spiteful to me, is not necessarily nasty or spiteful to someone else. 

Personally, I’m offended that a person who spoke of America as being "The Great Satan" was being spiteful and trying to demonize the US.  It was a hateful comment designed to demean, hurt and affect the self-image of all Americans in a negative way, as well as their reputation in the world at large.

The author of that quote (Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, currently dead), was not an employee of CBS and as such, could not be sanctioned, fired, or suspended by Les Moonves. 

Sometimes you just have to shrug your shoulders and move on.

Don Imus is going to be sleeping in for the next two weeks, thanks to an ignorant comment regarding the Rutgers Women’s Basketball Team.  Referring to the Rutgers squad as ‘nappy-headed ho’s’, Imus opened his mouth to change hand-tooled cowboy boots, hopefully fresh from the stables at the ranch.

Imus’ words are spiteful, no matter how you slice it.  Even going on Al Sharpton’s radio show to do a mea culpa won’t make it better and his employers have benched him for two.  Is it an appropriate punishment?  Well, yes and no.  You can argue fair comment, irony, comedy, sarcasm and all the other excuses, but the terms he used are across the line.  The problem is, the line is situational, especially in radio. 

I worked in private radio, as a DJ-host, in the 70’s.  If one were to say ‘damn’ on the air, the length of your career would be measured in the time it took for the Program Director to run down the hall from his office to the control room.  Needless to say, if you were to use other words of a harsher nature, the last thing you would hear would be another round being pumped into the shotgun.  Consider it the Mossberg Outplacement Procedure.

There were ‘saucy’ jocks in the day.  Scruff Connors comes to mind, on either CHUM-FM or Q107 with his "Morning Squirt"  Meaning, call in while you’re taking that delightful first of the day piss and be heard all over the city.  There was the Weather Fairy with (going by memory here) Mike Cooper at 680CFTR.  

Before Ottawa had an FM rock station (CHEZ-FM), CKBY-FM played hard rock on Saturday night instead of the country tunes they played the rest of the time.  One jock, who shall remain nameless, but was Brian Murphy, could be heard inhaling very deeply of what we all assumed was illicit smoking substances, on the air.  This made sense while playing Led Zepplin or Black Sabbath and was perfectly in keeping with the general attitude of the times.      

The Shock Jock revolution started, at least on my radar, January 13, 1982.  On that date Air Florida flight 90 took off from DC’s National Airport under severe winter icing conditions and crashed into the 14th street bridge, killing 78.  The next day, a jock called Air Florida asking for their fare from National Airport to the 14th street bridge.  To me, that was where the line was crossed from ‘saucy’ or ‘naughty’ or ‘suggestive’ to nasty. 

Notice that qualifier in there:  Nasty to me.  I am not the arbiter of taste for anyone else but me.

Don Imus calling the team a bunch of ‘nappy-headed ho’s’ is nasty to me.  Which leads us to what to do about it?

Here’s how we can make our feelings heard, if we so choose:  Private radio stations live on advertising revenue.  They charge more per commercial for larger audiences.  Nielsen is one of the biggest audience survey companies out there.  They send a diary and/or telephone people in every area of the US and Canada to ask them to list their listening habits in 15-minute increments. 

From the sample of returned diaries and phone interviews, Nielsen and other companies, like Arbitron, or BBM in Canada, statistically project how many listeners are tuned to various radio stations in each 15 minute daypart.  To the radio stations, those ratings mean money.

If you get an audience measurement diary, or get a phone call from a survey company, you can wreak havoc with a broadcaster who has carried a program you find inappropriate.  What you do is not list their call letters for the specific daypart you found, or find objectionable.  Don’t listen, or instead list the call letters of your local NPR or CBC station.  Heck, if there’s a private station in your community that exclusively plays Icelandic folk tunes, list them instead. 

Radio stations are notorious for changing programming based on miniscule changes in percentages of listeners, as there is a lot of money on the line.  If you so choose, you can make the personally objectionable go away by hitting the owners in the wallets. 

Who knows, perhaps that Icelandic Folk Tunes station (Noregur sjúga!109.9 FM) will become wildly popular and make a ton of money.