Straws and Camels' Backs

I taught my last lesson on biblical texts to my freshmen yesterday; the rest of the semester is going to be portfolio work and such. So no more musings on Job or David or Plato, for that matter. More of that in August.

I suppose I'll be the three-millionth blogger to say a little something about the Don Imus debacle that went down this month. What blows my mind is neither that a dozen newspapers dropped Coulter's column after her personal slur against John Edwards nor that CBS radio dropped Don Imus after his insult to the Rutgers basketball team; both of those moves make sense in a market where the sensible-people market is fickle. (Hardcore partisans stay brand-loyal where sensible people walk away from things that smell that bad.)

What I don't get is why this particular attack on Edwards, and not one of a hundred different personal attacks over the last five years or so, did the deal for those newspapers. What I don't get is why Imus has been doing the same thing for as long as I've been aware of Don Imus and it was this one comment got him canned. Now certainly Al Sharpton has something to do with the latter; that's obvious. But Sharpton has gotten bent out of shape on other things, and heads haven't rolled like they did here. And certainly Howard Dean had something to do with the former, but papers didn't drop columnists before.

I hope there's some theoretical framework that can render intelligible why these (by comparison lightweight) moments finally tipped the scales; if not, I hope someone comes up with one.

In a rather unrelated matter, I'm still sad that Vonnegut's dead. I know that the novels, not the man, have been a part of my life the way they have, but he's still one of those figures who makes the world better by walking around in it, and I already miss him.