One Week
Say bye, I-Man.
The concision of insult-racial and sexual, in just five simple syllables-could have been the handiwork of only a grandmaster of the ancient art of invective. Yes, the deplorable label that radio trash talker Don Imus affixed to the classy Rutgers University women's basketball team metastasized in the hothouse, downloadable environment of the Internet. But in the all-everything, all-the-time media world in which we live, that certainly should have come as no surprise. Nor should it have been a shock, despite the sad Mel Gibson and Michael Richards (of Seinfeld) eruptions over the past few months, that race, for all the objective and undeniable forward movement we as a nation have made over the years, continues to boil like a toxic lava just below the surface of our public life.
Hand-wringing, like invective, is an ancient and well-practiced art. But if one pauses for a moment to consider the rather extraordinary events of last week, it is hard not to find more cause for positive reflection than reason to indulge oneself in animus and obloquy. Forget, for a moment, the Imus soap opera. In North Carolina, a clear-eyed prosecutor cleared three white Duke lacrosse players of the heinous crimes alleged against them by a troubled young black woman. Facts, not fictional invective, carried the day. In the Imus affair, the unforgettable grace and dignity of the Rutgers women he so viciously maligned stood as the single most powerful indictment against him.
So the I-Man is toast. And three young men at Duke get their reputations back. Sort of. Life is a contact sport. But here, at least, the mores of justice and civility, happily, prevailed.
This story appears in the April 23, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.