He's Gone (and I Don't Mean LJ)

(The first few lines of this post, to truly appreciate their intent and mood, need to be singsonged in that kind of "nanny nanny boo boo" voice commonly used by a six-year-old who has gotten her way. What this says about me, I will leave you to infer.)

He's gone, he's gone, he's gone he's gone he's gone :::wiggly happy dance:::
They fired Mancow and now he's GONE gone gone :::cabbage patch::::
because he su-u-uu-uu-uuuu-uucks
so now he's FI-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-IRED
and I don't have to listen to his bullshit anymore :::twirls around the cubicle:::
(not that I ever listened after 1999 or so--oh, wait, that wasn't just ME, that was EVERYONE, which is why he's FIRED)
Good riddance, ignorant pig
If they taped your mouth shut years ago the world would have been a better place...
:::big finishing twirl and pose:::
HE'S GONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, yes, that was childish. Yes, it was immature and fairly stupid. No, I'm not sorry.

I have hated Mancow since about 1998, when I lost the last vestiges of my tolerance for idiocy, xenophobia, and sexism disguised as "political incorrectness". Everyone has run into the little kid who keeps yelling out "POO-POO! BOOGER! FARTS!!!" The first time it's kinda cute, a little; the thirty-eighth time, you're ready to tear off your own ears so you don't have to hear it anymore. To me, Mancow was like that kid. And he could play it off with the "oh, it's just a CHARACTER" explanation all he wanted; CR was one of his greatest defenders, and he swore up and down that the "real" Mancow didn't hate women, or Muslims, or liberals, or gays, or... Well, you know what? The problem is, when you play a "character" like that, you're going to validate the people who actually DO think like that--who actually DO think women are just a collection of orifices, or who actually WOULD take a baseball bat to a gay couple. And when, in the wake of September 11th, a radio host--no matter what kind of "character" he's supposedly "playing"--says something like "Let's take back Devon Avenue!!" (a street in Chicago frequented by Indian and Arabic residents)--well, to say something like that is just negligent and irresponsible.

He wasn't fired for anything he did, either, and I'm glad. Had he been fired for saying something outrageous, he would have used it to play himself off as a martyr for free speech. He can't do that now; he was fired, according to the station, because they had discovered a large disparity between the audience Mancow was attracting and the audience for the rest of the day. His ratings weren't awful, but they weren't stellar, either--and the advertisers were scared, as well. If you were an advertiser, would YOU want YOUR after Jello-Wrestling Nekkid Bimbos? So in effect, he was fired because his negatives finally outweighed his positives.

As for me, I couldn't be happier. Finally I can listen to music in the morning, played by James Van Osdol, no less--someone listeners can respect, someone with an actual passion for radio and for alternative music, who was with Q101 in the heyday of alternative. They're replacing Mancow with music, for the moment--and I hope it stays that way for a good long while, since Q101 is known for its legendarily-bad and -short-lived morning-show experiments (can anyone say "Lance and Stoley"?)

This moment was about seven years too late in coming, but better late than never.