(frequent swearing behind "read more" link)

I know, I know. Like a**holes, everyone's got an opinion, and they all stink. Well, having just now got around to watching the video, I'm gonna let loose anyway.

Video of the initial incident

Richards' apology on Letterman

The two hecklers on the Today show

All things being equal, his flipping out like this on two people at a nightclub isn't a big deal. It's not. The prevailing racial inequalities in society are a big deal. The fact that the prison population of this country is as severly skewed racially as it is is a big deal. The disproportionate poverty levels between races is a big deal. The fact that the people who promote war are disproportionately White and the people who fight and die in war are disproportionately non-White is a big deal. The fact that people think all our racial problems are behind us is a big deal. One guy flipping out and having a racist tirade at a couple of people in a nightclub? Yeah, it sucks, but it's about as newsworthy as yesterday's 15 car pileup on the Interstate. The tirade is only a big deal in that it brings feelings which our society has never truly dealt with back to the forefront. It is not news, in and of itself.

But all things are not equal.

Richards says the two guys in question were heckling him, and then he just exploded in rage at them, not thinking about his choice of words. The two guys say he started making fun of "the stupid bunch of Blacks and Mexicans" who had just entered, and used epithets when they stood up for themselves.

No need to call Nancy Drew on this one. The two guys on the Today show are lying pricks. Seriously.

First of all, I was suspicious of their story from the start. I've seen too many episodes of Judge Judy to ever believe the "I'm totally innocent and it was all that person's fault" story. The two guys would have us believe that Richards just snapped at the sight of Blacks and Mexicans in the audience, as if all his prior audiences were all-White before. It doesn't hold water. Something pushed Richards over. If those two just told us what it was, we could say that Richards' reaction was outrageous. Given the video, I'm sure any of us would say it was an outrageous overreaction, no matter what these guys did, as long as they just told us. But the only thing those two guys are admitting to is that they told Richards he wasn't funny, AFTER the slurs started flying. Nuh-uh. They did something, and they're not fessing up it.

The first real clue is that the video doesn't show anything before the tirade. The two admitted the comedy club recorded the whole thing. So it wasn't just an audience member turning the camera on halfway through. The club was recording the performance. Why don't we have the whole video? I'd be skeptical even if the whole video was there and it appeared that nobody said anything to provoke Richards. I'd be thinking, "Nobody with a professional comedy career just flips out like that. Somebody must have said something that didn't get caught on the mic." But no, the video just shows Kramer exploding, and the two guys responding to that.

So what happened before the video started?

According to the two guys, Richards yelled "A stupid bunch of Blacks and Mexicans just entered the room" when they arrived, and then Richards later flipped them off and said "Fuck you, n*****!" This was all supposedly before the video started. But watch peoples' reactions at the beginning of the video. Richards puts the two guys down with the "50 years ago, we'd have you something something" part, and everyone cheers. Then, he starts saying the "N" word, and then everyone gets all aghast. C'mon. If Richards had already hurled slurs, people wouldn't have cheered at the "50 years ago" comment, and then be offended the next time he used the words. The audience's reaction tells me that Richards' saying the "N" word on the tape was the first racial slur he used. The two guys lied.

And why did the audience cheer so loudly when Kramer put them in their place (before the epithets)? If a stage talent just shouted at somebody in the audience without provocation, I'd be like "What the Hell's going on?" If somebody in the audience was prodding at the guy on stage, trying to push his buttons, and then the stage guy put that asshat in his/her place, I'd cheer wildly. That's what I see in the video. I see people cheering like, "Hell yeah! Put those assholes in their place!," and then getting aghast when the racial slurs start coming out. The two guys deliberately heckled Richards and did what they could to push him over the edge, and now they're lying about what happened because the possibility of monetary compensation is involved.

Now, assuming these guys unfairly heckled Richards, why would they do that? Well, because they can, and as asinine as it is, it can only end up in their favor. The two guys could say just about anything they wanted to, and the worst thing that could happen to them is they could get really famous for doing it. And that's the worst thing. Best case scenario, for them, is they goad this guy who presumably has a fair bit of cash into doing something they can sue over. They had nothing to lose and everything to gain by heckling Ricards, and Richards, unless he had delusions of putting himself back on the front page as a way of jump-starting his career, had everything to lose. I'm very familiar with this sort of uneven power dynamic, and have knowingly exploited it myself when I saw fit. But if you're going to exploit it, you'd better have a lot to back you up, and these clowns have nothing.

And don't tell me nobody would lie about something that serious. It is really, really serious, but I've seen people lie about more serious stuff than racial epithets time and again. My best friend in high school was once falsely accused of rape by some psychotic ex-girlfriend. Another friend of mine was falsely accused of rape very recently. It really, really sucks that people would lie about those kinds of things, but they do, and you can't just say somebody's right solely because they're in an underpriviledged status. You have to look for some clue. Any clue. There are nearly always clues, and the clues here tell me the two guys are lying pricks.

Now to the big issue. Is Michael Richards a racist? Of course he is. We all are. Every single person in this society (and in many other societies) is racist. It's not like anybody watched the video and then asked, "What's that word he keeps saying?", and had to look it up in the dictionary. The question is not if we have racist tendencies or not. It's about what our attitudes about our own racist tendencies are. (Sorry, that was an aside, but that whole "Is he a racist or isn't he?" thing always pisses me off.)

So is Michael Richards unduly racist? All we have to go on is the tirade, so let's use that. I troll people online, and sometimes, I call people things I wouldn't ordinarily call people. If you can be egalitarian when you're trying to get somebody's goat, you get a big gold star, because it's a really, really hard thing to do. Most epithets are linked to race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, disability, or some other not-cool-to-make-fun-of thing. I'll admit, I've thrown egalitarianism out the window when trying to get somebody's goat. If I know my adversary is going to get pissed off if I liken him to a homosexual, I'll do it, even if I don't think being homosexual is an insult. It's all about pissing off your mark, because if you can piss him/her off, you're in control, and you win. A strong action deserves a strong reaction. In fact, I've seen confrontations where somebody appeared weak for not "going there," and the last thing you ever want to do in that situation is look weak.

That's all I see going on here. Richards wanted to get these guys' goats, so he just said something he knew would piss them off immediately. Because of all the racial animosity and rage that flows just beneath the surface (a rage us white people never truly appreciate), it can often take just one word to piss somebody off. Richards thought, whether consciously or unconsciously, "I know what word will piss them off." He said it, as if he thought everyone in the audience would know he was just trying to show those two guys that he can win at being the biggest asshole and wouldn't think he was serious. You can even see him looking up there as he's doing it, like "Is that all you got? I ain't scared of you!"

Why the Hell would he choose that word? Doesn't he know he shouldn't say it? Of course he does, but he's a risk-taker. That's how you get up on that stage: by taking risks. Shit, I've done things with girls that I thought for sure, even as I was doing it, that I would get fuckin' SLAPPED for, but I went for it anyway. And those risks were rewarded every time, I guess because I'm just the lucky bastard who spots the truly boneheaded ideas when they come to mind.

None of that excuses the fact that what he did was a shitty, shitty, shitty, shity, shitty, shitty, shitty thing to do. Not even the fact that he'll surely endure enough punishment for all this excuses what a shitty thing it was. But I refuse to villify him, because I don't see him as the big villain in this.  You don't hear me go on and on about how horrible September 11th was, even though it was a monstrous crime, because it was a reaction to the vastly more monstrous crime of ongoing U.S. imperialism and hegemony. In the same vein, I'm not going to portray Michael Richards as a bad guy. He just had a boneheaded reaction to some asshats' trollery. As far as the racial slant goes, there are far bigger criminals in this country to go after, and as far as the night club incident itself goes, those two lying pricks got everything they asked for. If you're heckling somebody on stage, when they're doing their best to entertain you, you have NO sympathy from me, even if your asshole plan backfires more than you bargained for.

I do feel great sympathy for victims of race-based humiliation and degradation. If it wasn't so obvious that the two guys in the Richards case are lying about what happened, I'd feel really sorry for them, and call for Richards to compensate them. But they're lying pricks, so fuck them.