So Hulk Hogan and Colin Cowherd walk into a bar …
Whereupon Hank Williams Jr. stops his Obama-is-Hitler rant to offer them 20 percent off some Confederate flag merch, and Donald Sterling, from his seat in the corner, yells out that he's buying their first round of shots.
Whatcha gonna do, brother, when even your 24-inch pythons aren't strong enough to separate you from such ignominious company … brother?!
I've been reading a novel of historical fiction over the last week or so, which includes large segments focused upon the civil rights movements of the 1960s. As someone who did not live through those events, my initial thought was something along the lines of, "What a crazy time."
And then my secondary thought was, "How sad that, in many respects, not much has changed."
How sad that we've gone from killing four people by bombing the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 to killing nine people by shooting up the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.
How sad that we've gone from Bull Connor's fire hoses and police attack dogs to Eric Garner's "I can't breathe" in New York City, to Michael Brown and Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo., to Sandra Bland in Hempstead, Texas.
How sad that it took until 2015 for the United States Supreme Court to overrule myriad state laws and give gay people the right to marry, and only then by a 5-4 vote.
How sad that it took the Charleston shooting for the South CarolinaLegislature to finally remove the Confederate flag — a symbol of a fight to affirm some people's rights to own other people — from the state's capitol.
How sad that the South Carolina decision prompted a Ku Klux Klan rally, not to mention Williams Jr. selling Stars-and-Bars merchandise at his concerts, and selling out, at that.
Against the backdrop of all that, this weekend's news that Hogan, a former professional wrestler, was captured on tape eight years ago dropping the N-word multiple times in a racist tirade, and that Cowherd, a blowhard radio host, lumped all Dominicans together as uneducated and ignorant, may not seem like such a big deal.
OK, fair enough — certainly, if the context we're considering is that no one died, and that the only hurt inflicted was on some people's feelings, I'll concede that point.
Just don't ask me to buy the arguments, though, that these events are only news because of political correctness run amok, because society is now preconditioned — damn liberal media! — to express moral outrage at any "opinion" we disagree with.
And don't ask me to buy the argument that Hogan being fired by the WWE and Cowherd being taken off the air by ESPN are examples of their free speech being infringed upon. To borrow some examples from the novel I referenced earlier, there's no U.S. equivalent of the Soviet Union's KGB sending Hogan to Siberia or the East German Stasi torturing Cowherd for their comments. The extent of their "punishments" was their private-sector employers deciding they didn't want the bad publicity that comes from being linked to their comments, and cutting ties with them as a result.
The bigger point to take away is how sad it is that, once again, sports and entertainment have failed to live up to the ideal of being refuges from the problems of the real world and have instead again become reminders of them. Donald Sterling being removed as owner of the Clippers a year ago for racist comments is clearly not the isolated incident we would have liked to believe.
Hogan and Cowherd may well not be the ignorant bigots they're being portrayed as, but the casualness with which they threw out racist words and stereotypes makes them microcosms of a society that, for all the progress it's made in the last half-century, still has endemic and systemic issues with hatred and inequality.
And that's the saddest takeaway of all … brother.
ewalden@sltrib.com
Twitter: @esotericwalden