"Ima Let You Finish"

I don't normally care for or about the MTV Music Video Awards, which is really the musical equivalent of the Clios. That is, promotional music videos are commercials. But even a musical curmudgeon like myself would have to feel compelled to comment on Kanye West's interruption of country singer Taylor Swift's acceptance speech for her award at the MTV shindig this past Sunday. West ruined what should have been a wonderful experience for Taylor Swift by interrupting her acceptance speech to declare his opinion that Beyoncé Knowles should have won that same award. Knowles herself expressed a look that was a combination of surprise and bewilderment, looking like she was laughing at West more than with him.

I don't profess to know what prompted West to pull such a stunt. After all, Taylor Swift winning an award instead of Beyoncé Knowles is not like poor people in New Orleans losing their homes to flooding. West was right to call out George Walker Bush four years ago, but expressing displeasure over an award recipient in the same manner was neither justified nor called for.

Knowles, to her credit, had Swift share the stage with her later in the ceremony, and even President Obama weighed in calling him a "jackass," which many found offensive. (So did I; he should have dropped the "jack.")

If you really wanted to find jackasses this past weekend, you only needed to look at Washington, where sixty thousand of them - although Glenn Beck insists there were over a million of them - demonstrated against Obama's health care reform proposals, virulently denouncing him as a fascist and accusing him of spending too much money and letting the government take over health care. Many of the signs and slogans were vicious and nasty, making clear references to Obama's race and national origin, continuously claiming he was born in Kenya. This is the culmination of numerous town hall meetings and public speeches (some of them Obama's) in which people carried guns.

This is all pretty unsettling. Because just as it was implied that Kayne West found it objectionable that a country and western singer would beat out a hip-hop/R&B diva for an award (Kanye West doesn't care about white people?), it's more than implied that these protesters really don't like the idea of a black man in the White House.

Kanye West is a clown. But these tea-party conservatives, egged on by folks like schizophrenic, egocentric paranoiac prima donna Glenn Beck are downright scary.