Kevin Annett lives in a small white house facing onto a ramshackle street in downtown Nanaimo, BC. The local RCMP detachment, with its lot full of solid, square cop cars, is just around the corner. Inside, on a watery day in mid-January, the living room is lit only by the gray light spilling in through the front picture window. An unlit Christmas tree still occupies the centre of the room.

Annett is as stripped down for efficiency as his home. Brisk but genial, he flicks on a light and sits, looking a bit mournful, for an interview. I ask him about the evidence for unmarked mass graves at the sites of former residential schools in Canada – as many as 28, according to Annett and others.

This is the sort of question that fills his days now.

“At this point, there’s three kinds of evidence,” he says. “There’s a lot of eyewitness accounts which I’ve documented over about 15 years, pointing to graves on the grounds of the former school or an Indian Hospital nearby. Second is documentation where we’ve found letters referring to these gravesites, from Indian Agents, school officials, other people.

“And finally, in a place like Port Alberni, we’ve actually gone out with a forensic team and done a survey of the ground, and they found, some of the people three years ago who did this survey, terrain very similar to what you find in mass grave sites in other parts of the world, like sinkholes and the vegetation and that.

“So there’s pretty conclusive evidence that these kids are buried somewhere around there.”

Those are the sorts of answers that have made Annett a lightning rod for controversy, opprobrium, and admiration across Canada and, increasingly, in Europe. But they pale beside some of his more recent charges. Last year, on his Vancouver Co-op Radio program “Hidden from History,” Annett claimed that Mounties had actually assisted notorious Vancouver serial killer Robert Pickton, not just by neglecting to properly investigate his crimes but by delivering women to his pig farm. His show has since been yanked from the air. More recently, his supporters and he have “summoned” The Pope, Joseph Ratzinger, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper “to answer charges of conspiring in Crimes against Humanity before an International Tribunal this September in London, England.”

To Annett’s detractors, of course, this is all bad theatre and fabulation. “For years,” wrote BC journalist Terry Glavin in a splenetic 2008 attack in thetyee.ca, “RCMP investigators have been chasing down these stories and they always come up with nothing. But they persist, like the alligators in New York’s sewers.” Others point to Ottawa’s establishment of a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to deal with the legacy of Canada’s residential school system. The $60 million, five-year TRC is currently holding a series of “national events” across the country, while also gathering and recording the stories of survivors and their families.

To Annett, the Commission is a whitewash. “The way it’s established according to its mandate, and the way it’s operated in practise over the last number of months in different forums, the whole purpose seems to be to protect the perpetrators and to silence the witnesses. People are not allowed to speak freely, their testimonies aren’t allowed to be used in court, they can’t even name names. There’s all these restrictions put on people, and at the same time there’s all these indemnifications granted to the churches responsible.

“In fact, they’re not going to be held responsible and they’re not going to be prosecuted, even though thousands of children died in these schools.”

 
Kevin Annett’s long campaign for what he regards as real justice for residential school survivors has been well-documented, by no one more so than Annett himself in his books Love and Death in the Valley and, most recently, Unrepentant. As a young United Church minister in the early ‘90s, he was hired by a small parish in Port Alberni, BC, an isolated logging town 193 km north-west of Victoria on Vancouver Island. Within three years he’d been fired. His employers said it was because he “failed to maintain the peace and welfare of the church”; Annett says it was because he welcomed natives into the congregation, and let them speak freely from the pulpit about murders that had occurred at the local Indian residential school, which the United Church operated for five decades until finally shuttering it in 1973.

Annett, along with his wife and two young daughters, moved to Vancouver, where he enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia and began digging into the microfilm. “I discovered that the entire record of Indian residential schools in British Columbia had been acquired by the UBC library system that very year,” he writes in Unrepentant. In it, he found “verified evidence that the residential schools had been an exercise in deliberate genocide – that over half of all the children in residential schools had died every year from their deliberate exposure to communicable diseases, with the full knowledge and sanction of church and state in Canada.”

But his tenure at UBC ended badly too. His wife left him, taking the kids. The faculty member responsible for handing out graduate funding and teaching assistantships turned out also to be on the executive of the United Church in BC. There would be no money for Annett. Broke, he was forced to abandon his degree — though not his research.

Eventually, the United Church “delisted” him as a minister altogether. Undaunted, he gathered his findings into a cerlox-ringed, self-published book, Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust (recently republished online as Hidden No Longer). Reading it, with its pages upon pages of primary documents, government and church correspondence, and first-person testimonies, it’s hard to discount Annett as a loon, if only because to do so is to discount those testimonies as well.

Witness: “The girls who got pregnant were expelled immediately. Some of them were even found dead on the grounds of the Alberni school. None of us could ever leave the school grounds, and we couldn’t mix with the boys – we couldn’t even hold hands with them – so the staff had to be the ones who fathered those kids.”

Witness: “We were playing soccer in the back field behind the school, where it was really covered in weeds. The ball got kicked among the weeds, and in those weeds I came across the remains of a body, maybe three feet long. It was decomposed and you could see a lot of skeleton . . . . After that, the RCMP came to us and told us not to say anything about what we discovered in the field.”

Witness: “One day in 1946, I was 11, and I went to the place under the stairs where I would go and sit and cry. I heard Mr. Caldwell at the top of the stairs with another little girl, a few years younger than me . . . . Mr. Caldwell was screaming at her, and then I heard this sound, like a kick, and I heard her falling down the stairs. I looked out and saw her facing me, with her eyes open, not moving or breathing. I never saw her again after that.”

Witness: “My sister Maggie was thrown from a three-story window by a nun at the school, and she died.”

Witness: “Kids had TB there and they weren’t sent away for treatment or any help. They just left them in there with us. And I remember one girl, she was just so sick, we didn’t even want to get close to her. But then the nuns told us, you know, ‘You guys get over there and play with her. You’ve got to be around her; you can’t let her be over there by herself.’”

Witness:“I think they were trying to deliberately infect us with tuberculosis, because they always made me sleep in the same bed with girls who had TB. One on each side of me.”

Witness: “Whenever we got sick in that school we were completely ignored. My mother was even forced to sleep in the same bed with kids who were dying of tuberculosis. This was common.”

Either all these people are lying, or Kevin Annett is right.

Next page: “Eventually, the station’s ‘investigation’ resulted in Annett’s program being taken off the air and his being permanently banned from the premises.”

On August 9^th, 2010, Annett took a phone call on his long-running radio show, “Hidden from History.” The caller wanted to discuss rumours of police complicity in the murders committed by Robert Pickton. “I have specific evidence of what you’re talking about,” Annett replied. “There’s a man, Les Guerin, he’s a maintenance worker down at the Musqueam Reserve, and he gave me documents about five years ago which showed that, as far back as 1989, Dave Pickton [Robert Pickton’s brother] was bringing bags out to the Musqueam Indian Reserve. And Les Guerin and another guy went in and dug up this stuff. They had it analyzed at Simon Fraser University and, sure enough, there was human remains mixed with pig bones.” He went on to explain that, though the evidence was taken to the RCMP, they never investigated.

After his show, Annett stepped from the booth and was handed a letter by Vancouver Co-op Radio staffer Daniel van Tijn, signed by all four of the station’s staff, telling him that he would be banned from the premises while an investigation was undertaken into events nearly three weeks prior. According to the staffers, they had video from a security camera showing Annett and an unidentified woman in the station’s broadcast studio during the wee hours of July 20^th, eating, drinking, and engaging in “sexual activity.” The woman was also said to have smoked what appeared to be crack cocaine. Eventually, the account went, a guard who had been watching all this on a security monitor intervened, and the visitors left at 4:22 a.m.

The station says all this was contained in the letter handed to Annett. Annett says the letter referred only to “activities that compromised station policy.” It wasn’t until two months later, he insists, that he learned exactly what might be on the video.

Which is when the story really gets strange.

“The whole thing is ridiculous because I have a solid alibi, I was sleeping at somebody else’s house that night and I have a letter from her confirming that. But this was at the tail end of a number of things that have happened, because when I was in Europe last April, after I got back, a number of the native people on the street were referring to conversations they claim I had with them during April, which couldn’t have happened because I was over in Europe. And there were suggestions like that which indicated that there was somebody impersonating me.

“Which wasn’t the first time this has happened. After our tribunal in 1998, one of our head native judges, a guy called Royce White Calf, claims that someone was impersonating him in the downtown eastside, to gather information and that. So I mean, it isn’t kind of far-fetched to suggest this.”

Well, maybe. When I ask Annett what he’d say to those who might think otherwise, he tells me they should “read more about the history of what they call ‘blackops,’ or the activities of the RCMP or the FBI. There was a program that’s still in place, actually, in America called COINTELPRO which the FBI set up in the 1960s . . . . one of the techniques they used is called ‘badjacketing.’ There’s a good book about this written by Ward Churchill.” I had a look at Churchill’s book, Agents of Repression, which refers mostly to the use of rumour-mongering and manufactured evidence to discredit radicals, rather than, say, body doubles. But then again, many unusual things happen on the downtown eastside.

Annett says that in October he ran into an acquaintance who told him that a certain woman was “flashing a lot of money around and was claiming that she made it after doing some ‘play-acting.’ And that kind of struck me as odd, so I asked him more about it, and he said, ‘Yeah, she said she was down at the radio station one night and she got payment for doing something there.’”  Annett later issued a statement in which he recounted tracking down “a sex trade worker, whom I’ll call ‘Candy,’” who gave him a notarized affidavit describing “how she was approached by men she recognized as undercover Mounties and offered $200 to engage in sex with an unknown man made up to impersonate me . . . . ‘Candy’ states that a white male let her and her accomplice into the station around midnight, where she smoked drugs and had ‘mild’ sex with him for nearly four hours, in front of closed circuit TV cameras in the central studio. Unexplainably, Portland Hotel security did not intervene until almost 4 am. She says the impersonator looked like me but had a heavy accent, and was told that no-one would interfere with them for hours, and that she would not get into trouble.

“The station staff subsequently used this video to ban me from Co-op radio, without ever allowing me to view the video or confront my accusers. Clearly, if I was allowed to view it, I would instantly recognize ‘Candy’ and the frame up would be obvious.”

I phoned Leela Chinniah, program co-ordinator for Co-op Radio, who declined to be interviewed for this article. She did say, though, before hanging up on me when I persisted in asking questions anyway (on the principle that journalistic organizations ought to be willing to talk to journalists), that Annett had been given the opportunity to view the video. He denies it.

Eventually, the station’s “investigation” resulted in Annett’s program being taken off the air and his being permanently banned from the premises. He says the real reason is that guests on “Hidden from History” had been implicating the RCMP in the murders at Robert Pickton’s pig farm. “Between July and August on a number of shows we were speaking on the air, including with an eyewitness who was out at the Pickton farm, who described seeing RCMP officers taking women out there. This one woman believed that she knows the identity of one of the serial killers, him being a retired Mountie. We were talking about all of that, and about the apparent complicity of the police in concealing that.

“In fact, only 10 days after I was banned, the Vancouver Sun had an article about how the Vancouver police admitted that they knew about the Picktons for two years and did nothing to investigate. And they’ve never explained very well why they did that – why they refused to investigate.”

A media liaison for the RCMP’s “E” Division in Vancouver called the accusations “pretty crazy” and said someone would get back to me. No one did. An e-mail to the Vancouver Police went unanswered.

 
I could probably get closer to the truth behind these conflicting stories. I could ask to speak to the friend at whose home Annett says he was sleeping on July 20^th. I could try to track down “Candy.” I could talk to the maintenance worker who says he took evidence of Pickton’s crimes to the RCMP, and place another call to “E” Division, and pursue the Vancouver Police for a response, too. But I’m not sure any of that really matters.

We can be pretty certain the RCMP and Vancouver Police would deny the claims of Annett and his colleagues, just as the United Church continues to vociferously reject many of his other charges (although not the fact of Indian residential school abuses). And whatever happened in the Vancouver Co-op Radio studio last summer is finally just a sideshow – one that has more to do with the dissension currently roiling that station than the lives, past and present, of Canada’s aboriginal people.

I expect they could care less about where Kevin Annett was that night. What they do care about is the way that they, or their parents and grandparents, were systematically abused in residential schools, whether by being forcibly separated from their family and culture, or by being neglected, beaten, raped, or killed. They care, they continue to tell us, about the fact that the majority of women who have disappeared from Vancouver’s downtown eastside, and along northern BC’s sinister Highway of Tears, have been native, and that that may account for law enforcement’s otherwise unaccountable languor in investigating their whereabouts.

And those on the front lines tell us little has changed: “An increasing number of women who are forced to live and work in conditions of extreme poverty and marginalization continue to be murdered or have gone missing,” says Carol Martin, a victim services worker at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre.

By continuing to draw attention to all this, however clamorously – indeed, because of the holy racket he makes, in his calm, relentless way – Kevin Annett has extended his ministry well beyond anything he could have imagined when he was in theology school, debating whether or not Jesus was a revolutionary. “As important as it has been that the deaths and crimes are finally being acknowledged,” he writes in Unrepentant, “nowhere in all the growing rhetoric and mainstream coverage of the residential schools, nor in any government or church release, or in the subsequent ‘apology’ by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, do the words ‘blame’, ‘murder’, ‘trial’, ‘churches’ or ‘genocide’ ever occur . . . . No ‘M’ word: it is not in our lexicon. It never happened. We have experienced the greatest crime in our history, yet one officially devoid of criminals.”

But not without its own chief prosecutor.

We want our/We want our/We want our faggot in the lyrics.

Is it censorship or sensitive to our times that the old biddies on the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council have designated the Dire Straits ’80s classic “Money for Nothing” unacceptable for play on Canadian radio because of its use of the word “faggot?”

It would be interesting to learn the age of the “listener to radio station CHOZ-FM in St. John’s, N.L., [who] complained last year that the song includes the word ‘faggot’ in its lyrics and is discriminatory to gays.” Not only would I like to the know the individual’s age, but their sexuality, too, because his or her complaint has obscured the meaning of this ’80s gay liberation anthem just a surely as the editing of the n-word from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn has diminished the power of his American classic. (If the complainant is a little faggot, he should know his history better.)

Not only is it censorship, the decision ignores the sensitivity of the time when, rather than being discriminatory, the lyric, in context, was empowering to us young, in-your-face faggots of the ’80s.

This was our time. We had healed from the assassination of human rights champion Harvey Milk two years earlier. We did not retreat. We were on the streets. Our packed clubs played the beats. We danced to this song.

 
The complaint and the Council’s decision not only ignore the word in the context of the song, but the song in the context of gay history. I would venture to say with confidence that the overwhelming majority of us “old faggots” who were there and were fighting for our rights and freedoms are pissed off that they’re messing with our song. Faggots don’t like censorship.

“Money for Nothing” was the first hit song and hit video that said our name – it was what we called ourselves then and do to this day. It recognized us as a reckoning force of social change and anticipated our future economic power. The faggots were taking over the music industry. MTV was ours. The song satirically mocked the new MTV generation as lazy, looking for the easy way, couch-potatoes who jeered many of the new, emerging video stars as faggots.

See the little faggot with the earring and the makeup
Yeah buddy that’s his own hair
That little faggot got his own jet airplane
That little faggot he’s a millionaire

What’s discriminatory about that? If I had my own jet airplane and if I had been a millionaire back in the ’80s – and more and more of us faggots had planes and were becoming millionaires then – you could call me anything you want. We were having too much fun to care.

One of my first acts when I return to the airwaves with a new radio broadcast will be to play “Money for Nothing,” not as the Council deems suitably edited, but unedited and in-your-face.

Dave Brindle is a new media broadcaster, writer, and journalist living in Lund, B.C.

You will have heard that an American publishing house has plans for an edition of Huckleberry Fiinn in which the character “N***** Jim” is to be renamed “Slave Jim.” Now comes word that the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has ruled that the song “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits is unfit for Canadian ears because it contains the word . . . well, I won’t write it, but it starts with “F” and rhymes with “shag it.”

Quite right. I, too, find these words to be unhearable and unreadable. In fact, they offend me so much — not on my own behalf, mind you, but on behalf of others — that I will not even refer to them as “The N Word” and “The F Word.” I prefer “The Letter After ‘M’ Word” and “The Letter With Which ‘Fish’ Starts Word” — just to further avoid offence, you understand.

But let us not stop now. So much of our cultural heritage needs to be edited. Let’s get at it.

For example, I am particularly interested in drama — or, as I like to refer to it, The Drama. But what a cesspool of offensiveness it is. Take David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross — a potpourri of profanity and racial epithets. But not irredeemable. Below I have indicated how it might be cleaned up for civilized consumption:

MOSS: You missed an intercoursing big sale. Big deal. A dead-beat Person of Polish Persuasion. Big deal. And I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you what else. Don’t ever try to sell a South Asian Individual. They like to feel superior (except of course they don’t, I am merely saying that for reasons of bigotry), I don’t know. Never bought an intercoursing thing.”

Much better. And I bet you can’t even tell where I made changes.

Similarly, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and its insensitive use of “The Letter That Comes Before ‘X’ Word That Rhymes With ‘Rich’ But Is Spelled More Like ‘Ditch.’” Surely it is time we replaced this hateful slur with the more contemporaneously acceptable “Solstice Sprite.”

PUTNAM: Don’t you understand it, sir? There is a murdering (but not really) Solstice Sprite among us, bound to keep herself in the dark (or so I believe in my unenlighted 17th-century view, for which I am deeply sorry.) Wait for no one to charge you — declare it yourself. You have discovered Solstice Spirittwittery!”

You’re welcome, Mr. Miller.

In fiction, Catcher in the Rye has, of course, been asking for it for years. Time to change it up:

“Anyway, it was December and all, and it was cold as a Solstice Sprite’s Baby-Feeding Mechanism. The week before somebody had stolen my camel’s-hair coat (which I deeply regret wearing, now that I better understand the suffering of cold camels). Pencey was full of People of a Thief-Like Persuasion (though in saying that we must take into account the possibility of childhood trauma which may have led to their anti-social behaviour).

And now our own Canadian watchdogs have recognized the need to move on to music. I suggest, once we have combed the entire Dire Straits/Mark Knopfler canon, we launder the discography of that incorrigible sexist, Elvis Presley. As a start:

Well long tall Sally, she’s built for speed
But Uncle John also respects her keen insights into the work of Schopenhauer

By the way, while the publishers of the new Huckleberry Finn have done fine work there, they also propose bringing out a new edition of Tom Sawyer in which “Injun Jim” becomes “Indian Jim.” But I am from B.C., where the latter has been further replaced with “First Nations.”

Hence I will have to wait for the expurgated version of the expurgated version. It’s not easy being enlightened.

We’ve now seen, for the second time in recent memory, a journalist being harassed by Canadian border guards while trying to enter the country. Three years ago, American talk-radio host and filmmaker Alex Jones was detained for four hours, in the middle of the night, by Citizenship and Immigration Canada agents in Ottawa who confiscated his passport, camera, and belongings. They ordered him back the next morning for further grilling.

Now U.S. public-radio star Amy Goodman, co-host of Democracy Now!, has received a similar hazing while trying to get to a speaking engagement in Vancouver. Goodman got off a bit easier — apparently the guard who interrogated her was mostly concerned that she might say something nasty about the Winter Olympics — but what they have in common is that they were stopped because they might be bringing across the border, not fruits or vegetables, but ideas.

Those ideas could hardly be more opposite — Jones is an extreme libertarian while Goodman comes from the far left — which suggests that it is not a particular ideology but thinking itself, not to mention any opposition to state authority, that causes our border police to become unhinged. We are unlikely to get an explanation or defence out of Citizenship and Immigration over this embarrassment; when Jones was detained, all they had to say was that they could say nothing because “we are forbidden from discussing individual cases.” But it’s time various knuckleheads-in-a-uniform started getting disciplined or fired for their behaviour. Telling them that trade in ideas is not criminal behaviour is not likely to work. Telling them their paycheques are on the line might.

And yes, border guards, if you’re reading this at some point in the future, because I’ve been flagged in your system for speaking ill of your fine work, I did write this. And I’d be glad to discuss it with you — though preferably not while in detention in the middle of the night.

I am back to listening to my local CBC Radio affiliate, the one out of Vancouver. This comes after a lovely respite, during which I listened instead to a talk-station called CFUN, whose hosts — besides offering news and commentary of substance — were, well, fun.

Earlier this month, CFUN switched to an all-sports format and rebranded itself TEAM 1410. This brings it yet closer in sibling cuddliness to its sister station TEAM 1040, also owned by CHUM, also all-sports all-the time, and together with TEAM 1410 a dyslexic’s nightmare. The reason was that old one: ratings. The station was 16th of 19 in the Vancouver market according to the last set of BBMs. There was some indication that it was starting to move up the ranks at the time of its extreme makeover, but not soon enough.

So, I am returned to the ever-earnest CBC (number one in the market), and, occasionally, the earnest and often angry CKNW (falling, but still strong). I don’t blame CHUM; I blame the city’s radio listeners. If Vancouver has a reputation as No-Funsville, and it does, the blame lies squarely with Vancouverites themselves, who wouldn’t know an entertaining station if it came on-air and tried to make their damp lives a bit more sparkly. As it did. So long, and thanks for the sparkles.

Jian Ghomeshi admitted at the top of a recent broadcast of the new CBC Radio arts show “Q” that some listeners were finding it a bit “Torontocentric.” Gosh, what a surprise. The CBC appoints yet another young man from Toronto as host of a program produced from Toronto, and it turns out the young man (and his producers) have a circumscribed view of the nation.

Ghomeshi’s idea of making up for this was to interview Albert Nerenberg, co-director of the satirical documentary Let’s All Hate Toronto. Before he could get to Nerenberg, though, another guest felt compelled to express his pique about the very idea of such a film: “Why would anyone hate a place? What a stupid thing to hate.”

But of course it isn’t the place that the Rest Of Canada hates; it’s the power its citizens wield over the country, for no particular reason other than historical inertia, as well as Toronto’s tendency to elevate mediocrities to national celebrity status. Does Mr. Ghomeshi, for instance, realize that he holds his job not because of his talent or good looks or intellectual aptitude or whatever, but because of where he lives? There are Jian Ghomeshis all over the country; Jian Ghomeshis are common coin. But it’s only the Jian Ghomeshis who live in Toronto who end up hosting national radio and television programs, and — along with the backstage Jians who produce the shows — deciding who’ll end up on the air.

Ghomeshi is one among a number of such recent hires at the CBC, which seems to want to return to the glory days of Front Page Challenge, when Pierre Berton and Gordon Sinclair, fresh from the rooftop bar at the Park Plaza, ruled the broadcasting roost. By way of illustration, consider this abridged litany of CBC hosts, some of them terrific, some of them not, but all of them living in The Right Place:

Brent Bambury
Sook-Yin Lee
Ian Brown
Stuart McLean
Eleanor Wachtel
Michael Enright
Anna Maria Tremonti
Andre Alexis
Avi Lewis
Russell Smith
Laurie Brown
Evan Solomon
George Stroumboulopoulos

CBC even parachutes Sook-Yin Lee into Winnipeg to host “Definitely Not the Opera,” because, apparently, there isn’t a single person within vicinity of the Red River competent to host it. Nope, not a one.

By contrast, the list of hosts living elsewhere includes Shelagh Rogers, Katie Malloch, Randy Bachman and a handful of others, which indicates that you may have a show and not live in Toronto if a) you have clout, b) can at least be trusted to play music, or c) are Randy Bachman.

CBC Radio used to be the network you could turn to for programming that was genuinely national — or at least more national than what CBC TV offered. That’s why the radio service is still more popular nation-wide; you have to dig hard to find an enthusiast for CBC TV (which is a bit unfair, as TV has actually made some good strides in decentralizing over the last few years), but CBC Radio has legions of supporters, even in those places that supposedly hate Toronto. Not for long, though, if CBC Radio management continues to treat the network like it’s 1960 all over again.

So, Don Imus has been fired from both his CBS and MSNBC gigs because he referred to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.”

Stupid? Yes. Racist? Certainly. A firing offence? I’d say so.

Then again, Rush Limbaugh once told a black caller to “Take that bone out of your nose,” and in another instance asked his listeners, “Have you ever noticed how all newspaper composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?” This would be the same Rush Limbaugh who once suggested Philadelphia Eagles’ quarterback Donovan McNabb was overrated because he was black.

And fellow paid-mouth Michael Savage said last year, in reference to the arrest of 17 suspects in an alleged bombing plot in Toronto, “”Whenever you see the word ‘South Asian,’ substitute the word for ‘terrorist,’ or reference to ‘terrorist.’” Earlier this year, after Melissa Etheridge won an Academy Award and thanked her wife and four children, Savage remarked: “I don’t like a woman married to a woman. It makes me want to puke. How’s that? I want to vomit when I hear it. I think it’s child abuse.”

Then again, Bill O’Reilly suggested that a young woman raped and murdered in New York last year was responsible for her fate because of the way she was dressed. And see here for a full range of other inspirational ditties uttered by America’s right wing talk show hosts.

And here’s what Don Imus hasn’t done. He hasn’t plumped for a deceitful, illegal war in Iraq that’s killed, as of today, 3296 Americans and at least 61,000 Iraqis (or over 655,000, if you believe the MIT study). He hasn’t demonized the word “Liberal,” thus effectively reducing his country to a one-party state. He hasn’t applied “yer either for us or agin us” rhetoric to American foreign policy. And he hasn’t been beating the drums for a war in Iran.

All this and more Messrs. Limbaugh, Savage, and O’Reilly do day after day, along with a host of other TV and radio screechers. So what say we keep Imus’s stupid remarks in perspective? And if we’re going to get rid of him, shouldn’t we also get rid of the guys whose talk actually ends up killing people?

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for the on-air contingent of the so-called alternative media (and no, we’re not talking Air America). It began when the website of the Republic Broadcasting Network, a freedom-fightin’ radio and webcasting outfit from Austin, Texas, suddenly disappeared and was replaced with an announcement from the guy who maintains its online archives. Web guy claimed that the network-owner is, basically, a gun-wielding, dog-kicking lunatic (no, seriously, one of the charges was that he had kicked his wife’s dog “because the dog urinated on the carpet”) and he wasn’t going to take it any more. The regular RBN website is back up now, but — ever vigilant on your behalf — I’ve saved the employee’s rant here.

Specifically, the flunky was upset that, a few weeks earlier, the owner had used his radio show to slur the host of a show on the rival “patriot movement” network, Genesis Communications. John Stadtmiller, the slurrer, had insinuated that Alex Jones, the slurree, uses drugs (in which case it would be Jones who should be referred to as the “slurrer,” but never mind). Mr. Jones vigorously denied the allegation. In fact, said his GCN fellow show-host, one Jack Blood, it’s Stadtmiller who uses drugs; he knew this because he once worked at RBN, and he witnessed it. I’m guessing Mr. Stadtmiller vigorously denied the allegation also.

It’s worth noting that John Stadtmiller used to work at GCN until he got fired, at which point he went off and founded RBN. Only GCN keeps stealing his hosts away from him, which may be the reason for his pique. There’s a lot of pique to go around in the patriot movement.

Then last week the “movement’s” travails came to a head, when its flagship website rense.com, went down for a few days. A representative explained that a hard drive and a server had failed, but speculation in the sorts of online groups that speculate about these things was that the site had been captured by government agents, and that its proprietor, Jeff Rense, was in danger of being murdered. Or maybe he just forgot to pay his bill.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like these sites. I confess that, as a guy who spends a lot of time at his computer meeting deadlines, I listen to them regularly. I used to listen to Don Imus on a stream out of Portland, but that was too commercial-ridden. I also used to listen to all-night New York City talker Joey Reynolds, but, with his steady stream of once-were and would-be celebrity guests, that became just too pathetic. So now I listen to the little guys with a big axe to grind, as much for the entertainment value as for the possibility that they might, in some particulars, be right.

The entertainment value is very high. Alex Jones, in particular, is a brilliant blowhard, with a voice that sounds like someone’s living in his throat and an irresistible schtick built around being an ordinary Texas redneck who’d rather just be raising his kids and loving his wife but has been forced, because of the evil Illuminati, to take on the New World Order. Someone once called him “The P.T. Barnum of the 21st-century,” and that’s not far off the mark. Which is not to say he’s a fraud. I have a feeling Jones believes every word he says — or rather, growls — and that, if nothing else, he and his kind have taken on the job of afflicting the powerful that the mainstream media have largely abandoned. (Check out some classic Jones below, as he bullhorns the Bilderberg Group in Ottawa last summer.)

At least they ask questions. The only thing more bizarre than some of the 9/11 conspiracy theories floating around on the Web is to report on them blandly, as most of the mainstream press by now has, and then go no further. Especially given that not all of them are bizarre. Credible scholars and scientists raise credible questions about the events of that day, The Washington Post writes them up, and then leaves it at that. This from the paper that once brought down a President.

So, ill-behaved and obnoxious as they sometimes are, I recommend these sites and shows to you. Better hurry and visit them soon, though. You never know when they’re going to suddenly disappear.