Well, I was right about ESPN's town hall meeting, "Across the Vick Divide." Yesterday, or more accurately, this morning, I wrote the following:

The guests will provide a gawking television audience with overblown depictions of Vick in a sure attempt to reduce him to a "thing" lower on the evolutionary tree than any Simian primate. Their praise of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell will be fawning - the new "bwana" keeps the animals with veldt origins separate from civilized onlookers. The panel will depict all black people who cried out for temperance rather than an automatic judgment of Vick's guilt before the facts of the investigation were known as a monolithic voice of unthinking emotional reactionaries in the tried-and-true tradition of loaded racist verbiage. There will be side discussions about various athletes who defended Vick and, in their rabies-laden eyes, downplayed dog fighting; side discussions about athletes - black athletes - in general and dog fighting. Perhaps the panelists will try to make a "cultural connection" to the rural South, black people, and dog fighting.

John Goodwin, "featured guest audience member" provided us with the, Vick as lower than animal because of his treatment of dogs, theme. Neal Boortz was relatively non-descript and actually acted as panel all-around bland guy. Boortz was so purposefully vanilla that he must have had "tone it down" written in the palm of his hand; or perhaps his role was pre-determined. Roger Goodell was praised because Vick committed a "federal offense," was the mantra repeated by Chuck Smith, former Atlanta Falcons player and CNN, NFL analyst. Terrence Moore took care of the "unthinking emotional responses" portion of the vilification process. The athletes who defended Vick were met with the charge of being uninformed by Smith. Selena Roberts took care of both the, why is dog fighting connected to athletes and the connection to the rural South.

No Selena, dog fighting does not have Southern roots. It came over to New York from England. It was an upper-crust Northeastern affair. Do your homework before you open your mouth, woman. Quasi-authoritative remarks glossed with half-defenses of black people don't fly with us black people who know your kind. You're the white woman who stays the fuck away from black people for real, but does a great acting job when you realize your "motivation" is empathy for a weaker people. You act "down" and insightful, but you're as fake and as pompous as the white men whose bidding you perform.

Meanwhile, the final question from Internet sloth to the ESPN "Across the Vick Divide" town hall meeting audience concerned whether or not dog fighting should be a strongly penalized law. Most of the audience felt there should not be a stiff penalty for dog fighting. I guess that's an "emotionalized" response from those "African-American" people who are "not rational," right Terrence Moore (and thanks for inventing a new word)?

Moore is a train wreck of a black man; a negro without a cause. He told the nation that he had a professional duty to vilify Vick and espouse his guilt, even before the evidence was gathered.

Unfortunately, Moore cannot see through the forest of his own fallacious behavior manifested in his writing. It really wasn't his professional duty to lie about the initial evidence concerning Michael Vick. It wasn't his professional duty to misquote Surry County district attorney, Gerald Poindexter, nor was it Moore's professional duty to quote Poindexter out of context while omitting valuable information that, if written or spoken, explained Poindexter's reticence to prosecute Vick. It was not Terrence Moore's professional duty to call Vick a weak-armed quarterback when he has one of the strongest arms in football today.

Moore had the temerity to say "they" in reference to black people, rather than, "us." The use of "they" illustrates just how separate he is from his blackness, from himself, and how he is viewed by the world, much like his compatriot in African American-ness, Chuck Smith.

Smith, until tonight, was not a well-known entity in the NFL talking head world despite his gaudy title. Yet he was very well-known in Atlanta. Now, everyone knows him. Everyone knows Smith has taken a very superficial tack when dealing with the Michael Vick case: Vick is guilty of a federal offense and that is the end of the story; black people need to get over it and move on.

Though he never said it, Smith appears to be another "they" in reference to black people type of person and it is obvious that most people in Atlanta see it; it's just that for many black people, Smith is a television-strictly version of Terrence Moore and is despised. For white people he is perceived as a black guy who sees beyond color. In other words, Chuck Smith will never make them uncomfortable.

What Smith forgets with his federal offense mantra is that, purposely derived or not, laws get coincidentally laws get passed just before a major black figure in the public eye is investigated. Meanwhile, our president is arguably guilty of impeachable offenses and is a seen as a war criminal in some countries, but you will never see laws invented just to get him to court so that later he can be impeached or tried in a world court.

Smith erroneously said of John Goodwin, "This man has devoted his life to [combating] dog fighting." The reality of John Goodwin, now of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is far different than the public image. You see, he didn't seem to know much about dog fighting cases, especially the Vick case, when I interviewed him. He said he hadn't seen the dogs in question in the Vick case and didn't know first hand whether or not they showed evidence of dog fighting. He also had no clue that dog carcasses were said to be buried on Vick's property, which indicates a distinct lack of knowledge about a case in which he was acting as an aid to the state of Virginia and the federal government, well, at least the United States Department of Agriculture.

Goodwin, in reality spent as much or more time as a pseudo-hippie leader of the Animal Liberation Front, which spent as much time committing crimes and escaping the law as it did calling to attention the mistreatment of animals by corporate entities. Goodwin, in reality, is the kind of guy who put underage teens on the front lines of protests so that police could beat their heads in and arrest them first, then be forced to release them because they were not adults.

That is the reality of John Goodwin.

During the ESPN show Goodwin said of dogs in dog fights, "They're discarded after they're broken and bruised."

That sounds a lot like NFL players to me.

The treatment dogs that participate in dog fights and the treatment of NFL players is strikingly similar. Professional football players, like fighting dogs, are bred to play the game. It takes a singular person to deal with the violence inherent in the game; to shake off injuries that require surgery for the average person; to hit someone with the sole hope that they not rise from the ground; to watch another athlete be paralyzed during a game and continue to put what was just witnessed out of his mind and focus on the task at hand - brutalizing another human.

The most feted dog fighting dogs go through a nurturing process that includes checking and rechecking their vital signs before and after situation where they are faced off with another dog, but chained so that they cannot touch. The fat content of their bodies is watched like a hawk. They run on special treadmills meant normally for dogs bred without enough land to run. The difference is, dog fighting dogs run to build endurance for fighting, not to exercise. If they are not ferocious, they either breed or are killed.

Before a football player becomes a professional he trains with specialists who alter the player's diet, his weight lifting regimen. They make him faster and more flexible. After this he enters an arena - the NFL Combine - where he is poked and prodded like a slave on an auction block, his monetary worth assessed like a courtesan preening in front of royalty choosing him for years of sex until his beauty - health, for an NFL player - fades. And when his time is done, he is discarded, broken and dying before his time, and replaced by a new dog, player.

NFL players drawn to dog fighting see the brutality and the potential finality of every fight. they know their dogs lives are cut just a little shorter with every nick and bite and injury incurred during each fight.

Perhaps NFL players see themselves in their dogs.

Finally, Terrence Mathis conveyed a message from Michael Vick to America. Though he spoke more toward helping us to understand Vick, he ultimately proved only one thing: that us, black people, were given a god by our masters in the form of Christianity, and should we choose to believe in that god, we pray harder and believe more in that god than white people ever could themselves.

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"Across the Vick Divide" proved that ESPN knows how to put on a show, but does not know reality. All of the claims that the Worldwide Leader's enterprises seek and find more diversity in its workplace are but a pigment of our imaginations.

Diversity does not exist when you seek out people of different colors who act and think just like you. All you do, then, is hire mirrors of yourselves - you might as well not hire the image of us and just hire you. This is the reason why Howard Bryant can compare Michael Vick with Alberto Gonzalez and tell black people that they forget one crucial difference between the two. It's why Bryant can reduce the ruse that was Gonzalez's investigation and his slipping quietly off into the sunset though guilty as sin, a matter of class, a matter of financial transcendence. He writes this with righteous indignation while somehow forgetting that neither Mark McGwire not Rick Ankiel - both, not-so coincidentally, wearers of the St. Louis Cardinals uniform - have yet to apologize for their malfeasance.

For the aware, "Across the Vick Divide" illustrated painfully that "blackness," is meant to be a thing of the past. We are now "African Americans" when, in fact, we are so far from this moniker that one wonders who coerced black people to accept it as a monolithic falseness. Nearly all of us, black people, are much more than African --- and much less than American. We are European white. We are Native American. We are Hispanic. We are Asian.... and we are African.

We are not American. We are not afforded the "god-given" rights of white people. We do not at all possess god-given anything; our rights are of the "civil" variety and must be renewed by acts of Congress and signed off on by a ringleader known as a president. True Americans practice something called "tolerance" when it comes to us, black people; not acceptance, but tol-er-ance. You can tolerate me and still hate me. However, you cannot hate me if you accept me.

With this stripping of color as an identifier comes the final, fine-grade sanding away of the memory of who we were and the understanding of what we are. Without memory or understanding, our future is bleak, if there is to be for us, black people, a future at all.

And we still are no closer to understanding Michael Vick and what he means to black and white America than we were September 25 at 5:59 p.m. EST.