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.

Only in ESPNland can Neil Boortz, Terrence Moore, Selena Roberts, and a jock, Terrence Mathis, be gathered and touted as an authoritative panel for a "town hall" meeting in Atlanta where the main topic is Michael Vick.

Boortz is a pro-Iraq War, pro-Patriot Act zealot. Moore is a black sports journalist who writes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His, straight off the plantation house negro, anti-black people rants in the form of AJC commentaries and ESPN television appearances relative to the Vick case are the stuff of legend. Terrence Mathis? Ummm, sure, whatever. And Selena Roberts of the New York Times has contributed exactly how many important pieces about Michael Vick and the investigation into Vick's participation into dog fighting? Well, she wrote a 917-word commentary about pit bulls, dog fighting, and athletes. Let me clarify that. She wrote about black athletes with a nod to Jay-Z. Roberts also wrote an 830-word commentary about Michael Vick, his friends and how many athletes like Vick surround themselves with people who have known them since their childhoods. In other words, Selena Roberts contributed next-to-nothing of worth to the Vick-dog fighting conversation. If you read her two commentaries you will find that she has actually provided her audience nothing of worth concerning Vick.

Perhaps this quote town hall meeting should be held in the Disney-created and once-Disney owned town of Celebration, Florida. It is a town built in the spirit of the alleged pursuit of perfection. Like the Vick town hall meeting, Celebration is perfect - perfectly dysfunctional. Only a Disney product - ESPN - could actually believe any good will come from what can only be a propaganda-filled production.

This dysfunction is borne out in the fact that, until informed by outside sources, some writers from ESPN.com had no idea that the television arm of ESPN is holding a town hall-type meeting. Maybe the din of the wailing in objection over the panel guests would have been too much for the management at the ESPN enterprises to handle.

After all, what good can come from this meeting?

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. 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. 

The goal will be to render moot all voices that hoped to provide a broader context by which we can view the Vick investigation and case. Most of the panelists will deny that there were elements of racism in the reportage of the investigation and subsequent case. Any overtures made implying that race did play a factor in the reporting of Vick will be met with derision. Should cultural differences concerning the treatment of dogs be brought to light, they will be quickly and summarily extinguished with a jingoistic contrast between third-world countries and highly-developed countries like the United States and those of Europe. It will be made clear that WE do not engage in those types of activities because WE are a land of mostly civil people. And "people" is the correct identifier, not peoples.

And if there are any protestations from Mathis, they will be subordinated by the "authorities" Boortz, Moore, and Roberts.

This will be the tone and the probable subject matter of the town hall meeting. ESPN will have once again secured its place as the purveyor of all that is good and wholesome about sports. It will reinforce the image that there will be no swell of a negative undercurrent within the sporting segment of America under the vigilant, watchful eye of the Worldwide Leader in Sports.

Some see this town hall meeting as being held a month too late. But in actuality, the timing could not be any more perfect. The powers that be at ESPN waited patiently to put on this ruse of an event. They carefully measured the sporting nation's temperature for its sentiment about the Vick case before putting such a biased ruse before the American people. They hope this event acts as an effective end game gambit to entrap and mute any future voices that draw parallels between the media's treatment of Vick and that of other black athletes.

ESPN feels it began the comprehensive coverage of the Vick affair when Kelly Naqi conducted the now-infamous interview with the anonymous informant who tied Vick to dog fighting. They tugged at the public's heartstrings, manipulated conversation, and never took an opposite tack on the affair, if for nothing else, to provide the semblance of balance in conveying the issues in and around the investigation. They continued pounding the 'Vick is guilty' drumbeat in the face of their own reporter's pronouncement that the Atlanta Falcons quarterback would not be indicted by federal investigators. As it turned out, by hook or by crook, they were correct. 

And the panel member lineup at the town hall meeting in Atlanta is the in your face dunk letting America know just how good it feels to be the worldwide leader of propaganda in sports.

In worlds far, far away from the genius that lies within each aforementioned participant in that singular event are recurring, Bizarro world block parties: the tawdry scenes of visits by high school recruits to college campus; prostitution rings run by former NFL players, dog fighting pits in darkened corners of cities and towns. These activities are peopled by the high people in low places and low people on the come up.

In a Boulder, Colorado courtroom, Lisa Simpson continues to seek justice for being sexually assaulted at a University of Colorado recruit party in 2001. That's six years removed from today. Resident, turn a blind eye head football coach Gary Barnett is long departed. Even the recruits who did attend Colorado and play on those football teams have come and gone. The policemen who knew of these activities and only said, "Keep it down, will ya," still drive a beat in the city of Boulder.

Meanwhile Bob Buczkowski and his girlfriend's circle of multi-million dollar whores served the entire Pittsburgh metropolitan area. And we are to believe no city councilman, no cop, married or otherwise, no judge, no businessman put in a call to "Bob B's Head-Bobbin' Ho Shop?" Don't feel this can be true? Then explain his pat-on-the-ass, 90-day house arrest sentence.

Sure you're right.

And we are to believe that the abhorred in America activity of dog fighting didn't attract small town and big city mayors somewhere in this vast expanse of a country. We are to believe that Tidewater, Virginia black man Michael Vick is the "Don of Dog Fighting   " in fully one-eighth of this United States without the silent yes of someone or some people who's wigs are big?

We have the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). We have People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

What we really need is PETAP and HSUS - People for the Ethical Treatment of All People and Human Society of the United States.

See, I'm still trying to figure out how Genarlow Wilson and the Jena 6 are receiving inhumane, unethical treatment, while Jonathan Babineaux can hammer his girlfriend's dog to death and play for Arthur Blank this Sunday. See, I'm still waiting - from his high school days - for a sincere apology by the community and the courts for the inhumane and unethical treatment of another, wrongly-accused Tidewater man, Allen Iverson.

I'm still waiting for the people at St, John's University responsible for the signs with monkeys that read, "Hey Pat, Can U Reed Dis, Nigger" to come forward and provide us with a mea culpa for their inhumane and unethical treatment of Pat Ewing when he attended Georgetown University.

The televised treatment of Ewing comprised some of my first real memories about the world of college basketball. Are you going to apologize to all the little black children like me who saw those signs? See, those images told little black children like me that white people are evil. Those same images told little white children that it was cool to think of black people as animals.

Why do you think I'm more afraid to face four members of the Duke Lacrosse Team on a street late at night than I am four black members of, say, Michigan State's basketball team at the same place and time?

Can I call my local chapter of PETAP and HSUS to address the psychic issues I and every other black child who saw those signs incurred?

I didn't think so.

We tend to lose our collective minds over cause celebre cases like that of Michael Vick and dog fighting. We do nonsensical things like compare the treatment of Vick to that of Paris Hilton. We make specious attributions of Vick's actions to "black culture," or "Southern culture." We even say that game hunting is somehow less of a vicious act than is dog fighting.

Say what you will (and I've mentioned this previously), but the fact that anyone can go on You Tube and watch Paris Hilton snort a mountain of cocaine and the police do not use this as cause to raid her home as they did with the Surry County Michael Vick-owned home is sickening.

Anyone who uses the excuse of "culture" relative to dog fighting is at least short-sighted and at most, racist. The fact that dog fighting is a misdemeanor in the states of Wyoming and Idaho explodes this myth of black and or, Southern culture.

Finally, taking anything from a high-powered rifle to a crossbow to kill an animal for "sport" is, short of committing murder, the most inhumane act in which a human can engage.

The high people in low places who overlook certain criminal activities in favor of others are more than likely themselves practitioners of criminal acts. Those who decry Vick's actions as the ultimate in inhumane treatment of animals have lost perspective of how inhumane we, as humans, can actually be. Ask yourself, was Vice President Dick Cheney's dinner at stake when, in the process of quail hunting, he sprayed a man's face with buckshot or was he hoping to revive a sense of his long-lost virility?

Did PETA and the HSUS demand that Cheney be held accountable for his frivolous hunting? Did they demand that he step down from his position due to his act? No.

Don't ever claim the Vick case is solely about celebrity.

And, by the way, who is going to return the innocence to all those children, black and white, who witnessed those racist anti-Pat Ewing signs? Who is going to return those lost years to Genarlow Wilson and to Allen Iverson? Who is going to restore Lisa Simpson's faith in men or the justice system? When will PETA and the HSUS protest Arthur Blank for his double-standards when it comes to players on his team killing dogs?

When will we learn that, by overstating the importance of certain incidents at the expense of others, we reveal more about the malicious side of our society and ourselves than we do our sense of justice?

While everybody else is drinking the new batch of O.J. or trying to squeeze in the back of a "Crown Vick," or checkin' a chick and her Beli, I mean Belly, I'm going to take a right turn into some other territory. It's something that's been on my mind for awhile and has been the topic of some conversations since the beginning of this season.

So, here we go.

Black quarterbacks don't get the same treatment as white QBs do. What! Oh my goodness it can't be true! Quarterbacks with darker skin get sort-leashed, while white QBs can get passed around like an after-show, after-party groupie and no one cares?!

The blasphemy! The horror! Once again we've been bamboozled, hoodwinked, had the wool pulled over our eyes! Damn....

For real, who cares? Most black football fans know the drill. We know there are only five starting NFL QBs. We know the press always has an eye out to dog those starters.

We know that the verbiage gets real slippery when it applies to us. 'He needs to stop running and learn how to read defenses,' they say. "Why is he trying to be something he's not? He's not a classic drop back quarterback like Peyton Manning or Carson Palmer. Why doesn't he use his god-given ability and make something happen when the play breaks down.'

We can't escape it. It's there for the world to see. The thing is, everybody knows it, white and black. It's just that only a few of us will genuinely talk about it.

What we don't need is someone who has made a career out of being non-committal about these issues to suddenly start talking about racism in the NFL and how it pertains to the quarterback position like he's been trying to say this all along. None of us needs Donovan McNabb to tell us about race and racism; needs for him to suddenly attempt go black before our very eyes.

DMac came into the league firmly committed to breaking stereotypes about black quarterbacks. He didn't want to talk about being black, didn't want to be referred to as a black QB. He wanted to be known as Donovan McNabb, quarterback of the Eagles, nothing more, nothing less.

Now, McNabb wants to call racism, like it's fresh out of the box.

Normally, I'd think of defending McNabb's statements on HBO's Real Sports, as undoubtedly many black and perhaps even some white sports journalists will do. Normally I'd say, go ahead, man, it's about time somebody said something. Normally I'd shake down the thunder and call the names of those who set up the ruse in the first place, as well as those who perpetuate it today.

Normally, I would.

But this time I can't.

Like I said, McNabb didn't want any part of "black quarterback" when he was drafted with the #2 overall pick in the NFL Draft in 1999 by the Eagles. McNabb was, through his play and his silence on that issue was going to force one of the most openly racist cities north of the Mason-Dixon Line to judge him based solely on performance and how he handled himself in the good and the bad times. McNabb wanted to be judged as all Americans are purported to be judged: by their merit.

He parlayed that non-racialized perception into a long-running Campbell's Chunky Soup advertisement campaign. And this was way back in 2001, McNabb's third year in the league. In only his second season, he led Philadelphia to an 11-5 record and its first playoff appearance in five years. He was also an MVP runner-up.

By 2004 McNabb and his Eagles, after three straight NFC Championship appearances broke through and made it to the Super Bowl. McNabb and new teammate, wideout Terrell Owens, combined for a magical season. In the Super Bowl, though, with Philadelphia down 24-21, McNabb has a chance to gain football immortality by leading his team down the field for at least a game-tying field goal attempt. But by all accounts, he fell apart.

It was reported that he puked in the huddle and that he was hyperventilating so badly that he couldn't call the plays. He was called out for choking by teammates. And a few months later, his so-called friend, Terrell Owens, began his bitter hold out.

Where was he when T.O. was getting spared no rod from the Eagles management? He was awfully quiet and pretty much a company man. How McNabb turned his back on Owens effectively ruined his credibility with at least half of your teammates. He let Hugh Douglas, aka the "Massa's House Man," talk for him as he attempted to crush T.O.'s spirit. This is the same Hugh Douglas, who, as a member of the media, against NFL rules, walked into the Eagles training facilities, confronted Owens and started a fight. Douglas then twisted the story to friendly members of the press to make it appear that he was in the right the whole time.

This is the same Hugh Douglas that the world saw - the world that cared, anyway - on NFL Network trying to work his magic House Man act on Jack Del Rio. Hugh was in the lens so much it seemed he was the featured character in the documentary on J-ville. Turns out he was, until he got cut, that is.

But for McNabb, this is what happens when a man sits on the fence. Everybody shoots at him without compunction. Each time McNabb declared himself the team leader, his teammates have spoken out against the very thought of his perceived role. Meanwhile the media strafed him, even after wins. Rather than say something years ago, McNabb kept silent.

When the Eagles drafted quarterback Kevin Kolb this offseason, McNabb was suddenly miffed and hurt that the Eagles would draft a potential replacement for him. McNabb's main ally, Brian Dawkins tried to come to his aid by saying the QB was only upset because the Eagles stated need was in the defensive backfield and thought that the first round draft pick was better used on a cornerback or safety. But McNabb didn't take the cue from Dawkins and continued to complain to the press.

Both Dawkins and McNabb have seen enough of Jeffrey Lurie the Eagles owner and head coach Andy Reid's tactics to know that no player on the Philadelphia team is protected from being unceremoniously traded or released. If either or both fail this season, the Eagles management will take a long, hard look at their salaries versus their football life span - and who knows where they might be when the first game of the 2008-09 season is played. But it is McNabb's statements that will be played up by the Philadelphia and national media.

Why? Because he is a starting quarterback in the National Football League who seems to be feeling very insecure about the Eagles drafting a relatively unknown quarterback who is a good two or three years away from playing in Andy Reid's offensive system. Why? Because McNabb is known for failing in the clutch more than his is winning big games. Why? Because he is a black starting quarterback.

And the answers to the whys are in that order.

He knows he rushed his rehab and isn't 100% . He should have made that known. He didn't and if he says something about it now, it will look like an excuse for his spotty early play. He knows he has no contract extension and the Eagles will take a huge cap hit next season because of his contract. There's nothing wrong with letting the press know how important this season is financially; it can be done tactfully without giving the impression that he is pining for a new deal through the press. When McNabb does complain this offseason, it will be too late, and in negotiations, Eagles management will have the upper hand. All complaints then will be viewed as whining.

However, now Donovan McNabb is telling the world that there is a disparity in the manner in which black and white QBs are treated. Now, that it appears that the writing is on the wall for the veteran and that his time in the City of Brotherly Love is limited, he wants to speak out against the injustices incurred by black players at his position, especially himself.

Though he might garner some sympathy in some corners because he stated his case with his usual calm, he gets none here.

Donovan McNabb appears to be just another self-centered athlete who, despite his well-cultivated image, could care less about the slights suffered by black quarterbacks - unless, of course, his butt is on the line.

Oh well.