From the Green Room: The I-Man's Obsessions

There’s a fine line between being enamored and becoming completely obsessive-compulsive over something. It’s a line over which, on more than one occasion, our fearless leader has leap-frogged.  It’s one thing when the I-Man focuses like a willful three-year old on a lollipop when it comes to his brave battle with cancer.  It’s quite another when it’s a four-month monologue about mercury in vaccines.  He went on so much about heavy metals that some members of Black Sabbath switched to playing backup pan flute for Enya.  And it seems like only yesterday the whole Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers story was the subject of incessant analysis…probably because it was only the day before yesterday when he finally stopped talking about it.  His fascination with the minutiae of Woodstock typewriters not only made you wish he was filling his time emptying vodka bottles again, but that he’d let you take a healthy swig after downing a handful of sleeping pills.  

Now, with the publication of Hellhound on His Trail, by Hampton Sides, Imus is on the James Earl Ray bandwagon.  It’s not like he wants to have Ray’s birthday declared a holiday, but he’s immersed himself so deeply in the details of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, he’s beseeching listeners for a copy of the famous photo of Reverend Abernathy and Andrew Young on the hotel balcony pointing across the street.   He’s been droning on and on and on about who was where and when, and how Ray got out of the country. He had five pages of questions to ask Mr. Sides. A person doesn’t undergo this sort of grilling when applying for a job at the NSA. It’s gotten to the point where now, I’m obsessed.  With HIS assassination.  But I won’t be in one of those photos pointing across the street.  I’ll be the one across the street they’re pointing AT.