Ugly Reality
June 21, 2005
8:45 AM CST
One of the potential problems with “celebrity” is that sometimes it can turn around and bite you.
When The Mrs. and I first started Did Today, we discussed whether this blog, with its bad-tempered and foul-mouthed ranting, hoplophilia and pics of beautiful women, would be a liability for the company.
If it proved likely to be the case, what then? Should I just end the blog—say “Thanks for the memories”, and quit?
In the end, we decided that attempting to rewrite the past three years, or trying to cover it up, would be worse—Google will not be denied—but at the same time this blog could be a liability for the company.
Well, it was, just this past weekend. A prospective investor, check in hand, decided to do a little last-minute research, and googled “Kim du Toit”.
He’s no longer a potential investor.
His reasoning was pure business: having an outrageous conservative gun nut womanizer as CEO might become a public liability in years to come. And he could be right. As I said, The Mrs. and I had discussed this very eventuality earlier.
And if some woman decided to retaliate against a reprimand or firing by accusing me of sexual harassment, all a canny attorney would have to do is show the pinup pics. Even though the pics are 95% G-rated, proving sexual harassment is easier when you can demonstrate that the Beast ogles women all the time.
Rock, meet Hard Place.
I discussed the whole matter with our CFO, and we tried to figure out just what had alarmed the investor. Unfortunately, the list was a lengthy one: anti-Big Gummint rants, foul language, suggestions of hanging liberals, gun pics, full-figured women—you can probably add a few more yourselves.
Ultimately, of course, the choice was quite simple: I could tone down the bad language / make the Rant more “professional” / lose the pinups and so on; or I could quit as CEO.
Well, I’m not going to quit the company, so here’s what I’m going to do.
1. Skin. Of all the content on this site, the girlie pics are the most irrelevant. The erstwhile “Skin Pics” have already been renamed into something less likely to raise a red flag ("Weekend Women"), and sometime today I’ll put an intermediate page between the link above and the pics themselves. I’m also going to go through them, post by post, and remove any pics that are anything other than Reader’s Digest-quality. Starting immediately, however, I’ll no longer make any more weekend Skin posts. Big whoop. All the pics came from sites readily available to anyone with a search engine anyway, so if you want to see more pics of Tina Louise, do yer own dirty work (as it were).
2. The Gun Pics, and all gun-related material, will never be removed, or altered in any way. On this issue, my resolve is immutable. I’d quit the company first. Other than a means for me to vent my wrath, this website exists to return this country to being a nation of riflemen—which, ultimately, is of greater value to the nation than a piece of software. And if people are frightened by pictures of guns, then the hell with ‘em. Which leads to my last point.
3. Bad Language. The swearing will cease. Once again, this is no big deal—I’m a writer, and as I’ve always said to my friends when they’ve critiqued my novels, “You don’t like those words? I’ve got others.” And it’s true. I can say the same thing six different ways, with the identical meaning and passion, so not using bad language means that now I have only five. Big fat hairy deal. And, to be frank, I’ve received quite a lot of email over the years asking me whether the bad language was quite necessary—and I know that I’ve been linked a lot less by other bloggers because of the profanity. (One can only imagine the response of Big Media, should they ever want to interview me on TV or something, reading the Rant to get an idea of who I am—I’d be on a ten-minute tape delay.)
Some of you guys are going to get upset about these changes. Too bad. I’m not going to resign as CEO of a company I helped found, a company which I think is going to profoundly change the way kids are educated in this country, and (unashamedly) a means to provide a comfortable income and retirement for my wife and myself, and a more comfortable future for my kids—I’m not going to risk all this just so I can call Ted Kennedy a choice name in print.
But here’s my promise to you.
If you think that I’m going to become some effete National Review-style girlyman essayist, think again. I’m still the same angry guy I always was—only from now, the anger will be, if anything, all the stronger because I have to tone down the language.
There’s no profanity, for example, in expressing the thought that the New York Attorney-General Eliot Spitzer should be strapped to a chair and beaten to death with an iron pipe.
Which he should be.
I am a deeply conservative man. I have come by my opinions after a tremendous amount of quiet reflection, study and debate both internal and with others. I am also by nature an angry man—not the silly “get into bar fights” angry, but angry in the sense of being enraged when good things are turned bad by whim, malice or stupidity, or when bad things are suddenly presented as being good, by the malicious to the gullible.
That part of me will never change. In marketing terms, the packaging may change slightly, but the product won’t, ever.
And speaking of marketing, we launch Did Today into the charter customer market at month’s end, which means that starting tomorrow, Your Not-So-Humble Narrator will be working 24-hour days rather than the easy 20-hour days of yore.
Which means that email is unlikely to be answered (even, I’m ashamed to say, if it contains actual pics of well-known Democrats in compromising positions).
That’s it. I’m pretty sure you’ll all understand.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range.
