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Wide is the way to destruction, as the poet says; and poets, more than most, are apt to find it. In the 20th century, poets from Pound to Sapphire made a bed in sorrow's bosom. It should come as no surprise that Marshall Bruce Mathers III, "arguably the most compelling figure in all of pop music," according to Newsweek, should be marked for destruction. But in this case, it's neither melancholy nor drug abuse, nor even his own malfeasance that threatens Eminem. It's his absorption into mainstream culture. It's not what Eminem is doing to America that's alarming. It's what America is doing to Eminem. Not that he deserves better. Eminem is a bad person. He's cruel and dumb, and he makes a jerk of himself on TV. He sodomized a blowup doll that represented his wife onstage. Hate speech is his native tongue. He's a wigger's wigger, a Bombay toff right down to the rubber souls of his Lugz. He makes you listen to an appalling fantasy of his homosexual alter-ego being fellated by the Insane Clown Posse. There's no doubt that the American Id is speaking through him with the volume at 11; not only bad himself, he's the cause of badness in other people.
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