Gangsta, Gangsta

Speaking of cable programming, there was a bit of confluence on one cable movie channel last night. At the very moment that Stanley "Tookie" Williams was meeting his maker, one station was showing "Colors".

Colors, if you'll remember, was a Robert Duvall/Sean Penn movie that came out in 1988 that was quite controversial. It was the first to center around the L.A. gang culture and got the world familiar with the rivalry between The Bloods, and The Crips --- a gang that Tookie co-founded decades ago. And the movie, for some reason, sparked violence among knuckleheads that watched it in the theaters.

Watching it 17 years later, the movie shows its age terribly. For starters, one of the actors playing a feared Crips gang members is Damon Wayans, a onetime funny comedian who now makes his living in failed family-oriented sit coms. The other is the great Don Cheadle, who needs an academy award fo Hotel Rwanda. But you would have never have known where Cheadle's career was headed by watching him playing a stereotypical drive-by shooting thug.

Most of the very staged gang violence in this fild seems to be nothing but a vehicle for Ice-T's terrible song "Colors." I like hip hop and gangsta rap, but nobody ever did gangsta rap phonier than Ice-T. Ice was known later for the song Cop Killer, but his choice of genres was so misguided, he should have called the song career killer. Ice-T wisely gave up rap for --- what else? --- network television cop dramas.

So watching celebrities and anti-death penalty activists call for Gov. Schwartzenegger to commute Tookie's death sentence rang just as false as Colors does today. Tookie deserved credit for doing something with the rest of his life by writing children's books telling them that gangs are bad. But he was still an ex-gang leader who killed four people and set up a machine that's killed hundreds more. That gets you the death penalty in this country. And if the people want to spare Tookie, they need to get rid of the death penalty laws all together. But writing "Bad Stuff 'Bout Gangs" is not reason enough to give him a pass just as casting Damon Wayons in "The Tookie Story" would also be a bad call.