Sunday night I had had enough of Imus. It wasn’t quite, “Get me back to Anna Nicole,” but the pile-on was complete … in terms of Imus. As I’ve said previously the whole episode is fascinating for the sense of cultural tipping point it brings. Worse things have said by worse chronic offenders. But several rising trends converged to absolutely bowl the guy over and submerge him. (He will almost certainly bob back up … on satellite at just as much dough, is my guess.)
Anyway, I wrote my epilogue, preparing to move on to all-Par all the time, since that appears to be the local media matter that can’t stop itself from giving and giving.
It was a damn good piece. Frame-worthy, I’m telling you. But you’ll have to take my word for it since I obliterated the whole thing jumping back and forth plugging in links. (Basic need: Two monitors, like all real geeks use these days.) I know, I should have just done the dogged and diligent thing and started over. But it was late, adult beverages had been consumed, the Strib had done a front page punt on the Rachel Paulose story and their ombudsman was scolding their blogger.
Thankfully, Kevin Drum, recommended the following piece by a guy I had never heard of, and it nails the whole Imus cultural issue thing perfectly. It’s long, but well worth the time … if you haven’t jumped back to Anna Nicole or Sanjaya.
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Sunday, April 15, 2007
Making Carefully Nuanced Distinctions Regarding the Totally Unacceptable
MIKE WALLACE: “You told Tom Anderson, the producer, in your car, coming home, that Bernard McGuirk is there to do nigger jokes.”
DON IMUS: “Well, I’ve never–I never use that word.”
TOM ANDERSON: “I recall you using that word.”
DON IMUS: “Oh, okay, well then I used that word. Of course, that was an off-the-record conversation.”
–60 Minutes interview, July 1998
“I’m a good person.”
–Don Imus, April 2006
“Phil, there are a lot of very nice guys in the Ku Klux Klan.”
–my Aunt Betty
In 1980, while running for president, Ronald Reagan, appeared at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, best known as the site of the murders of three civil rights workers by various pillars of the community. There, he gave a speech about the need for states’ rights, time-honored code in that part of the country for white racists’ resentment over forced desegregation. The scene was generally taken as an unusually blunt reaching out by a major candidate to the bigot vote, and not long after, Reagan did indeed receive the KKK’s official endorsement for the presidency. But the appearance in Philadelphia, while unmistakable in the signals it gave off, was still safely within the realm of the “symbolic”, and it’s bad form to blame someone for his tackier fans, so nobody in the mainstream dared whisper that Reagan himself actually had a racist bone in his body, not even after he expressed his opposition to the creation of a holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., and in the course of that opposition indicated that he mainly considered Dr. King to have been an uppity troublemaker and very likely a Communist agent. When it was time for Reagan to move on into his twilight years, his vice-president, George Bush the Elder, overcame his essential emptiness and lack of any serious widespread support in part by means of a TV commercial that tied his opponent to a scary-looking black man. Of course, everyone understood that Bush had no racist impulses in him but had to do what he had to do to ensure the votes of Joe Caveman. Back in 1964, Bush had campaigned hard against the 1964 Civil Rights Act; two years into his presidency, he would veto the 1990 Civil Rights Act, after having Congresional Republicans work hard shaping it to his preferred specifications. After considerable criticism, he would reluctantly sign a civil rights bill the next year, at a point when his prospects for re-election were already in free fall. Early in 1992, after the Rodney King verdict resulted in the L.A. riots, Bush would dispatch Marlin Fitzwater to explain that the riots were Lyndon Johnson’s fault, and the the result of having been too nice to inner city blacks in the 1960s.
Again, as any reporter inside the Beltway could tell you, none of this reflected any racial insensitivity on the part of the people involved. It was “just politics”, and that meant anything that worked was fair and justifiable. On the other hand, during the same period as Bush’s presidency, David Duke got himself elected to the Louisiana legislature and then set his sights on the governor’s mansion, and this, everyone agreed, was a crisis. No one was more upset about it than Republicans like Bush, who feared that Duke might be taken as representative of a part of the Republican party and give it a bad name. Duke didn’t stagger around calling people “niggers” and calling for a return to slavery. He talked about rising crime rates and too much money going to welfare families and a society gone to hell in a handbasket because of excess tolerance of the wrong sort and government sticking its nose in where it didn’t belong and making things hard for Mister and Missus Lily-White. In other words, he talked like Ronald Reagan and like a hundred other Republicans who had learned to speak in code to white bigots who felt that some measure of their freedom had been curtailed because black kids could sit next to their kids on the bus. The problem was, Duke had been a self-proclaimed Nazi and Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. If Duke had appeared out of nowhere in 1989 with no paper trail and no photos of him wearing stastikas and prancing around his college campus toting a sign reading “GAS THE CHICAGO 7”, there would have been no reason for the media or his fellow Republicans to object to the obvious racist strain in his positions and statements; it would have been as okay as it had been with Reagan and Bush, because it would have been “just politics.” But Duke’s past made it uncomfortably likely that he wasn’t simply pandering to open-mouthed hillbilly bigots. Everyone agreed that he had no place in American politics, because he meant what he said.
We live in a country where one major party has spent most of the past forty-odd years depending on ever crueler appeals to racism to help it out in elections, even at the same time as society has largely taken it on faith that racism is a settled matter. Reagan and Bush may have had to do what they had to do to get the Snopes family to go to the polling place, but so what? When someone shows himself to be a “real” racist, he’s stripped of his epaulets and driven from the fort. Unfortunately, in public life, you have to practically be filmed burning a cross in front of a black church and waving to the camera to be tagged as a “real” racist. If you protested the Vietnam War, you’re going to be explaining and even apologizing for it to your dying day, but there are plenty of people who voted against civil rights legislation in the 1960s–an act that you might think would pretty clearly and unambiguously stamp you as maybe not being, as Don Imus says, “a good person”– who have been allowed to go on to long, respectable political careers. People like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond were held by the Beltway not to be racists because, well, because they just couldn’t be–they were duly elected politicians, so the thought was too morbid to be seriously considered. If necessary, apologies for anything they’d done that might give one pause would be fabricated on their behalf. After Trent Lott became Minority Leader last year, returning to prominence after the fall from grace that resulted from his kissing Strom Thurmond’s warty ass on the occasion of the old shitkicker’s unearned centennial, many in the media insisted that Lott had, of course, apologized for those remarks, though as far as I can determine, all he’d done was repeatedly say that he was sorry that so many mean people had misrepresented his sweet remarks to a nice old orange-haired man on his birthday. Lott, as his recent memoir demonstrates, is typical of the kind of Southerner who doesn’t think he’s a racist and would have apoplexy if anyone suggested that he is, but who still disapproves of the government’s role in implementing desegregation; if you ask him, in the right setting in front of the right tobacco-juice-stained crowd, he’ll be happy to explain that, while he’s happy as a clam that whites and blacks can share the same drinking fountain in Mississippi now, it was a dastardly act for the gummint to force all those good Mississippians to do what they’d never done before but would have been delighted to do, of their own free will, at some point. It’s just a shame that the mean ol’ gummint made them do it, thus muddying the issue. As a child in Mississippi in the 1970s, I grew up hearing this line of manure from the local grown-ups, who would apply it to everything from the minimum wage to the Clean Water Act to the attempt to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. By forcing them to do the obvious right thing, gummint was leaning on the common people, and it wasn’t fair. Heck, the worst thing about it was the suggestion that they had to be forced, by law, to do the obvious decent thing. It was true they’d never done it before, but they had been planning to get around to it, and probably would have done it five minutes after the law had been passed, if gummint hadn’t gone and gotten its panties in a bunch. Now all they could do was bitch till the end of their days about the injustice of being forced to not lynch nigras when there was nothing good on TV and not pay their employees in shiny beads. Not that they’d have ever done those things anyway, but oh, the injustice of being told that they couldn’t do it!
It would be a very pleasant thing to be able to say that this line of self-pitying imbecility died out in the provinces and never spread to the shoe-wearing regions of the country, but Don Imus and his brothers in the talk radio stratosphere depend as much on it as the Trent Lotts of this world. The fact that he has so much in common with Trent Lott would probably sting Imus more than any realization of the no-brainer fact that he is not, in fact, “a good person,” a realization that would be quick to follow if he could ever get his rodent’s brain around the simple truth that you really have used a word even if you’ve used it in an “off-the-record conversation,” but there you are. The talk radio world, one that Imus worked hard to shape, is one where overpaid white guys who did well in the voting for the title of “Class Clown” at their respective high schools sneer at blacks, women, gays, what have you, in a dismayingly self-congratulatory tone. The self-congratulation comes not from the cleverness of their material–nobody could be that self-deluded–but from the fantasy that they’re speaking truth to power and taking on The Man by being, and here hold tight while we flash back to the thrilling days of 1993, “politically incorrect.” Their natural audience is people who hate their lives and, at least for a few minutes a day, like to imagine that they’re outlaws by listening to some peabrain on the radio make fun of, say, homeless people or the victims of the 2004 tsunami. This stuff is not hard to do. Lest you think I’m being self-righteous here, let me make it clear that I know how easy it is to do funny ethnic voices and make fun of gay stereotypes because I’ve done it, usually very late at night, often on car trips when I was trying to keep myself and someone else awake, always when my cerebral wattage had reached the draining point and I couldn’t think of anything to say that would actually have counted as funny. In my defense, nobody was throwing millions of dollars at me at the time, and if they were, I like to think that I would have differed from the Imuses and the Opie and Anthonys of this world in that I would have made some effort to actually earn the money. (I remember that when Howard Stern began a short-lived tenure of having his show broadcast in New Orleans, he held a press conderence, and one of the local reporters asked him how he would compete with the hilarious, daring wild man talk guy who was already doing a New Orleans morning show, and whose name escapes me. Stern, who’d clearly never heard the local guy’s name, said something like, what’s he do, like a Southern guy and a black guy and a gay guy, all the while doing high-school level impersonations of a drawling hick, a Stepin Fetchit type, and a nelly dude, which did indeed sound exactly like the local guy’s repertoire of funny voices. I remember that the New Orleans reporter was stunned by this, and seemed genuinely unaware that there was some yokel doing the same basic act at some radio station in every city in America.)
With Imus’s career meltdown this past week, he managed to demonstrate one thing worth knowing, which is that the rules regarding racist behavior among celebrities are kind of the reverse of the ones governing politicians. We’ve reached the point where racism is simply an unaceptable trait in a public figure, but there are some openly bigoted celebrities, such as Mel Gibson, who are simply too rich and famous to be swept off the map–it would be too unnerving and would frighten the horses. So people like the anti-Semitic Gibson and the homophobic Isiah Washington are diagnosed as being ill, sick with intolerance–we believe they mean it, so the important thing is to decide that they’re victims of their own vile thoughts. They get to stay and the keep the money, but only if they admit that they have a problem and seek help. (John Rocker may be the best example of just how hard a celebrity has to work to convince us that he just needs to be expelled from consideration as one of People magazine’s most intriguing people of the year.) For decades, Imus has trafficked in bile, giving the boobs in the listening area a vicarious thrill by saying stupid, ugly things into a mike because it’s easier than actually being funny. We know for a fact that he’s not a good person, no matter how much fucking charity work he does on the side, because a good person just doesn’t say this shit, just as, my late aunt to the contrary, there probably aren’t any really nice guys in the Ku Klux Klan for the simple reason that it’s hard to imagine the circumstances under which a really nice guy would join a violent, racist terrorist organization. Yet people probably do assume that, to the same degree that Republican politicians’ racist appeals are “just politics,” the ravings of someone like Imus don’t stamp him as a “real” bigot, because they’re “just entertainment.” One could ask what kind of person besides a bigot would find the spectacle of a mean-spirited, dim-witted old man grunting about those different from himself at a level of wit that never rises above calling politicians “lying weasels”, but that would risk getting us into uncomfortable territory.
A number of people have noticed that what Imus said that got him fired was pretty weak beer compared to some of the things he’s said, or permitted his loathsome sidekicks, to say in the past. (More bizarrely, some people have seemed to point that up as if it were an excuse.) It’s true that Imus made the scandal possible for contriving to build a sort of perfect storm situation around himself. First, the gutless old fart actually said it himself instead of appointing one of his lackies to say something that he could then cluck his tongue about. And instead of going after some indefensible public servant or professional blowhard or an anonymous creature of fantasy such as Reagan’s “welfare queen in a Cadillac,” he targetted some real and blameless young women who had done neither him not anyone else a lick of harm. Put him and his targets on TV together and there was no contest. Here you have the dignified and affronted college students wondering why they’ve been smeared by a millionaire; on the other side of the screen, we have some toxic waste in a cowboy hat. Imus himself, in the first recorded instance on record of a talk-radio star demonstrating self-knowledge, showed that he had at least learned this when he told Al Sharpton that he had learned that there are people you shouldn’t make fun of because they don’t deserve it. There might have been an implication in there that, if he were left alone, Imus would from that moment on, he would only make fun of those who deserved it, but if he had followed through on that, he would have had to become a satirist instead of some lout thoughtlessly blowing shit into a microphone whenever the “ON AIR” sign lights up,and he may not have fully realized how much effort and rethinking of his act that would require–almost certainly more than a man his age could have mustered, especially given that Imus’s major life achievement up to this point had been the Dubyan feat of ceasing to snort and guzzle himself into a perpetual state of oblivion. If there was any wisdom in his decision to peg his attempt to keep his job on his attempt to prove himself a “good person,” it can only be that, as unlikely as that claim sounded, it was easier to believe that he was on some level a good person than it was to believe that he could ever, ever have become funny and talented. Dim and self-obsessed as ever, he never seemed to grasp that the people calling for his job weren’t doing it because they were not yet convinced of his goodness. They were doing it because they’d concluded that there was a real chance that they could get him fired, and he’d make an impressive trophy.
I know people who have the sense to offer no defense of Imus but who feel the need to complain about his firing. I’ve heard some strange things said, and some even stranger things hollared, towards that end this past. I suspect that it mostly boils down to a reluctance to embrace some of Imus’s attackers, and the feeling that all that hot air could have been put to better use. One friend of mine actually yelled something about how we shouldn’t be wasting our time with this nonsense when there are children dying, but I remain unconvinced that any of the people who spent the week denouncing Imus would have spent the time saving children from death if it hadn’t been for the distraction. I kind of hate to be part of what James Wolcott calls a big public pile-on, but I have to admit thinking that the final outcome was pretty satisfying. I’m something of a free speech absolutist, but I also have some belief in the wisdom of the marketplace, and this was an example of it working rather well, I think. Imus is not a first amendment martyr; he wasn’t hounded and clapped in chains and driven to unemployment like Lenny Bruce, he was informed by a couple of major media conglomerates who had been paying him a fucking fortune that they had come to the conclusion that any continued association with his disgusting self was no longer something they wanted to explain to their stockholders. He won’t starve, and he probably won’t even be gone for as long as some of us would like. But at least his admirers will have to live with the memory of him spending the week crawling on his belly, whimpering and licking every boot he came across in his pathetic bid for forgiveness, a most gratifying commentary on just how much of a ballsy anti-P.C. outlaw the jowly cretin and most of his ilk really are. No, the public excoriation and humilation of Don Imus will not rid the country of racism. But surely a country where the Don Imuses are never publically excoriated and humilated would be a worse place to live.