Posted by
Green Faerie on Wednesday, April 11, 2007 4:36:36 PM
I'm not a Don Imus fan and I don't listen to his show. He's pretty much a liberal and for every time he's poked say, the Clintons, in the eye, he's taken a hundred more opportunities to do the same to any sort of conservative or conservative idea. Aside from that, he has had a long-standing reputation as a jerk off the air. Howard Stern's book (and the movie) "Private Parts" chronicles the nasty reception Howard got when he met his "idol" Don Imus for the first time. I can certainly see why people would find his comments on the Rutgers women's basketball team offensive and just plain not nice.
However the fallout has reached proportions of ridiculousness and I think it's dangerous. First of all, Imus made a huge error by crawling to racial huckster/hypocrite/demagogue "Rev." Al Sharpton. He should've just apologized over the air, apologized personally to the basketball team, and perhaps reconsider when and where to cross the line. But now it has devolved into a pathetic drama of weepy basketball players (I suppose these gals weren't so tough after all), "civil rights" leaders who come crawling out of the woodwork when whitey misbehaves but ignore far worse problems than hurt feelings, cancelled sponsorships, and calls for Imus's head. Figuratively, of course. At least figuratively as of today. All because Imus had the temerity to mess with the wrong group of people. Had he said something offensive about Mormons, he'd be hailed as a First Amendment Hero by the cultural elites and we'd be told the rest of us intolerant insophisticates just have to live with it.
Which gets to why I find this whole pseudo-brouhaha alarming. We have a culture that on the one hand celebrates outrageousness and on the other hand, adopts political correctness as a cheap shorthand for basic morality. The result is thus...Staples and Proctor and Gamble have dropped sponsorship of Imus's show while they cheerfully continue to sponsor "The View," home to Rosie O'Donnell's 9/11 Truther rantings. O'Donnell belongs to two classes considered oppressed by the PC crowd and her comments are not directed at any other oppressed class, so her brand of outrageousness is (for the moment) tolerated. An actor on a t.v. show can utter a slur and still keep his job so long as he heads off to rehab, because he belongs to an oppressed class. A WASP female loses her class status due to her conservative views, so her riffing on slurs and rehab trips is met with greater outrage. Meanwhile, rappers can say whatever they like as long as they keep making millions for The Man. What the public gets is a shellgame where the rules change depending on your racial, social, and political identity. Not only can such a situation impede on the free speech rights of many of us if government were to get involved, it also creates an atmosphere of hostility, fear, and mistrust. Few things are worse for the national discourse than feeling like you can never say anything for fear of not only offending someone but losing your livelihood and your reputation, while others can more or less say what they please.