Symbolic Imus
Oddly enough, I don't know a thing about Don Imus except what I read — which is a lot in the past few days — because I never listened to him. Come to think of it, I never listened to or read (whichever is appropriate) Anne Coulter or Sean Hannity or Rush, either; instead of complaining about what they say and wondering why people should even pay them a moment's notice, I don't.
By all accounts, I seem to be the only person I've seen mention Mr. Imus who has not ever appeared on his show. Odd that, but I was never asked for some reason. Therefore I cannot comment on how the real Don Imus compares to some other Don Imus.
But still, people can be so dense sometimes. Here's something on the celebrated event by Dick Cavett:
Is there not a sort of a conundrum in everyone’s agreeing that the words are horrible, and not fit to be broadcast or heard — and then hearing them re-aired every 20 minutes on most TV channels? Not even euphemizing the H-word. Some of the seeming astonishment expressed about how well-spoken, attractive, articulate and self-possessed the basketball players are — all true — at times bordered a bit uncomfortably on Obama’s being called (surprisingly?) “articulate” and “clean.”
[Dick Cavett, "Imus in the Hornets’ Nest", via Donkey O.D., 11 April 2007.]
Perhaps this is something in the form of a rhetorical flourish, but it doesn't seem so. How can someone of Mr. Cavett's noted perspicacity think for even a moment that all the kerfuffle comes down to "nappy-headed ho's" being naughty words that should not be uttered on the air. Puhlease.
The naughtiness does not inhere in the phrase as I'm sure Mr. Cavett and most everyone else realizes, and the outrage is not about Mr. Imus' merely saying it. It's more in the nature of a synecdoche, a literary tip-of-the-iceberg that means far, far more than the phrase in question and its alleged naughtiness.
"But! But!" sputter his defenders, those who rush in and hope that it's all a free-speech issue, or something important and constitutional, "it was just a joke!" To my ear, that just makes matters worse.
To my ear, then, the whole Imus-foot-in-mouth incident is seen to reveal the much, much bigger problem of residual, undergound, hidden racism that's alive and well in the US today, shared nudge-nudge-wink-wink assumptions and attitudes that make it plausible that the incident might be construed as humor. The incident reveals all this in misdirected clarity for everyone to see and react to — "misdirected" because I think most people understand what the issue really is but they can couch all their "debate" in terms of the un-utterability of the phrase in question rather than talking about the real issue. That means that Imus can also be punished for his infractions — most of which constitutes offering a suitable incident for the misdirected discussion — without having to say that he's really a scapegoat, the mere representative of a problem revealed by his representative incident.
It's not Imus that's being punished, it's the shared attitudes of white America that are being put on notice, and it makes people uncomfortable out of all proportion to any upset they might feel over whether Mr. Imus should lose his job or not, an issue about which I suspect most couldn't care less. Mr. Imus is a symbol who happened to say something at the wrong time that revealed the barely concealed racism that he shared with his fans, and they're surprised to find that the popularity of their racial prejudices are fading as fast as the popularity of Bush Republicanism.
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I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Thursday, 12 April 2007 at 14.56
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I, too, put this back on Imu's audience. But I think indicting white America as a whole goes too far, as you indicate at the end of your post.
What it comes down to is a bunch of people with a shared failing. Hearing people different from themselves made to sound weak, small, dumb, bad, etc., makes them feel strong, big, smart and good. Literally cheap thrills, in other words.
But for people like Imus, Limbaugh, Coulter and their ilk, this failing can be mined so as to achieve fame and fortune.
If there's good to come from this incident, let it be that a few in the so-called infotainment field realize anything doesn't go and that there's a difference between freedom of speech and license to spew demeaning, hurtful things.
As for those who make up the audience of Imus and rest, I hope they come to appreciate how pathetic they, their taste and their perceived needs are.
on Thursday, 12 April 2007 at 15.34
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You're right, SW, I go too far with "white America", when I really meant some white Americans; perhaps I should have labeled them "White Americans", that self-selecting not-so-secret society of supposedly superior folk who seem always to want to demonstrate said superiority with continual dunderheadedness.
on Saturday, 14 April 2007 at 03.12
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"Dunderheadedness" — that's good. Immediately brought to mind Strom Thurmond, who, another of of the dunderhead M.O. assured us, "Had he been elected president, we wouldn't have had all these problems all these years."