So now that I’ve pissed off the right-wing with my Duke post, let’s see if I can get the left wing mad at me about Don Imus.

I used to listen to Imus regularly. The show was interesting, more intelligent than most anything else on the radio in the morning, and often made me laugh. Yes. Sometimes even at the politically incorrect zingers tucked into Charles McCord’s essays, usually read by someone impersonating Richard Nixon, George Patton, Bill Clinton, or various other personalities. The stuff sometimes made me cringe. It sometimes went too far. And it sometimes wasn’t funny. But sometimes it was, even when it hurt people’s feelings. It’s disarming and natural and healthy to laugh at our differences. It’s why we laugh at Sarah Silverman’s stand-up, or The Aristocrats.

Imus was also edgy, satirical, and political. I also liked the way he was able to not only get Washington elites on his show, but to get them out of their comfort zones, to speak in a language other than Talking Points, and, best of all, to occasionally say something stupid (for which they too would then get into trouble).

I stopped listening to Imus because I found him to be increasingly annoying as he moved away from all of that stuff, got less funny, and started droning on about his somewhat indulgent charitable ranch, which probably has the highest dollars-to-kids-actually-benefiting ratio of any project of its kind. I also lost interst when his wife started running his show. I tired of hearing him shill for his wife’s crusades against cleaning products, hearing him preach her dogma that everything with chemicals causes cancer, and that vegan diets are delicious and healthy and the really the only diet of good, moral, enlightened people. I also tired of him constantly imploring me to buy his damned salsa. His hammering away at stupid politicians also evolved over the years into sycophancy, mostly I guess because he wanted them to continue appearing on his show.

But I didn’t stop listening because he was politically incorrect. That’s why I started listening.

As for The Comment, I didn’t find it particularly funny. But Jesus. This thing has degenerated into an utterly hysterical feeding frenzy.

Imus isn’t a racist. He’s a misanthrope. He hates people. All people. His show made broad, possibly offensive generalizations about everyone on a near-daily basis. We now learn that the Rutgers women’s basketball team was apparently hurt and offended by the comments. But were they really? I’d hazard to guess that not a single one of them was listening to the show that morning. The more plausible narrative is that they were hurt and offended only after having to hear the comments replayed over and over, on TV and radio stations across the country, for the better part of two weeks. If the professional outrage groups hadn’t picked this up and run with it, it would have been what it was, and should have been: a not-particularly-funny attempt at a pop culture allusion from a past-his-prime DJ still trying to be hip. It would have died the moment it left Imus’ mouth. And we wouldn’t have had to hear from people like Al Sharpton about how what Imus said was important because if he thinks it, lots of other seemingly non-racist white people probably think it, too. Therefore, we should punish Imus by firing him–to send a message. Which is absurd. And paranoid. And needlessly divisive.

This idea that everyone who says anything racially sensitive has to parade his bare ass before Al Sharpton, beg for forgiveness, then still get not only a severe paddling, but no forgiveness to boot is a troubling development, not only because of its obvious implications for politically incorrect speech, but because it reinforces the idea that a thug like Sharpton has somehow come to serve as a proxy for all of Black America (see the brilliant South Park episode a few weeks ago, that foretold all of this). If that’s true, how unfortunate for Black America.

Conservatives say that before Sharpton accepts another apology from a white person, he should have to apologize for his years-old “diamond merchants” comment, and Jesse Jackson for his even-older “Hymietown” slur. No. That’s playing their game. The idea that American Jewry was somehow mortally wounded by either of those comments is just as silly as the idea that all black women were mortally wounded by Imus’s. It rather underestimates both groups to suggest that either could really be affected by a dumb comment from a single individual. These are just words, people.

Of course, there are times when words can inflict real damage. Which is why if you ask me, the real apologies we ought to hear from Sharpton should be directed at Steven Pagones, or the family of Yankel Rosenbaum. Yet somehow Sharpton has managed to move on to respectability as the man to whom all latent racists must atone pay homage without ever really doing his own atoning for his own big, honking fuck-ups.

Of course, the conservative reaction to all of this is pretty stupid, too. “Look at all the rap music! They call women ‘hos’ too!”

No, you idiots. How typical. The answer to politically incorrect censorship is not…more political incorrect censorship.. Not to mention that Imus’ comment was stupid, lame humor. Hip hop is art. Sharpton and Jackson actually are going after hip hop. And their efforts to take words away from rap artists are every bit as lame (lamer, actually) than their attempt to take words away from clueless, aging disc jockeys.

I held off commenting on all of this because “nappy headed hos” was a pretty stupid thing to say, I don’t much care for Imus these days, and frankly, if Imus’s sponsors want to boycott him over it in response to consumer pressure, that’s a fine, free-market, non-governmental solution to all of this.

(Side note: Famed attorney, smart guy, and lefty Abbie Lowell was on the Tony Kornheiser Show yesterday offering up a tepid defense of Imus and free speech. Kornheiser rightly pointed out that the right to free speech doesn’t include the right to say what you want on someone else’s television station. To which Lowell rather astoundingly replied, “I’m not so sure. Once you’ve earned the right to that platform, I’m not sure they should be able to take it away from you for exercising your right to free speech” (quote is approximate). To which I audibly replied, while alone in my car, “Huh?”)

Obviously, Imus’s sponsors feel that continuing to buy ad time on Imus’s program will cost them more in public goodwill than it will earn them in revenue from his listeners. No problem, there. And when sponsors started pulling out, his employers made the decision to fire him. No problem there, either.

But this is where I start to have a problem. The lefty activists are now moving into “it’s more than just Imus” mode, in which they’re fishing through archives of talk show hosts with whom they have political disagreements in an effort to get them silenced. I have no love for Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. And yeah, they do occasionally say dumb things I find offensive, and that are probably tinged with bigotry. But I would find any efforts to shut them up a hell of a lot more offensive than anything they could say on the air. Reminds me of the time the Clinton White House tried to smack right-wing radio over the head with the Oklahoma City Bombing. Drudge also reported the other day that many activist groups were protesting Imus to the FTC, as well, a’la Brent Bozell. Note to my lefty friends: When you’re imitating Brent Bozell, you’re doing something wrong.

This is bad news. The danger here is that the left is eventually able to use racism or perceived racism as cudgel with which to smack and silence anyone who disagrees with them on political issues tangentially related to race. That’s dangerous some dangerous stuff.

I don’t deny for a minute that racism still exists in this country (see my post below). Nor would I deny that it still does real harm to real people, fairly regularly. I guess my point is that it’d be nice if all the energy spent the last two weeks expressing self-righteous outrage over a mistaken comment from a harmless old fool were instead spent on, say, the racial sentencing disparities in the criminal justice system, or the fact that a substantially higher percentage of black men are in prison in America than were imprisoned in South Africa during apartheid.

My first reaction any time a public figure is accused of saying something bigoted is to buck the feeding frenzy. I guess I value speech and discourse more than protection from hurt feelings. The one exception is when that person is in a position where he has the power to force his bigotry onto other people. Meaning someone in government (you, Trent Lott). You want to talk about institutionalized racism–policies in which government is actively or passively discriminating against black people? I’m all ears. But posturing and self-serving condemnations of people who slip with the tongue at the wrong time, with all the accompanying gesturing and arrogant down-looking upon of the unenlightened? I’ll pass. It’s a waste of time and energy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 12th, 2007 at 7:37 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.