Don Imus Vobiscum


 


When I was a child, I will tell you how protected I was. I knew the list of the bad words we would get in trouble for saying: there was shit, and piss, and hell, and tit. I vividly remember the adjustment to that list when my older brother slapped me hard for saying God damn it. So damn was on the list, with the same biblical dispensation as hell.
Thing was, fuck was so far away from my world that it wasn't even on the list.
This came to a head at a piano recital given at my teacher, Mrs. Bearce's house. She had kids from all over as her pupils, and so I met kids I'd never met before, who were talking about that strange word fuck.
Now I knew my list, and fuck wasn't on it, and so had absolutely no problem saying it, even the point of prancing around on the grass, shouting fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck in a nice loud voice,to the giggling delight of those kids.
(Of course, not being a complete idiot, I began to suspect that fuck might in fact be on the list, and decided not to test it on any adults. But after reporting this to my friends (who had never heard it either), we decided to admit it to the list on a probationary basis.)

I have therefore had an abiding affection for the word fuck, which once fell from my lips in absolute innocent impotent purity.

I have also, from very early childhood, known the difference between bad words and ugly ones.

Don Imus has been fired off of his radio station, his syndication, and his simulcast, for a rematk he made. In a non-apology apology typical amount the rich and the proud these days, he called it a 'mistake.'

If it was a mistake, then his entire career has been a mistake, because this was not an aberration or something foreign to the way he did his show, but in keeping with it. It's hard to say whether the 'mistake' was that he slurred the wrong people--or whether the 'mistake' was not to back and fill immediately, to say to his Caliban Bernie McGirk "Oh that's nasty--stop". laughing all the while--whether his mistake was not to call in more markers earlier. Listening to the offending audio,the sexual and racial insult just slipped out as if he didn't have to think about, just standard spiel. Which it was, for Imus.

Insult and anger have been a part of our broadcast media for a while. I remember (though not vividly) the Alan Burke and Joe Pyne shows when I was growing up--and the genre's resurrection under Morton Downey Jr. Outrageous guests, baited and yelled at by the host, in front of an obstreperous studio audience: Grand (and Grand Guignol) social theater. It got prettified by Phil Donahue--and got depoliticized and sexualized by Jerry Springer, hoping for the anger and raw energy that David Susskind or Dick Cavett couldn't generate if they were set on fire.
But, you know, studio audiences are expensive--and so are guests. A Shock Jock could do all the anger and abuse from your usual dinky radio studio, and you were the audience and/or the guest, siting in your car or cubicle.
But while Burke and Pyne sitcomized public-issues dialog, Imus and the others laugh-tracked it. Just a couple of filtered phone calls that the host could (and would) regularly cut off, abuse, and ignore.
But it brought the anger, right? It got people listening, right? Enough with the hokey-jokey smooth voiced DJ who would give you the traffic and weather and say "How 'bout those Mets?" and spin another disc.
It did, but at a price. Instead of a packaging of public debate, a low-fi re-enactment of a Parliamentary debate, we got part of it: just the asshole host. We were either the audience or the guest--or the victim. We supplied the answering roar.
Except we couldn't. And didn't.
And so we got something that was even worse than the nation of passive detached couch potatoes that the critics bemoaned: in the case of shock radio, we got the audience of yelled-at, abused and powerless listeners.. Vouch potato, mashed. Of course you could always move the dial: it helps explain the rise of all-news radio. These robotic channels very seldom gave you anything other than your typical 9-minute headline flash, indefinitely repeated--but the unspoken contract was that there would be no hookers, no prank phone calls, no personal insults. And sixteen songs in a row as well: It wasn't just more music, but it was no zoo crew.
Its persistence created both a model and a class: the model where the medium says what can we do for you? to the model where the medium says fuck you.

In a sense, Don Imus reflected that insidious creep: having listened to him (and disliked him) as a foul-mouthed rock and roll DJ, I was flat-out bewildered when he started becoming an interviewer of major political figures: he had neither changed his style nor gotten any smarter. Why were they flocking to him and not to Howard Stern? (The simple answer is that Howard didn't want them--but would they have come if Howard had asked?)

Whatever the strange machinery behind it, we now had a political show with the same adversarial relationship--not with the guests (wouldn't that be nice?) but with the public at large. While I'm not trying for a genetic cause-and-effect argument, the fact remains that we began to get increasing numbers of shows, both on radio and TV where the relationship was not accommodating or dignified, but combative, angry, and at the base contemptuous.
I am not equating all right-wingers with this contemptuous attitude: Rush Limbaugh is a genial radio host of the old school--which is probably one of the main reasons he's at the top of the right-wing heap. His lies and smears are another story. But all over the radio dial, we have 'talk-show hosts' ranting at the audience--not hosts, but just ranters who, even if they don't rise to the Tourette's heights of Michael Savage, are doing nothing but yelling.
And that's the other part: These 'hosts' are no more well-informed, eloquent, thoughtful or coherent than most of the audience--quite the contrary, in many cases. But their original Burke/Pyne role as the motive force in a public psychodrama has devolved, as it had to without the (suppressed) blowback, into just an array of jerks mouthing off--and believing in their bones that their speech is privileged, hostile, stupid, and fact-free as it so often is.

Some of this is due to a concerted decades-long right-wing takeover of the media--but not all of it. Imus is definitely not a Scaife/Murdoch/Coors placement--and there are plenty of media executives who sincerely believe that the appointment of a Glenn Beck will 'spark controversy' and therefore ratings. This is nonsense, and not because all the 'controversial' figures are from the right and say the same thing--it's that it's not a controversy if it's all one way.
The voices on talk radio and the faces on cable news are not there to argue their case. They're not even there to inform, because when they try, they do an awful job. Bill O'Reilly, when in a neutral venue, argues incompetently. Can Michael Savage even debate? Once again, it's not just the right: a 'centrist' like Chris Matthews has neither information nor ratiocinative skills to either make a point or defend one.
But that's not their job, as they see it, and as the media matrix is currently shaped. They all channel Alan Burke and Joe Pyne in a strange soundstage with no fourth wall, but with no shotgun mike to pick up audience reaction, not even when it reaches an angry growl.

I tell you this: if Don Imus had ears to hear his studio audience, he would not have said what he said. Even the office bigot would have more sense than to call those champion athletes whores. The O.B. might think it, but wouldn't say it. The insane thing about Imus's privileged position is that he might not even think it--and yet he says it.

Don Imus has had decades of privileged speech. He has sat in that soundstage for so long that I don't think he even believed his audience existed--and definitely not that their voice--even their collective voice--was equal to his. Even a hard right wing demagogue, in a place with a big audience, would not use ugly words, and certainly not casually the way he did.

And this is what I've been getting around to. A lot of people (many dishonestly, but many not), focus on 'ho' and 'nappy-headed', and say that rappers use 'ho', so shouldn't we go after them next?

"Ho" (I actually had an older friend ask me just what 'ho' meant: he was surprised when I told him it wasn't any sort of new word, but a pronunciation of 'whore.' The word did not come from rappers--it's a thousand years older, at least) is a bad word. 'Whore' is a bad word. It's a horrible insult to most people. But there really are whores in the world. It can be used without malice. (cf. Simon & Garfunkel's The Boxer: I would venture that there's not a soul that bristled at the word 'whores' in that song.) Crime novelists write about whores and pimps, as well as thieves, psychotics, pederasts and worse. Those are all bad words.

They become ugly when they are used cruelly.

Fictional ho's (which is most that occur in rap songs) are not different from the whores on Seventh Avenue. Blanket statements (found in some rap and, alas, many rappers' heads) that all women are ho's is getting nasty--but Don Imus used it as a casual, offhand cruelty. That's some ugly shit.

The French have a word for it--anomie, which is the boredom that comes from alienation from one's society. Imus has a partial case: he's obviously not alienated from the media and political elite who call him 'pal', and not from all the folks he knows in his rich person's charity work. Everybody says he's a nice guy. But at work he's the anomie poster child.

I was sick of Imus along time ago. Every African-American I know viewed him with disgust. He was one of a vast number of media people who just plain felt immune. The public square was empty except for them and theirs, and the rest of us only thin, crackly voices from somewhere far away and down below. African Americans know all too well how that feels.

There is the Internet. Ordinary people have voices again, and we cats can look at those kings. Imus just let fly one more piece of cruelty-laden spittle--and was surprised as hell as ghostly arms grabbed him and threw him against the wall.

But Radio and TV are still heavily laden with those people who simply lie, and rant, attack, and just plain make shit up. They don't think we exist, not really, and that there are certainly no strictures on their privileged speech. The Imus thing has them spooked, just as the creeping eldritch horror of the blogosphere fills them with a nameless dread.

We ghosts are moving. We have had enough of your long reign of ugliness.

Fuck you.

Posted: Tuesday - April 10, 2007 at 05:39 PM        

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