Imus and the Nappy-Headed Ho's
by A.D Lelong
You can tell what society values by looking at what it is interested in, by what it spends its time focusing upon. This past week, Americans have NOT been focusing on an unconstitutional war that has violated one of the oldest civilizations and turned into a fiasco, nor the possibility that the US is provoking a war with Persia, nor that the Taliban may launch an offensive against our soldiers in Afghanistan, nor that a bomb blew up in a cafeteria inside the Green Zone. What Americans were preoccupied with this week was Don Imus. This was the biggest story in months. And to me, it is the distilled essence of the intellectual fraud that saturates the stupid cowardly minds of America's chattering classes, the ruling elite that make up the government, the establishment media, and the top corporate world.
Consider: NBC News President Steve Capus said that the decision to drop Imus from MSNBC had nothing to do with America's top corporations pulling their spots from NBC. NBC did it to take a principled moral stand.
Consider: CBS fired Imus because they are suddenly "upset and repulsed" in the words of CBS’s CEO Les Moonves; this after paying Imus a huge salary for years to do the kind of show he does. This is like the scene in Casablanca where Claude Raines, playing the police captain, claims to be, "...shocked!....SHOCKED!!!! that gambling is going on here…," just as he is handed his rigged roulette wheel winnings.
Consider: This same CBS fired Opie & Anthony from their NYC station WNEW for encouraging a couple to have sex in St Patrick's Cathedral, during day time hours, when Masses were being said. But then, a few years later they hired them back at another CBS owned NYC station WFNY. Neither their stunt, nor their firing, nor their being re-hired generated this level of pretended outrage.
In Tuesdays New York Times, in an Op-Ed, PBS's Gwen Ifill laments that, "For all their grit, hard work and courage, the Rutgers girls got branded 'nappy-headed ho's' -a shockingly concise sexual and racial insult, tossed out in a volley of male camaraderie by a group of amused middle-aged white men." Rutgers coach Vivian Stringer and her team gave heartfelt description of their hurt at Imus's insults. The official line being ginned up by Anointed America is this: "Imus has gone too far, he has shocked America by picking on young non-professional college girls who were the underdogs in their struggle for winning the women's basketball title. Don’t pick on amateurs." This is the new mantra, the official bromide. It is phony. It is transparent. It is typically moronic. It is safe. Don’t pick on amateurs? Only pick on professionals? Then why was Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder let go from CBS after commenting on black professional athletes? Why was Rush Limbaugh forced to resign after comments about a black NFL quarterback?
If this story was about a rude, tacky, powerful radio star publicly picking on young college girls, then I would point out that our society HAS become intolerably coarse and rude over the last 40 years to the delight of the official media and the anointed intellectuals. Guys like Imus and Howard Stern have contributed hugely to this, and have been rewarded with huge paychecks by a market of radio listeners conditioned to act like children. But the establishment talking heads refused to acknowledge the real story.
The real story is that The Rev. Al Sharpton is attacking Don Imus in order to play the race card so that Sharpton can be the center of attention of a crusade. The real story is that some are more equal than others. The real story is about using government censorship to protect an arbitrarily chosen group of Americans. And moreover, it is about artificially changing society through extralegal intimidation to advance the political and legal agenda of special interest groups, at the expense of the non-protected who never had the foresight (or had too much scruple or sense of honour) to pile on to this intellectual fraud. If you want to fix blame for the humiliation of the Rutgers girls, blame Rev. Sharpton and the intellectual poltroons in the establishment media and corporate America who want to be seen as combating racism. This story would not have seen the light of day, and those girls would have been unaware of Don Imus (whose audience is middle-aged white males) and his humiliating remarks had not Sharpton and the media milked this story to death. Instead his remarks were played over and over on TV.
I'm not going to get into whether Imus is a good talk show host. He certainly is successful, but I never listen to his show as I work for a competitor; however his MSNBC feed is on in our newsroom and I occasionally catch it. Also, he has been in the NYC market for 30 years starting at the old WNBC, and I've been familiar with him. He seems mellowed from the days when he was a big coke and booze addict. He is now a kind of Paul Harvey of shock jocks.
I remember in the 1970's a friend told me about a song he used to run on his WNBC show. It had lyrics like this:
Now isn't it interesting. No Catholic or Protestant group called for his ouster.
But with Rev. Sharpton it's different. He IS offended. Would he have been offended if Imus had called some Wisconsin women's basketball team (assuming they were of Scandinavian descent) "Cheese headed Viking Amazons"? Would The Rev. Al Sharpton have been in high dudgeon had Imus referred to a Boston Jesuit College women's basketball team by saying, "a bunch of freckled, whiskey drinking bricktop sluts"? I don't think so. And most Americans of Norse or Irish decent wouldn't have either. Maybe a couple church groups, here and there, but this would not have become a national hot issue.
What is really at issue here is that Sharpton is a professional race card player. It is his stock in trade. It is the only real vocation he ever had. It has made him good copy in the NYC and national media. He can get reporters to show up at a press conference. And he knows how to use the media to bully his victims.
Now I don't begrudge a mountebank from earning his daily bread, but when I see Rev. Al talk about using the FCC to get Imus fired for doing his puerile shtick, this has serious ramifications for free speech. Sharpton said (and I'm paraphrasing) that we own the air waves and have a right to remove someone who abuses his position. Actually, "we" don't own the air waves. There are no stock certificates in air wave frequencies. They have been usurped by the government starting with the Radio Act of 1912 after the Titanic sinking. Radio licenses are in effect government rented easements, like feudal lease-hold estates. They can be rescinded just like a king could revoke a writ of title from an earl. The radio stations own them as a peer owns his title.
The mere hint of a threat of losing a license terrifies ALL radio station license holders. And given that most license holders are corporations controlled by an unthinking collective of conformist non-intellectual executives, without regard to principle or rational thought, a Sharpton figure has a chilling effect on free expression by the talk-host employee. Sharpton has a radio show on a station here in NYC. Did he lose his time-slot when he referred to White business owners in Harlem as "white interlopers" after the Freddy's department store fire on 125th street 12 years ago when a black gunman shot up and torched the store killing 8 in protest because the white owner did not hire enough blacks? Was Sharpton punished when he failed to distance himself from Jesse Jackson and his "Hymietown" remark? Or the Tawana Brawley hoax? Or when he called the Central Park jogger, beaten almost to death and brain damaged, a "whore"?
What is even more troubling is the extra-legal element of intimidation that has manifested itself throughout our culture. This is part of a trend over the last 40 years. It is the universal acceptance by the entire mainstream establishment of Politically Correct Speech. Being un-PC can be a career killer. It is disgusting watching, over the past few days, the universal lock-step behavior against Imus on this. Even his defenders have to issue a disclaimer about what he said. Sharpton is now attacking people who appeared as regulars on his show. People like Tim Russert the NBC Washington Bureau Chief, or John McCain, a presidential candidate, have to justify their association with him. It has sparked rebuke from other contenders of the High Throne such as Hillary and Rudy. Mayor Bloomberg had to weigh in. It was featured on the front page of Wednesday's NY Times – above the fold. And, in a weird twist of bad luck, NJ Gov. John Corzine was to moderate the "official apology" by Imus to the Rutgers girls when his car crashed en route.
It was especially disgusting watching Imus fall into line. Endless apologies! Here is a guy who has made a 35-year career out of trashing others without a care. Yet he insults those on the Protected Americans List and he, like Henry II after killing Beckett, has to submit to public humiliation in penitence for gross sins worthy of the inner circle of Hell. I was secretly hoping for a John Galt or Dagny Taggart moment; where he would get up, announce his retirement, tell his sponsors, his management, Sharpton, and the whole faux intelligentsia with their pretended concern for the Rutgers girls to drop dead – and then tell them why in eloquent stentorian tones, and bolt the studio and leave an open microphone with dead air for three hours, and no show to air the paid spots. But that was a fantasy. Instead, he played right into the frenzy.
Here is another interesting observation. Don Imus' brand of humor, with its adolescent coarseness and rudeness is a creation of the arbiters of modern taste and culture. The same establishment intelligentsia that is so vexed over Imus’s use of "nappy-headed ho's" has, since the 1960's told us to "express ourselves," to "lighten up." They have striven with boundless energy to "push the envelope"; to shed ourselves of "Victorian inhibitions" like social graces, manners, decency, mores, decorum, formality, polite speech, concern for the feelings of others. Why are the establishment upset that we have mastered and are practicing the only acceptable codes of etiquette that they have taught us for 40 years?
Rap music is the ultimate expression of this unrestrained "hipness." Just compare a Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern and PG Wodehouse or some other pre 1960's lyric with the average "rap" record lyric. The former sings about "moon, June, and swoon" and the later about "killing bitches and ho's." This is excused as "Black self-expression," but did Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong or Lionel Hampton talk like this in performance? Is this the subject matter of Negro Spirituals?
"Nappy Ho" is a phrase straight from the hip gangsta-rap world. Imus used it to demonstrate his "hipness." Sharpton says he will go after them next, but will there be the same media circus? Jesse Jackson on Thursday actually blamed the executives at record companies for rap lyrics. I agree that executives are enablers, but Jackson implies that inner city black kids don't talk like that were it not for the rich white guys at record companies. This is to shift blame from those on the Protected Americans list.
What effect does playing the race card have on policy? Does social intimidation work? Can other groups copy this tactic for their own agenda? Does public intimidation work? I'll leave that for the reader to decide.
April 16, 2007 A.D Lelong [send him mail] grew up in the NYC area. He started in radio in North Carolina as a reporter. In 1994 he moved back to New York City where he has been working as a producer and newsroom sound editor for a news-talk radio station. He currently lives in Queens and enjoys skeet and sporting clays shooting, bird hunting, and sailing. Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com |