Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2007-04-11 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

BALTIMORE -

Anyone wishing to defend — or to minimize — Don Imus’ remarks on the national airwaves about the Rutgers women’s basketball team need only ask yourself a simple question: What if he had said those things about your child? Would you want him suspended from his job? Would you want him fired?

Of course not.

You’d want him shot at sunrise on national television.

Which, in effect, is exactly what’s happening. Having uttered his sexist and racist remarks, Imus commences the media version of facing a firing squad. This morning he may breathe, but he is now and forever on professional life support.

On his MSNBC program, he dons the mask of contrition and issues an apology. Then he appears on the Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio program to offer another. And on Imus’ nationally syndicated radio program, he reiterates how sorry he is and how he regards himself as “a good man who said a bad thing.”

“That’s some rough girls from Rutgers,” he declared over the air the other morning, setting off the current commotion.

“Some hard-core hos,” said his executive producer, Bernard McGuirk. (“Hos,” that’s the drawled street-corner pronunciation of “whores.” They’re talking about 18-year-old kids here.)

“That’s some nappy-headed hos there,” replied Imus, tossing in some follicular reference lest anyone miss the fact that the women in question are African-American. “I’m gonna tell you that now, man, that’s some — woo.”

Later in the show, comparing the Rutgers players with Tennessee’s — whom they had played against for the national collegiate women’s championship — McGuirk called them “the jigaboos vs. the wannabes.”

And this is what the Imus program offers under the rubric of “humor.”

Is there anyone around with brain cells who wishes to defend this kind of language, even as a lame gesture of joking around? It was not only offensive, but creepy. And, not to be overlooked, it was a variation on a theme.

The Imus show is a bunch of middle-aged white guys who gang up with a narrow way of looking at the world every day. On this particular day of disaster, they happened to find themselves talking the way certain Neanderthal middle-aged white guys talk in private — only the Imus guys were dumb enough to do it in public.

And now they’re paying a price.

But, having said all of this, let’s not throw Imus off a cliff and think we’ve done ourselves a favor. If we do that, then we overlook the culture that produced him, and protected him because he was commercially successful, and allowed a generation of voices to coarsen the national airwaves and legitimize hateful language because they brought in lots of money — including white radio talk show hosts who hide behind code words, and black hip-hop artists who get a pass and don’t bother to use code words.

That’s why Imus’ TV and radio bosses are having so much trouble now about his punishment. He has good ratings, and he brings in the ad dollars.

And so we’re left with the Rev. Sharpton on TV and radio, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson in front of all microphones, calling for Imus’ banishment from the landscape.

Sharpton, who gave us the racially poisonous case of the liar Tawana Brawley.

Jackson, who gave us “Hymietown.”

Were they wrong? Of course. Was it years ago? Absolutely. And they’ve gone on to speak their minds in public, and we can listen to them if we want to listen — or not.

Don Imus is tough to like for many reasons. He’s gruff, he can be a bully and he’s casually insulting, even when he’s not being racist or sexist. But he’s also symptomatic of the American marketplace of ideas, in which crude and coarse and cruel unfortunately sell. So our national dialogue has become a theater of the outrageous, and our national punch line an obscenity.

Until it goes a little too far, and we attempt to purge.

But where does it leave us? It leaves the airwaves only marginally less filled with the daily coarseness and bullying. It turns Imus into a martyr among those who insist minorities get special treatment. And it overlooks the real power enjoyed by listeners who are truly offended.

Turn off the set. Stop watching and listening. Then the ratings will go down. And then you will see those network executives finding excuses to get rid of Imus — and, if we’re really lucky, all those others who traffic in the American coarseness.

Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com