"CBS fires Don Imus from radio show"
-- AP headline, April 12, 2007.
"You ain't no racist, Mister Imus, nah suh. No, thank you, I don't want no watermelon!"
-- Bernard McGuirk, Don Imus' producer, using an 'Amos 'n' Andy' voice to a laughing Imus on his radio show, as quoted by Newsweek.
"An entertainer like Imus can trace his lineage to Bruce, with one crucial distinction: Lenny made fun of the powerful and their orthodoxies. You won't find Imus mocking WASPs on a regular basis. Instead, this rude dude focuses on groups whose status is still contested, such as blacks, immigrants, and gays."
-- Richard Goldstein, "Celebrity Bigots," The Village Voice, July 18, 2000.
"There are 100 people in this country right now that can solve hate television. They are the CEO of Procter & Gamble, the CEO of General Motors. These people control all the advertising dollars and they spoke... These CEOs can spend the money in places that don't promote hate."
-- Donnie Deutsch, the host of CNBC's "The Big Idea," quoted by Mike Celizic at TODAYshow.com, April 12, 2007.
Things Change
April 13, 2007 -- Rush Limbaugh senses it coming, telling his listeners yesterday that he's next, and the other Rush wannabe radio bile spillers of the right may be dimly aware of it, but Don Imus' firing by CBS Radio, removing him from the air nationwide, augurs the end of their run of nasty spittle-flecked bigotry disguised as 'humor'; a vicious humor designed to appeal to their core audience of Angry White Men who blame minorities and women because they're losers, ignorant boys cowering in adult bodies, whispering racists, snickering water-cooler-wit a-holes, and mutant teenagers who thought the Garbage Pail Kids were brilliant comedy.
It won't happen overnight, as major societal changes rarely do, but gradually advertisers will begin pulling ads from Limbaugh and his clones, realizing that the country has shifted away from the mean-spirited neocon tripe they've successfully peddled for over two decades and is heading in a new direction.
Most media analysts will credit Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson with bringing Imus down; they'll focus on the "nappy-headed ho's" remark as the centerpiece of his downfall; all of it was certainly a factor but, if Imus were as popular as he was even a decade ago, his critics would have been ridiculed into silence or ignored. What I see happening now was expressed by Newsweek's Howard Fineman on the Imus show April 9th. He told the 'I-man': "[T]hings have changed. And the kind of -- some of the kind of humor that you used to do you can't do anymore. And that's just the way it is."
Here's 'the way it is' these days: The country is becoming aware that "nappy-headed ho's" are not the problem; the problem is the smooth-haired caucasian variety who infest the halls of power in Washington and the broadcast booths in New York.
While Imus may claim he's not a racist, a long trail of reprehensible remarks argues that he wears a white sheet in private. He or his 'crew' -- especially his execrable producer Bernard McGuirk -- have habitually referred to black people as "bugaloos," "brilloheads," "dark meat," "dingos," and "mandingos." He's called Sammy Davis Jr. a "a one-eyed lawn jockey," and regularly referred to Aretha Franklin and other black women as "ho's." Terms for other minorities like "raghead," "camel jockey," "gook," "zipperhead," "banana picker," and "our urine-colored brothers" have been uttered with sneering gusto on the Imus airwaves, as well as his bashing of gays with such tried-and-true nuggets as "homo," "fag," "faggot," "fag-queen," "queer," and "load-swallower." All in good fun, of course, Imus assures us -- as long as you're not black, Hispanic, Asian, Muslim, Arab, gay or female.
Several years ago, Imus even promised columnist Clarence Page, who is black, that he would stop using racial slurs. Obviously, he didn't.
Notoriously he said in 1995 of black New York Times correspondent Gwen Ifill, "Isn't The Times wonderful? It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House." He even admitted to 60 Minutes back in 2000 that he uses the 'N-word' in private, but never in public. (Uh, the ghost of Dr. King thanks you, Don.) On that same show, he said, "I don't apologize for offending people ... I know it's not politically correct, and I don't care."
Well, times have changed -- Imus was forced to care, and apologize, but it was much too little, too late. Imus is not by any means the worst of the bigoted shock jocks, however, just the proverbial canary in the coal mine.
The ludicrous age of victimized White Man Ranting is breathing its last as the promise that the Republicans would 'fix everything' has turned into a bitter joke under Bush. More and more Americans every day realize that it isn't blacks or women or some minority that's keeping them down, that is ruining our economy and our standing in the world; it's soft, rich, pampered ofay jerks like Limbaugh and his ilk that are pulling the strings putting them out of work and getting them killed in wrong-headed wars.
Ironically -- since the neocons so worship 'free markets' -- as the worm turns and the 'invisible hand' of economic reality asserts itself, advertisers will flee from the right side of the dial, anxious not to offend minorities or the many whites who are becoming cognizant of the fact that the neocon Republicans have been steadily destroying this country for the past six years, methodically dismantling a government designed to respond to the wishes and needs of the people and replacing it with an over-easy plutocracy that serves the privileged few at the expense of the majority.
The results of the last election and every poll since has shown that the majority of Americans are heading in a new direction, a direction that doesn't include the vitriol and spite of vain 'funnymen' like Imus and Rush.
Ratings for right-wing radio and TV shows have been steadily falling for three years running; even Bill O'Reilly has lost over a million viewers since 2004, and they won't be coming back. Most purchasers of the neocon ideology promoted by Bill and Rush and Fox News have realized it's a modern-day Edsel, one with four flat tires and an engine that doesn't run.
Rush, do you hear that growling at the door?
It's for you.
"What all you folks need, who still treat fellow human beings as 'black', 'white', 'yellow', or 'red', is to watch a Documentary entitled 'The Angry Eye' by Jane Elliott which is described as follows: Documentary which features Jane Elliott's blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise in discrimination involving college students forced to experience racist treatment minorities have received for years. Jane Elliott was an elementary school teacher in Iowa in the 1960s when she developed her exercise on the effects of racism in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr."
-- Comment by JPBreeze at Common Dreams, April 10, 2007.
Sources for this piece include:
-- Mike Celizic, "Is Imus firing a turning point?" TODAYshow.com, April 12, 2007.
-- Isaiah J. Poole, "Imus and Beyond," Tom Paine, April 11, 2007.
-- Richard Goldstein, "Celebrity Bigots," The Village Voice, July 18, 2000.
-- Philip Nobile, "A Catalogue of Slurs," Tom Paine.com, May 16, 2000.
-- Marcus Mabry, "The Ugly Truth About Imus, Power and the Press," Newsweek, April 11, 2007.
-- Media Matters, "Imus Cancellation: Statement from Media Matters," April 11, 2007.
-- Gwen Ifill, "Trash Talk Radio," The New York Times, April 10, 2007.
-- Media Matters, "Imus Has Long Record of Incendiary Remarks," April 9, 2007.
-- Adam Howard, "No More Imus," The Nation, April 9, 2007.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment