Washblog

...this week defines more clearly the style and assumptions underlying Imus' show and what got said.

Or so he thought. Imus, who had been on the air for more than three decades and claimed he'd practically invented shock radio, had spilled countless words into the ether, many of them crude, tasteless, racially charged and intended to insult. Most of them simply evaporated. He got a thrill from his role as a provocateur, and rarely missed a chance to push the boundaries.

Imus's show, like the shock jock himself, had always been something of a one-man culture clash. At 66, the "I-Man" was still big on tasteless caricatures of anyone in the news, or in his sight. (He called Dick Cheney "Pork Chop Butt.") He seemed to revel in reducing his targets to crude racial and ethnic stereotypes. A running gag had McGuirk lampooning New York Roman Catholic cardinals John O'Connor and Edward Egan as vulgar Irishmen with thick brogues. Arabs were "ragheads." NBA star Patrick Ewing was a "knuckle-dragging moron." McGuirk did an impression of poet Maya Angelou, telling whites to "Kiss my big black a--."

But Imus took special pride in his unlikely role as host and scold to the nation's ruling political class. He goaded the journalists and politicians who begged to appear on his show, belittling them as "fat losers" and "baldheaded weasels" or worse, and asking, with mock solemnity, for their analysis of the presidential "erection." He once called Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz, a regular on the show, a "boner-nosed, beanie-wearing Jew boy."

Arthur
You sure you ain't staking too much on yer theories? Not enough common sense?

by Arthur Ruger on Sun Apr 15, 2007 at 08:11:58 AM PST

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Anyone who's been physically or verbally abused -- and told it was a joke -- knows that's triple abuse.  You are a victim of the injury itself, of a denial that the injury has happened, and of the insult to your intelligence (can't you take a joke?)  This is true exclusion.  I know it in minor form -- enough to be angry right now as I think about it.

It happens all the time, it is pervasive, for people of color and not uncommon for women.

Racist and sexist remarks are a form of violence.  Those remarks are not innocent or funny and they never were.  They are scornful, they deny humanity and reinforces the economic and social violence that results in Black, Native American, and Latino people making less money, living in more polluted communities, losing more of their babies; getting less education but more incarceration, dying younger, higher levels of incarceration, etc.  These remarks are a form of violence to all the people who hear them, regardless of color.

Imus is old, played out, behind the times.  I grew up in NJ and NY listening to him on AM radio. 25-30 years have gone by since my childhood and during that time it has slowly unfolded for me what a racist milieu I grew up in -- and how racism persists now.  I hadn't understood this because my parents weren't racist.  And it's difficult to see the cultural norms that you're inside of.  When my Black friend was called the N word in school, for example, I was so shocked, I didn't know what to think.  When I was told three separate times while looking for an apartment in NYC in the 1980s that I'd feel comfortable because minorities were not allowed, I knew that was racism and I turned down an apartment because of it.  But I didn't know enough to report it.  Hurricane Carter was framed and put in jail in NJ when I was a child -- that famous crime of the time and place that I was shaped in.  Even though I listened to the song about him by Bob Dylan, I was oblivious to that crime, I didn't feel a connnection to that person in jail.  Imus' voice was on the radio that whole time.  Did he ever speak of Hurricane Carter?  He's stuck inside a corrupt cultura norm -- and he's been keeping everyone else stuck.  Good riddance to him.

It is an extremely hopeful sign of the times that Imus has to pay -- that he's cleaned off the air.  It is an absolute embarrassment that any radio personality thinks he can get away with such violence.  

by noemie maxwell on Mon Apr 16, 2007 at 02:11:33 AM PST

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