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Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
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April 15, 2007
Indignation Whores Lynch Don Imus
The indignation hos have lynched Don Imus, costing him both his television airings on MSNBC and his main radio job for CBS.
I'm feeling a strong need to bring the pimp hand down on some nappy headed hos over this Don Imus foolishness. Actually, I'm not sure which if any of these fools have nappy heads. I've never figured out exactly what that means, other than it has something to do with black people's hair. Plus, I don't care much about anyone's hair styles. Also, not all of the hos are black, and black ain't why I'm cheesed.
But I do care about this whoring of indignation. We've got a whole worse than worthless industry of race hustlers who LIVE to find some picayune bullcrap like this about which they can decide to be indignant and hurt. It's a statement about how little black Americans have to complain about that this passing Imus comment is the best thing they've got.
From the April 4, 2007 edition of Imus in the Morning:
IMUS: So, I watched the basketball game last night between -- a little bit of Rutgers and Tennessee, the women's final.
ROSENBERG: Yeah, Tennessee won last night -- seventh championship for Pat Summitt, I-Man. They beat Rutgers by 13 points.
IMUS: That's some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and --
McGUIRK: Some hard-core hos.
IMUS: That's some nappy-headed hos there. I'm gonna tell you that now, man, that's some -- woo. And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know, so, like -- kinda like -- I don't know.
McGUIRK: A Spike Lee thing.
IMUS: Yeah.
McGUIRK: The Jigaboos vs. the Wannabes -- that movie that he had.
IMUS: Yeah, it was a tough --
McCORD: Do The Right Thing. [Actually, it was School Daze -Al]
McGUIRK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
IMUS: I don't know if I'd have wanted to beat Rutgers or not, but they did, right?
ROSENBERG: It was a tough watch. The more I look at Rutgers, they look exactly like the Toronto Raptors.
IMUS: Well, I guess, yeah.
RUFFINO: Only tougher.
McGUIRK: The [Memphis] Grizzlies would be more appropriate.
Imus later said, "I want to take a moment to apologize for an insensitive and ill-conceived remark we made the other morning regarding the Rutgers women's basketball team, which lost to Tennessee in the NCAA championship game on Tuesday.
It was completely inappropriate, and we can understand why people were offended. Our characterization was thoughtless and stupid, and we are sorry."
For starters, I do not for a second believe that most of the people bitching about this are actually feeling as hurt as they claim. This comment was a little bit of absolutely nothing. To the extent that some folk really ARE offended, it's purely a matter of them CHOOSING to be offended. People talk themselves into emotional states all the time.
But the true feelings of the offended parties don't matter as to the determination of the supposedly horrible offense of Imus. Whether he did something bad, or how bad it was is not determined by other people's reactions. The fact that a bunch of idiots have decided that this is SO awful does not for one minute make it so.
Ann Coulter alias Miss Manners suggested that Imus was out of line in that he was mocking people who weren't public figures, and that thus he should apologize - just to them. But I'll have to be, in this case, less sensitive than Ann Coulter. I might have thought a personal apology as Imus gave to the Rutgers team for that minor bit of unnecessary roughness on the playing field would be in order - until they themselves starting whoring their manufactured indignation.
"I think that this has scarred me for life" said team member Matee Ajavon. Coulter suggested that these women weren't fair game for criticism, but these public remarks make her now fair game. Miss Ajavon is hereby invited to shut her ho mouth with that brought-on indignation nonsense that she's selling.
But in fairness to Ms Ajavon, she's just taking her play from the coach. Vivian Stringer described Imus' remarks as "deplorable, despicable, abominable and unconscionable." Eww, he's abominable! "What he did was evil" said Ms Stringer.
Over reaching just a TAD bit, she says that Imus didn't just insult them. "It is more than the Rutgers women's basketball team. It is all women's athletes. It is all women." Well, no it was not anything about all women. You're just making that up. Ms Stringer is certainly welcome to take a flying leap with that completely malicious manufactured outrage.
Then there's the head indignation pimp Al Sharpton. "It's not about taking Imus down," Sharpton said. "It's about lifting decency up." In 1995, Al Sharpton organized a protest and called a Jewish landlord a "white interloper" after he ended the lease on a black-owned store. Later, the landlord's store was burned to the ground, and eight people were killed. That this evil racist demagogue gets to judge Don Imus for a passing bad joke gives you a good idea how perverse this whole Bonfire of the Vanities controversy really is. Imus mocking a girls ball team for supposedly being ugly and masculine is not a slanderous accusation that would hurt their reputations, unlike the manufactured charges of kidnapping and rape Sharpton infamously and maliciously pushed for years in the Tawana Brawley case.
Ah, but now we get to the nub: Al Sharpton "It is our feeling that this is only the beginning. We must have a broad discussion on what is permitted and not permitted in terms of the airwaves." Well, isn't that special? I am, however, not sure who died and left this demagogue to be the arbiter of just who is allowed to say what.
I grant that Don Imus is frequently boorish, and sometimes traffics in crude ethnic jokes. He's the original "shock jock." He cracks on pretty much everybody, and I perfectly well understand how many people don't appreciate it. I don't care for it myself, and I only ever watched him on MSNBC for a few minutes total.
If folks got tired of his abrasiveness and the audience drifted away, he'd have been canceled and forgotten, and that'd be perfectly fine by me. It's not like I'm a big fan. Nothing wrong with writing a story about why you think Imus is a schmuck. But I don't at all appreciate having PC Keystone Cops like Sharpton determine what's on the menu for the rest of US.
Side note: As the most prominent gangster rapper in the land, Snoop Dogg has been frequently invoked as a counterpoint, as he and his routinely talk 100x worse about black women than anything in Imus' passing boorish remarks. But Snoop's not having it. "First of all, we ain't no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls. We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them mutha----as say we in the same league as him." Further, Snoop asserts, they should ""Kick him off the air forever." Snoop's scorecard: Explaining in song how pimps should beat their hos is cool. Mass killing Crips founder Tookie Williams is cool. Don Imus thoughtlessly using the phrase "nappy headed hos," that's just unacceptable.
A lot of folks were up in arms over country radio fans boycotting the Dixie Chicks, calling it censorship and a freedom of speech issue. Not that such boycotts were necessarily very nice or appropriate, but they certainly didn't have any kind of First Amendment implications. Government officials had pretty much nothing to do with them. The FCC wasn't involved.
But politicians were tripping over one another to get to a camera so they could call for Imus' head. Barack Obama in particular was calling for Imus to be fired. For starters, that completely discredits ANY idea that he's the magic Negro who's going to heal our racial wounds. He's just another race pimp like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. But beyond that, what would all these good liberals have said if George Bush or John McCain had been calling on the record company to drop the Dixie Chicks?
Don Imus didn't do anything substantively bad to the Rutgers team, and he obviously didn't mean anything by it. Note from his remarks that he was even apparently rooting for Rutgers.
They are not injured in any way. They suffered the slings and arrows of a mild offhand schoolyard insult, and are enjoying a bonanza of attention, sympathy and praise. In fact, they should by rights be thanking Don Imus for the publicity he's garnered them - 100x what their ball playing got, or what the actual winning team got. They've been nothing but fawned over for how supposedly brave and classy they are.
But in fact, the Rutgers team volunteered to become the head indignation whores. If they actually had grace and class and forgiveness, they would have accepted his apology a few hours after the event and said that it wasn't that big a deal to carry on about or destroy a man's career over. The ball was clearly in their court. That would likely have ended the matter if the supposed "victims" had refused to play the role. Instead, they carried on with utter nonsense about him being "evil" and scarring them for life.
Only after they do that and wait a week for him to be fired, they decide to say that they "accept" his apology. That's a lie. It's no such thing. They played victim and maliciously helped to destroy Imus' career, and now want credit for their gracious forgiveness on top of that. Imus inadvertently handed the Rutgers team a knife, and they absolutely CHOSE to stick it in and twist.
For this half-assed bit of shock-jock talk, Don Imus has been sacrificed. I don't necessarily care that much about poor Don Imus. He's rich and famous, and he can get another job or just retire. Thankfully, the lynching is only metaphorical.
But not only does this spiteful little Stalinist PC lynching not help black folks in any way, it is actively counterproductive to race relations. This is generating HUGE amounts of mostly quiet resentment among a lot of white guys for starters - as well it should, but no doubt among others as well.
If even so prominent a person as Don Imus can be utterly destroyed in this arbitrary manner over a passing nothing comment, then how are any of the rest of us supposed to feel? Any member of an officially aggrieved group decides to be offended, you're out of a job and publicly disgraced. Unless you carefully censor yourself to sound at all times like Mr Frickin' Rogers, you can find yourself on the chopping block at any moment.
That combined sense of injustice and vulnerability is NOT going to cause the white guys to think better or more generously of the black ones. That's not just or even primarily the uneducated crackers either, but ESPECIALLY the more learned professionals working in nice offices. They're much more vulnerable to these PC human sacrifices than is some hillbilly down on the farm. They get to spend their days knowing that they can be disgraced and humiliated at any moment for the least little un-PC slip of the tongue. Also, at this point, they KNOW better than daring to articulate any of this, for it would only prove that they are "racist." Incidents like this certainly reveal what a big lie supposedly "liberal" claims of tolerating diversity really are.
We've gone to a lot of effort in America in the last 50 years to do right by black folk in particular, and minority groups in general. It's taken a lot of thought and effort to carefully root out bad attitudes going back hundreds of years. We can probably never be 100% successful in that, but the further we get from Jim Crow, new generations are not being raised to a lot of that stuff. But crap like this Imus lynching generates new, real grievance that will be a lot harder to shake off.
Imus' thoughtless moment of schoolyard insult was boorish and perhaps deserved a passing bit of ridicule. But this crucifixion by the Rutgers team and their pimps was absolutely malicious and FAR worse than anything Imus did.
posted by Al at 4/15/2007 03:16:00 PM
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