Full Disclosure. This is an Imus diary. You have been warned.
The gates of Neverland have swung open to admit radio shock jock Don Imus. He will now join the company of Anna Nicole’s boobs, Princess Diana’s cracked skull, OJ’s black glove, and Clinton’s penis in that special circle of hell only the American media can create. Enjoy the ignominious downfall of the pampered cowboy kleagle but be warned that nothing in Neverland is ever truly free. That well stocked playroom, that gallon of ice cream, that giant stuffed teddy bear with your name stenciled on each paw, the unintentional comedy of the latest well to do white male pundit tripping all over himself to explain how sitting around in the MSNBC studios tell jokes about “greedy Jews” and “nappy headed hos” isn’t racist, all of it comes with a price.
It’s time to come upstairs.
Don Imus has always been a bit like the homeless men inside Penn Station or the Port Authority Bus terminal in New York City, class politics and social pathology hidden in plain sight. The commuter who tries to avoid physically bumping into the poor soul smelling of vomit, Colt 45 and medication washing his feet in the sink of the bathroom of the New Jersey Transit terminal no more thinks of the deinstituationalization of the mentally ill in the 1980s then frequent Imus in the Morning guests like Craig Crawford and Frank Rich think of legal segregation and affirmative action or the bussing riots in South Boston and Canarsie in the 1970s. It not only looks normal, but no one really ever gets around to cleaning up the mess until he has something to gain by it. Nobody of any consequence in New York City politics said very much about squeegee men until Disney wanted to move into Times Square in 1994.
No one in the corporate media addressed the constant stream of white nationalist rhetoric coming out of the Imus in the Morning Show until it was both unavoidable and, more importantly, until it could be spun in a way that minimized the amount of damage it would do to the corporate media elite.
While left liberal New York Times columnist Frank Rich may feel socially and politically secure enough to go on the Imus in the morning show to listen to anti-semitic slurs directed at him personally, a kind of fraternity hazing ritual where he would demonstrate that he was man enough to take it all with a smile and in exchange get the opportunity to publicize books for himself and his friends, anybody who’s spent any time on white nationalist web forums like Stormfront or Jew Watch would immediately recognize the language and the level of vitriol used by Don Imus and his producer Bernard McGuirk. If you don’t have the stomach to read Stormfront, the liberal watchdog site Media Matters has done a good job of collecting some of the more outrageous things Don Imus, his producers and his guests have said over the past few years.
http://mediamatters.org/issues_topics/people/donimus?sort=default&offset=0
Why wasn’t the Imus in the Morning Show taken off the air on November 19th, 2004 when frequent guest Sid Rosenberg referred to Palestinians as “stinking animals” and said that they “ought to drop the bomb right there, kill ’em all right now”? Well, we all know the corporate media’s bias against Palestinians and Arabs, especially after 9/11, so maybe that was it. But how about December 8th, 2006 when Imus himself referred to the “Jewish management” at CBS as “money-grubbing bastards”? Why wasn’t he taken off the air then? Or how about when he compared Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont to John Mark Karr, the man who confessed to killing Jon Benet Ramsey? Didn’t that cross the line?
In each of these cases, even when Imus made anti-semitic remarks about his own employers, no, it didn’t. To understand why, let’s go to the remarks Bernard McGuirk made on March 30th, 2006 about Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll, who was abducted and held hostage by a group of Islamic militants in early 2006 and released in March. “She’s probably carrying Habib’s baby at this point,” remarked producer Bernard McGuirk. “She strikes me as the kind of woman who would wear one of those suicide vests. You know, walk into the — try and sneak into the Green Zone.” As ridiculous as this may seem to you or me, to a white nationalist this is deadly serious business. Any contact between a white woman and a non-white man can only be about one thing, sex, and any white woman who has extended contact with non-white men is damaged goods. The only real difference at this point between the Imus in the Morning show and the Stormfront message boards is that most of the Stormfront crowd are probably wittier and more literate and that Stormfront occasionally posts some useful information about how to keep the feds from snooping into your hard drive. CBS probably should have pulled the plug right there, if only because Imus and McGuirk were spewing vitriol about a fellow journalist who had just survived 3 months of unimaginable terror at the hands of her captors.
But doing so would have meant explaining why. It would have meant an extended, and possibly intelligent debate on the American occupation of Iraq. It would have meant talking about the various resistence groups, which range from foreign terrorists fighting for Allah all the way to Iraqi patriots fighting for their homes, and it would have required making a distinction between the two. Firing Imus over Sid Rosenberg’s remarks that Palestinians are subhuman animals would have meant a frank discussion about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. Firing him over Ned Lamont would have given more attention to Lamont’s grassroots anti-war candidacy only two weeks after he beat Joe Lieberman in the primary. It would have given Lamont free publicity at the very moment the corporate media elites and the Democratic Party elite were desperately trying to get Lieberman back into the race. And firing him over the anti-semitic slurs about the management of CBS would have meant explaining that no, the way the media is run has nothing to do with Judaism but rather, with corporate profits, social and political control, something nobody at CBS really wants to get into.
Inevitably Don Imus finally ran into the perfect media storm, something not even he could survive. There’s been a lot of talk about how Imus attacks the powerless, which he certainly does, as in the case of the Palestinian refugees or the terrorized freelance journalist Jill Carroll (who was obviously in no position to defend herself in writing so soon after her release), but in April of 2007 his mistake was not in attacking the powerless, but, rather, in attacking a group that could hit him back, the African American middle class. Like any racist, Imus tends to think that whatever minority group he currently has in his crosshairs is a monolith, a faceless crowd with no distinctions among themselves. In spite of his obvious misogyny, Snoop Dog understands the African American community in a way Don Imus doesn’t. “It’s a completely different scenario,” he said. “Rappers are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports.” Surely with all that time he supposedly hangs around Harold Ford (a member of the African American elite if ever there was a member of the African American elite) Imus should have know that while a remark about a purely fictional member of the African American underclass could be ignored, women who play basketball for a well-known university at the most elite level would be off limits.
What’s more, the issue had more crossover appeal that Outkast or Jimi Hendrix. Not only did Imus have to deal with the African American elite and the usual media hogs like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, he would also have to deal with everybody else, Asians, Hispanics, Jews, lower level employees at MSNBC, white people in general, anyway who was sick of the kind of clown who would dress up in cowboy gear and make racial slurs on national TV, or put on a flight suit and swagger onto the deck of an aircraft carrier and give a speech under a banner saying “Mission Accomplished”. Indeed, while the American people were willing to give anybody who put on the airs of the great white hunter and all American gunslinger the benefit of the doubt right after 9/11, by this time, after seeing them bungle the war in Iraq, lose an entire American city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and get stuck in a seemingly endless parade of minor scandals, there would be no second chances. Nancy Pelosi and the Republicans have probably cut a deal protecting George Bush from impeachment but nobody was going intervene for poor Don Imus.
But as every Leninist, most members of the American ruling class, and very few liberal Democrats know, with every disaster comes an opportunity. And we would all have to pay the price. Don Imus makes a series of truly vile racial slurs against 10 innocent young women who had probably never even heard his name. Don Imus is fired. Case closed. Easy, right?
But nothing is ever this easy. Every one of those elite talking heads who had ever spent any time yucking it up with Imus and McGuirk about them Jews and them niggers now had to have his say (and note I say “his” because one of the few women who had appeared on his show, Anna Marie Cox, actually apologized for it). Politicians would join in. Professional African American contrarians and critics of African Americans would leap into the fray (Can a statement from Bill Cosby be far behind?). The specter of “political correctness” would rear its ugly head like Godzilla rising out of Tokyo Bay. The Gates of Neverland would be opened and all hell would be unleashed on the American people. Oh yes. We would now be subject to that most horrifying of all disasters, a “national dialog on race” hosted by the corporate media.
In other words, the rappers made him do it.
An elderly white racist compares African American women to animals, he, like Jill Carroll giving statements under duress from her terrorist abductors, must have no other choice right? Poor Don Imus was not only a racist but he was a racist because of hip hop, an art form that came out of the South Bronx in the 1970s, when he was already well into his 30s, and which didn’t develop the obsession with glocks, hos and bling until the 1990s, when he was already well into his 50s. Poor Bernard McGuirk. Not only was he a knuckle dragging Klansman, he was a knuckle dragging Klansman under compulsion. Oh you think poor Bernard was making crude sexual innuendos about Jill Carroll because he’s a sexist pig and a racist clod. Nope. He’s doing it under compulsion. Somewhere offstage, Fiddy Cent is holding a gun to his head.
Klan it up white boy or I’ll blow your brains out.
Fortunately for us, these media storms have a way of burning themselves out. And yes, the American people are going to be no less pissed at the corporate and political elites 6 months from now. But excuse me if, in the meantime, I reach for my Jesus juice.