A couple of things to tie up the case of disgraced shock jock Don Imus (I'm sure everyone knows the story by now.)
First, King Kaufman was on the scent Friday, wondering what was really accomplished by Imus' canning. The first thing I thought about when reading King's piece was Al Campanis, whose infamous Nightline appearance was twenty years ago on the anniversary of Jackie Robinson's major league debut. That was followed shortly thereafter by Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder being dumped by Imus' most recent employer (CBS) for some poorly-conceived racial remarks. People have been losing their public jobs for racial insensitivity for some time now. This is not a bad thing, but, as King writes:
The pattern of these things is familiar by now. Some public figure says something offensive, gets called on it, starts furiously back-pedaling and apologizing, and, usually, ends up getting fired.
Then there's some cheering, and we all move on to the next one. Tick, tick, tick. Who's up? I have Ozzie Guillen in three separate pools.
But with Imus trudging to the employment office I can't help asking the same things I always ask when we've reached this point in the process: Are we closer to a world of harmony and inclusiveness than we were before this all started? Has the dialogue improved? Are we getting better at talking about the uncomfortable issues of, in this case, race and gender?
The answer this time, I think, is no. The answer is almost always no. So what's the point? Why is it some kind of victory for the forces of good for Don Imus to lose his job?
The problem, I think, is that we don't believe people can really be reformed. Every white male is a canister of pent-up racial and sexual biases, so the only solution when someone's bubble pops is to kick them out on the street. People are just incorrigibly racist, so there's no point in trying to talk them out of it.
Perhaps a testament to this can be found amongst what might be considered Imus' apologists. Although no one is really "defending" him per se, there has been an effort by some to throw up the smokescreen of black rap artists, claiming Imus was merely dropping language he picked up from Snoop Dogg or 50 Cent.
Besides being a laughably bad port of the silly claim that the 'n' word is fair game because black people use it, this ignores the important question of why that language is so prominent in this style of music. A few months ago, I caught a documentary on "Independent Lens" (unfortunately I didn't catch the name of the film or the director), made by a black man examining the ideas of masculinity in hip-hop music and culture. He turns an accusatory eye on the (mostly white) record-label executives, who seem intent on keeping this shallow view of sex and money as monolithic and ubiquitous as possible, the better to reinforce the stereotypes of black people held by the primary consumers of rap music: suburban white kids. Several interview subjects (mostly artists looking to get signed) said, in effect, you can fit the mold and rap about bitches and hos and bling, or you can keep looking for a record contract.
There may well be legitimate questions people in the African-American community can ask each other concerning the image of women in "mainstream" rap music, but that discussion isn't necessarily meant for public discussion, and white folks marching it out as an excuse for their poor behavior look silly and embarrassing.
Update: Something else in KK's piece caught my attention
Maybe CBS firing Imus was, as my boss Walsh wrote, "the right thing" to do, but CBS didn't fire him because it was the right thing to do. It was the right thing to do last week and last year and last decade if the issue was his offensiveness.
CBS fired him because it got pressure from advertisers, which pressured the network not because the companies that make cars and dog food and credit cards are the watchdogs of civil discourse in our culture but because they got pressure from angry customers.
This is something I may be harping on quite a bit in the future here. From Spocko's battle with gasbag radio to SJR-7, the de facto strategy for righting wrongs in the public sphere is "threaten the advertisers." This strikes me as dangerous territory; companies don't have moral compasses, they have balance sheets, and trusting that they will always "do the right thing" is a harrowing proposition. There are other groups who can apply corporate pressure just as well as the left can.
Update II: The film mentioned above is "Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes" directed by Byron Hurt.
