On Monday, one of my leftist co-workers asked me what I thought about the ongoing Don Imus/Rutgers women’s basketball team controversy. As usual, he was up to his neck in ignorance about the subject, since he apparently believed Don Imus is a right-wing blogger with a TV show. He probably doesn’t know where Rutgers is either, which leads to my first point. Why does he care? Why do any of us care?
Mr. Imus made his unfortunate and now infamous about the “nappy-headed hos” on the Rutgers basketball team on April 4. On an average day, approximately 60 people are murdered in the United States, and I assume April 4, 2007 was an average day. Even given the possibility that a few of the victims that day were criminals in their own right, drug dealers, wife beaters, etc., it’s reasonable to suspect that most of them were as innocent as snowflakes and did nothing at all to deserve a horrible end to their lives. Yet none of their tragedies, nor the grief of their families and friends, made the news. I’m opposed to name-calling too, but it doesn’t begin to compare to the tragedies which are taking place in the United States every day.
About two weeks ago, I saw one news story about 3,500 people being laid off by Circuit City, and today Citicorp announced it is laying off 17,000 people. Here we have two stories which will affect more than 20,000 families, but both of them combined will get far less media coverage than one sentence fragment uttered by a grumpy old white man on a TV show few people actually watch. The first thing to understand about the Imus/Rutgers affair is that is a non-story about the media’s fascination with itself.
The second thing which seems odd about the story is that the blood lust for ending the broadcast career of Mr. Imus was being spearheaded by two black men who are misappropriating the term reverend, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. I’m not defending what Mr. Imus said about the Rutgers basketball team at all, but real reverends know that grace is needed by the guilty. Grace is completely unnecessary for the innocent. John Newton, who wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace” was a slave trader, and that is precisely why grace is amazing and necessary. Yet in this case, a continuous and unlimited number of groveling apologies by Mr. Imus only whetted the appetites of the merciless reverends. He does owe the women at Rutgers an apology, and he’s going to meet with them face to face to give it. He does not owe Al Sharpton an apology, but he gave him one anyway. Instead of accepting the apology, Sharpton and his friends simply invited more vultures to circle around their victim. Sure enough, Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, Opra Winfrey, Procter and Gamble, Staples, American Express, Sprint Nextel, General Motors, and finally, MSNBC and CBS pounced on the prey. They have turned Don Imus into this week’s Richard Nixon, and once they finish him off, they’ll go searching for a new victim, because ravenous wolves are always hungry. It’s worth noting that the only two notable men who refused their turn at the canibal’s table were Joe Lieberman and John McCain. Both of them expressed appropriate disapproval for what Don Imus said last week, but they were at least willing to give him a chance to make amends. I disagree with Senators Lieberman and McCain about many things, but I don’t question their personal courage. It should be noted though that their willingness to stand up for what they believe, whether I believe it or not, is ruining both of their political careers.
I asked my co-worker if he really believed Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would have been interested in this case if Mr. Imus were black or if most of the women on the Rutgers basketball team were white. We all know the answer to that question, and I couldn’t even get a bleeding heart liberal to argue with me about it. Mr. Jackson and Mr. Sharpton have never expressed any concern about injustices done by blacks, or injustice suffered by whites or other racial groups. Their version of justice isn’t color blind, as it ought to be. In fact, their version of justice is every bit as racist in its intent as the ugly story about bullet Bob Hayes having to drink from a separate water fountain because he was black, even though he had represented the United States in the Olympics. No matter how evil, slavery and discrimination do not justify the trans-generational guilt passing Sharpton and Jackson advocate. No one in their right mind believes I have the right to rape someone’s sister because their great grandfather raped my great grandmother, but this is exactly the sort of world these so-called reverends advocate.
One might suppose, based on the above paragraphs, that I actually like Don Imus. The truth is that I would probably rather have an appendectomy than to have to listen to him for an hour. I have listened to brief segments of his shows from time to time, and this is how I would describe his attitude. “I suck, you suck, everyone sucks, everything sucks, life sucks, and I feel really grumpy about it.” It’s not the sort of message one wants to wake up to in the morning. Imus is unpleasant, bitter, miserable, and even self-loathing. Waking up to a Don Imus broadcast is nearly as unpleasant as waking up with a snarling dog, nearly but not quite.
I know very well that Don Imus is not a choir boy, and I have no illusions that he’s likely to become one. But there is something I like about him. Howard Stern has many of the same disagreeable characteristics as Don Imus, yet I can’t even print how he says he would have reacted to this scandal, if it were of his making. Howard Stern is beyond redemption, he knows he’s a jerk, yet he’s proud and arrogant about it, and he wants his hostile attitude to be shoved into everyone’s face.
By contrast, Don Imus tried to do what a gentleman would do when he realized he had made a big mistake. My impression of Don Imus is that he’s a jerk, but on some level he is ashamed of being a jerk, and he wants a way out. The wrong reverends Jackson and Sharpton should be offering this man an olive branch, but it’s not in their arsenal. They are predators, who will now tighten their grip on the cowardly and search for a victim for their next ambush. It’s pathological for them.
Here’s what I have read about the exchange which started this uproar. On the morning after Rutgers lost to Tennessee, Imus said, “Those are some rough girls from Rutgers. They’ve got tattoos.” In the initial part of the exchange, calling them rough girls may actually have been a compliment, since he was discussing a basketball team. We’ll never know what he meant, because no one has been interested in asking, and the conversation took an unfortunate turn afterwords. His producer said, “They are some hard-core hos.” Only then did Imus echo what his producer had said by saying, “Those are some nappy-headed hos, I can tell you that.” I don’t even know what nappy-headed means, and I don’t think most Americans have ever heard that term. Hos, is a slang expression for whores, and it is the slang of rappers and some blacks, but the word whore says nothing about anyone’s skin color. Of course, it was a rude, offensive and inappropriate remark. But I don’t think I know anyone who hasn’t said something to a parent, a spouse, to their children, or about strangers which they have later regretted. It’s what people do after they make mistakes which really matters.
My real concern is not about Don Imus, but about the selective indignation of those who have favorite groups of people, though they are utterly without compassion for anyone else. Don Imus never has been one of my favorite people, but he tried to be a better man this week than he was last week, and I am more upset about his failure to get anyone to listen this week than about his failure last week.
Finally, I want to say something about the Rutgers basketball team itself, specifically about a quote attributed to Matee Ajavon that being called a “nappy-headed ho” on TV has scarred her for life. It’s reasonable to me that she should be displeased, perhaps even disgusted, by that characterization of herself and her teammates. But scarred for life? She needs to be reminded that the TV has an “off” switch. There are many things in life which don’t come with an “off” switch. Just to give a simple example, my parents divorced when I was nine, and there was no “off” switch so I could ignore the disintegration of my family. I’m not excusing name-calling. It shouldn’t have happened, and everyone who writes knows that words are important. Nevertheless, if she can’t handle being called a name by a grumpy old white man, who calls everybody names, she hasn’t got the courage or the backbone to survive on a planet like this one. When Don Imus meets the Rutgers basketball team, they have every right to share their hurt feelings. But it would be nice if at least one of them would acknowledge that this incident has been more costly to him than to any of them.
