Strong Words

Wednesday morning, after several hours of sleep riven by violent dreams, I finally gave it up at 4:30 AM and planted myself on the sofa to channel surf. As you can imagine, the pickings were slim, and so I found myself watching, for the first and apparently last time, the Imus show on MSNBC. And within five minutes, I was saying to myself, "Oh, he is so getting cancelled."

When people colossally fuck up, you think you'd like to see them grovel. Turns out, not so much. The spectacle of Imus, in somber mode on an obscenely bright set, self-flagellating in slow motion -- playing the video of the Rutgers team's press conference, describing his intentions of telling them "who I am and where I'm coming from," all occasionally punctuated by drippy country music -- well, you could see it couldn't last. Even given that it was 4:30 in the morning and it was Imus or reruns of Full House, I still wouldn't tune in for a second dose. Apologies make for very poor TV.

So it's no surprise that MSNBC and now CBS have shut down the whole operation, TV and radio alike. But it's not over yet. Because there are a couple of things that need clearing up.

First of all, people really need to stop saying that Imus "crossed the line." This is ridiculous. He said something bad, but he's been saying bad things for decades. When I was a teenager in upstate NY, I used to occasionally listen to Imus in the mornings because we had, like, 2 radio stations, and he was on one of them. And you know what? He was fucking offensive. That was his thing. "Nappy-headed ho's" is not a nice thing to say, but it's not empirically worse than many of the other things he said, and people should stop pretending it is. Sure, it involves both race and gender, but so did calling Gwen Ifill the cleaning lady, and that one flew past. The truth is, there is no line. There is occasional hype, and the need to take someone down, to prove to ourselves that we care deeply about race and gender, and to re-affirm to ourselves a fundamental untruth: that there is a line.

But it isn't true. Anyone who has listened to Michael Savage advocate outright violence against gays knows that there is no line. Ever heard Tom Leykis? His entire show -- the whole premise -- is hatred for women. Listening to it alone in my car one night, I felt I was getting a shade of what Rwandan state radio sounded like during the genocide. With any luck, one of these days Savage's or Leykis' number will come up, and they'll go down in flames for a similarly ill-judged comment. And when they do (please God), they will no doubt, like Imus, be thinking, "What the hell? Why this time? Why now???"

The fact is, no one knows why some of these incidents blow up, and others slip by unnoticed. But trying to pretend that it's because this is a specifically more egregious instance than myriad others is genuinely naive. It is also naive for opinionators to suggest, as I have heard some of them doing this week, that the public airwaves should be policed for this kind of thing, and that penalizing it ought to be taken care of, not by the market, but by government. That is a truly dangerous notion. The reason there is, as I believe I've mentioned, no line, is that we are talking about language. Any effort to contain it always comes to no good. You can ban "fuck"; but "nappy-headed"? Seriously? That's an actual plan?

One more thing. Please, stop blaming this on rap music. It's just stupid. I listen to rap. I can quote Snoop Dogg at length, and I enjoy both NWA and the solo stylings of Eazy-E. But I couldn't have come up with "nappy-headed ho's" if I'd worked on with both hands for a week, and if presented with the phrase, would damn well know better than to say it. This is because I have a sense of decorum. Decorum dictates, for instance, that while I may swear like a sailor on my blog, I swear only very occasionally in lecture, and then precisely for the purpose of impact. Decorum dictates that, while I may turn to T-Cro and say, "God, you're such a Jew," I'll kick the ass of any Christian who tries to say the same to me. There is certain language to which you are entitled, and certain audiences with which you are entitled to use it. And then there's everything else. The fact that 50-Cent (Fitty!) can talk with a certain, um, rich vocabulary, doesn't mean it's ok for me to use it. If you don't know that, then you have much bigger problems than a coarsening of the culture around you. If you don't know that, you don't know the very first thing about human society, the world over.

Peace out, mothafuckas.