Radio personality Don Imus, left, and Rev. Al Sharpton appear face-to-face on Rev. Sharpton's radio show, in New York Monday April 9, 2007. Imus issued another apology for referring to the Rutgers women's basketball team as 'nappy-headed hos' on his morning show last week.He turns you off? Then don’t tune in: Irony in indignation over Imus
Boston Herald Business Columnist
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Let me get this straight. We hang people now for the phrase “nappy-headed hos”?
I have watched with disbelief as the media mob has formed around talk jock Don Imus. OK, so he wasn’t paying a compliment to the young women of the Rutgers basketball team. But so what? Are compliments the only kind of speech permitted these days?
It needs to be said: This was not a Michael Richards moment. This was not a Mel Gibson moment. “Nappy-headed hos” was crude and off base, but it was obviously tongue in cheek, and it is not hate speech.
It is not, for example, like calling Jews “Hymies” and New York “Hymietown.” That, of course, is what the Rev. Jesse Jackson once did. Yet on Monday Jackson was leading 50 people in protest against Imus in Chicago. “These walls of bigotry are coming down,” he intoned. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
And “nappy-headed hos” isn’t, for example, like going before an inflamed anti-Semitic mob in Brooklyn to rail against “diamond merchants” with “the blood of innocent babies” on their hands. But that’s what the Rev. Al Sharpton did back in 1991, after a car accident involving a Jewish driver killed a local black child. The Crown Heights riots Sharpton helped whip up eventually left one Jewish student dead.
The same Sharpton is now apparently presiding over Imus’ show trial as the judge, jury and executioner. Imus even went on Sharpton’s radio program Monday, vainly seeking clemency.
The activist industry is now in full swing aided and abetted, as always, by those useful idiots in the press.
The National Organization for Women is running a signature drive to get Imus fired. “We want to make sure he’s no longer on the air,” Hazel Dukes, president of the New York State NAACP, said of Imus. “He’s outlived his usefulness.”
Outlived his “usefulness!”
Angela Burt-Murray, editor of Essence magazine, wailed: “Michael Richards apologizes. We move on. Mel Gibson apologizes. We move on. When does it stop? When do we make it stop?”
Imus, of course, had nothing to do with Richards’ or Gibson’s comments. But why let that get in the way?
Of course, the greedy lickspittles at CBS and MSNBC bowed to the arm-twisting and suspended Imus for two weeks.
As the hysteria has spun out of control, otherwise sane people have taken leave of their senses. The New York Times professed itself shocked that Imus “seemed to impugn” the Rutgers players’ “moral characteristics.”
Memo to the Times: I don’t think the word “ho” was meant literally.
Meanwhile the president of Rutgers says the university is “considering its options.”
Imus’ enemies are dragging up past transgressions. Ten years ago he said Gwen Ifill looked like a cleaning lady. He called the New York Knicks “chest-thumping pimps.” Shock, horror.
Millions tune into Imus every day. They like his acerbic wit, the subversive way he mocks politically correct sensibilities and his great interviews.
The question is whether he can be saved at this point. The process is under way and it almost never stops without a blood sacrifice.
Anyone who stands in the way is probably going to be accused of racism. It is precisely what he has made fun of all these years.
Talk back at mail@brettarends.com.
Boston Herald Business Columnist
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Let me get this straight. We hang people now for the phrase “nappy-headed hos”?
I have watched with disbelief as the media mob has formed around talk jock Don Imus. OK, so he wasn’t paying a compliment to the young women of the Rutgers basketball team. But so what? Are compliments the only kind of speech permitted these days?
It needs to be said: This was not a Michael Richards moment. This was not a Mel Gibson moment. “Nappy-headed hos” was crude and off base, but it was obviously tongue in cheek, and it is not hate speech.
It is not, for example, like calling Jews “Hymies” and New York “Hymietown.” That, of course, is what the Rev. Jesse Jackson once did. Yet on Monday Jackson was leading 50 people in protest against Imus in Chicago. “These walls of bigotry are coming down,” he intoned. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
And “nappy-headed hos” isn’t, for example, like going before an inflamed anti-Semitic mob in Brooklyn to rail against “diamond merchants” with “the blood of innocent babies” on their hands. But that’s what the Rev. Al Sharpton did back in 1991, after a car accident involving a Jewish driver killed a local black child. The Crown Heights riots Sharpton helped whip up eventually left one Jewish student dead.
The same Sharpton is now apparently presiding over Imus’ show trial as the judge, jury and executioner. Imus even went on Sharpton’s radio program Monday, vainly seeking clemency.
The activist industry is now in full swing aided and abetted, as always, by those useful idiots in the press.
The National Organization for Women is running a signature drive to get Imus fired. “We want to make sure he’s no longer on the air,” Hazel Dukes, president of the New York State NAACP, said of Imus. “He’s outlived his usefulness.”
Outlived his “usefulness!”
Angela Burt-Murray, editor of Essence magazine, wailed: “Michael Richards apologizes. We move on. Mel Gibson apologizes. We move on. When does it stop? When do we make it stop?”
Imus, of course, had nothing to do with Richards’ or Gibson’s comments. But why let that get in the way?
Of course, the greedy lickspittles at CBS and MSNBC bowed to the arm-twisting and suspended Imus for two weeks.
As the hysteria has spun out of control, otherwise sane people have taken leave of their senses. The New York Times professed itself shocked that Imus “seemed to impugn” the Rutgers players’ “moral characteristics.”
Memo to the Times: I don’t think the word “ho” was meant literally.
Meanwhile the president of Rutgers says the university is “considering its options.”
Imus’ enemies are dragging up past transgressions. Ten years ago he said Gwen Ifill looked like a cleaning lady. He called the New York Knicks “chest-thumping pimps.” Shock, horror.
Millions tune into Imus every day. They like his acerbic wit, the subversive way he mocks politically correct sensibilities and his great interviews.
The question is whether he can be saved at this point. The process is under way and it almost never stops without a blood sacrifice.
Anyone who stands in the way is probably going to be accused of racism. It is precisely what he has made fun of all these years.
Talk back at mail@brettarends.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment