| By Eli Corp - Apr 12th, 2007 at 11:56 pm EDT |
| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Tags: African Americans, ann coulter, CBS, culture, Discrimination, Don Imus, Homophobia, Minorities, MSNBC, music, Rush Limbaugh, women
While the comments by Don Imus don’t reflect the views of everyone, they are indicative of the underlying societal views about minorities and women. Let us not forget that these are comments often directed at women and African Americans from other women and African Americans. Women call each other “ho’s” and “bitches”, and there is the ever present “N” word used by African Americans. These terms have become a mainstay of the music culture, a culture which has permeated the youth of our country. Hip-hop and Rap artists portray women in often degrading ways, and the lyrics often reflect this fact. Don Imus is not the first person to call someone a “nappy headed ho”. It’s a reflection upon our culture that even a 60 something year old radio commentator has heard the term used. It does not excuse him or anyone for that matter from saying such a degrading comment about anyone, especially not innocent individuals who found themselves in the middle of a firestorm, instead of celebrating their remarkable athletic and academic excellence. We have to fundamentally change our culture and instill within the next generation a sense of accountability and moral consciousness of how we should treat others. Our music artists share in the burden to provide our youth with positive and uplifting messages instead of discrimination and negativity towards any group of people. The firing of Don Imus demonstrates that people are being held accountable for what they say and do, especially in the public sphere.
The concern shared by many is the seeming double standard that has been established with the firing of Don Imus. We didn’t see this level of outrage when Ann Coulter called John Edwards a “faggot” in front of a large public audience. We didn’t see this level of outrage when Rush Limbaugh called Barack Obama a “halfrican American”. While some have expressed their outrage of their remarks, no action was taken in either of those cases. It’s a good sign that there is such a furor over the Don Imus comment, but where is the indignation when people use homophobic remarks to denigrate a group of people? Are we going to give a free pass to people like Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter simply because they have made controversial statements in the past? We need to categorically say that all discrimination and derogatory language by public figures is unacceptable and inexcusable. This is an opportunity for our society to have a dialogue about discrimination against minorities, women and the LGBT community, and what we can do to end it. This may be a unique moment in history when people finally say enough is enough and that we need to move beyond the negativity and stereotyping. America appears ready to have a conversation about discrimination, and this could be a good opportunity to do so.
When advertisers began to pull their ads from MSNBC and CBS, it was a positive sign that even the corporate world realizes that the public will not tolerate these kinds of racist and sexist remarks. Most employers have anti-discrimination policies in place to prevent racist, sexist and homophobic remarks in the workplace, but we still need to adopt a national anti-discrimination policy to address these kinds of issues, and hold people accountable for what they say and do in the workplace and in broadcast. There is a fine line between freedom of speech and public sensibility, and we need to have a conversation on the best course to accommodate both.
The furor over the Imus comment struck at the heart of the deep moral issue of the kind of example we want to set for our children. The negativity and discrimination towards people based solely on their race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation must be eradicated through education, and highlighting the great strengths of our diversity. Holding people accountable is part of that equation, and the Don Imus incident highlights both the fact that intolerance still exists, but also that it has become unacceptable for most Americans. We have an opportunity to turn what was an unfortunate event into a catalyst for change and an open door for dialogue about how we can improve our culture. We are at a crucial moment in time, and the decision is ours to use this opportunity to create a positive outcome, or to continue to ignore the skin-deep issue of discrimination in society.
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Imus was a high dose substance abuser in his younger years and it is now beginning to show. He loses control of his mouth, thus exhibiting more his crotchety old man traits than any real feelings. His apologies thus mean nothing because for over a decade his literally "brain damage" personality is beyond his control.
But more important is the fact that America is aging, just like Imus. And, just like Imus suffers from past substance abuse. As a nation, we needed to be "high on America" for quite a while. So we did everything big, but without paying for it, passing on the bill to our kids. Now comes pay back time. It all started with 9/11, when all we did to keep our oil imports cheap (so cheap that we destroyed our domestic oil industry) and our SUVs full, came back at us in the form of hateful suicide mass murder. The look on GW Bush's face-- that "tilt" stare blankly into space-- when told of the acts of terror, was pretty much that of the nation. Then, the decisions America made, after finishing with all the pretty pre-canned speeches, were characteristic of the middle aged brain damaged by years of substance abuse (cocaine and alcohol in his case, oil in America's).
As rage swept over the land, aging America realized that it didn't have much of an army to go to war with. So it used forces almost 50% thirty somethings, moms and dads who expected only to be called up to fight fires, floods and race riots. LBJ had wisely realized that such people could not cope with the rages of jungle warfare, so all through the Vietnam War he never mobilized the Reserves and National Guard-- neither did Nixon. But Bush was probably the most substance abuse brain damaged of the whole Administration and so he reacted with utter abandon. Now our soldiers in Iraq are on average five years older than those in Vietnam; the dead almost always leave behind widows and orphans, but Bush doesn't care. He's got to be tough because he's the "decider." Meanwhile, suffering from the "ain't my kid going to Iraq" disconnect syndrome, the aging American population cheered on the president who would have them eat their cake and have it too, instituting a policy of "preemption" with abandon, while calling on the public to respond to 9/11 by shopping until they drop. To further show that it is "O.K." to be so disconnected, he cut taxes while escalating war. Perhaps someone around Bush remembered that the only time public opinion rose against the Vietnam War was in 1967 when LBJ instituted a 10% surcharge on income tax.
Bush has a life history of fear of responsibility. So his "poppy" arranged for someone else to make decisions and take the heat. That was supposed to be the role of Rumsfeld and Cheney. But, like all spoiled brats-- especially those with substance abuse histories-- he suffers from an erratic vanity and wants to SEEM as if in charge. This in sum is the Bush psycho-dialectic.
Normally, Bush would have been discovered and humiliated in public. But America is like Bush: middle age and desperate to seize a last chance at seeming to have achieved something manly. In an effort to keep up with their heroic illusion of themselves, today's Americans seized anything from "salvation" by having "discovered" Jesus to ostentatious wealth display. But. men especially, that manifest their "things" as if their God-given plumage, reach a middle age crisis where they realize that either they never had really been nakedly "manly" or were losing it fast. And so, as they swallow down Viagra with a double whiskey and a beer chaser, they are drawn like moths to fire by the pornography industry as spark to mirages of romantic conquest when advancing on the plump bent-over old lady, should they be unable to trade her in for a newer model.
And still, a deep desire for a feeling of manliness for the last time before they die burns incandescently in their bosoms. If substance abusers like Bush, they start wars and feel soooo manly in their stubborn holding out in the face of utter defeat because of their own incompetence. If weasels like Rove, they feel great pride in their deception of the masses, like a larcenous snow fox steeling incubating eggs from penguins. But most Americans are like Imus, "manly" with their mouth, daring to say in public what most other mere humans would dare say only when dead drunk. But in fact, there is no difference in the way "Imus" acted up on the air, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld acted-up giving orders and lying to justify themselves to the public, and the way financial "advisers" steal dumb investors' money to plume themselves in glittering "things."
Peace-time generals, who served as grunts in the last war, get to feel manly recklessly fulfilling Rumsfeld's orders, getting boys killed trying to use firepower as a substitute for the non-existing voluntary manpower needed. They are called "star whores" by people who wonder how it is that unlike generals like Westmoreland, Abrams and Powell, they are not called to account for casualties, civilian and military. Instead, they needed only stand next to Rummy the boss at press conferences with that fawning look (down, for Rummy is short) in their eyes-- at the Pentagon that's called "parrot on the shoulder."
The tragedy is that physics always gets in the way of the tall tales of old farts. Flatfooted marines who never heard a gun go off in all their 365 days in Vietnam serving as clerks are throwing "dynamite quotes" around as if fireworks on the 4th of July, speaking "vet to vet" without one word of empathy for the victims of repeated concussion brain injury from pointlessly ridding around through Iraq and Afghanistan in vulnerable Humvees that get hit by improvised explosive devices. To these old vets, all that is unfortunate "fog of war" and the devastated wives and kids that will have to take care of these Iraq casualties are nothing but part of the "America that must bear the burden of bringing democracy to the Middle East." Why the Middle East? Who can say, when the same people who say we must fight there are demanding that we end our dependency on Mideast oil. Perhaps there are other motives. Like what?
Like the manliness thing for a cabal of men who have a life long history of chasing manhood while avoiding the dangers of military adventures; but, due to congenital factors of physical appearance they could never achieve that status. So they go around calling for "World War IV." It is interesting that a lot of these endless war advocates never seized their opportunity to volunteer. But even if they had, there are no uniforms available to fit their pear shape or scrawny diminutive look. And so they fight with words in print at elaborate "think tanks" where they give themselves academic-sounding titles of expertise when they might barely qualify to enter academic institutions as students, not faculty.
Such people mold our current culture of "virtual manliness" on bombastic blogs consisting of wings- flapping eagles with a waving American flags in their beaks, as if run by birdbrains. So a giant of military "strategy," for example, is a diminutive, not bald eagle, but bald midget, who barks as if a marine DI should he not like a submitted post. Or, the savant in military strategy who responds to our troops crossing from Kuwait into Iraq: Now I no longer feel like the scrawny Jewish kid getting beat up in the school yard by the big Swartzas.
In fact, Imus is a mouth-fighter, like all the other odd shaped "males" in his entourage. They never amounted to much until they called for: all pudgy irrelevant to unite. And once united what did they do? Well, it was all as if verbal and virtual sex. And since in the brainstem the region for sex and the region for violence are closely linked in the male of the species, they went from talking dirty to talking tough to talking violent. And so "talk" radio of nasty old men was born.
One of the things I noticed when I first came to America is that, despite the tradition of "fighting fair" brought from root European cultures, fighting here was always many against one. And as that one falls in a pool of pain and bruises, each feels like he downed the opponent himself; it is VICARIOUS heroism. And when, as old farts, they see on TV, US soldiers, wrapped in armor to look like spacemen, ramming open the doors of homes in Iraq and Afghanistan and thrashing the houses, they cheer, vicariously feeling a sense of manhood: take that, you filthy Islamofascists, for 9/11, as trained to do by neocon propaganda. That sense drives them to maneuver their wheelchair to the phone stand to call Bill O'Reilly or Imus as if to say: "play it again Sam...bartender, give me another drink."
But when the real warriors come home and ask for a job, a home, a school for their kids, tuition for college, help with getting "things" too, and above all medical care, the answer is: hey, you ain't getting mine buddy." I recall going to a meeting of vets to discuss how to supplement medical care for brain injured Iraq-Afghan vets that live far from VA Hospitals. But after tough talk about themselves, all these old vets could discuss is that there's no good care for their diabetes, lung cancer from smoking and erectile dysfunction at the VA!
So, stepping back and reviewing the landscape, I can understand why Imus was knocked off the air. Had he been allowed to stay, he would have been as much a glaring proof of substance abuse brain damaged America of the 60s turned abusively gaga as GW Bush is, seen as leader of a declining pariah nation in the world. So get Imus off the air, get even Limbaugh off the air; that way the rest of us won't have to look in the mirror for another few years as we search for who is responsible for the decline and fall of America.
It can't be us guys, because we thought we had a "goin' problem" and it turned out to be a "growin' problem." Soooo, Mr. and Mrs. America, put on your geriatric diapers next summer and go watch the Bush-Rove victory parade as our boys come home "victorious" from the surge after "showin' dem Aarabs that you can't fool with America."
America has the world's most wonderful democratic institutions. But these are made for a young vibrant population trying to live by the standards inculcated in it at home. Degenerate religious leaders, war industry kick-back crooks, and a totally bravado pair of president and vice president frauds that even their wives can't stand, serving the interests of the leaky geriatric America of the 60s that can only remember the sex and drugs of its era, not the idealism, can lead us nowhere else but to the erectile dysfunction decline and fall of the American Empire.
It is only when we each deem all our soldiers as OUR kids and do not allow to be done to them what we would not allow to be done to our biologic kids (and grand-kids) that we stand a chance at recovery. Our Iraq surge is as fraudulent as the erectile surge the TV ads promise. So if you can't get it up, don't curse the young girls for their youth. Just think about leaving something worthwhile for them to remember you by.
This is dedicated to Luka and Noah, my second generation American grandchildren, one born, the other soon to come, who deserve more of an America like that which Bush, Cheney, Rove and Imus inherited from our parents.
Daniel E. Teodoru
One thing that jumped out at me:
""It all started with 9/11, when all we did to keep our oil imports cheap (so cheap that we destroyed our domestic oil industry) and our SUVs full, came back at us in the form of hateful suicide mass murder.""
Uh, no. Sayyid Qutb was having plenty of fun being repulsed and disgusted by our way of life back in the Truman-era 1940s.
The real issue of the mass-murdering extremists is the return of the Caliphate. Even if we didn't buy a drop of oil, I'd hope we'd have the human decency to do everything in our power to prevent another Caliphate from arising.