I missed this on Sunday so thanks to No More Mr Nice Blog for pointing to this post by Phil Nugent which neatly puts the whole Imus kerfuffle, that on the face of it seems so insular and trivial (who listened anyway?), into the necessary historical context as an integral stage of the process of the absorption of barely-disguised racist right wing rhetoric into the common daily culture, a process that’s been aided and abetted by some of the most well-known names in US politics and media.
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When someone shows himself to be a “real” racist, he’s stripped of his epaulets and driven from the fort. Unfortunately, in public life, you have to practically be filmed burning a cross in front of a black church and waving to the camera to be tagged as a “real” racist. If you protested the Vietnam War, you’re going to be explaining and even apologizing for it to your dying day, but there are plenty of people who voted against civil rights legislation in the 1960s–an act that you might think would pretty clearly and unambiguously stamp you as maybe not being, as Don Imus says, “a good person”– who have been allowed to go on to long, respectable political careers. People like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond were held by the Beltway not to be racists because, well, because they just couldn’t be–they were duly elected politicians, so the thought was too morbid to be seriously considered. If necessary, apologies for anything they’d done that might give one pause would be fabricated on their behalf. After Trent Lott became Minority Leader last year, returning to prominence after the fall from grace that resulted from his kissing Strom Thurmond’s warty ass on the occasion of the old shitkicker’s unearned centennial, many in the media insisted that Lott had, of course, apologized for those remarks, though as far as I can determine, all he’d done was repeatedly say that he was sorry that so many mean people had misrepresented his sweet remarks to a nice old orange-haired man on his birthday. Lott, as his recent memoir demonstrates, is typical of the kind of Southerner who doesn’t think he’s a racist and would have apoplexy if anyone suggested that he is, but who still disapproves of the government’s role in implementing desegregation; if you ask him, in the right setting in front of the right tobacco-juice-stained crowd, he’ll be happy to explain that, while he’s happy as a clam that whites and blacks can share the same drinking fountain in Mississippi now, it was a dastardly act for the gummint to force all those good Mississippians to do what they’d never done before but would have been delighted to do, of their own free will, at some point. It’s just a shame that the mean ol’ gummint made them do it, thus muddying the issue. As a child in Mississippi in the 1970s, I grew up hearing this line of manure from the local grown-ups, who would apply it to everything from the minimum wage to the Clean Water Act to the attempt to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. By forcing them to do the obvious right thing, gummint was leaning on the common people, and it wasn’t fair. Heck, the worst thing about it was the suggestion that they had to be forced, by law, to do the obvious decent thing. It was true they’d never done it before, but they had been planning to get around to it, and probably would have done it five minutes after the law had been passed, if gummint hadn’t gone and gotten its panties in a bunch. Now all they could do was bitch till the end of their days about the injustice of being forced to not lynch nigras when there was nothing good on TV and not pay their employees in shiny beads. Not that they’d have ever done those things anyway, but oh, the injustice of being told that they couldn’t do it!
It would be a very pleasant thing to be able to say that this line of self-pitying imbecility died out in the provinces and never spread to the shoe-wearing regions of the country, but Don Imus and his brothers in the talk radio stratosphere depend as much on it as the Trent Lotts of this world. The fact that he has so much in common with Trent Lott would probably sting Imus more than any realization of the no-brainer fact that he is not, in fact, “a good person,” a realization that would be quick to follow if he could ever get his rodent’s brain around the simple truth that you really have used a word even if you’ve used it in an “off-the-record conversation,” but there you are. The talk radio world, one that Imus worked hard to shape, is one where overpaid white guys who did well in the voting for the title of “Class Clown” at their respective high schools sneer at blacks, women, gays, what have you, in a dismayingly self-congratulatory tone. The self-congratulation comes not from the cleverness of their material–nobody could be that self-deluded–but from the fantasy that they’re speaking truth to power and taking on The Man by being, and here hold tight while we flash back to the thrilling days of 1993, “politically incorrect.” Their natural audience is people who hate their lives and, at least for a few minutes a day, like to imagine that they’re outlaws by listening to some peabrain on the radio make fun of, say, homeless people or the victims of the 2004 tsunami.
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Like they say, read the whole thing.