First, as I've said elsewhere, the DID wasn't an issue of censorship or "banning words"; censorship is the government telling you what you can or can't say. The Constitution gives us a right to free speech; it doesn't give us the right to make $10 million a year, as Imus did, speaking into a subsidized microphone. It should be self-evident that insulting your boss at work will get you fired; it happens all the time, no one cries censorship, and nor should they.
Don Imus's (richly deserved) firing came as a result of an economic decision by his direct employers, who were paying his leathery ass to SELL SOAP. To us, the listening public, his "indirect" employers. It's our dollars that pay radio advertisers, thereby enabling subsidized microphones to be switched on.
Imus was paid to sell soap. Not necessarily to be funny, or erudite, or entertaining, or insightful, or transgressive; those were just possible side effects. The motherfucker was useful to his paymasters only insofar as he was able to justify the money spent on radio by advertisers. What's beautiful and downright inspiring to me about the whole DID is that at a certain point, the people Imus worked for said "Hey, wait a minute -- Black folks have money and they buy a lot of soap. This guy may actually be bad for business." And the free market -- the same free market that conservative (and even some liberal) drive-time-radio fans seem to think is the solution to every *other* goddamn problem -- delivered its verdict, in the form of a pink slip for our man Don. "Big Government" didn't step in to regulate a fucking thing. Republicans and libertarians of all stripes should be over the moon.
Second, when someone loses their job in front of a subsidized mic -- or a subsidized camera -- for making racial or ethnic slurs against the people who ultimately pay the bill, it obviously doesn't mean that racism has been defeated or even seriously wounded. To point that out in a kind of sarcastic huff, as if seeing someone come to grief for doing something you counseled against, is a silly bit of pedantry.
Did King Kaufman at Salon Magazine really think he needed to remind us that "Talk radio did not just get smarter or kinder or more inclusive because Don Imus got canned"? David Bromwich at Huffington Post mentions "the destruction of Don Imus" (as if he'd been forced into bankruptcy instead of just out the door), then fearlessly tackles the hard question: "Can anyone believe [Imus's] replacement will be made of finer stuff?" I have an easy question for him: Does anyone fucking care?
No one seems to ask these profound questions when it comes to the Mel Gibsons of the world, and well they shouldn't. If it's a career-damaging or career-ending move for a current or aspiring Hollywood actor to spew anti-Semitic bile, that's only because the many influential figures in Hollywood who pay people to make movies and also happen to be Jewish, quite correctly decide that they'll be damned if they'll pay someone to insult them. I doubt that, having made that decision, they also think that the blood-libel or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion will be universally repudiated the next day becuase of it.
The end of DI's (current) job doesn't mean the end of racism; why should it? It's enough for me that, despite the many ways in which they continue to manifest, racism and misogyny are sometimes perceived to be bad for biz. If anything, we could stand to see this kind of thing happen more often (and to pre-empt a common argument in the DID debate, I'm certainly interested in seeing the culturally genocidal elements of hip-hop culture get exactly the same treatment).
Black Americans seem to have plenty of collective economic muscle. Rev. Al Sharpton, his flaws as a person and a politician notwithstanding, raised his eyebrows and his voice to remind people of that. The Don Imus Debacle is a "speech issue" in exactly one respect: it reminds us that money talks.
Third, as I read other forums where people weigh in on this issue, I find a stark contrast between the nuance with which people judge Imus's overall output, and the absolutism they apply to Rev. Al Sharpton. Here's David Bromwich again:
[Imus] is also the only interviewer who ever put John Kerry at ease (the subject, once, was basketball). He had corrosive things to say about the Iraq war, and his references to the president were often in a class with his sprawl of words about the Rutgers team. A non-denominational hater and, like certain other misanthropes, fearless as well as feckless.
By voicing base passions such as our disinclination to support the careers of rich, unfunny middle-aged shock jocks, Bromwich seems to be telling us, we've Lost Something Special.
In the interest of thoroughness, he includes a sarcastic reminder for us to ritually deplore the usual suspect:
The occasion was arbitrary, the penalty outsize, the author of the majority opinion that stern moralist, Al Sharpton.
Several of the comments responding to Bromwich's article seem to go out of their way to point out that Imus was a Good Guy Really, despite his faults and errors in judgement-- while almost all the posts which mention Al Sharpton find that he is completely and irredeemably bad, because of his. One person (under the strangely appropriate screen name of chickenhawkwarrior) goes so far as to weepily proclaim that
Imus threw himself on the mercy of the court of elite opinion - and that court, pandering to the mob, lynched him. Yet, for all his sins, he was a better man than the lot of them rejoicing at the foot of the cottonwood tree.
(One imagines poor Don Imus, $10 million salary no longer forthcoming, hefty severance check in one clawlike hand, dangling like strange fruit from the tree of early retirement -- although Imus is 66, so maybe early is too strong a word.)
Another poster decried the continuing "distraction" from more important political issues that apparently happens whenever Sharpton speaks out about something.
Not to mention the refrain, repeated ad nauseam anywhere on the web you'd care to look, that misogynistic comments appear in rap music all the time, and --- say it with me -- No One Says Anything.
All this is somewhat strange to me.
Rev. Sharpton, with whom I certainly don't agree on everything, has been extremely vocal in his disapproval of degraded language and behavior in hip-hop culture. It's also worth noting, for the benefit of those who mourn the loss of Imus's contributions to political discourse, that when Sharpton ran for president in 2004, he brought issues to the debate -- issues important to voters of all races, by the way -- that the more mainstream Democratic candidates, in their craven rush to "claim the center", were afraid or at least unwilling to talk about.
Let me be clear: this is not about the relative merits of Rev. Al Sharpton or Don Imus. It's about consistency. Rev. Sharpton has spoken intemperately and unwisely in the past. He was also one of the few who spoke out on behalf of the young men who were wrongfully convicted of the Central Park "wilding" incident back in 1989. (Their confessions were found to have been coerced and they were recently acquitted and released from prison). Do the intemperate and unwise things he has said completely blot out the good he did in aiding the release of these men, or the good he's done in other areas?
If Imus is to be forgiven his racially offensive speech because of his charity contributions, fine: go on and forgive the son of a bitch. The young women he insulted already have. (WCBS, his former employer, seems to be much less forgiving, but no one seems to be accusing them of lynching anyone--go figure.) If Imus' supporters are willing to overlook the unwise or offensive things Imus has said and judge him on a day-to-day basis -- racist one day, thoughtful critic of U.S. foreign policy the next -- so much the better for him. It's fascinating to me that certain public figures who are black and outspoken don't get a similar reading.
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