It seems that the groundswell of objection to the remarks made recently by Don Imus will result in his removal from CBS radio while Alberto Gonzales has been relegated to the periphery to weather the storm surrounding the Attorney General and the Justice Department. An AP release this morning reports that a bomb was detonated at the Iraqi Parliament in the Green Zone in Baghdad where two lawmakers were killed and ten others were injured. Meanwhile, John McCain stops just short of calling his Democratic colleagues traitors; George Bush and Dick Cheney prepare another desperate frontal attack to sell their ill-begotten war in Iraq by ratcheting-up their campaign of fear-mongering and innuendo by questioning the patriotism of anyone who disagrees with them. I don’t listen to Imus or to Rush Limbaugh, but if I had to choose Imus would win hands down. As a nation, we must have the attention span of a flea: the counter of American dead in Iraq clicks almost daily; New Orleans has not risen like a magic Phoenix as the administration promised but staggers in its muddy purgatory; the Patriot Act was an instrument of fear, which absolved the powerful of the conscience that regulates a free society rather than a safeguard for a trusting constituency. Too many freedoms have been bartered away for promises that no one, not even our government, can honestly guarantee: free speech is dangerous to those who seek or hold power without recourse; it is a danger we dare not eliminate. As for Imus, if we are fortunate, the underlying causes that propelled this incident to national status may be addressed openly. I hope so; scapegoats make it easier for us to ignore our own culpability.
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The Zero
A NovelJess Walter
I was taken by your comments vis-a-vis Limbaugh/Imus. I was once a regular listener of Rush Limbaugh (until we started getting sportstalk radio on another station in his timeslot, at which time I ceased listening. After all, Rush had promised that anyone who would listen to his show for a month would be a convert, and I had been listening for going on 3 years and was further calcified by his tripe against those things he espoused), but I have never been able to give Imus more than 3 consecutive minutes without switching frequencies. The difference was that Limbaugh gave me insight into the sort of “thinking” that allowed me, when I engaged freiends from the mindless right in argument, to sense where they might be coming from. Imus, on the other hand was just a personality and, in particular, a personality who always seemed to me to be callous, unfeeling, unthinking, and uncaring.
Interesting observations. I confess that I view both Imus and Limbaugh as a personalities for essentially the same reasons. Limbaugh exhibited the same sort of uncaring, unfeeling, unthinking, and callous behavior in his on air comments about Michael J Fox. I wish I could believe that it is a radio personna playing the devils advocate and not the man Rush Limbaugh who suggested that Fox was somehow faking the effect that Parkinson’s disease had on him when he was taped making a political endorsement. Both Limbaugh’s and Imus’ drug addition is well publicized so it isn’t surprising that hypocrisy is a common byproduct of their efforts to humanize their professional personna’s when those characters run afoul of sponsors and/or their listeners.
But Limbaugh’s callousness has political purpose.
And Imus had a political agenda as well; in fact, he was regarded as an excellent interviewer with politicians and journalists eagerly submitting to his interrogations. That largely political component was an integral part of his show even though it did not advocate a purely defined perspective as determined by any particular band along the political spectrum.