Don Imus Firing: Some Final Thoughts

Don Imus.

Never listened to the guy anyway. I know who he is. He's probably pretty liberal. I wouldn't know fully. I am sure he had an honorable career and seems like he cared a lot socially about a lot of things.

What he said was deplorable, especially in the forum and context in which he said what he said. I think when you are touching 70 million plus listeners everyday, you really ought to be more careful. Same goes to Rush. Same goes to Franken. Hannity. Dr. Laura. You gotta be careful.

But think about something for a minute. Is what he said an uncommon American utterance? Picture yourself in college. Your hanging with the guys. The Heineken is flowing. You had a tough round of some Frisbee Golf or what have you, and something comes on TV, or some people walk by, or you ran into some strange circumstance at the 7-11 where you picked up that Heineken and you say to your buddies in your group, between the 4-5 of you and only that group: "Man, those hoes be crazy" or "Those are some tough assed bitches". And your friends will laugh, then hit you up for 5 bucks to buy the beer. And it won't be thought of again. And it was completely harmless.

Is it really that Imus is a racist or is he guilty of accepting the current pop culture? Al Sharpton will tell you Imus and people like him, or even me for bringing the double standard pop culture into this argument, are racists. Yet, the marketing pop/Hollywood/movie/music scene that the Beatles started in the 60's and brought to Public Enemy in the 1990's is the social catalyst not the socially responsible cause of the problem here. We accept things said between people and cultures that weren't being said 40-50 years ago. That one thing though, comes along and the stars all line up and it is said in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong context and the world wakes up and realizes that we've become morally corrupt. It's kind of amazing if you think about it. You flip on some rap and some pretty derogatory shit comes on. Same goes with some shock rock like Marilyn Manson or some Tarantino film or some Kevin Smith dialog. We hear it or see it and in those contexts we call it art. But if we say it publicly to millions, out of the context of art and we're dead in the water.

Imus deserved to lose his job even though, we all would have said the same thing in front of our own friends and families. Amazing.