4-11-07, 8:44 am

Don Imus has made a good living for a long time being a professional ass-hole. Imus's gimmick, similar to his 'great competitor' Howard Stern, is to hang out on radio with 'street corner punks' who then insult anyone they think they can get away with insulting, particularly women and anyone who appears to be different.

The I Man and his gang (the entourage who exist to egg him on and smirk with him) usually attack well-known people in the news – as I remember, because I am not now nor have I ever been a regular listener – but this time they attacked the whole Rutgers University Women's Basketball team following their defeat in the National Championship game to the University of Tennessee.

These are female students and basketball players who made what was the greatest achievement in Rutgers college sports history by getting to a National Championship game. They were essentially minding their own business and playing their game and being students and they were viciously slandered with racist hate speech by the I Man and his gang, as if they were prostitutes and the I Man and his gang were pimps.

The I Man's bosses issued a corporate apology that reduced his gang's vicious racism and sexism to 'insensitivity.' Me publicly criticizing a student with a major personal problem for being late to class at Rutgers, where I have taught for thirty-six years, is insensitive. The I Man gang were racist and sexist in a society where those prejudices are no longer accepted as normal, but can still be expressed in a variety of ways in mainstream commercial media.

But, the incident isn't dying down. The cable stations have put out the predictable talking heads saying the predictable things over and over again from their inventory of right-wing and centrist talking heads. The right-wing talking heads are saying,'So what, Blacks say the same thing in rap music,' and its 'politically correct' to 'flog' Imus and let's get back to business. The centrist talking heads are saying that Imus is tasteless and deserves some punishment (maybe penance is a better word) but so what let's get back to business: Anna Nicole Smith's death has yet to be fully investigated. Nancy Pelosi's trip to Syria has yet to be fully condemned. The Democrats have yet to be fully flogged for 'not supporting our troops in Iraq.'

At Rutgers though, people are very angry and are fighting back against simply going back to business, the business of 'talk radio' as it exists today. Vivian Stringer, the African American coach of the Rutgers women's basketball team, issued a well-reasoned response to the I Man which defended not only her team but all women of color who could only be hurt and humiliated by the comments.

Richard McCormick, president of the University, has issued a strong comprehensive statement to the all people associated with the university and to the society as a whole condemning the Imus gang's activities as 'despicable' and analyzing and condemning its very negative effects. Rutgers students have scheduled a protest rally against radio racism and sexism for Wednesday (April 11) outside the Rutgers Commons on College Avenue in New Brunswick at 1:30 PM. No one at Rutgers is satisfied with a business as usual approach to these events.

Although the mounting criticism had led Imus' bosses to suspend him for two weeks, at this point, it appears that they hope IMUS in the Morning will continue to do its number, waiting perhaps for a short time before returning fully to his Archie Bunker of the air game when the heat is off. Unlike Archie though, who always had characters to challenge and make fun of his racism, the I Man only has interlocutors to make him go further and further, as if there is nobody around to tell the big man that George Corley Wallace and Bull Connor are no longer among the living.

Imus by the way isn't a right-winger, unlike the legions of 'talk radio' haters and baiters who reach a 'free market' audience of shut-ins and couch potatoes who probably fantasize that they are John Wayne or worse. From time to time, the I Man pops up on the side of liberal causes.

But he makes a living pandering to people who want to be left alone with their prejudices and their scapegoats. His humor to the best of my knowledge never leads anyone to seriously explore in reasoned way anything, like the best of Comedy Central today or groups like Second City or Britain's Beyond the Fringe in the past.

There is nothing creative or imaginative in the Imus in the Morning show, just a bunch of jerks talking irreverently and irrelevantly about anything that they want to talk about. Progressive sociologists might say that they are a group of people being paid handsomely for acting like failures and losers in any social system, socialist in regard to doing cooperative labor and making constructive criticism to help people, or capitalist in terms of being competitive and developing real skills and abilities that will make you into a successful business or professional person.

Howard Stern and Imus are in their own way great examples of the advance of capitalist consumer culture since the Reagan era. (Imus, by the way, had his greatest moment when he smashed the window of a liquor store selling Stolichnia Vodka when the Soviets shot down a Korean airliner over their airspace in 1983.) Both make fortunes out of acting the way psychiatrists portrayed small children who happily smear feces in order to get attention from adults by defying adults.

I grew up with people like the Imus gang in the tenements of the South Bronx (not the great majority of people, who disliked and avoided such people, but some). I especially remember one of them, a kid who snuck up and watched through the window as an attractive young Puerto Rican girl in his building got into a bath tub. She screamed and he went into hiding as the girl's father scoured the neighborhood for him. Eventually the affair blew over. Most of us didn't like him, but we didn't squeal on him.

This kid, whose nasty, low income parents made him bring money into the home by searching everywhere for Coca Cola deposit bottles, liked especially to feel superior by insulting Puerto Ricans, whom he called 'bongos.'

Many years later, I heard that there had been a Radio report that he had been badly beaten up in a poor Puerto Rican South Bronx neighborhood (he had left the neighborhood long before). The radio report made it appear that he was just a middle-class white person attacked by violent minority people, but many who knew him from the street figured that he had finally gotten what he always deserved.

But those punks on my street never made a good living out of their personal failures and their scapegoating of others. They didn't call their insults a comedy show, like Imus in the Morning. They would run away when people stood up to them, but never apologize for their 'insensitivity' because they never pretended to be sensitive in the first place or even understood that concept. I doubt the Imus does either.

I don't say that Imus should be censored from the air, which he of course would be if he were using his show to advance socialist and communist critiques of society, or even any progressive analysis which would upset his sponsors.

But people who really oppose racism and sexism should stop listening to such shows and tell their friends and coworkers to stop listening to such shows. Also they should perhaps tell their friends that people who really like the Imus's and the Howard Sterns of radioland don't deserve to be their friends because they are better than that and have better things to do with their times and their lives.

Anyone and everyone who can come to the New Brunswick rally Wednesday, April 11, should do so to show their solidarity with Rutgers students who refuse to accept racism and sexism directed against their fellow students or anyone else.

--Norman Markowitz teaches at Rutgers University.

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