We've been unusually crowded here at the Experience these last couple of days. Something I wrote about how Don Imus is responsible for racism, gingivitis, and the cancellation of Andy Barker, P.I.
got a few much-appreciated nods from some high profile sites, and the next thing you know, people who'd been coming here once a week since we first started operation were finding themselves seated next to the kitchen. Anyway, I think my fifteen minutes are over now, and I'm just glad that the check to Kevin Drum cleared and nobody was around to see what this place is like an hour after we lock up at night and the rats start dancing on the tables. My original plan was to not even acknowledge any of this, since I figured the cool thing would be to pretend not to have noticed, but I have to say that it was really exciting to see what it's like to actually get comments posted here.
Sort of made it feel less like a monologue and more like a discussion. I'm especially grateful to the smart people who wrote in to say they disagreed with me. We welcome dissenting opinions here at the Experience.
I find that hearing from intelligent people who think differently than me makes me smarter, and that giving equal time to not-so-intelligent people who think differently than me makes me look smarter, an area where I'll take whatever help I can get. (Of course, all the contrary opinions posted here these last few days fell into the former category. Nor do I want to give the false impression that I have any objection to people stopping by just to tell me I'm brilliant.
You're doing the Lord's work, all of you.)
I don't want to bog things down with anything that's meant as a direct reply to anyone, but there were some points raised that struck me as interesting enough that I'd like the fun of addressing them. (Sadly, this means a few more words that are sort of about Don Imus.
Anyone who has the not unreasonable feeling that they'd rather jump off a roof than ever read another word on the subject might want to sneak out to the lobby for a smoke.) First, I should admit that I wasn't a recent or regular part of Imus's audience, though I do feel that I've listened to the show enough for one misspent lifetime. There have stretches where I listened to it every day for weeks on end, usually when I was employed someplace where I was not invited to have a vote on whether the radio stayed on or which station it was tuned to.
(It was under similar circumstances that I obtained the knowledge that I have of Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, and The Thistle and Shamrock.) By the way, I really did listen to the show; one thing that's seemed surprising to me is how many people with fond memories of it referred to having watched what was supposed to be a radio show.
Maybe that made a big difference; it reminded me that I used to sometimes catch Howard Stern's show when it was broadcast on E! (which, blessedly, would boil it down to a half hour), and it seemed a lot more interesting to me that way. What made it interesting, though, was the chance it gave you to observe the process, to see this self-possessed oddball sitting in a carefully sectioned dark room skillfully manage the antics of his geek troupe; it's not as if it made his material any better.
I'm afraid that the people who found Imus's discussions of books and politics entertaining and enlightening got something out of them that went right past me. I just found most of that stuff to be so much standard insider-buddy-buddy back-scratching bullshit, and the sound of politicians and pundits sucking up to Big Hat ("Ha, ha, I-man, you rascal--I guess in some ways I am a spineless money-grubbing Jewboy. Touche'!
") struck me as being as grating as Stern's nonstop self-promoting. I appreciate that others think there was something there, but I'm going to have to file it under "It takes all kinds." Though the thought of people actually listening to Imus on current events had the strange effect of making me feel kind of guilty that I always change the channel from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as soon as the interviews start.
Last night I actually watched their whole shows. Turns out I've been mispronouncing Elaine Pagels's name since 1980. (It's a hard "g".
)
Of course, as everyone knows, Imus's switch from prank phone calls and fart jokes to a format of ethnic slurs and fart jokes mixed with topical commentary wasn't motivated by a deeply felt need to stretch but a canny decision to rebrand himself as the thinking person's asshole after Stern had beaten him in the on-air limbo contest to the bottom and claimed the lion's share of his old audience. The post I wrote last week gave some people the impression that I'd compared Imus to Stern, though I hadn't; I just dropped in an anecdote about Stern to illustrate how far the frat-house humor that both he and Imus's crew trafficked in is from being in any way daring or creative. I'll compare them now, though.
I'm not a fan of Stern's, but I do find him easier to take than Imus. Partly this is probably a knee-jerk reaction on my part, based on the fact that Stern isn't a hypocrite--he doesn't pretend that he's doing something serious. (The most annoying thing about Stern is his own version of the false truthteller pose: he comes on as a guy who doesn't know or care about anything but tabloid celebrity culture and what's new on the porn racks, and that could be amusing for minutes at a time if he didn't seem to believe that everyone else is secretly the same way and that anyone who claims to care about anything else is a pompous fraud.
) One big difference is that Stern has never given me the impression that he hates his life and his job and has nothing but contempt for his audience and the world in general. I can see how someone might mistake Imus's bilious misanthropy for a smarter pose than Stern's happy wallowing in sleaze; I think I might have done the same thing once in my life. Now, I look at that kind of seething, slopping-the-hogs attitude and it just looks to me like a cry for help.
There's one other thing, and it may be all about me. But I am, let's face it, a child of the '70s. My big movie hero as a kid was Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
When I was a kid, in high school and college, I hero-worshipped people like Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Philip Roth, the staff at the early National Lampoon, Hunter Thompson--people who used words freely and extravagantly with no respect for any societal constraint that might have gotten between them and whatever point they wanted to express. Imus, Stern, Opie, Anthony, and all the rest stand in for a dominant culture that will say anything to get a rise out of someone but has no point at all. When Lenny Bruce was on trial for obscenity, he implored the judge to let him do his act in the courtroom.
He was upset about being tagged as just a guy with a mean mouth and believed, naively and touchingly, that if he could just show His Honor that there was a context in which his dirty words meant something, then everything would be all right. For all his whining about what a good man he is, Imus never took that approach, because there was no point to what he said--there was never any point to anything he said, unless you think "This sucks" is a point--and no context that would give it meaning. He was just a burn out doing his Tourette's thing, throwing shit at the wall in hope of producing "some idiot comment meant to be amusing.
" It's been said in his defense that he was often self-deprecating, and I have no doubt that he hates himself almost as much as he hated his guests and his listeners and the planet as a whole. Unfortunately, self-loathing is only really interesting when it's not fully deserved. Claiming total expressive freedom to express nothing, but with a special emphasis on abusing their betters as hatefully as possible, Imus and his ilk have dedicated their careers to something that I regard as unforgivable.
They have dishonored the image of the smart, funny American motormouth as wild man.
News RSS