The Reluctant Whore

Yes, the once furious hysteria has pretty much blown over at this point. Isaiah Washington has moved on and been cast in the remake of the Bionic Woman, on The View, it was unanimously agreed that Al Sharpton’s claim that TMZ calling Beyonce’s outfit “Roboho” was somehow sexist and racist was inaccurate and now the New York Post reports that Don Imus might be back in September.

It’s only a rumour that Imus will return of course, but western culture always has time for a professional politically archaic, essentially cruel, racist bigot mouthpiece so if he did return it would make sense. Perhaps this explains why he was so calm and rational while he was being chastised and debated about by the US media. The entire thing seems like a plea bargain deal; perhaps he was told he just had to lay low for a few months until this whole thing blew over.

Which it appears to have done.

The alarmingly obvious thing about the Imus firing, as summed up at the time by Stanley Fish for the New York Times (at least a week AFTER I made essentially the same argument on this blog) was that the entire thing was a calculated, business decision that was entirely dictated by money. NBC’s nauseatingly transparent apologetic bleeding heart “won’t someone think of the children” backpedalling and conspicuous public hanging of Imus after he called the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed hos” (and incidentally, I still don’t even know what that freaking means) might have rung heart warmingly true and tearfully decent for some people but with talk of his re-emergence, both Fish and I, it seems, were right all along.

Imus’ predictable brand of offensive one-liners brings in the big bucks because it indulges a frustrated, black and white mean streak in the ill-educated that will always run within cultural groups beneath a resentful bland exterior. The Post does report that Imus is looking for a black sidekick to absorb some of the cries of racism though. It would be entirely fascinating to see who takes the job. OJ Simpson, perhaps? [source]