Hunter on Imus

Hunter at Daily Kos is, in my ever so humble opinion, one of the greatest columnists of our time. His latest offering is entitled Fall of the House of Imus. A few paragraphs:

You can never predict how these things will play out: as many others have mentioned before me, Imus or Rush or can say bigoted, vile, meanspirited stuff like this all the time, and never get seriously called on it once, and then there’s one particular incident that is just barely more egregious than most of the others, and it suddenly galvanizes the whole frame around that person, and all of a sudden there’s hell to pay where there wasn’t a mere week before. It is a strange, bizarre aspect of American political life, but it is a pattern that has become very commonplace. First inured, dull apathy; then sudden scandal; then reflection on the history past behavior that nobody could bother to cast their eyes upon for the months or years or decades leading up to the “big” event; then summary judgment.

America can’t deal with long histories of implicit racism, or borderline corruption, or just general, simmering unsavoriness: there is no hook there to attach the American attention span onto. It has to be a true pie-in-the-face moment, and when that moment happens, the tidal retribution that was built up from all the previous, apparently ignored incidents surges in all at once and buries the poor unsuspecting bastard.

Then we can point to the whole thing as a learning experience or something, and everyone feels a little good about themselves and a little sick about themselves, and we move on, and nobody but nobody is going to start wondering too seriously about all the other white radio hosts regularly making bigoted and sexist remarks, or the black ones either, because once Imus has been chastised the problem is momentarily solved, and we can go back to more pleasurable tasks of democracy, like talking in excited whispers about which dysfunctional, dull-eyed blot on the collective soul of humanity now can claim full cash ownership of Anna Nicole Smith’s daughter.

. . .

There was a period of time in the Eighties and Nineties when shock jocks ruled daytime television: pissed off white guys whose schtick was to foam just as unintelligably as their intentionally dysfunctional guests. Geraldo’s nose and O’Reilly’s ego owe a lot to that period, and even Rush was given a television program, which he used to typical Rush effect, and I still can’t hear the name Morton Downey Jr. without dying a little inside. But it got old. The entire genre became a bitter parody of what was already bitter parody to begin with, and America for the most part grew the hell up and moved the hell on.

Similarly, from that period to this, I half wonder whether there is a storm over the utterly enfranchised Imus now where there wasn’t before in large part because of the underlying anger and skepticism at the media in general that is pervading many, many of these discussions — the feeling, once again, that we’ve all been duped, and that these figures that appear on our television sets not only aren’t as smart as they keep telling us they are, but that in actual fact they’re pretty damn hollow, and pretty damn narcissistic, and pretty damn mean, and pretty damn dumb. Except this time, the media figures that America is angry at aren’t some low-class televised hangers on, it is the uppermost rungs of our discourse, the people who decide life and death and taxes and war. And Imus, we have been told, is one of their rulers? No, seriously — are we fucking kidding?

You can tell, viscerally, when the American public is collectively in a foul mood and looking for a little payback — it happened to the Republicans last November, an election of intended retribution pure and simple, but the anger at the media itself for many of the same faults has not been sated. It’s a broad-based anger that we’ve been taken advantage of, snookered by hollow people who have been leading America into directions that have been empty at best, and intentionally destructive at worst, and worst of all filling the airwaves with narcissistic self-promotion over how great they’ve been to do it.

Under this broader premise, Imus certainly isn’t the only gopher in this hole, he’s just the dumb bastard that happened to stuck his head out first?

I always quote far too much of any piece he’s written, but that’s just because I wish I’d written it myself.