Don Imus And The Blackboard Of My Heart

"My tears have washed 'I love you'

from the blackboard of my heart,

It's too late to clean the slate

and make another start..."

Background

Don Imus has made a very offensive remark and has been fired. The remark was appalling and atrocious.

(When I first heard of this, I immediately suspected that his co-hort, Bernard McGurk, was somehow behind it. It turns out that the remark was made in a bit of tasteless repartee between Imus and McGurk. Bernard has been an outrage waiting to explode for a long time.I have turned the show off a number of times. I watched it in the early morning watches, usually on a treadmill running the obligatory 6 per hour. I distinctly remember reaching up and slapping the OFF button and running in silence for 10 minutes or so. When I turned it on again, if the storm had not passed, I slapped it off again.When the coast was clear, everything was fine.)

The Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were involved in the Imus dismissal.

I shall tell you what I think of these gentlemen, not holding back anything.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson I remember speaking at the Democratic National Convention and I recall being spell bound by his words. I thought it was one of the finest speeches I had ever heard.

The Rev. Al Sharpton my family and I awaited one bright, sunny, New York afternoon. We were on the grounds of the old City Hall and were waiting for Al Sharpton to lead a demonstration across a bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan.It turns out the Rev. Sharpton wasn't in the demonstration. It was some other leader. The demonstration was getting a very late start, so we left. We had wanted to hear Mr. Sharpton.

I have heard the words "shock jock". I have no idea what that means. I thought it meant disc jockeys who did outrageous stunts and yelled a lot. It apparently does not.

(Mr. Daniel Schorr spoke of the imbroglio in terms of "shock jock". I have enormous respect for Mr. Schorr...how deep is the ocean, how wide is the sea type notion here.)

I shall not defend Don Imus.

The remark was indefensible.

What I shall do is write about what Imus means to me.

 

I Come Across Imus

I never heard of Imus until late in my brother-in-law Billy's cancer.

Billy had trouble getting to sleep, and he fell asleep finally on the couch with the TV blaring.

We were visiting him in Quebec. I would come downstairs in the morning and there would be Imus and Billy.

Interesting, I thought.

No, Bill, I never listened to Imus.

It turns out Bill had listened to him forever, going back scads of years.

We were with Bill for two weeks, then, so I had a fortnight of Imus in the morning. As I listened, I became more interested, for I began to hear things I had never heard before.

Here was someone openly dismissive of the war in Iraq !

Here was someone calling the Vice President a war criminal.

Here was someone who had the courage to give speech to the things which frustrated my silence.

For the first time on radio and TV, I was watching and listening to someone speak their mind, and their mind was not the rear piece of a pantomime horse costume.

Oh, there was indeed a lot of trash that went with it, and my interior demons and interior parsons battled whether I should laugh openly or be disapproving, but it was such a feeling of freedom.

For indeed that is what I felt. I did not watch the American TV news anymore, for they had been usurped, embedded, and purchased by the powers that be and their war:

All of us were watching with slavering delight as our President beamed a cosmic smile upon the flight deck of an aircraft carrier and found delight in wearing U.S. Army paraphernalia...he, the son of a President who waged war, finding delight...just as did the son of Germanicus, little Caligula, who loved the Roman Army boots, the caligae, and loved to dance about in little copies, caligulae, of them.

The radio was a vast wasteground of raving lunatics who fancied themselves Conservatives, obviously judging Conservatism to be a scorched earth policy of launching tirades.

The liberals were only of value when I needed a Heimlich manoeuvre and no one was around.

Imus the Destroyer of the Establishment!

Imus the Deconstructor of Structure!

What was going on? I asked myself, what is the role Imus plays? The other people on TV and Radio usually have some hideous agenda, filled with the little hedged scribblings of their minds, jotted down by their talons on a tattered napkin, and their purpose is to support the established way, support the established religions, support the accepted morality.

Some of them even traipse about in the clothes of psychiatrists and insinuate their teachings into the minds hungry for succor, beguiling us, bewitching us

One often feels that the talking heads are surrogates for Sauron's ring: one agenda to rule them all, one mind to find them, one establishment to bring them all, and in the darkness BIND them!

Well, so Imus was my little bit of the Shire. True, there were a lot of rough edges. True, I found myself censoring the show. I found myself shaking my head with disapproval, and muttering to myself "Imus, you've finally gone toooooo far!"

I felt freedom in each escape of air from my lungs as I guffawed. I felt license as I whipped my head around in disbelief, gaping at the TV screen.

Imus As The Trickster

Imus to me was Coyote in the Tricksters myths; he destroyed structure.

The Trickster is Amoral, not Immoral.

The devil and evil are immoral. These we should avoid.

Paul Radin writes:

Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer,...,he who dupes others and is duped himself...He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social...yet through his actions all values come into being.

(Please keep in mind at this time I am delineating the Trickster god of myth, not Imus yet!)

Ezra Pound asks "What is a god?", then answers that god is an eternal state of mind.

To the Trickster nothing is eternal.

Lewis Hyde writes:

"When he [Trickster] lies and steals, is isn't so much to get away with something or get rich as to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by doing so, open the road to possible new worlds."

Heady stuff. All it means here is that Imus constantly pecked away at the official rationale for your war, all of you that bought into it. He pecked away at the structure of the official line. Believe me, there were a lot of people that hated his guts.

Senator Clinton hates his guts. She was positively dancing twinkle-toes when she was interviewed about him.

The Trickster, the shape-shifter, makes the world out of whatever is at hand. He does not have the Power that comes with established structure, so he must lurk on the periphery and aim his barbs from there, a guerilla type warfare with the Establishment.

The Zulu trickster Thlokunyana is like a small man yet animal. Thlokunyana is cunning and steals bait from the traps set by man for other animals.

Thlokunyana obstructs, obviates, the power of the trap.

Trickster's cunning create new situations which, by the force of things, sometimes turn out badly for him.

Remember that our intelligence creates truth as well as falsehood.

Our intelligence and cunning led us to victory in WW II and to discomfiture in the Iraq debacle. 

Intelligence works both ways, it is great success and the tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive;i.e., use intelligence to tell a lie.

Trickster often ends up sitting on a dung heap because his cunning has undone him.

How does Imus fit into this pattern?

He is a destroyer of the established order.

He has often poked at the accepted official racism that exists in the USA. (For example, after Huriicane Katrina, he stated that the dilatory response of the federal government was due to the fact that most of the stranded victims were black, not merely because they were poor.)

He supported various African-Americans in their bid for office.

His charity works never discriminated on the basis of race.

So now old Don Imus gets into trouble. His common sense tells him that he's a heck of a guy, tells the truth about racism, and has black friends.

Next thing you know he's running off at the mouth...and he's stuck to a gum pole in the middle of an angry farmer's watermelon field...and the farmer has a gun

Racism and racism

The last racist joke I heard was one recounted by an insurance salesman of the evangelical persuasion.

The joke was "Why is an aspirin white?" The punch line should be obvious. I won't repeat it. I did not laugh.

However, I DID get the joke. I understood the punch line. It crept up on me, all unaware, and I only managed to control my expulsion of breath, as it were.

At this second I realized that I would always get the joke. I may not laugh, but I would always get the punch line. All the stereotypes and caricatures that go with racial relations were deep within my mind, and I did not see how they could be expunged.

We learn racism from birth.

We may not be Racists, but we are racists; we shall always get the joke.

And those Punch Lines are all over the place! The country side is littered with them! They lurk everywhere, waiting to spring out at us, make us laugh, or cry, or turn red with anger, and make us make fools of ourselves...and end up sitting on a dung pile!

The punch lines of racial jokes are in the very air we breathe.

The description Imus used is everywhere on the music airwaves. Since the music serves the purpose of making money, it is tolerated.

But it's out there waiting to spring on us

The " N " word is around the corner. I know a teacher who wouldn't say the "n" word in teaching a piece of literature written with it. So a young black lady wrote a letter charging the teacher with insensitivity, if not racism.

Thus, the teacher was caught in a Catch-22: say it, you're sacked; don't say it, your insensitive...or whatever is in the air of academe that day

I respect the Rev. Jackson.

I respect the Rev. Sharpton.

I respect the accomplishments of the Rutger's Women's Basketball team.

I have never met Imus.

I consider him Don Imus my friend. Maybe not a role model, but a man I respect. "We shall need a new Coyote, a new Thlokunyana, a new Legba, or a new Raven to peck away at the rich and established...do it with mind-snaring humor, be outrageous, make us shake our heads...make us make a new world from the scattered pieces of the old. Lee Iacocca is in there swinging, writing in his new book: "Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, 'Stay the course.' " I think as a surrogate, we allow ourselves to get angry at the words, but we cannot bring ourselves to attack the disease.

The illness is not saying nasty things; it is DOING nasty things. I believe Don Imus, more than anyone else in the media, went the long mile to try and get people mad about this mess. Now he's gone. Don Imus is my friend.

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