What to do about Don Imus

For whom Don Imus's bell tolls

DAN ROTTENBERG

The CBS talk radio host Don Imus, who is paid to make shocking and outrageous comments over the airwaves, has been suspended from his job for two weeks for making shocking and outrageous comments over the airwaves. This is like firing a Marine drill sergeant because he transformed sensitive young boys into hardened killers, or disbarring a lawyer for defending a terrorist. That’s his job, for goodness’ sake.

A blurb on the New York Times op-ed page (April 10, 2007) asserts that Imus’s comments “were no surprise. But they were a new low.” Of course they were a new low. How does a shock jock hang on to his audience unless he’s constantly testing the limits of free speech?

Imus’s specific offense was his demeaning reference to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed ho’s.” (Listen to it here.) And it was demeaning— not to the gritty Rutgers women who battled their way to the NCAA championship game, but to Imus, who exposed himself and his on-air buddies as juvenile middle-aged white men incapable of seeing these women beyond their skin color. Nevertheless, from the moment Imus condemned himself by opening his mouth he was besieged with demands for his resignation.

The Mel Gibson example

The Imus imbroglio confronts us once again with a sticky but important question: What’s the best way to handle bad speech? I’ve repeatedly suggested that there's no such thing as bad speech. Even the falsest, most malicious expression possesses some value, in that it sheds light on the speaker and offers the rest of us opportunities to debate the subject at hand.

Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, for example, may have been a gratuitously violent and anti-Semitic film, but it provided new insight into Gibson’s mind; it also opened the door to discuss an intriguing question that nobody dared to address until Gibson’s film came along, to wit: Why is Christianity, virtually alone among the world’s religions, so preoccupied with the manner of its founder’s death?

The same holds true for the Imus insult. In the short run, he hurt the feelings of a group of decent and dedicated young women. In the long run, he focused more attention on their virtues than any of their supporters could have done. He also focused more attention on his own flaws than his critics could have done.

Two ways to react to bad speech

As I’ve said before, we have two ways to react to unpleasant speech. One is to say: “This oppresses me.” The other is to say: “The speaker has done me the great favor of revealing himself as an idiot.” Free speech is about more than the mere opportunity to express ourselves. It’s about our opportunity to find out what nutty ideas other people are thinking. It provides us with an early-warning system against bigots and sexists. It expands our choices as consumers of literature, theater and art. When we shut up other voices, we’re really shutting ourselves out.

I’ve never listened toi the Imus program. And that’s precisely my point. I don’t have to listen to Imus if I don’t want to, and neither does anyone else. On the other hand, I object to being told that I can’t listen to him, which is in effect what those calls for his resignation seek to accomplish.
Silencing bad speech is no solution. Responding to it is. Each of us serves the greater good in his or her owwn way. Even Imus.



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