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i'm kinda torn on this issue.
on the one hand, like others above, i find imus tedious.
his remark about the rutgers team seems about par for the course for him as yet another expression of the kind of floating resentment that apparently resonates with the demographic that listens to his show. the network(s) that carry his show have long profitted from the ways in which he helps his listenership channel their petit bourgeois resentments. and he has made a career of locating and playing around with the boundary that separates the socially acceptable from its inverse: if he didnt have a knack for locating that boundary, there'd be nothing funny about him at all. what you make of his particular mode of doing so in an aesthetic question. so i guess that one of the many reasons i find him tedious is that he locates and works a border area that i do not find interesting in a way that doesnt interest me either.
it is absurd that the networks who have made money off his show are now acting as if they are (suddenly) suprised by what amounts to an encapsulated expression of his entire m.o.
larry flynt was right about freedom of speech: you only realize what it means when it comes to defending the right to make offensive statements that offend you in some way.
so curiously, find myself inclined to defend imus' right to be a fuckwit on the air.
the public/private distinctions that occupy much of thie debate are correct, but at the same time, it seems that while corporations have the right to hire and fire, a consequence of this is that corporations can also act to suppress freedom of speech and folk react to it by going along with the suppression because it is legally permissable for a corporate entity to do what it likes as if in the doing there are no broader implications. well that is horsepucky. that's right, i said horse pucky. this is suppression of freedom of speech. and like i said above, it matters BECAUSE the speech in question is offensive.
and the rituals of contrition that imus will now perform make me kinda nauseous. after the requisite appearances in the requisite spaces over the requisite period, he will go right back to doing what he does and the network will go right back to profiting from it.
it is a joke, like all such media rituals of contrition are.
all that is assured is that the next time the rutgers women's basketball team gets into the ncaa finals, he wont say the same thing about them.
and with any luck, the next time they do get into the finals, they'll beat tennessee.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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