Quest of a Closet Poker Player

Sweetie and I were married in the summer of 1991, two years to the day after our first day.  After a honeymoon at the Half Moon Club in Montego Bay, we packed up our belongings and moved to the great North.

As Southerners, we were supposed to be afraid to wade into the land of the Union Army.  After a short stay in a corporate apartment, we settled on Princeton as the place we would first call home.  It was a garage apartment consisting of a kitchen, living room, bedroom, and a bathroom.  I hadn’t measured the narrow staircase up to the apartment, and Sweetie’s piano had to live in the garage while we were there.  I commuted to New York each morning, fifteen minutes in the car followed by an hour train ride and a fifteen minute walk to 39th and Broadway.  It was here that I first met Imus in the Morning on WFAN.  I was smitten from the start.

The bookend to Imus was Mike and the Mad Dog in the afternoons, arguably the best sports talk show in America and at minimum the shaper of what is the best in the genre.  Imus was a strange bird on the sports talk show.  He had nothing to do with sports, sort of had a disdain for being on the station.  This was before syndication, when some of the funnier things were when he would read the spots that the Fan’s sales team had rustled up.  I’d never been exposed to shock jocks or radio shtick, but his was golden.  He started to veer toward the political and intelligentsia along the way, as well as launching the charitable works first for SIDS after the sudden death of the son of a station executive (maybe Joel Hollander’s son, although I can’t remember) then for the Imus Ranch, where he brought children with cancer to a working ranch in New Mexico.

Leaving WFAN is one of the things I didn’t like about moving from New Jersey in 2000.  I lost Mike and the Mad Dog driving home and also Imus on the way to work.  Atlanta carried Imus for awhile but eventually I couldn’t hear him.

All of this to say that I think this whole thing leading to his firing is just plain despicable.

• Imus’ comments are offensive clearly, but on the offensive scale where 10 is the vilest, most horrible thing you’ve ever heard and 1 is the praise of a parent, I’d put this at a 7.  Nappy headed hos?  It was a throwaway phrase that was obviously tongue in cheek.  Growing up in Mississippi, I heard things a couple of orders of magnitude worse on a regular basis, and still within the South there are pockets of racism that are the norm.  Fortunately, my parents were never of this mentality, and it’s amazing to see our boys devoid of what racism toward African-Americans is, lacking even a rudimentary understanding of why it would even be perpetuated.
• The attack machine is increasingly turning into a well-oiled mechanism for ruin.  This is less about African-Americans and more about how helpless anyone is once the alignment of blogs, YouTube, media, special interest groups, and Corporate America occurs.  Hardly anyone is a match for this machine, and small improvements occur to how it works with each successful venture.  I think the problem is caused by most Americans being apathetic about most things, unable to care enough to fight others who have a vested interest in making their voice heard.
• People who take the easy way out turn my stomach.  I’ll just limit this to Barack Obama and Oprah.  “Remove Imus because this is despicable language.”  How about use this firestorm of attention to talk about solutions for the African-American community, where the incarceration rate of young men is a national epidemic with no simple solution.  The African-American community has been left in the dust by the Asian-American, Indian-American, and Mexican-American communities.  If you don’t think so, just head to any analysis of school districts and look at standardized test scores in the context of the racial and ethnic make-up of the school.  Are African-American children just dumber?  That’s preposterous, in my opinion.  Do African-American children have the level of parental involvement in their schools and education as we see from Chinese-American, Korean-American, or Indian-American parents?  They are polar opposites.  Is this because African-American parents don’t love their children?  No, it is because of many things like too many single mother households, which makes it extremely difficult to be intimately involved in the day to day education of children.
• The corporations are culpable here.  Jeffrey Imelt and Leslie Moonves, CEO’s of GE and CBS respectively, took the high road by immediately ejecting Imus.  Our culture of scapegoats vs. accountability is one of the great illnesses confronting executive leadership in this first decade of the 21st century.  Both of these men were happy to see Imus lift MSNBC’s ratings this year or bring significant margins to CBS Radio and WFAN, but now they are puritans when Imus bumps over the line?  This show has had many, many things far more scandalous than this episode, which brought viewers and listeners to the show.  Where is the prevention and ownership of something like this occurring in the first place if it is so wrong?  Obviously, the buck stopped at Imus and nowhere else.

I haven’t listened to Imus regularly in probably seven years, but this week-long saga has been just stupid and a waste of time all the way around.  Rutgers Coach Vivian Stringer should have been answering why her team came out flat against Tennessee when Rutgers had a legitimate chance to take their first national championship in any sport just about ever.  Instead, she’s dealing with this mess which although unpleasant will arguably help Rutgers and their women’s basketball team in the long run.  Imus should be going away for a weekend after raising more money to help kids and parents going through the worst things imaginable, the death of their child.  Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson should be focused on finding effective solutions and new leadership to reinvent the African-American community in the context of the global marketplace rather than sniffing out the next offender of their psyche.

And all of us should think hard about our place in reshaping America as we head into the 2008 elections.  My life is a mess, granted, but so is our nation in case anyone hasn’t noticed.  Our ability to select the best America has to offer to lead our nation is obviously broken, and we’ve all become media-shaped drones.  I say all of us, because whether you’re conservative or liberal, we all seem to simply regurgitate whatever the thought shapers pour down our throats.  Can we take the best of what our nation is while fixing the hard problems that are the worst parts of this experiment called the United States?  We’ll soon find out.

Have a good weekend, and thanks for your patience.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 10:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized.