4534 Imus and the Mourning

Yeah, the picture of the RCA 44 is squshed so that it fits neatly next to the grim-faced guy looking at it.

Don Imus outlived his talent by about a dozen years.  When he died last week, his obituaries ran the gamut from “...Maybe the greatest radio personality of all time…” to “the original shock jock” to “Racist Radio Show Host Dies at 79.”

The first quotation is from Allan Sniffin, proprietor of a group of radio message boards, websites, and an internet radio station.  The second quote is generic.  Everyone says that about him.  The third is from the website Huffpost.com, whose writer Sebastian Murdock had a few choice things to say.

Among them:

--He was fired for calling members of the Rutgers University Women’s basketball team “Nappy headed hos.” But he bounced back pretty quickly.

That kind of summarizes things.  But the obit goes on to mention that Imus...

--Called Gwen Ifill “a cleaning lady.” Ifill was the first black woman to anchor a nationally broadcast news program (on PBS.) She had worked for NBC News, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Baltimore Sun, among other places.

--Called the people at publishing house Simon & Schuster “thieving Jews.”

--Called Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz a “boner-nosed beanie-wearing Jewboy.”

--Called Arabs “rag heads.”

You get the picture.

He started out funny.  One of his best known bits was calling a burger joint on the air, pretending to be a sergeant and ordering 1200 burgers with wide variations of toppings to go. There were no troops to feed.

A regular “character” he played was The Right Rev. Billy Sol Hargis as part of an ongoing riff about money-grubbing radio and television evangelists, their lavish lifestyles, womanizing and trading salvation for your dollars.

But as time went on, he got serious.  And seriously racist as you see in the paragraphs above. People of note were guests. People like Maureen Dowd and Dan Rather. Also, Tim Russert, Senators Dodd of Connecticut and McCain of Arizona. And high profile national officeholders like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Yes, he started and ran charities that helped kids with cancer. But he also gave away plenty of free airtime to his brother Fred who owned an Imus-branded hot sauce business.

He got sick a lot.  That happens to alcoholic cokeheads. He depended for years on help with writing bits and banter with his newscaster, Charles McCord who turned from serious veteran NBC journalist to silly sycophant/yes-man on the air. If McCord has anything to say about his years with Imus, we haven’t yet seen or heard it.

Imus paved the way for other so-called shock jocks.  Early on, he got away with saying things no one else would have.  In some ways, he was the Arthur Godfrey of his generation, someone who revolutionized the previously stiff-assed ways of conventional broadcasting.  Godfrey also was deeply flawed but he kept most of that out of his on-air performances.

In some ways, he also cleared a path for the plague of right wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh whom he called a “fat pill-popping loser.” But Limbaugh wouldn’t get away with what he’s been getting away with if Imus hadn’t first cleared the sewer in which they both operated.  Limbaugh can also be funny in a mean-spirited way.

In the last days of his show in 2018, Imus’ patented stylized mumble was often incomprehensible.  Most days he sounded like he didn’t know what was going on around him.  It was like attending a show where an opera star had lost his voice but continued to tour and sing.  

Or a cowboy too often thrown from his horse and landed on his head once too often.  He opened pathways for the rest of us. After years of shooting himself in the foot, he realized that to be effective, he had to shoot himself in the head.  And that’s what he did.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ® 

Comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2020

 

1415 A Murder in Ferguson, Missouri

Let’s get a few little things out of the way first.

--Peaceful protests do no harm but often little good.

--The only beneficiaries of a riot are the rebuilding companies and the bill collectors.

--Then, there’s the old lawyer joke: “Given the will, any district attorney can indict a ham sandwich.”

--Michael Brown, 18, was not the kind of guy you’d ask to watch your handbag when you had to use the restroom in the diner.

--Darren Wilson, 28, probably could be trusted to watch the handbag.  But at a traffic stop, you’d want to make sure the dash cam in his patrol car was running and in focus.

--Prosecutor Robert McCulloch has held that job since 1991 and is the son of a St. Louis police officer killed in the line of duty.  McCulloch is known locally as “the policeman’s best friend.”

--McCullough also is president of a group called “Backstoppers.”  It makes contributions to police, fire, EMS workers killed or injured in the line of duty.  According to published reports, Backstoppers benefitted from the sale of “Support Darren Wilson” t-shirts with proceeds going to his defense.  Backstoppers denies this.

Too bad Wilson isn’t a ham sandwich.  Because if he were, he’d be where he belongs which is behind bars.

It’s been said in some quarters that McCullough is what happens when you elect the village idiot.  This of course is untrue.  McCullough is tainted, but his errors of omission in this case were not bumbling or bungling. They were clever. They were devious.

Did the grand jury ever hear that Brown was not only an unsavory thug who may have beaten the owner of a small convenience store while stealing smokes, but was unarmed?  Apparently not.

They got a collective belly full of the unsavory thug and robber part, alright.  But not the unarmed part.  They may have known that anyway because the evil media covered it pretty thoroughly considering the story is about an 18 year old dead black kid.  But they never heard it out of an official mouth.

McCullough lobbed his hamwich of conflicting witness testimony on the table and said, in effect, “sort this stuff out for yourselves ladies and gentlemen. Get back to me when you have a decision.”

A typically enthusiastic prosecutor would have let the jurors know he wanted to put gunslinger Wilson on trial for pulling the trigger 12 -- count ‘em 12 -- times.

He would have thundered and rumbled and instilled his enthusiasm in the grand jurors who surely would have voted for an indictment.

Question: You ever buy a bag of white rice and find some stray grains of brown or black rice in it?  It happens.  This is not just about rice.  It’s also is a graphic description of the Ferguson police department. And of a grand jury that needed seven votes among the ten members to hand up a decision.  The grand jury was seven white people and three black.

Not everyone always votes on color lines. But such is the separation of majority blacks and minority whites in this town that it can almost be guaranteed in a case like this.

Do you think McCullough is going to convene a second grand jury?  And before you bleat about double jeopardy, that applies only if there’s a guilty verdict in a formal charge or an un-coerced confession which is the same thing as a conviction if it happens before or during a trial.

No indictment means no charge which means no trial and no verdict, hence no double jeopardy. But the prosecutor has to want a second bite. Are you willing to hold your breath until this one does?

In any event, with Michael the evil Giant out of the way, you don’t have to be as careful of where you leave your purse … if you can find a place to set it down amid the physical and emotional ruin that once was Ferguson, Missouri.

---

And now, the Wessays™ Guide to things you can say if you agree with the grand jury decision and don’t want to be … um … mistaken for a racist:

- “A crime is a crime and the color doesn’t matter.”  --Talk show guest.

- “(Michael Brown) looked like a demon.”  -- Police officer Darren Wilson.

- “We need to tackle criminal justice reform.”

-- Barack Obama.

- “This (riot) was … a strategic plan…” -- Rush

Limbaugh.

- (The autopsy report showed) “...Michael Brown had marijuana in his system when he died.” --Newsmax.com.

- “...this isn’t  a metaphor for police brutality or race repression or anything else, and never was. Aided and abetted by a compliant national media, the Ferguson protestors (sic) spun a dishonest or misinformed version of what happened.” -- Politico quoted by the National Review.

-“The riotous situation in Ferguson… has been hijacked by the media and diluted the real issue…”

--Former NYC Police Commissioner Bernard Kerick on the Steve Malzberg radio show, quoted by Newsmax.

-”That was one gutsy grand jury.” -- NYPost Editorial 11/25/14.

-”If Brown had surrendered, he’d be alive today.” -- too many sources to single out one.”

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014