April 14, 2007 Back To Archives Go To Comments
Imus In The Morning
Self-proclaimed oringinator of the shock-jock broadcasting format Don Imus, received the shock of his life Friday when he was summarily fired by his corporate media home, NBC. Imus' racially charged remarks about the Rutgers University womens basketball team was the final straw that broke the camel's back. Imus apologized while at the same time defending his remarks because, as he claims, insults and mockery have always been a big part of his "comedy" routine, and has nothing to do with racism.
I had watched the Imus program for a while in the past, and although the program often had big name politicians and journalists on for some commentary, I never found the show to be very informative. To me it was short on information and long on ridicule and worthless jabbering. I never thought Imus or his partners were racist, just crude and insulting. I switched over to the much better Washington Journal on CSPAN for some morning news with breakfast.
Does racism exist in the United States? To some extent it does, but most people I know have moved on from that attitude. My personal experience in civil rights and the people that I work with leads me to that conclusion. Also, the fact that a major presidential candidate is a black man, and our last two Secreataries of State are black only adds to the evidence that the racism of the past is gone forever.
The furor that has been generated by Imus' comments is an indicator of other forces at work in America that go beyond racism. Don Imus is a symptom of an American culture that has grown callous, coarse, rude, impolite, uncivil, and immoral. The garbage that passes for entertainment in our TV programming, our movies, songs, and books are also symptoms of this declining cultural standard. Even our universities are not immune. If most parents and alumni knew what types of trash are actually presented to our young people they would stop sending their hard earned money to such institutions. Without being too graphic let me just say that live, overt sexual performances, including homosexuality and other such trash, are now presented in the college setting as enlightening and educational (just ask your college age child). Indeed, this attitude is so widepread that we are now finding 12 year old grade school children having sex in their classrooms!
To what can we attribute this decline into hedonism and immorality? The answer, I believe, is two fold. The first door to be opened on the path to degeneracy occurred in the sixties when students at the University of California at Berkley demonstrated in the streets for the right to use the "F" word publicly. No matter how naive anyone thinks the previous generations were to reality, it is undeniable that this change was significant beyond its appearance. The United States Supreme Court, in my opinion, began the wholesale corruption of the Constitution and of all decency when it decided that cursing was a matter of free speech protected by the First Amendment! Jefferson and the other founding fathers were very concerned about political freedom of speech, but I can find no evidence that any of them considered vulgarity and immorality to be a part of the freedom they were seeking! I believe it was Jefferson who said that the "Constitution was made for a moral people". When we trashed the very document itself with such fallacious reasoning, we began the slide into immoraltiy, incivilty, rudeness, etc.
The second cause of this degeneration of our public life involves those who attacked the very idea of morality itself, claiming that right and wrong were simply feelings that differed from person to person. Once that concept was presented, it naturally followed that God should be removed from the public sphere as well, because after all, only those self-righteous religious types actually believed in God and that He had anything to say about what we do. Once again the Constitution was corrupted in its meaning by those claiming that because the founding fathers did not want any state sponsored religion, i.e. a Church of the United States, that they also meant that God should be totally removed from any public place. Yet every evidence exists that although many of our founders were not overly religious, they were mostly believers in God, and every President from Washington to Bush has used any or all of these words in every speech or proclamation; Divine Guidance, Providence, our Creator, and God.
The tragedy of our day is not that some guy named Don Imus spoke foolishly or meanly, and now is out of work. It is that we have put ourselves on a path to self destruction which only we as a people can reverse if we understand the political consequences of who we choose as our leaders. Ponder these words from Samuel Adams; "On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders".
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