I generally have little interest in the celebrity stories – Anna Nicole Smith; Who’s getting divorced/married/rehabed in Hollywood; What Paris Hilton is up to [or down to]. It’s just not my thing. And I’ve felt that about this Imus story, but I do have a thought about it. I occasionally find myself someplace where the radio is playing in the background. Here in North Georgia, it’s usually Rush Limbaugh or Neal Boortz. But I go other places where it’s Don Imus, or Air America. As polar as my personal politics, I’ve been surprised that I don’t like talk radio – no matter what they’re saying. It seems to me that it relies on Contempt.
The same thing is true of the blogs. I don’t like the ones that live in the contemptuous domain [even though all of us get there every once and a while, myself included]. Contempt is a dangerous emotion. When you feel contempt for something, that thing is all bad – it has no redeeming characteristics. I often think of Karl Rove’s speech to the New York Conservatives in June 2005 when I hear contempt. While it wasn’t delivered with fiery rhetoric, it dripped with contempt as he relegated Democrats and Liberals to utter extinction.
So, to Don Imus. He’s being criticized for a racial slur, but that falls on a steady diet of contempt. Even though he’s much more likely to articulate my side of things than the right wing pundits of hate like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, I find Imus’ contemptuous dialog divisive. If anything, right now we need a meet between Liberals and rational Conservatives to neutralize the constant stream of contempt from Bush, Cheney, and Rove – each delivered in different ways, but with equally lethalality. America was not founded on contempt, and it hasn’t helped us thrive.
Talk radio, in my opinion, has been a negative force in our culture. I won’t miss Imus, and frankly hope his counterparts from both sides either change their act of find a way to become equally obsolete along with him. We have no obligation to Imus or any of his breed to perpetuate the venom. His pleas for forgiveness sound ludicrous in the face of the hoardes of people he’s slammed during his career…
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