Forget carbon emissions. Forget big gas-burning Hummers, miles of smoke-belching factories, oil refineries and steel plants. We've been looking in the wrong direction for the real cause of the notorious "Greenhouse effect."
The real culprit is the massive amount of hot air, a gigantic tidal wave of searing, broiling hypocrisy sweeping over our country and being wafted by the media all over the world. What caused this eruption, this odious tsunami of gaseous duplicity?
A few spontaneous, ill-chosen but would-be humorous words in the early morning broadcast of the Don Imus show. An off-hand kidding remark about a college women's basketball game the night before. Bad taste, sure. But cause for summary judgment and release by MSNBC – and pretty quickly being fired by CBS – just like that? Are you kidding me?
Just a minute; what were the ill-chosen words that the early morning Imus uttered? Aren't they the words ranted and spewed incessantly by rappers and hip hoppers in their multimillion-selling records, the words that are responsible for the Rolls and Bentleys and Ferraris and the glittery, opulent "bling" sported obscenely by these "artists"? The words marketed fervently by the biggest, most profitable record labels – and rather routinely heard, though garbled and drowned in raucous noise, on network TV, including CBS? How do you suppose these words found their way into the vocabulary of Don Imus?
I don't know him personally, but I do know that Don was being paid by CBS and MSNBC to be grumpy, irascible, irreverent and highly opinionated, every day to delicious ratings, for around $10 million a year. That's his public persona, the reason people tuned in to hear and enjoy his show. His popularity and on-air spontaneity drew a lot of big guests: politicians and newsmakers and business moguls, celebrities of every stripe, to benefit from the exposure to his audience and possibly gain a grudging compliment or two.
Meanwhile, across town at Sirius Radio, Howard Stern is being buried under an avalanche of money, over a half billion dollars, to say far more reprehensible, morally inexcusable things every day to a predominately high-school and college age crowd! He calls himself "the King of All Media," and his salary would certainly seem to make him the logical poster boy of modern media and entertainment today.
And guess what? The man who is running Sirius and making Stern the Sultan of Sleaze is the very man who championed him when he was running CBS for Viacom, the parent company of that network. And guess what, again? Viacom has bragged recently that another of its subsidiaries, MTV, is its most profitable entity, carried in 160 countries and making sure that all those millions of viewers around the world hear the words that got Imus fired.
Fired by CBS!
Compared to Howard Stern and a growing number of other highly paid "shock jocks," Don Imus is a kindly old father confessor, reminiscent of the neighborhood barber who seems a little grumpy, who voices his complaints to any who will listen – but you know he has a kind heart and only means half of what he says.
So the rappers and record execs roll in filthy lucre, the networks rake in ratings and moolah from shows that portray every form of immorality and violence, the cable webs glorify decadence, profanity and every last taboo, the weekly magazines and news networks belabor the IMUS INCIDENT as if it were World War III, hoping to score ratings and sales.
Instantly, two of the foremost minor prophets of our day, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, are all over television condemning Imus' six or seven words and demanding he be fired, if not deported by week's end. Having apparently been away for several years, maybe on some other planet and unaware of Snoop Dog and Ludacris and Fifty Cent and Nelly and countless other rappers who've been inundating the sensibilities of America's young with the very words Imus uttered – plus every other foul obscenity known to man – set to music and MTV videos for the world to enjoy, the two modern Jeremiahs also seem to have forgotten highly public missteps and misstatements each have made themselves. The public hasn't forgotten, but who cares?
Our beloved Oprah recently gushed praise on Russell Simmons for his philanthropic activities, good as they are, ignoring how he came by his millions – creating Def Jam records and TV's filthiest show ever, "Def Comedy Jam," featuring mainly black men and women quite simply competing with each other for the Toilet Mouth of the Month award.
After all, our venerable Motion Picture Academy declared, just two years ago, that the very best song all our best movie composers and producers could come up with – all year long, and out of all our creative genius – was "Hard out Here for a Pimp." And if I went un-edited with the lyrics of that masterpiece here, I'd get fired, at least by WorldNetDaily! A paean to pimps, prostitutes, (yes) hos and the whole seedy world of decadent street life, this song joins "White Christmas," "Over the Rainbow," and "Mona Lisa" as an Oscar winner, America's best! Is there a more definitive way of being ratified Mainstream?
And Imus got fired.
Which, on a scale of 1 to 10, would you say was worse? Imus' dumb slight of some college girls who didn't even know he existed? Or Rosie O'Donnell's scandalous claim that "the Christian right is as bad as the Taliban" in America? She only slandered, vilified and insulted 60 or 70 million fellow Americans, who do know she exists; but what kind of media firestorm did that kick up?
You guessed it. Little or none. The ratings of "The View" went up, and she virtually took over the show. To her credit, she had little to say about the Imus affair when the subject came up, though. I'm guessing she didn't want her audience to start thinking about what was appropriate to say on the air, and what wasn't.
Yes, ice is melting, the barriers are disappearing, the moral guidelines are vanishing – and the hypocrisy is becoming acutely noxious. Some pots are calling some kettles black … so insistently, so loudly, that the public airwaves are getting toxic. It's every man for himself, every woman for herself; and the rules, if any, keep changing. Courtesy? Respect? For whom? For what?
Almost nightly, the talk-show hosts revile the president, even the pope, with rude and salacious jokes – all just for laughs, of course … and millions of dollars. Nothing sacred, nobody "off limits," freedom of expression, "free speech," and all that. Who really cares if somebody is hurt or insulted? It's just a joke, right?
Imagine what poor Don Ho felt, hearing his name everywhere drug through the muck like that. Come on, get real, bring Don Imus back … or maybe replace him with kindly old Don Rickles.
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