Last night at a dinner the subject was Don Imus the radio talk show host who recently let loose some racist slurs regarding a women’s sports team. (He called the girls “nappy-headed hos”.) There has been a hubbub in the media and the station’s advertisers pulled out and now he’s been fired and his career is probably over. The story has a happy, or at least just, ending. One dinner guest suggested that all such incendiary shock jocks should be canned, as they attract listenership principally by spewing hate. Hate drives ratings up. (And therefore advertising dollars.) But initiating a reign of terror against talk show hosts and other loose canons is heading for a slippery slope, as we all agreed.
More interesting was the suggestion that the market had been the deciding factor — and that somehow the market could be a way, a device, a lever, to eject poison from the social system from time to time. That it was the advertisers pulling out, because they didn’t want to be seen as supporting a pariah, that helped to keep the social body healthy. Another guest said that it was Al Sharpton who brought this racist remark to greater attention, and that Imus has said similar things before but they’ve slipped by — that the advertisers didn’t distance themselves until Sharpton and the media made everyone aware of Imus’s remark. And isn’t it the advertisers who support and benefit from the vitriolic and incendiary attitudes fostered by these shows? Even if the hosts are sometimes careful not to cross certain lines they make it clear that they would like to.
I asked if the publishers and artists of the Danish cartoons should, in a just world, likewise be canned. Someone said, “but those were not attacks on people they were attacks on a religion.” I responded that they were in fact veiled attacks on people — on the tiny minority of Muslims in Denmark. They were a way of saying to these “foreigners” in their midst, “Your religion is stupid and you are stupid for believing in such nonsense”. Note that the cartoons did not make light of Christian imagery or mythology, nor did they accuse pious Danish churchgoers of brainless stupidity. My position is that most religions are equally based on insupportable myths and if you attack one you should attack them all. (That said, the myths and imagery are beautiful, moving and powerful.) Religions do a pretty good job of attacking one another as it is — by nature only one can be true, so all the rest must therefore be infidels. To its credit, North America is more mixed and therefore tolerant than many European and Asian countries. Those places have ingrained ideas about what is means to be German or Danish or French and the idea that Turks or Algerians might be considered German or French is slow to be accepted. The “foreigners” in those countries are usually ghettoized, so interaction with people different than oneself is rare.
There is a banner of free speech that gets waved in these discussions. The idea that anyone should be free to say anything, however hurtful, anytime, anywhere. And the question of whether the ACLU should be defending neo-Nazis who march in Skokie, Illinois is an example often quoted. I asked if one could shout fire in a crowded theater and was told that, no, there is in fact a law against that. I had hoped to make the point that we voluntarily limit our free speech in order to get along, but I picked a completely wrong example. I’ve come back to this topic more than once. I think we’re left with our social sense — a sense of getting along and living together — and not a set of absolute rules. This possibly innate social sense should govern our behavior. It’s more work than falling back on rules and it isn’t fixed like rules, either. We are social animals, and if one member of the group decides to be anti-social — which is their prerogative — they will, as in any social group, soon be ejected. (Unless they have loads of money or weapons or some other leverage that would outweigh their harmfulness.) Of course the group has to disagree with them, find their behavior disruptive and harmful to the future well-being of the group as a whole in the first place. Many times we tolerate the existence of anti-social individuals; they might be good at something else, for example, or we are not sure it is worth the necessary effort to scour out the filth. We can live with a bit of filth, but if others begin to notice it and point it out then it’s time for housecleaning.
Someone at the dinner pointed out the coincidence that as Imus was being vilified the North Carolina lacrosse players — all white — were being declared innocent of rape. They are considering suing the woman who accused them, the prosecutor and Duke university. The woman had been “hired to dance at a party”. She is poor and black, the lacrosse players are wealthy and white. There is a lot of money and popularity involved in university sports. The incentive for the “marketplace” would be to look the other way. I don’t think we can leave the oiling of the social gears to the marketplace, but economic pressure sure has an effect. Globally, though, it seems complicated. It doesn’t always work as planned. The U.S. embargo has made the lives of Cubans worse, and has possibly achieved exactly what it sought to prevent — it has provided Castro with an excuse for everything and an obvious and clear enemy. The embargo unites the Cuban people — well, sometimes — rather than spurring them to rise up against Castro. Likewise the Israeli blockage of Lebanon simply reinforces the idea of Israel as an enemy of the Arab world. It makes Hamas stronger, not weaker.
In South Africa the embargo eventually imposed against the apartheid regime seemed to have had a different effect. From over here it did seem to weaken the regime and remove their economic foundation…which eventually led to a relatively peaceful change.
Why did that one work while the others did not?
I would suggest that on a smaller scale the same thing happens. Giving people convenient scapegoats and adversaries is sometimes an unintended consequence of trying to punish or enforce “correct” behavior. The victim and the persecutor become weirdly co-dependant. We need our enemies — and they love us too, in a sick kind of way.
