Nothing spoke louder about the supremacy of hypocrisy in America's cultural cesspool than the lynching of cranky radio-TV personality Don Imus for sliming Rutgers University's black basketball players as "hos," the insidious hip-hop code for whores.
Leading the mob to the barricades was the black community's most experienced, tiresome hypocrites: the ethically shallow Rev. Jesse Jackson, who's slandered New York Jews as "Hymies" and fathered a child in an adulterous affair with an office staffer, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, whose outrages include being docked $345,000 for slandering a public prosecutor as complicit in the rape of a black teenager, and for wrongly calling Duke University lacrosse players guilty of raping a black exotic dancer.
Jackson and Sharpton were quickly followed in their sham moralizing about Imus' humor by shameless, me-too media and political celebs who appeared on Imus' programs for decades without a peep about crude, coarse, racist, demeaning language. (Millions of us found nothing worthwhile in Imus and simply didn't watch or listen.)
Thereafter came the shallow broadcasters, after checking the winds of public opinion: having earned tens of millions of dollars off Imus, they now consider Imus revolting and pulled the rug only after advertisers (who'd also bankrolled Imus shows for years without protest) got cold feet and canceled.
A few voices in black and white America have railed for years against "gangsta' rap" lyrics abusing women as "hos" and glamorizing murder and gang violence. But broadcasters who turned on Imus had ignored them as profits flowed in from consumers, including black Americans, who tuned loyally to Imus on the air without objection.
Some national politicians who became instantly self-righteous looked more foolish: While now deploring Imus, they've ignored or participated in America's longest running cultural plague, government by incompetence, corruption and deceit.
Certainly, oases of elegant arts and culture, intelligence, model behavior, honesty, respect, integrity, exceptional literacy, honor exist in America.
But America's reputation is feeding on failures of character, not achievement—the world's most violent gun society, rampant corruption, government bankruptcy, television and film violence and trash, a trigger-happy and unreliable presidency declaring war, politics driven by religious dogma, vanishing industrial leadership, environmental abuses, corporations dominated by greed, bribery in high places, media fixation with the salacious private lives of trampy women, civil liberties and privacy in peril. And the list grows.
Is America better for firing Imus?
Hardly. Now it's a campus massacre and the inevitable outcry about guns. But in a few days, millions can return to their fixations in America's rush to the cultural bottom.
