The Imus Thing

Since this Imus controversy won't go away, I finally got around to reviewing his original comment about the "nappy headed hos" that got him axed.

I wonder how many people actually did that, went back and played the original video.

I don't know about you, but my first reaction was that there really isn't much there. He and a sports guy are commenting on the video of the Tennesee team beating the Rutgers team in a championship game, and it's actually the other guy who first drops the h-bomb.

Imus is a bit crass, I'll give you that; but the whole thing seems pretty goofy to me. Here's what happened.

Imus and--I think it was sports guy Sid Rosenberg--are doing voice-over while the video is on the teams playing. Imus says, "So I watched the basketball game last night between a little bit of Rutgers and Tennessee, the women's final . . ."

Rosenberg: "Yeah, Tennessee won last night, seventh championship for Pat Summit, man, they beat Rutgers by thirteen points."

Imus, reacting, says, "Some rough girls from Rutgers, man, they got tattoos and . . ."

Rosenberg: ". . . some hard core hos."

Imus: "[chuckling] . . . some nappy headed hos there, man, I'll tell you right now . . . man, that's some . . . ooh [chuckling] . . . and um, the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know."

So that's it. I don't have the time to do deep research on the use of "ho" in popular jargon, but it's my guess that Imus had no intention of actually calling these girls whores. He was just commenting on the way the looked to him, with their tattoos and locks and such, in contrast to the girls from Tennessee. It was the tattoos that got his attention, not the color of their skin.

And another thing: If Imus is in so much trouble, how come the other guy isn't? He must have gone and hid under a rock somewhere, relieved to have the axe falling on the other guy's head.

This is all the product of a society looking for things to be offended about. New definitions of sin abound. This is political correctness run amok, and when it comes to racist sounding remarks, then eveyone jumps in because it's easier to make the outrage stick.

I call it hypocrisy.

It is more evidence that our society is getting more accustomed to being intolerant. This keeps up for awhile, and pretty soon it will get quite uncomfortable for anyone with a different point of view. These may well be the building blocks for a civilization which one day might begin condoning some real persecution.