COLUMN: Do hateful comments deserve to be defended? I’m not sure
Unless you have been living under a rock that is itself covered by an even larger rock, you’ve heard of Don Imus’ comments, apologies and firing. It’s a shame that Imus picked this week to implode, because he overshadowed the death of novelist Kurt Vonnegut. Both were sometimes over the top, and both managed to offend a lot of people in their time. But Vonnegut did a much better job of it.
Someone wrote a letter to the editor this week calling the attack on Don Imus “anti-intellectualism and anti-Americanism at its most repugnant.” Despite the triple-word score the writer gets for using the word “repugnant,” I’m going to have to disagree with the rest of his letter.
Imus did not just do something stupid: He did something brazenly idiotic and hateful. Among the members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team, there is a valedictorian, an aspiring doctor and the Division I Women’s College Basketball Player of the Year. Imus’ comments struck a nerve because they suggested that because of their race, a group of accomplished women like this will always be nothing more than “nappy-headed hos.”
In Imus’ defense, he has said the comments were not hateful but were in the “process of us rapping and trying to be funny.” After all the harm that his words have caused, we can only hope that some good will come out of this. We can only hope that Imus and Vanilla Ice start a support group for misunderstood male rappers.
Kurt Vonnegut said some pretty dangerous things in his career too, but he would never have gone so far as to insult a group so undeserving of insult for something so arbitrary as their race. Vonnegut made a career of showing us just how awful we were to ourselves. He satirized the world we live in and made us realize just how terrible we are sometimes. At his best, he was also pretty funny about it.
If Don Imus and Kurt Vonnegut were to be memorialized with holidays, Imus would be a little like that Thanksgiving where everyone was having a great time until Uncle Eddie had one too many and took off his pants. Vonnegut, on the other hand, was more like a New Year’s party where, among all of the fun and the revelry, you have a moment of clarity that allows you to look back on all of last year’s mistakes and to anticipate all of what next year can be.
Part of me wants to stand by Don Imus. After all, what happened to him is more or less a macrocosm of what happens between my wife and me every week or two. I say something stupid, she gets angry and threatens to fire me, and I tell her that I’m a good person with a charity ranch for terminally ill kids who just happened to say a bad thing.
But the better part of me says that what Imus said was actually where we found “anti-intellectualism and anti-Americanism at its most repugnant.” I don’t believe in censorship. Kurt Vonnegut certainly didn’t believe in censorship. But, unlike Imus, Vonnegut also didn’t go around spewing hate for hate’s sake. He was a difficult artist, but the way that he pushed for positive change made him more American than all the world’s right-winged Imuses put together.
And so while I hope the world gives Imus the forgiveness he wants, I hope more that it finds the time to remember Kurt Vonnegut and the way that he irreverently imagined the equality, the justice and the humanity we ought to have been talking about.
Zach Pendleton is a senior majoring in English. Comments and questions can be sent to zpendleton@cc.usu.edu.