COWARDS KICK AWAY
ANOTHER PIECE OF
AMERICA'S SOUL
[We've already got a problem. Souls aren't strewn along the ground like rocks to be kicked away. It's an odd metaphor, and it doesn't work.]
By KINKY FRIEDMAN
April 15, 2007 --
I MET Imus on the gangplank of Noah's Ark. [Confiding, cool, this is writing that assumes a lot -- No need to give a first name -- you know who I mean, and the two of us have that special cool intimacy which has us calling each other by our last names... Friedman's attempt to find a clever way of saying he's known Imus forever doesn't work -- the Noah's Ark thing is hokey.] He was then and remains today a truth-seeking missile with the best bull-meter in the business. ["Truth-seeking missile" is clunky, somehow cliched, not funny. "Bull-meter" wants to do something innovative with the cliche bullshit meter, but, again, it doesn't come off. A large part of Friedman's problem in this essay is precisely this spew of metaphors. No metaphor's going to work if it's lost in a hundred other metaphors. What's created is just a mess, and readers read verbal messes as out of control emotionality. Friedman can't defend Imus and get us on his side if his essay is merely an airing of Friedman's personal feelings. So far he hasn't even tried to reach out to us; he has merely displayed his sense of his own brave cool.]
Far from being a bully, he was a spiritual chop-buster never afraid to go after the big guys with nothing but the slingshot of ragged integrity. [UD's heart breaks at this horrible writing. So Imus was a David against ... exactly which Goliaths? Judging by press coverage, Imus was a Goliath. Slingshots aren't ragged, and Imus isn't ragged. None of the images seem to have anything to do with reality.] I watched him over the years as he struggled with his demons and conquered them. [But he didn't conquer them. Not all of them. That's why he's roasting in hell at the moment.] This was not surprising to me.
Imus came from the Great Southwest, where the men are men and the emus are nervous. And he did it all with something that seems, indeed, to be a rather scarce commodity these days. A sense of humor. [I have no trouble with the Dadaist absurdity of the emu thing. That's fine. But to try that hard to be an original writer, and then to come right back with a cliche -- scarce commodity -- is to communicate a sort of schizy confusion, which serves you not at all when you're trying to write a persuasive piece.]
There's no excusing Imus' recent ridiculous remark, but there's something not kosher in America when one guy gets a Grammy and one gets fired for the same line.
The Matt Lauers and Al Rokers of this world live by the cue-card and die by the cue-card [live and die is a cliche; so is of this world]; Imus is a rare bird, indeed - he works without a net. [A bird that works without a net? Don't all birds work without a net? Our sense that this piece was dashed off in a self-righteous rage is deepening.] When you work without a net as long as Imus has, sometimes you make mistakes.
Wavy Gravy says he salutes mistakes. They're what makes us human, he claims. And humanity beyond doubt, is what appears to be missing from this equation. If we've lost the ability to laugh at ourselves, to laugh at each other, to laugh together, then the PC world has succeeded in diminishing us all.
Political correctness, a term first used by Joseph Stalin, has trivialized, sanitized and homogenized America, transforming us into a nation of chain establishments and chain people. [Just wild gesticulation here, with bizarre generalizations and massive logical gaps.]
Take heart, Imus. You're merely joining a long and legendary laundry list of individuals who were summarily sacrificed in the name of society's sanctimonious soul: Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, Joan of Arc, Mozart and Mark Twain, who was decried as a racist until the day he died for using the N-word rather prolifically in "Huckleberry Finn." [Losing touch with reality...]
Speaking of which, there will always be plenty of Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons around. There will be plenty of cowardly executives, plenty of fair-weather friends, and plenty of Jehovah's Bystanders, people who believe in God but just don't want to get involved. In this crowd, it could be argued that we need a Don Imus just to wake us up once in a while. [Sputtering.]
There probably isn't a single one of Imus' vocal critics who come anywhere close to matching his record of philanthropy or good acts on this earth. [Irrelevant.]
Judge a man by the size of his enemies, my father used to say. A man who, year after year, has raised countless millions of dollars and has fought hand-to-hand to combat against childhood cancer, autism, and SIDS - well, you've got a rodeo clown who not only rescues the cowboy, but saves the children as well. [Did he say sanctimonious somewhere up there?]
I believe New York will miss its crazy cowboy and America will miss the voice of a free-thinking independent-minded, rugged individualist. [Cliche.] I believe MSNBC will lose many viewers and CBS radio many listeners. [After all that hot language, he gives us this sentence.]
Too bad for them. That's what happens when you get rid of the only guy you've got who knows how to ride, shoot straight and tell the truth. [Ronald Reagan School of Writing.]