Imus in his mourning

When you're at a wedding reception, or cocktail party, or bar mitzvah, you experienced the phenomenon. You find yourself gradually raising your voice to be heard, until you begin to strain your vocal cords with the effort. If you are, like your humble essayist, someone who relies primarily on irony and subtle nuance for his conversational contributions, you find yourself out of your element, and the latter stages of the soiree are given over to silent gestures: nods of the head, a smile frozen on your face like the rictus of death, shrugs. Trying to be heard over the din is aggravating, even pointless.

Those who study such things, social psychologists, audiologists, whoever, conclude that what's going on is a positive feedback loop of volume escalation. As each person raises his or her voice to be heard, others do likewise, until everyone in the room is shouting like a lunatic on the wrong medication. If we were more interested in intelligible conversation, we would probably occasionally shout out "reset!" and everyone would lower their voices to half-volume, from which position on the dial it would again begin to rise. But then, that would spoil the party; the idea is not to have conversations in the first place.

In the Big Conversational Pit of America, the world of talk radio, simulcast TV-radio (such as Imus's erstwhile show), talking head cable "news" shows, et cetera, the conversation has gotten very loud indeed. The proliferation of venues brought on by FM and satellite radio, cable TV channels, in addition to the preexisting world of AM talk radio, means that anyone interested in talk formats about current events, including the shenanigans of "celebrity" culture, has many choices. Reasonable, measured voices tend not to attract attention or to hold an audience; witness the decline and disappearance of Aaron Brown from CNN. To attract a following, those inclined to be the loudest, "edgiest," and most outrageous gradually increase their volume and their offensiveness until they become prominent and can command a following of American listeners who like this sort of thing, and, by and large, they are most of the listening public. Thus, we have the mutant evolution of the "shock jocks" like Howard Stern, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly and, of course, Don Imus, as well as the cadres of cutthroat "commentators" like Ann Coulter. Their shtick is that they will say anything, particularly something very offensive and deeply personal about anyone who gets lined up in their crosshairs. Their audiences expect this; it's why they tune in. The best known radio psychologist was Dr. Laura, who perfected a kind of non-therapeutic attack psychology.

Inevitably, the pressure to maintain this kind of outrageous imbalance leads these weird individuals, who by a process of self-selection were never very stable to begin with (despite the money, who would want to live like that?), over a line of "acceptability." It isn't what Imus said, after all, that did him in. The problem was his choice of target. He was cheered on when he was merely being anti-Semitic or generally unfair; that's why, to repeat, people were interested in listening in the first place. But he picked on a group of dedicated women athletes, African-Americans, who had done nothing to earn his scorn or ridicule. Psychologically, I think what happens at a moment like that is that the American audience feels deeply ashamed that they made such an asshole famous and rich in the first place. They're appalled at their own vulgarity, at their role in elevating such a jerk to a position of power and influence. So, as Freud would instruct us, they "displace" their anger on to the shock jock in an orgy of sanctimonious bullshit. How dare he? Doesn't he know what's fair?

Of course he doesn't. Or does, but that's not the point. Imus was deeply confused by the reaction to words he considered part of his modus operandi. His bread and butter. How could people turn on him like that?

Ultimately, these stories have little to do with the "content" of what these people say, and everything to do with a steady coarsening and debasement of American public discourse. There is a declining market for civil, respectful and thoughtful conversation. The barbarians have crashed the party, and the only ones we can hear are those shouting the loudest.