I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

Wimps, Wussies, and W. Masculinity, American Style

5 7 Masculinity, American Style Wimps, Wussies, and W. in april 2007, nbc announced that the shock jock don Imus, whom the network had hired to provide “irreverent” and “controversial ” drive-time comedy, was getting the bum’s rush because of his irreverent and controversial characterization of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos,” a remark that NBC News president Steve Capus deplored as “deeply hurtful to many, many people.”1 The smoking crater where Imus used to sit afforded a pleasant view for those of us who never understood the appeal of his grizzled -codger shtick, which always sounded, to this writer, like Rooster Cogburn reading The Turner Diaries. But amid the camera-ready outrage of pundits and pols (many of whom had, until Imus’s nappy-ho moment, been only too happy to laugh along with the irascible old bigot when they were in a book-flogging or vote-grubbing mood), few seemed to notice the situational irony of the thing: in a country where you can’t swing a cat without hitting a race-related social problem , we rise up in righteous anger not over the moral obscenity that there are seven times more blacks than whites behind bars, or that black men under twenty-five are fifteen times more likely than whites to be murdered, but over the bigoted fumferings of some “cantankerous old fool” (to quote former Imus newsreader Contessa Brewer).2 If we’re going to administer a ritual flaying to every shock jock who channels the ugly American id, shouldn’t we at least spread the love? How is it that a serial hate-speech offender like Ann Coulter W I M P S , W U S S I E S , A N D W . 5 8 has escaped the skinning knife? She called Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards a “faggot” at a Conservative Political Action Conference; quipped on Hardball Plaza that Al Gore is a “total fag”; and wrote, in her syndicated column, that the odds of Hillary Clinton “coming out of the closet” in 2008 are “about even money.”3 Oh, and she managed, by a neat trick of contortionist logic, to argue on the July 25, 2006, episode of The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch that Bill Clinton’s bodaciously hetero womanizing is proof positive of “latent homosexuality”: ms. coulter: I think that sort of rampant promiscuity does show some level of latent homosexuality. . . . I think anyone with that level of promiscuity where, you know, you—I mean, he didn’t know Monica’s name until their sixth sexual encounter. There is something that is— that is of the bathhouse about that. [. . .] deutsch: But where’s the—but where’s the homosexual part of that? I’m—once again, I’m speechless here. ms. coulter: It’s reminiscent of a bathhouse. It’s just this obsession with your own—with your own essence. deutsch: But why is that homosexual? You could say narcissistic. [. . .] ms. coulter: Well, there is something narcissistic about homosexuality. Right? Because you’re in love with someone who looks like you. I’m not breaking new territory here, why are you looking at me like that?4 Did I mention that she mocked a hostile questioner at Indiana University in Bloomington as a “gay boy”?5 Coulter’s defense is that she’s a right-wing wag; humorless liberals who accuse her of gay bashing are just swimming into her gently smiling, Nicorette-scented jaws. Journalists seem to agree: conventional wisdom, among the media elite, holds that nobody takes her homophobic slurs seriously because, like the woman said, she’s an insult comic—okay,the kind whose“Reichsminister of Funny Walks” routine would have brought the house down at a Nuremberg rally, but a comic nonetheless. 5 9 W I M P S , W U S S I E S , A N D W . Another reason she hasn’t been Imus-ized is because she’s a mouth for hire, not the host of a TV show dependent on controversy-shy advertisers. Most important, racism—slavery, lynching, institutionalized discrimination—has taken a much greater toll, in the history of this country, than homophobia. According to an FBI report on hate crimes committed in 2005, most such attacks (54.7 percent) were racially motivated; only 14.2 percent were inspired by the sexual orientation of the victim.6 But there’s another...