The Ever Popular Anti-Liberal Liberal Double Reverse
Guest post by Steve M.
In The Boston Globe today, the novelist Elinor Lipman argues that we shouldn’t have been upset when MSNBC’s David Shuster asked whether Chelsea Clinton was being “pimped out” by her parents:
I learned of Shuster’s question and its fallout while watching “Countdown,” from its increasingly self-important and bombastic anchor Keith Olbermann, who added his own wah-wahs – “Utterly inappropriate and indefensible” – to the network’s apology. (“We are literally, dreadfully sorry. The Clintons have every right to be furious, hurt, and appalled.”) I waited for the “Not!”, unwilling to believe that Olbermann’s cynical ears had gone so delicate that he believed that Shuster for one millisecond was assigning any sexual-trafficking connotation to the Clinton campaign.
I would like to think that someone among the NBC brass noted, “That’s live TV for you,” or cited its noble twin, “Whatever happened to freedom of speech?
Er, freedom of speech comes with a cost. The people who hear you have freedom of speech, too, i.e., the freedom to say they thought you had a goddamn nerve to say what you said.
And as for “connotation,” it seems that Ms. Lipman has an interesting rule of thumb: If she can’t conceive of a slur being literally true, then nobody can, and therefore the use of that slur is perfectly OK:
Which brings me to Don Imus, who surely scarred and scared the Human Resources department of MSNBC. In April I squirmed as I listened to the funereal earnestness of the deeply offended Rutgers women’s basketball coach. Inherent in Vivian Stringer’s testimonials was seemingly an odd given: that sane people for one second took Imus’s offensive words seriously. It was as if she had to prove to a jury that these young women, caught in the crossfire of a stupid joke, weren’t in fact — you’ll forgive me, but for journalistic accuracy — “hos.” Did anyone in his or her right mind need to be disabused of Imus’s characterization?
Well, yes — actually, I do think some people would think virtually any young black woman is likely to be a “ho.” But maybe it’s been a while since Lipman met anyone who would think such a thing. This is from the bio at her Web site:
I live part-time in Manhattan, but mostly in the bucolic yet chi-chi (8 sushi bars) college town of Northampton, Mass., home of Smith College.
You live like that and how likely is it that you’re going to know anyone who literally thinks the Rutgers women were “hos” — or, at least, who’d say so out loud to you? Now, admittedly, I’m a Manhattanite, and these days I don’t run into a lot of people who say such things out loud either, but I don’t live in such an insular world that I’ve forgotten such people exist (and it’s only been a couple of years since I went back to the Boston neighborhood where I grew up and heard an elderly former neighbor railing against “niggers”).
By the way, for Ms. Lipman’s delectation, here’s a fuller transcript of what was said on the radio that day:
IMUS: That’s some rough girls from Rutgers. Man, they got tattoos and —
McGUIRK: Some hard-core hos.
IMUS: That’s some nappy-headed hos there. I’m gonna tell you that now, man, that’s some — woo. And the girls from Tennessee, they all look cute, you know, so, like — kinda like — I don’t know.
McGUIRK: A Spike Lee thing.
IMUS: Yeah.
McGUIRK: The Jigaboos vs. the Wannabes — that movie that he had.
IMUS: Yeah, it was a tough —
McCORD: Do The Right Thing.
McGUIRK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
IMUS: I don’t know if I’d have wanted to beat Rutgers or not, but they did, right?
ROSENBERG: It was a tough watch. The more I look at Rutgers, they look exactly like the Toronto Raptors.
IMUS: Well, I guess, yeah.
RUFFINO: Only tougher.
McGUIRK: The [Memphis] Grizzlies would be more appropriate.
Rough jigaboo hos. Yeah, they should have just shrugged that off, right?
Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.
MelodyMaker
says:Well done. Double reverse on free speech! Thanks for reminding me what Imus actually did. dat’s messed up. So’s this comment box.?
RonChusid
says:Er, freedom of speech comes with a cost. The people who hear you have freedom of speech, too, i.e., the freedom to say they thought you had a goddamn nerve to say what you said.
That’s the hard question–what should the cost be? Shuster’s comment was wrong on many levels. Besides the obvious distaste for calling Chelsea a pimp when the analogy doesn’t hold at all, his argument was nonsense even without the use of that word. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Chelsea campaigning for her mother, and plenty of other children of candidates do the same thing.
Shuster was definitely wrong, and anyone certainly has the right to criticize him for it. Beyond that it is sure hard to say what the appropriate response should be. While I don’t approve of what he said, and am not surprised that Hillary was mad, I am also concerned with a candidate for president calling for the firing of a journalist.
RonChusid
says:Obviously in the above comment it should say Schuster was wrong for using the word pimp in relation to Chelsea (as opposed to calling her a pimp which I wrote in error).
Crissa
says:Comment boxes don’t word wrap, so if you’re using a different sized font than the site’s designer, you may have trouble seeing it appropriately.
Also… I don’t understand the logic. We should accept people describing in ‘colorful terms’ when we see those terms as an insult, because… Some people don’t see the insult?
I’m confused.
MelodyMaker
says:Hell ya, Ron. I can only get a character per 2 seconds here, so I think I’ll leave it at htat. (!) time fro a reboo
Lena
says:Could we please put to rest the mistaken notion that Clinton was pushing for Shuster’s dismissal?
With Shuster’s remark occurring close on the heels of Chris Matthews’ recent comment against her — for which Matthews also was forced to apologize — Clinton was convinced that merely singling out employees for specific infractions was not going to be enough to change the relentlessly snide and sexist culture at MSNBC. That, clearly, was what she meant. Funny, it was the same conclusion I came to!
Since you can often tell the managers’ attitude by looking at the help, perhaps what’s needed at MSNBC is — more enlightened MANAGEMENT.
libra
says:6yr olds are being suspended from school for “sexual harassment”, when they kiss another 6yr old. It usually happens in those rarefied environments like Manhattan (which Ms Lipman inhabits) and I dare say she doesn’t think it’s ridiculous. Yet, Ms Lipman wants us to believe that, sexually-loaded terms like “pimp out” and “hos” are OK, when used in reference to young girls, because everyone knows it’s not true?
I wonder how Ms Lipman would feel if someone on TV referred to a group of young Jewish girls as “cross-slits”. Everyone knows it’s not true — Jewish girls are built like all other girls. All the same… That’s how Jewish women were often described in Poland of my teens. But, at least, not in MSM; only in private, when people thought they were talking to a like-minded asshole.
Free speech not withstanding, if you have no decency to put limits on your nonsense yourself, someone else will do it for you.
Laura
says:Damn. I love Elinor Lipman’s books. Love them – The Way Men Act and The Inn at Lake Devine in particular. But man is she ever wrong here. Which, BTW, I think despite having been born in Park Slope and raised in Northampton.
Katie
says:I agree with Elinor Lipman. An apology was in order, but the suspension was excessive. Schuster’s comment did seem rather mean-spirited, but this wasn’t hate speech by a long shot. And although she remains a teenager in the imagination of many, Chelsea Clinton is in fact a grown woman who was participating in public life by choice, not a defenseless child who should automatically be off-limits.
What was particularly annoying though, was that after Olbermann and MSNBC had made the larger than necessary gesture, the news headlines continued to report for days afterward that the Clintons were pissed off and contemplating shunning MSNBC. It made the Clintons look pretty thin-skinned at a moment in Sen. Clinton’s campaign when she was having enough trouble appearing gracious.
Steve
says:In opposition to post 9, I think MSNBC didn’t go far enough with the suspension. From a personal standpoint, had Shuster made such comment about my daughter, a serious portion of me would have wanted to reach for a crowbar. So long as the Imuses and Shusters of the world are allowed to walk away with mere wrist-slaps—or as Lipman would have, no penalty at all—the quality of the national discourse will continue its downward spiral.
Do I have the right to not watch Shuster? Do I have the right to boycott Imus? The answer is, in both cases, a resounding “yes”—and yet, my right of disassociation is inherently weakened by the consensus of noise that continue to support these individuals and their “junk-yard jocularity.”
The core failure is that we allow the envelope to be pushed just a we bit beyond the norm—and then we step back and allow the pushed envelope to become the norm.
ChicagoPat
says:Touchy, touchy! Some people get so offended just by having their daughters equated with whores on national television!
I’m certain Ms. Lipman would have no problem with me expressing my belief that she is a whore for the Republican party, renting out the use use of her hands for satisfaction of their immediate need for gratification… Right?
Danp
says:I don’t understand Crissa’s (4) comment. I’ve never seen a comment in different sizes or fonts. Has anyone else ever had this problem?
bubba
says:The biggest problem I have with Schuster’s comment is that it reeks of double standards across a wide spectrum of issues. I didn’t hear anyone in the media state that Romney was ‘pimping out’ his 5 boys by having them work near full-time on the Romney campaign–no, it was instead presented more of a long-lasting family outing. Nor did we ever hear that satan himself, VP Cheney, was ‘pimping out’ his daughters for the work they were doing for Bush/Cheney in 2000 and 2004. W didn’t hear anyone in the media claim that Bush was ‘pimping out’ Jenna and non-Jenna when they worked on behalf of Bush/Cheney in 2004. And hasn’t McCain’s 23 year old daughter Meghan been active in and blogged about her father’s campaign, but the media hasn’t stated he is ‘pimping’ her out. Had the asshats at MSNBC treated each of the candidates fairly and equally regarding the use of children in campaigns, then I would not have a problem. But there is a clear double standard when it comes to Mrs. Clinton and her campaign at MSNBC, particularly Chris Matthews. Schuster merely added the last straw.
Dan S
says:Elinor Lipman is a Clinton-hater, as evinced by this ridiculous poem she wrote on the Huffington Post mocking the Clinton marriage. It regurgitates all the hatred generated by the Republican noise machine over the past couple of decades.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elinor-lipman/little-nameless-unremem_b_86263.html
On the other hand, libra (comment #7) makes a ridiculous non-sequitor point about how Lipman presumably feels about six year olds and sexual harrassment, just because Lipman lives in Manhatttan! To make it worse, libra references a vile sexual insult that should have no place in civilized discourse. To her credit, libra condemns it, but why bring it up at all?
zhak
says:I read that piece in the Globe and thought it was awful of them to give this woman a platform to publish that garbage. It was not especially well-written & the opinions were half-baked at best. But perhaps I’m being overly critical because I didn’t agree with them.
The Shuster thing — Chelsea Clinton is a smart, classy and very very intelligent young woman. Even if I were the sort of person who uses the term “pimped” in some “hip” way, I would not think of it as applying to hear in any fashion whatever. That Chelsea ALONE was singled out — there ARE many OTHER candidates’ children who are campaigning for their parents — says to me that Shuster meant it specifically as a jab against Hillary Clinton. That makes it out of line, in addition to being crass and borderline misogynistic.
The Bush twins are nasty people — people of privilege who have openly behaved very badly and who made fools of themselves at the last Republican convention (amongst many other occasions). The term “pimped” might find a happier co-existence with them. But that would be horribly insulting, wouldn’t it?
zhak
says:augh — typo — “her” not “hear”
P-nut
says:Lets say for instance that a black radio voice makes a comment about a team with a white starting five.Then lets assume that these white boys all have buck teeth and shaggy beards.What if this black talk show host called them a bunch dumb hillbillies. I doubt that that would be even in the local news.