by Richard Stern

I have just listened to the Chaconne of Bach's second partita, a piece played by the violinist Joshua Bell in a Washington D.C. Metro station back in January while a Washington Post reporter watched 1,600 odd people hurry by on their way to work, only four or five pausing to take in a smidgen of one of mankind's greatest creations. People. I begin with this human-all-too-human (Nietzsche) anecdote as I write about Don Imus, the 66-year-old self-exhibiting radio performer, who, last Friday, slid along one of the worst of his many talk lines, as he mouthed (imitated?) one of the pathetic, self-boosting clichés of the wounded, black male about accomplished, beautiful, brilliant or otherwise successful black women whom the male wants to denigrate. Imus, following the low lead of his complexly semi-racist producer, Bernard McGirk, laughingly said that the triumphant Rutgers University women's basketball team looked like "nappy-headed hos." Protests, soon spearheaded by the usual spear carriers, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, called for Imus to be permanently denied the publicly financed airways. For the last two years, somewhat to my own surprise, I wake at 5:00 or 5:30 a.m. and make my way through the dim corridor to the day's activity via the Imus program. An enormous amount of it consists of Imus's daily report about his health and mood-- frequently poor--or about his recent, unexciting doings; another great chunk consists of his selling some of the Imus products--household cleansers, Salsa--the profits of which go to a New Mexico ranch which he and his deeply decent wife Deirdre run for "kids with cancer." Another great chunk boosts other worthy causes he champions or the books of his guests. Perhaps the most brilliant and original part of the 3-hour-long show consists of well-written and delivered aria-like spiels by the actor Rob Bartlett or McGirk as they imitate such public figures as Cardinal Egan, Bill Clinton, Alberto Gonzales, Jerry Falwell, or Dr. Phil. Imus himself is frequently the target of these spiels and laughs along with others as his body, his marriage, his complaints, and his activities are mocked, ridiculed, and damned. Like millions of others, I have grown almost addicted to these shenanigans, jokes, ploys, and characters. Imus's opinions, the most Philistine of which annoy me no end, often at least rime with my own. He was one of the first public personalities to be outraged by the Iraq war, and he doesn't hesitate to call President Bush and Vice President Cheney war criminals and imbeciles. Meanwhile he champions an odd array of political and other favorites, Rick Santorum, Joe Biden, Joe Lieberman, and Harold Ford, the military analyst Jack Jacobs, Howard Fineman, Evan Thomas, and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, the reporting staff of NBC, Brian Williams on down, and many country musicians, a very few of whose songs I, surprisingly, enjoy. Occasionally I get tired of the program--it is very repetitive and an hour of it five days a week more than suffices. Imus's endless strip tease ultimately reveals what a peeled onion does. His many sensible, often impassioned views are often subverted by his mercurial character which is what happened last Friday in the remarks for which he will be suspended for two weeks. Nonetheless, I want to make the record here by saying that he is one of the few genuinely interesting people who fill the airwaves of the country, that he ultimately stands for many good things and that as far as a mere listener can tell, he is a better human being than many of those who rush to get him permanently off the air. Which does not mean that he should not pay the price--suspension and a permanently soiled reputation--for these years of public self-exhibition and idling self-indulgence which have made him rich, influential, powerful, and the object of jealously, envy, and hatred.