Don Imus is back, kind of sort of. He will no longer be on Clear Channel, nor will he be simulcast on MSNBC, and the radio deal he has now netted places him on considerably less stations than on which he formerly appeared. By virtue of this fact alone, he will command a considerably lesser audience than he previously enjoyed. Former sidekick Charles McCord evidently will not be returning, although former show producer Bernard Magurk, who also came under harsh criticism for supposedly racist and/or racially insensitive remarks, will return, along with two African American regulars.
In one of his initial appearances, taped in front of a studio audience, Imus declared that he would not make the young women of the Rutgers University basketball team (formerly known as “nappy headed hos”) feel like fools for accepting his apology. However, he has also assured his listeners that he would not be a “kinder, gentler” Imus.
Translation-Imus is going to limit his criticisms to the “institutionalized racist white power structure”, which he will probably mercilessly slice, gut, and filet as badly as was he himself by the race card drivers, notably the Reverend Al Sharpton, who promises that he will be listening.
I was of the hopes that Imus would land on his feet and get a contract with FX or with Sirius satellite, and would be as mercilessly brutal with all groups equally. Instead, Don Imus seems content to spend his twilight years all but not so much put out to pasture as a gelding-which would have been preferable-but to play at appeasing his hordes of detractors as the sad joke of a media cuckold that I very much fear he has now become.
Like Al Sharpton, I too will be listening, when and if possible, in the probably vain hope that Imus will, as they say, "grow a pair". However, I am not expecting much.
True, geldings have been known to do well in some races. They have been even known to win.
Unfortunately, the most obviously unavoidable aspect of geldings is that by their nature, and by definition, they leave no legacy to speak of. Such will be the case, I am afraid, with this latest incarnation of the late, once great Don Imus (g).
