After Blacksburg

After Blacksburg, anybody remember Imus? Tragedy swallows farce, and the ravenous media move on. But the puerility of American consumer culture persists. Imus's radio slander of the Rutgers women's basketball team was called everything from insensitive and outrageous to racist and imbecilic.

But the one thing it wasn't called is what it shares with so much else in American society today: it was egregiously juvenile, simply infantile. Who is it but the mindless adolescent who blurts out the kind of rude, scatological, stereotypical stuff that was Imus's stock and trade?

Adolescence today, however, seems less a state to be overcome than an aspiration of the consumer marketplace. Because we live in a culture, for all the tut-tut ting someone like Imus causes when he crosses the line, that supports and reinforces such behavior. The righteous condemnations coming from our moral cops recall the cynical Vichy police officer in Humphrey Bogart's Casablanca who, upon entering Rick's Café, is "shocked! shocked! that there is gambling going on here."

So we too affect to be "shocked" at the radio hosts like Imus and Howard Stern whom we have ourselves merrily dubbed shock jocks, even though they are being paid high-end salaries precisely to shock us, to test and cross the boundaries of tolerance and decency. When the real shocks come along -- a massacre at Blacksburg, more massacres in Baghdad - we give idiocy a break. Briefly. Then, it's back to puerility.

How different are the shock jocks from pundidiots like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, who traffic in hype, hyperbole and aggravated insult? They are scarcely to be distinguished from the gangsta rappers who go platinum demeaning women in equally gross terms. And doesn't the posturing NBC distribute some of hip hop's most graphic lyrics via its Interscope label, and produce films like Slither and Waist Deep singled out by the new F.C.A. report on marketing violence to teenagers? How come, post Imus, I just saw Snoop Dog on VH1 parading a couple of models on chain leashes?

What is new in America is not scatology or bigotry or violence, but a consumer culture that licenses and reinforces scatology and bigotry and violence by carefully nurturing infantilism - in order to sell all the things it needs to sell us that we don't really want or need. The culprits here are only secondarily Imus or Stern or Limbaugh or the rapper groups that years ago were already giving themselves names like "Niggas with Attitude." The real perpetrators are the networks that support them, the global media companies that profit from glamorizing crime -- has anyone linked the racist talk on the oh so fashionable TV series The Sopranos with Imus's rant or television's homicidal violence with Virginia Tech?

Behind the outrage against Imus is a simple reality the corporations busy punishing him don't want to acknowledge: puerility pays. So perhaps when Imus has made all his apologies and gone back to Texas, or to satellite radio (where nothing is taboo and all is forgiven), and after the earnest keepers of American righteousness are through venting about Blacksburg even as they aired Mr. Cho's sick photos, we ought to take a look at the underlying consumer culture that supports and reinforces the behaviors against which they spout. For it is with our support as consumers of polarizing, juvenile shock talk, and with the full complicity of the consumer corporations that have made stars not only of Imus and Stern and Coulter and Limbaugh but of Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton, that Imus peddled his intoxicatingly toxic talk and we consumed the Cho videos on NBC and YouTube.

So folks, until we identify and begin to resist the real culprits, let's at least be honest with ourselves. Imus may be gone, but even after the horrors of Blacksburg, Imus is us and we're still here.