Pondering Cho Seung-Hui and Don Imus
April 19, 2007
One shot from the lip. The other from every place else.
There’s nothing but an adjoining news cycle that connects Don Imus to Cho Seung-Hui.
Both stories have consumed me.
As a kid in San Francisco, where Imus’ show wasn’t even heard, I was a would-be broadcaster who briefly followed the I-Man’s path and idolized him. I understand his fall.
But like everyone else, I’m trying to understand Cho’s.
In the aftermath of the horrific Virginia Tech tragedy, we’ve all become amateur psychologists.
But as an adult Asian American who has written a column for 12 years called “Amok,” and a book in 2000 with the same name, I recognize something in the idea of the amok that may help.
Derived from the Malay term, amoq, William Marsden’s 18th-century dictionary defined an amok as one who engages “furiously in battle attacking with desperate resolution, rushing in a state of frenzy to the commission of indiscriminate murder.”
Filipinos referred to it as juramentado, where an armed person with pent-up ANGER and rage, runs into a crowd of people and begins a wild shrieking violent orgy, only to snap out of the state later, as though awakening from a bad dream. That is, if the amok doesn’t kill himself first. To go amok tends to be an act of suicide during a time of war
As a writer I have long embraced the term because it seemed an apt metaphor for some explosive assertiveness by a silent and docile Asian American community.
But I’ve only intended my writing to kill a few stereotypes.
Sadly, Cho’s graphic writing went beyond metaphor, implying mental instability. Indeed, health officials prior to the incident referred to Cho’s mental illness and how he could be a danger to himself. Reports say Cho was under medication for depression and that his creative writing teachers Nikki Giovanni and Lucinda Roy thought him to be troubled and sought help.
But no one listened. Some who saw the signs reached out, briefly. But when rebuffed by Cho, they allowed him to go down his own dark path.
We all should pay attention to the signs and reach out a bit more.
Even with the packet and videos sent to NBC, the writing doesn’t prove pre-meditation so much as it shows the anger of a loon taken too far.
DON’T FORGET THE US IN IMUS
“Nappy-headed ‘ho?”
Like the Top 40 radio contest of old, it was last week’s “phrase that pays”—at least for Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and others.
It was the odd mantra during their swift, unrelenting and ultimately successful campaign to fire MSNBC and CBS talk host Imus — who had uttered the crude and derogatory phrase about the Rutgers women’s basketball team.
But the victory seems hollow, mostly because it came in such an opportunistic and bullying way, and focused on just one man: Imus, who for all his verbal transgressions is a Hall of Fame broadcaster with a record of humanitarianism and charitable giving.
What about the others in the mainstream media who have said equally insulting things against Asian Americans in particular?
Remember Tarsha Nicole Jones, host of the Miss Jones in the Morning show on New York radio’s Hot 97, who in 2005 made fun of Asians and others victimized by a deadly tsunami?
There was a grassroots boycott of advertisers and demands for Miss Jones’ head.
But ultimately, after only a brief time off the air, Jones kept her job and broadcasts to this day.
How about Rosie O’Donnell? She remains on The View after mocking Asians with a ching-chong accent. She deserved the Imus treatment.
Instead, she got a pass after apologizing and saying she didn’t know that using the ching-chong voice was considered offensive.
That is Ah-so not credible.
Just how racist and sexist were Imus’s remarks if he thought he was being as racist and sexist as our culture allowed? He was being his routinely offensive and funny self, aping urban street talk, an aging, white rock ‘n’ roll cowboy deejay, trying to show he’s got “street cred.”
But he had misread the country’s race barometer. And his crude remarks failed as satire because the target was too lowly. Imus wasn’t the jester going after Kings or Queens. He was a member of the powerful media elite going after young women who could be your daughters.
But what about CBS, which fired Imus for his remarks, yet continues to cash in on its Viacom-owned cable music properties that pimp the often racist and misogynistic patois of rap and hip-hop culture?
When is Viacom going to pull the plug on all that?
There was more than enough hypocrisy to go around last week. Even Jesse Jackson had to sidestep the memory of his calling New York “Hymietown.”
But it didn’t stop him or Sharpton. They had Imus by the throat. And they knew they didn’t have to accept an apology. Let the basketball team do that. The Revs wanted blood.
So they killed the show. And now they’re cashing in. An e-mail this week from Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Push Coalition boasted: “We won!”
Calling it a “victory for dignity over degradation,” the e-mail asks to click on an “Imus is Gone” link to donate up to $1,000 to Jackson’s coalition.
Imus is gone. But not Miss Jones and Rosie.
We shouldn’t let Imus’ career die for the sins of the culture while giving other broadcasters a pass.
Any effort to reform the culture must go beyond black and white. Activists of all colors had better show that the cultural reform of standards extends to the entire society, broadly and diversely.
That means Asian Americans, too.
Comments
Got something to say?