Don Imus and Mike Nifong II: How are the Mighty Fallen

The Imus and the Nifong "cases" are so fascinating because they tell us much about ourselves as a society and our own fears, resentments and unspoken anxieties. This essay tries to take apart some of the things we learn from these striking cases. The "lessons" are in no particular order; perhaps you can add to the list.

1. It really is true--we are often our worst enemy. We often speak of people who want to injure us, to bring us down, to "get even" with us. If we don't speak this way we often mention "rivals" or "competitors" whom we want to best. But the older I get the more I believe that this isn't true or isn't largely true. In general, people are too hung up with their own lives to be much concerned with yours. There are struggles, to be sure, in life, but we don't primarily fight against others; we primarily fight against ourselves. We know we shouldn't eat that extra dessert but we do; we know we shouldn't get ourselves in situations that show our worst part, but we do. We know we should avoid certain words and actions, but we nevertheless do them. Sometimes, of course, we are blindsided in life (see points below), but often we enter into our own disaster willingly and with eyes open. Both Don Imus and Mike Nifong did this. Misplaced prosecutorial zeal, which may have been fueled both by resentment and a desire to be re-elected, lay at the heart of Mike Nifong's ill-considered prosecution; a history of loose lips, met with roaring approval from appreciative fans, led Don Imus to push the envelope into an area where all should fear to tread--insults against accomplished African-Americans solely because of their race and gender.

2. Both cases are drenched in what one might call the "symbolisms" of our day. In the Duke case you have the richest of the rich (lacrosse players at a "near Ivy" school) behaving in a fairly loose and irresponsible way, by hiring a stripper at a party in a college-owned house, but in a way that has been "winked at" for years. Rich white boys in our society can act irresponsbly, and dad and his bevy of lawyer friends will always be there to bail 'em out. But Mike Nifong was going to put a stop to this. He was going to side with the "little guy"--in this case an African-American woman--from the "other side" of the tracks, a woman who "danced" in addition to going to school and raising her children in order to make ends meet. We know all three types; the privileged rich, the woman struggling to make ends meet, the zealot who wants to "make justice happen."

And because we know all three types, we could have typescripted a lot of the case. We have a baby-boomer DA who never had the breaks himself to go to the elite schools, who had been known as a scrupulous defender of the "little guy," who probably carried a life-long chip on his shoulder because of the protected enclave known as Duke University that was within his county. I think it enrages some people to drive past an athletic field at 3:00 p.m. on a sunny day and see slim and trim college boys, with wavy hair and easy smiles, with admiring girls looking at them, flinging around a lacrosse ball instead of working. But, in fact, these white boys, who seem so defenseless and vulnerable in their little blue shorts, are very well protected. They have a "security system" that the President of the United States would admire.

The Imus case also has its symbolism that can only be understood in the history of the evolution of American values. He is who he is because of America's increasing tolerance of "shock" techniques on the public airways. This tolerance arose in the late 1980s and was fueled primarily by the aging of baby-boomers, many of whom disagreed with the self-righteousness of the "affirmative action" crowd, which had the ears and pocketbooks of the rich and mighty in the 1970s. That is, the "rage" that allows vituperative and insulting language on the public airways is a response to a system which those enraged felt was an "overcorrection" of what everyone agrees is wrong: explicit racism. But when the shock jocks took to the airwaves in the 1980s and 1990s, they seemed to think that nothing was sacred in America anymore. But indeed, there were sacred cows that you just couldn't attack. Or, better said, there was the looming issue of "race" out there, which you had to be careful how you handled because of America's historic experience in mistreating African-Americans. But with the advent of Fox TV's news in the late 1990s, with Bill O'Reilly and others, race-baiting was returning to the public airwaves. Imus just carried that race-baiting one step further--by insulting people of demonstrated and unquestionable accomplishment who apparently had no means of fighting back. If Imus had been allowed to get away with his comments, it would mean that scores of "lesser Imuses" would have been emboldened to do the same. Indeed, the three-word phrase uttered by Imus in characterizing the Rutgers women has now entered into the vocabulary of many racists, and others, already.

3. These cases teach us that pain is a life-changing experience and, if it is rightly felt, leads to good. The Duke University lacrosse players held a press conference yesterday to say how their lives had been a living hell for the 13 months since the March 2006 incident. Parenthetically, I think Duke University made a mistake by suspending two indicted students pending the investigation. Isn't that a little like a judgment before the facts were in, the very thing that Duke University President Richard Brodhead chided prosecutor Nifong for doing? Laying that issue aside, these three young men (and, for that matter, eight women on the Rutgers Univ. basketball team) now know, just as surely as they breathe air, what it feels like to suffer untold pain at the hands of someone who really had no concern for them personally, someone who treated them as a sort of gratuitous pawn in their larger ideological, political or entertainment agenda. But what I have learned about pain, especially pain unjustly or relatively unjustly suffered, is that if you give it long enough and are courageous enough to face the emotions unleashed by the pain, you become a stronger, better and more complete human being. Certainly the Duke players have more than residual anger at Michael Nifong; indeed, the Rugters players can be forgiven for carrying animus toward Imus. But if they give the matter some time, and examine the way unjust treatment and the pain that flows from it humiliates and shames them, they have the potential of rising to a level of strength and confidence that simply was not available to them previously. This, then, is one of the mysterious ironies of life: that those most abused are the ones who have the potential to become the most understanding, the deepest, the most gracious people. I would say to the Duke and Rutgers players--don't lose this opportunity.

As for Nifong and Imus, however, there will be different roads to tread. They will be brought low, as they have been already, and they can respond to it in two ways. They can respond the way that William Bennett has responded to his bad behavior--by ignoring it and still trying to be a political commentator. Or, they can respond to it by realizing that they have done some pretty bad things. Is there redemption for those who realize this? I don't know, but it will be a lonely and long road to get there. I, frankly, wish them well--they will need all the good wishes they can get to mend what they have done.

Conclusion--American Rage

But there remains one unsettling issue--the kind of rage in America that seems to be behind the shock techniques of Don Imus and the prosecutorial decisions of Michael Nifong. The next essay (not yet written) explores this anger through looking at another recent event.

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