Imus Is Dead

Since we're coming off Christmas, I shall adapt a line from A Christmas Carol: "Imus was dead. Dead as a doornail."

Don Imus was a morning radio host in NYC, a so-called "shock jock", for almost 50 years. As I've blogged about before, he was awful on the air and apparently in life too. His ratings were bad. His health was bad. His humor was really bad -- offensive without being thought-provoking, hateful just for the sake of it, childish in its sophistication, a classic example of a privileged rich white man who punched down from a position of safety, an overgrown school-yard bully.

He was often compared to, and was a rival to, Howard Stern. But whereas Howard was and is a brilliant social satirist, a person whose words and humor always have a greater point, a man who makes fun of himself more than anyone else, Imus was empty, mean-spirited Id, attacking wildly and wantonly at anyone weaker than him. 

Just awful.

That said, in a perverse way, one has to admire his life and career, not for quality but quantity. Despite his lack of talent and ratings, despite his addiction problems and stormy personal life, despite the fact that everyone hated him, he managed -- someway, somehow -- to stay on the air in morning radio in NYC for nearly half a century.

That is incredible just unto itself.

As I age, I realize that the greatest achievement in life isn't money or fame or any of the classic monikers of success -- it's just being able to survive, holding on, going on, keeping on, living and then living some more, working and then working some more, and on and on and on. Someday, of course, careers and lives will end -- as they did for Imus -- but he managed to muddle through much longer than either his talent, ratings, or health would have otherwise predicted.

We should all be so lucky. 

Imus is, to me, a dual role model -- the kind of person I don't ever want to be (he was a bad guy and I wanna be a good guy) but also the kind of person I desperately want to be -- a survivor who keeps going until the bitter end.