Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
S everal years ago, when radio shock jock Don Imus took a cheap racial shot at C. Vivian Stringer’s Rutgers women’s basketball team, Coach Stringer responded like the lady that she is: Nothing at first, then gracious forgiveness a few days later.
As Coach Stringer reminded her girls, they had a championship to win, and needed no distractions.
Imus at least has saving graces. He does, after all, and has for years, funded and led a camp to provide cancer patient children of all races with an excellent outdoor experience.
Howard Stern, on the other hand, has made only one tangible contribution to society; he’s the punch line of a really good joke.
“What’s black and brown and looks good on Howard Stern ?”
Answer: a Rottweiler.
It was, therefore, no surprise when Stern’s rant about academy award nominee Gabby Sidibe (Precious) crossed both racial and taste boundaries.
It’s also no surprise that his website has attempted to erase evidence of Stern’s crudity, cruelty, and general bad taste, in his treatment of a young woman who is fully aware both of her talent and her size, following network news coverage (Network: defined as a thing Howard Stern has proven himself incapable of being on.)
Perhaps it is better to be African American, gifted, and plus size than it is to be talentless, stupid, and have to make a living mocking other people. Maybe we should ask Stern’s sycophantic sidekick, African American woman Robin Quivers, how she felt about Stern’s racial and gender slurs.
Oh, I forgot. She sold out to Howard the Coward years ago.
In case you haven’t noticed, Stern takes his cheap shots at talented people from the safety of his Sirius Satellite station desk, which, presumably, involves a station which he owns.
In case you haven’t followed his meteoric rise to mediocrity (or even, like me, been tangentially aware of it), Stern was never able to hold a job in network radio for very long.
Precious is not Gabby Sidibe, not by a long shot. The very giftedness lay in the fact that an outgoing, energetic, intelligent and funny young actress was able to portray an emotionally damaged teen so different from herself.
Like the lady she was apparently raised to be, Ms. Sidibe has (as of this writing) not responded to Stern’s remarks. If it was an attempt to get a reaction from his target, it appears to have failed miserably — the one thing Stern is obviously good at.
One realizes that, even by getting columnists to react, a shock jock has done the very thing he or she likes to do — gotten a reaction. I also realize, from past experience, that, with CNJ Online, this column may reach a certain number of Howard Stern groupies whose computers beep every time the key word appears.
Then, I get emails. Nasty ones.
There may be a really good side to this, yet. As I said to my wife when the story was on TV, maybe Howard Stern has finally gone too far, pushed it over the edge, this time.
Then he will end up where he ought to be — which is anywhere where he is not polluting the airwaves with his rancor.