MY GENERATION BABY!

Everybody’s got a different concept about what happened to Imus, so at the risk of beating a dead horse, I’d like to advance my own opinion.

I saw a photo of him from thirty years ago, and he was a cute kid. The photo was of him and a female fan who had volunteered to get naked in the studio for a publicity shot with him. It is an adorable portraiture of two young people having a great life. Hey, you’re only young once and it doesn’t last forever.

That’s the problem. Imus grew up, only his mind didn’t grow up with him. Substitute the Imus of 2007 for the Imus of 1977 in that photo, and instead of a cute young guy making hay with the girls, you got a crusty old pervert who doesn’t have the sense to act his age. When you’re young everything you do is cute. When you’re older, being cute is the kiss of death. Keith Richards already looks like a rhesus monkey. Acting like one and actually falling out of a coconut tree does not enhance his appeal. Mick Jagger doing the boogaloo in a sequined tube top at age 62 is not doing anything to boost his artistic reputation. Why don’t these musicians get Armani suits and Panama hats and play the blues like they’re supposed to? They could do what Ry Cooder did and record in Havana, or go down to the Cape Verde Islands and record steaming Portuguese Fado music with an African backup band. Now that would be cool!

People get weird when they get older, and it’s because they stop learning. When the Who’s Peter Townshend was downloading child pornography off his PC, did he really believe he wouldn’t get caught? Or is he just a fuckin’ moron who didn’t understand the implications of the digital new age? I vote for all of the above.


Billy Preston was a phenomenal organ player who recorded with the Beatles and had some terrific spiritual hits such as “That’s The Way God Planned It.” Did God plan for him to get caught and do jail time for pedophilia with young boys?

You can stay in the game when you get older, but you have to maintain your dignity. Even Rodney Dangerfield, not exactly a paradigm of decorous behavior, managed to maintain the public’s respect by reserving his worst shots for himself. Actually, if you think about it, Rodney Dangerfield, was more distinguished than Donald Trump the Billionaire, who has a thin skin, is a liar, and has a propensity for feuding with fat, useless lesbian comedians.

A big part of the problem is that people don’t realize they are old. Aging is a gradual process. Plus which, your vision gets softer, which is nature’s way of sparing you some of the harsher realities of life. I knew this guy, Papo, who was totally destroyed at age 50 from booze and crack. His face looked as though he had had smallpox and mumps and then been worked over by a sandblasting machine. “I look like a kid,” he told me just before he died from AIDS.

When Mick Jagger and Imus look in the mirror, that’s what they see – a kid. And that’s how they are behaving, like kids.

This infantilism is running wild in our society. Alberto Gonzalez’ dog ate his homework. George Bush doesn’t want to be confused by the facts, even as the Republican Party and indeed the whole world are voting with their feet in the other direction.

We seem to be part of a process of reverse Darwinism, natural selection in the reverse sense, where every generation is getting progressively stupider, until we eventually devolve back to apes and then one-cell nuclei, because people are insisting on favoritizing people who are stupider than they are and therefore no threat to them. I see it happening all over, and this tendency toward regression would be a rich mine of research for some fool with a lot of time to kill.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating a reversal of course – reversal to what? People have always been idiots and I don’t have to tax myself very hard to outsmart them.

But sometimes rationality gets lonely.

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Posted on 4/21/2007 ( Permanent Link )
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