WHY IMUS ANYWAY?

A couple of days ago, Bulworth (hope your tooth is feeling better) was having a bad reaction to this New York Times article about Don Imus and the regular guests who won't abandon him -- particularly these passages in the Times article:

...his show is one of the few places where [politicians] can talk seriously and at length about public issues....

He fills a demand for serious discussion on contemporary radio ....

I've never really been an Imus listener (or watcher) -- I know the show mostly from clips and transcripts -- but it does seem there's at least some level of seriousness there ... mixed in with a lot of manly chortling and chest-thumping and feces-flinging.

And then, of course, there's the gang atmosphere of the show, captured in a Vanity Fair profile of Imus recentle quoted by Digby:

I can feel the high of becoming part of his incestuous circle of regulars -- the media elite who have entree with the I-Man and have never seemed troubled, at least publicly troubled as far as I can tell, by the show's forays over the years into homophobia and crudeness and sexism. I like this idea of being right in there with columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich of The New York Times and NBC's Andrea Mitchell and David Gregory and Tim Russert..., all Imus regulars. I wonder if there's some secret media-elite handshake I need to learn....

Isn't this a bizarre combination? Isn't it odd that powerful people, mostly white men, gather to discuss the fate of the world (at least semi-seriously) in an atmosphere full of grade-school insults and secret-club insularity?

Then I think: Er, isn't that what we always heard about the Bohemian Grove, the secret California retreat for the powerful?

From Philip Weiss's 1989 Spy magazine story on the Grove:

...Meanwhile, [Henry] Kissinger had been offering Rocard advice: "I told him, 'Do anything you want, hide in the bushes -- just don't let them see you.'" Rocard was Michel Rocard, the prime minister of France, and this was a secret trip. No one was supposed to know he was peering up at ospreys and turkey vultures and hearing Soviet speakers along with former American secretaries of State and the present secretary of the Treasury. And David Rockefeller too. And Dwayne Andreas, the chairman of Archer-Daniels-Midland. Merv Griffin. Walter Cronkite....

"My friends don't understand this," a pudgy 35-year-old in front of me confided to his companion. "I know that if they could see it, they would see how terrific it is. It's like great sex..."

It was the sort of analogy I was to hear often in the nearly 60 hours I spent inside the Grove.

The friend and I leaned closer. "It's more than it's cracked up to be. You can't describe it," he explained....

You know you are inside the Bohemian Grove when you come down a trail in the woods and hear piano music from amid a group of tents and then round a bend to see a man with a beer in one hand and his penis in the other, urinating into the bushes. This is the most gloried-in ritual of the encampment, the freedom of powerful men to pee wherever they like... Tacked to one of these haplessly postprandial trees is a sign conveying the fairy-dust mixture of boyishness and courtliness that envelops the encampment: GENTLEMEN PLEASE! NO PEE PEE HERE!...

At lakeside the grass was crowded for the day's talk. Under the green parasol stood General John Chain, commander of the Strategic Air Command, who spoke of the country's desperate need for the Stealth B-2 bomber. "I am a warrior and that is how I come to you today," he said. "I need the B-2."

The important men come out for the Lakeside Talks, and each speaker seems to assume that his audience can actually do something about the issues raised, which, of course, it can....

Other Lakeside speaking is more indulgent. Here Nicholas Brady examined the history of the Jockey Club. Here William Buckley described how he had sat at his desk and cried upon learning of Whittaker Chambers's death. Here Henry Kissinger made a bathroom pun on the name of his friend Lee Kuan Yew....

A high point of the middle weekend was the performance of The Low Jinks, the Grove's elaborate musical-comedy show....

This year's Low Jinks was called Sculpture Culture, and the humor was not just lame but circa-1950s college follies lame. Rex Greed, an effeminate gallery owner who sells toilets ("a counterpoint of mass and void"), tries to convince artist Jason Jones Jr. that his future lies in sculptures composed of garbage....

The girls were all played by men, and every time they appeared -- their chunky legs and flashed buttocks highly visible through tight support hose -- the crowd went wild. After one character called the secretaries in the show "heifers," the audience couldn't resist breaking into "moos" every time they came back onstage. But the biggest crowd pleaser was Bubbles Boobenheim, a showgirl turned patroness who rubbed her prosthetic behind against the elevator doors at stage left....

The only difference is that Imus has put a microphone and cameras in his little Bohemian Grove, so the rabble can watch the powerful cavort.