I was at Bradley International Direct Flight to Amsterdam Fun Palace We’re Sorry the Rehab Isn’t Done Yet Airport the other day, doing important research on beer and fried stuff for the Hartford Business Journal.
Before long, I switched research topics and began studying how women decided which fashion/lifestyle/Hollywood kinds of magazines to buy at the news cubicles.
It’s the covers. Many of the young women never made it past the magazine covers in deciding which of the 305 featured stars, starlets or sexual secrets to please your man to take on the plane.
It’s all very confusing. Most of those Hollywood guys look like Cohen the Columnist clones. I can’t tell one from another. And all those magazine covers are full of trivial, grandiose stuff to entice readers to buy, buy, buy.
It’s not right. Imagine if you decided whether to read the Hartford Business Journal, based on the front-page stories about, well, you know, Hartford and stuff. You would never get to the picture of Cohen — and newspaper circulation would drop faster than developer interest in the Front Street project downtown.
That’s why the Business Journal features me on billboards and bus panels, so you remember the important stuff inside.
‘Noose’ Controversy
This brought back memories of the “noose” controversy earlier this year involving Golfweek magazine, which featured a great, big old noose on its front cover, to illustrate a story about the Golf Channel anchorwoman who joked that Tiger Woods might be lynched by other pro golfers frustrated by his success.
So, the anchorwoman got suspended because Tiger Woods is black, and lynching is an ugly reminder of the bad old days in the South.
And then, the magazine editor got fired. At the time, I shrugged off the editor thing as political correctness run amok. But, after watching magazine sales at the airport, I wonder if the magazine editor deserved a marketing award.
As Cohen the Consumer rather than Cohen the Columnist, I am a lousy golfer who likes golf — but not quite as much as I like politics and policy and stuff. I never would have made an impulse buy of Golfweek magazine, if it had a cover story about the best new putters and 15 new sex tricks to please your woman. But the noose thing? At the time of the controversy? Maybe.
This kind of “controversy” sniffs of white folks wanting to sort-of-apologize to black folks, without actually having to shake hands and say, “I’m sorry.”
Did the Golf Channel anchor actually want the golfers to don white sheets and lynch Tiger Woods?
Did Don Imus, the radio shock-jock, actually intend to deceive us into believing that the Rutgers women’s basketball players were “whores?” Of course not. Crude talk is his schtick. He had a huge audience not in spite of his crudity, but because of it.
And did the Golfweek editor intend to encourage us to go out into the neighborhoods, looking for blacks to lynch? Of course not. He wanted to sell magazines.
This kind of adolescent sensitivity about language is particularly complicated for professional communicators.
In a National Review magazine cover article in February, John O’Sullivan offered apology and self-doubt before gingerly describing Barack Obama as “a combination of black charm and Swiss efficiency.”
In his new book, “The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias makes Race Relations Worse,” Stanford Law School professor Richard Thompson Ford describes this kind of squeamishness as “racism without racists.”
We need to grow up about language, lest we diminish the meaning of “racism” to only symbol and never substance.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
