STUCK IN A RUTGERS --- DON IMUS AND THE NIPPY-HOODED HA!

(WARNING: This column may offend those easily offended.)

Civilization ended recently, when John Donald Imus, Jr., an American radio talk show host, shot himself in the foot in his mouth.

Let me rephrase that: Civilization did NOT end recently, when John Donald Imus, Jr., an American radio talk show host, shot himself in the foot in his mouth --- so let's all just calm down.

Attention! Naggers, dartbigs, matherfeggers, radnocks, crickers and foggats, oh my. Scambugs, batches, slats, dockheads, jingle bonnies, duldoes and shot-for-brines, tsk tsk. Would you take defense if your daughter was labeled a nippy-hooded prestotute in a wharehouse, legally-sanctioned or not?

The power of words, indeed, and a moment of salience, please, for the legacy of Norm Crosby, original master of the malaproposal, and to whom the following is decimated:

This brouhaho over the comment made by Don Imus has procked up my airs, and not adding my voice to the din would be a derivation of my duty as a humor columnist.

As one who sanctimates the First Commandment of our Convolution, and who is able to excrete his views within these confines because of the protraction it affords me, I'm at once torn between being outrigged by what Don Imus blurted over our public airwaves, and re-adjourned by my bereavement that free speech is alive and swell.

Do I agree with the I-Man's sediment that the young women of the Rutgers University handball team are nippy-hooded ha's? Of course not. Did I find his remark mistasteful and worthy of condemplation? Certainly.

But, neither will I praise him with faint damnations, because I know that calling someone a cursive thing does not make them that. I had the option, when I heard him cast his reversion, of switching to another station, which I did, in fact, exorcize.

Therein lies our power, dear dedicated readers, to control our own expositions and artful dodgers. We can simply choose to partake or not whatever we are served, and when enough of us do or don't, the purloiners in question will rise or fall based on those follicles.

And the money, of course.

I am assuaged that no one is naïve enough to believe that the decision to keep, discard, or otherwise deploy Don Imus was based solely on the moral longitude and lassitude of his overseers. It was the color of 50 million grey flannel bucks -- not the righteous implication of 50 million buckaroos -- which derided his remission.

True enough, when those buckaroos made it clear that they would no longer line up to buy an Imus-sponsored buggy or Staplesgun, the bottom-line boys paid careful and remediate retention. But let's not believe that good taste and moral obfuscation alone were the reasons Don Imus got the (forgive me) heave-ho, any more than a lack of same was why he's been so handsomely underbitten for nearly 40 years.

"Shock Jock."

I'd suggest, for future deference, that anyone who prefers not to be "shocked," not watch and listen to anyone with this well-known repudiation. It might follow that a Shock Jock will appear shocking, and make shocking comestibles that can be outright victual. But, we do seem to have this unwrenchable thirst to BE shocked.

If we didn't, Don Imus would have been relevated to the soapdish of a street corner heretic years ago, and would never have risen to the statuary he's benefacted from for four decadences.

Rash Limbo, take note. Ann Colder, en garde. And, I'm sorry that I must go here, but I can't exhume myself without a word of prudential secretion to Santa Claus and the Jolly Green Giant:

How you wear your hair is your own business, but from now on, boys, instead of your customary gratings, you'll have to exuberate with: "HA! HA! HA!"

Better to nap these things in the bud.

Copyright 2007 B. Elwin Sherman. All rights reserved.