Flappy-bedded toes

Yes, I hate to admit that I’m going to be yet another of the hundreds of people weighing in with an opinion on the pious sacrifice of Don Imus to the vengeful gods of Political Correctness. In a brief survey of the Internet, I have found, for starters, only the Rude Pundit and Kinky Friedman (though there may be more) coming to his defense, as distinguished from the dozens who have disemboweled him and fed his entrails to the jackals. It naturally stands to reason that the Rude Pundit would defend him, since he himself actually brags about a level of political incorrectness which exceeds that of Imus by orders of magnitude. Friedman not only passionately protests Imus’s sacrificial slaughter but goes on to praise him for his charitable work and to compare his martyrdom with those of “Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, Joan of Arc, [and] Mozart.” (Excuse me? Mozart?) I, on the other hand, tend to agree with Pundit, who maintains that Imus was an insufferably obnoxious asshole (and who should know better than Pundit?). But that’s the whole point of freedom of speech. As I have vigorously argued for years, freedom of speech means absolutely nothing if it does not mean the freedom to be an obnoxious asshole. Evidently none of Imus’s executioners ever heard, or if they heard, ever took to heart, the maxim attributed to Voltaire about disagreeing with what someone says but defending to the death his right to say it. And to call it hate speech? Come on, pussies! There wasn’t a trace of hatred in Imus. Recklessness and imprudence perhaps, but nothing approaching hatred. Anybody who could not recognize to begin with that it was just another of his many thoughtlessly crude attempts to be funny, or who could not accept his apologies which tried to point this out to the humor-impaired, just needs to stop taking themselves so fucking seriously and get a goddamn life! If I were anywhere near that pathologically sensitive to being called a fag or a homo, I’d be a worse basket case than I already am. He apologized, fer crissakes, but this does not satisfy the tar-and-feather mob. They want blood, not contrition.

No, this is just another sorry spectacle of what we get when we let the Political Correctness fascists run rampant and unchecked, as they have been doing for decades, to the grievous detriment of any open and honest communication in the pitiful pack of sniveling losers and self-declared victims that this sick fucking society has become. When I get further depressed by reading Joe Bageant, I lose all hope of ever seeing this tragically failed nation of ours get its shit together and pull back from the brink. A growing number of recent cartoons depicts us as lemmings happily running over a cliff. (“Well, if everyone’s doing it, it must be all right.”) A sadly apt metaphor, I fear.

Life imitates comedy

Way back in 16 December, in my post on “Books I’m reading,” I referred to a passage in Lenny Bruce’s How to talk dirty and influence people (1965) in which he uses a humor skit, presented as a hypothetical argument between Bruce and a night club owner, to discuss the hypocrisy of the latter refusing to put “Tits and Asses” on his marquee because they are dirty, vulgar words.

“Titties are dirty and vulgar?”

No, … it’s not the titties, it’s the words, it’s the way you relate them. You can’t have those words where kids can see them.

“Didn’t your kid ever see a titty?”

I’m telling you, it’s the words.

“I don’t believe you. I believe, to you, it’s the titty that’s dirty, because I’ll change the words to ‘Tuchuses and Nay-nays Nightly!’ ”

That’s a little better.

“Well, that’s interesting. You’re not anti-[Yiddish] idiomatic, you’re anti-Anglo-Saxon idiomatic. Then why don’t we get really austere? Latin: Gluteus maximus and Pectorales majores Nightly!’ ”

Now, that’s clean.

“To you, schmuck—but it’s dirty to the Latins!”

Now, to show how little progress has been made since Lenny died for our sins, this just in from a recent “News of the Weird” column. “The Atlantic Theater in the Jacksonville FL suburb of Atlantic Beach planned to stage several dramas this winter, including Eve Ensler’s ‘The Vagina Monologues,’ but following an undisclosed number of complaints from parents who said they were uncomfortable seeing that title, management changed its marquee to ‘The Hoohaa Monologues.’ (The change lasted one day, until management realized it was barred by contract from calling the play by another name.)” A Google on “hoohaa” hits a story from News4Jax.com, which was probably the source for the “N-o-t-W” piece, and which reveals, as I suspected, that the complaint(s) came from just one woman. Makes you wonder what kind of problems the poor lady had. (“Well, just seeing it up there in public made me feel funny in my, uh – hoohaa. And I didn’t like the feeling!”)