Implosion

Oh, please. Is fried food aficionado Paula Deen’s career really going up in smoke because she admitted under oath that she has, at one time or other, referred to black people as “niggers”? Can that be? A white 60-something Southerner essentially cops to being a white 60-something Southerner and renounces her transgressions and swears that it’s been years, perhaps decades, since her last offense and we still want her head on a plate?

I’m no Paula Deen apologist, believe me. Were she being pilloried for advocating unhealthy eating habits, that I could get behind. She wears way too much makeup, too. Are the fashion police on sabbatical or something? And she’s a cartoon, for godsakes, a sad and rather insulting (to people of non-color) cultural stereotype. Spank her for those things. But this? This is goofy. No, wait. It’s insidious. And it makes me wonder whether we, at long last, have left no sense of decency. Or proportion.

And don’t even get me started about this positively infantile business of substituting “the ‘N’ word” for every instance of “nigger.” I have a penis, not a “pee-pee.” I don’t “go number one” with it, either. And if somebody says “nigger,” in whatever context and for whatever reason, that’s what they say.