Stop me if you've heard this before: radio shock jock Don Imus is in hot water for saying something coarse and reprehensible. On any given weekday morning the syndicated bloviator and his on-air attack minions say horrible, hateful, and irredeemably offensive things about blacks, women, liberals, Jews, Muslims, fatties, handgun opponants, homosexuals, politicians, substance abusers, third world nations, Christians, Hollywood, HIV-positive, illiterate, at-risk and desperately poor people. Beanie-wearing jewboys and towel-headed sand worshipers walk hand-in-hand into the furnace of invective that Imus stokes every day like a blacksmith with a bellows. Imus has been consistent, incorrigible, insightful, irrelevent, egomanical, mind-numbingly boring and bafflingly mean spirited or soft hearted during his four decades of growling into a microphone. Personally, he is not my cup of tea.

Last Wednesday morning Imus described the Rutgers University women's basketball team, which had lost in the national championship game the night before, as being "nappy headed hos." His on-air apology Friday has not blunted the calls for Imus's firing by newspaper columnists, and the Rev. Al Sharpton who said, "I accept his apology, just as I want his bosses to accept his resignation." Unless Imus is gone in a week, Sharpton vows to picket New York's WFAN-AM, where Imus's show is broadcast and heard by millions on 70 radio stations around the country and simulcast on cable TV on MSNBC.

Is this the end of Rico? And if it is, isn't it delicious that the racially insensitive remark that may prove to be Imus's undoing is about hair? And that the man leading the protest is sporting a doo like Al Sharpton's! Is that irony, or simply reality? Imus said nothing that isn't celebrated on BET hip hop videos where black womanhood is manifested by booty-bouncing, bling-seeking, boob-revealing women hanging off obscenely wealthy, Moet-popping, high school dropouts with diamond studded teeth who keep it real by singing of mean streets where every man is armed and every king is a pimp. As hurtful as Imus's "nappy haired hos" comment may have been, he didn't invent or poplarize that word or that spelling to describe black women. Imagine if he had used the b-word or the n-word-that-ends-with-an-"a"-which-somehow-makes-it-OK-to-say-as-long-as-you're-a-nizzle. Sure it was a mean thing to say, but Imus simply held up a mirror to a society where white people don't say things like "nappy haired hos" and mean it. His joke was not about tattoo-sporting women on a Rutgers basketball team called the Lady Knights. It was about a language and a culture where the word lady is alien.

Photo Credit: Google image of a 1973 Imus LP album cover.