I just did something I know I’ll regret. I violated my own standards. I knuckled under. I played it safe.
I censored this week’s episode of my own radio program, Big Talk.
Ugh!
Now, inasmuch as all editing, even self-editing, can be construed as censorship, I’m always censoring either my radio show or my written work. I spend hours every week snipping out my and my guests’ uhs, ums, ers, belches, sneezes, belly grumblings, tongue trips, misspeaks, and every other conceivable form of audio detritus before I load the latest episode into WFHB’s programming software. That’s normal. What I did today was not.
My guest this week is colleague and friend Tristra Newyear. The aim of this particular episode was for us to riff on the return of the Indiana University students (and their parents) to Bloomington for the 2025-26 school year. I led off by saying, The students are coming back, the five scariest words in this town. I went on to rant about the stores being packed, traffic getting snarly, nowhere to park downtown, people driving the wrong way down one-way streets (do one-way streets only exist here?), doting parents loading their kids’ shopping carts with luxury towels and bed linens, and all the rest of the sins, mortal and venial, the flood of humanity now washing over our little village commit.
At one point, I said, “I want them to be shot.”
A joke. An exaggeration. A throwaway line. Tristra laughed and said, “Can we say that on the air?”
I immediately covered myself by saying, “… with a hypodermic needle filled with beneficial drugs…,” at which point Tristra added, “…drugs that help them read street signs.” Not exactly Mark Twain or Richard Pryor, but that was our flimsy attempt at humor.
Then, in the middle of the night I woke up. Damn it, I said to myself, someone’s gonna piss and moan about it. Someone’s gonna accuse me of advocating gun violence against college students and their parents. And, for pity’s sake, college kids are under siege enough these days, from university administrators whose goal in life is to transform academia into a high-end resort hotel and self-help retreat to Li’l Duce extorting money from colleges and universities and trying to force them to become Chamber of Commerce propagandists.
So, for the next six hours or so, I quibbled with myself over bleeping the word shot. The angel on my right shoulder whispered, Don’t put the radio station in a bad spot. Don’t open yourself up to any accusations. Be a good boy. The devil on my left sneered, Don’t give in. Don’t let the hand-wringers and pearl-clutchers win. Don’t be afraid.
At approximately 9;45am, the angel won. That little schmuck. I re-edited the audio file for this week’s Big Talk episode and inserted a bleep over the word shot. That’s what you’ll hear Thursday at 5:30pm on 91.3 FM or anytime at wfhb.org.
I’m not happy with it.
I hate soft language. I detest the censorship imposed on America’s conversation by both the Right and the Left. I can’t stand the social media finger-waggers who peek under everybody’s beds and sniff around everybody’s garbage bins looking for things to be outraged over. I’m never gonna let them tell me what to do, I’ve always told myself.
And I haven’t. Until now. Damn it.
Funny thing. Corporate America has become humanity’s word policeman. Anybody who’s outed in the media for dropping an N-bomb or uttering misogynistic drivel gets fired. Nike, McDonald’s, Walmart, Apple, CVS, and Cigna get to say, Hey, look at us! We’re good guys! We don’t tolerate that kind of verbal wickedness!
Which, I suppose. is good. On the other hand, with everybody and his brother in a public setting not able utter N-bombs or judge a woman by the size of her breasts, we came to think the absence of that kind of mouth-spew on the airwaves and the internet meant nobody thought that way anymore. We were shocked that a presidential candidate who gave voice and license to the worst, racist, women-hating, white supremacist, foreigner-loathing element of our holy land’s populace could be elected. Twice!
Who knew? We all could have known how very many “deplorables” were out there if only we’d let them speak freely. An enemy that’s invisible can’t easily be fought.
But, I may be going off on a tangent here. Or maybe not. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. I’d rather know if a guy tends to drop N-bombs than not. Free expression tells us much about our fellow species-mates.
And, for chrissakes, people, learn to take a joke. Learn to tell the difference between hyperbole and a criminal threat. Remember that scene from “Twelve Angry Men,” where one juror says to the other, I could kill you? The Henry Fonda character uses the incident to prove his point that people’s words shouldn’t always be taken literally. I could eat a horse. I’m dead. It’s to die for. I could have clobbered him. We’re always speaking over the top, embellishing, distorting, fudging, and inflating. They’re all verbal exclamation points.
Speaking of movies, I remember someone asking me, many years ago, what I through of “The Big Chill.” Throughout the whole movie, I said, I was pulling for terrorists to break in and wipe out all the characters.
Again, a joke. An exaggeration. A throwaway line. I might have been able to get away with it in the 1980s or ’90s but not today.
I want them to be shot. Anybody who’d think that was a call to action is, to borrow a handy phrase from James Carville, a goddamned idiot. Or, in keeping with this post’s theme, They oughtta be taken out and shot.
I still have a bit more than 30 hours to delete my bleep of the word shot. I probably won’t do it.
I’m not proud of myself.