Paula Deen

In a rant reeking of anti-goyishe animus, sports writer Dan Bernstein calls Deen an “Ugly Racist” who peddles “lowbrow, redneck garbage” and indulges in “downright inhuman behavior” while appealing to “diabetic simpletons.” Apparently able to read minds, he states it as a “fact” that “Paula Deen just flatly, clearly, undeniably views blacks as lesser people, if entirely human at all.”

Clearly, Dan Bernstein views white Southern non-Jewish rednecks as entirely human.

The Christian Science Monitor glumly pondered whether it was possible to say anything positive about Southern history and cuisine without conjuring the smelly taint of bigotry, hatred, hateful bigotry, and bigoted hatefulness.

A writer for the yay-for-blacks blog The Root lamented that instead of taking his advice to “Bash Deen” as humorlessly as possible, younger blacks (and a sprinkling of crackers) on Twitter had a bit of fun speculating about some of her favorite dishes such as “Honey Bunches of Ropes,” “Porch Monkey Bread,” “Colored Greens,” “Klu [sic] Klux Flan,” “Cotton Pickin’ Fried Chicken,” and my personal favorite, “Lynchables.”

Both Salon and Mediaite, which you’d expect to be cynical toward primitively mystical notions of morality”€”or at least Christian ones”€”referred to Deen’s “sin.”

What a preposterously magical and mystical word “nigger” has become. I think back to the O. J. Simpson murder trial”€”probably the most high-profile legal proceeding in the past quarter-century”€”where defense lawyers turned the jury’s attention away from a brutal double slaying to whether a policeman had said the word “nigger.”

No matter what the powers that be insist, no matter how hard they try to purge it from one of American literature’s greatest works, it really is nothing more than a word. It only has the power that you superstitious morons give to it.

I also think of the futility when a white person apologizes for uttering it. Paula Deen’s downfall isn’t the first time a public figure publicly groveled to no avail after it was revealed that they’d said “nigger.” Offering a tearful, shell-shocked apology didn’t do Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman or Michael “Kramer” Richards any good, either.

So I suggest an entirely different tack, one more along the lines of “Draw a Cartoon of Muhammad Day.” The only way to strip the word of the “power” that people insist it has is for everyone to start saying it as often as possible. I suspect the only thing that will stop this insanity is for everyone to start saying the word en masse like a sudden populist upsurge of racial Tourette’s. Let it burst forth like an epidemic of niggerrhea. Throw the word right back in the faces of the pious turds who use it to destroy careers through cowardly festivals of public shaming. I’m only half-joking when I suggest that the only rational solution for this ceaselessly embarrassing national moral panic is for people to start filming themselves saying the word “nigger” and posting it online.

Here…I’ll be the first.