HAM MY ASS

A pre-teen put food on a table, in a school cafeteria, and now faces possible hate crime charges.

O.K., it was ham, like the kind you find on a pig's ass. And the students he put it in front of are Muslim. But a crime?

We take things too seriously these days. When I was in the fifth grade our teacher asked the class where our ancestors came from. I told the class my Mom's side of the family came from Germany. This was back in the mid sixties. In the South.

The next day I found swastikas carved on my books. Now, I was ticked. I wasn't a Nazi. And my momma wasn't no Nazi. During recess I found the kids who did the carving and I lit into them like a cyclone in a hay field. When the oats separated from the chaff, two of the three had black eyes and the third was sporting a blood splattered shirt. And I was no longer a Nazi. The next day the four of us went bass fishing together.

And that was that. No one was charged. The school didn't get involved. The sheriff wasn't called. We settled things and moved on. Eventually, we grew up and left childish things to the children.

SPAZ THINKS SHE'S A PARROT

Lately, Spaz has been jumping on my shoulder. She stays perched there, like a parrot, as I walk about the house. If I start moving too fast, she puts a hind foot on either shoulder and hugs my forehead, resting her chin on the top of my head.

Spaz spends her morning hours sitting on the window sill chirping at the other birds feeding in the yard. When they chirp back, she gets excited and preens herself.

Any day now I expect to find an egg in her litter box.

WHAT'S BEHIND SHERYL CROW

In an effort to save the environment, SHERYL CROW wants us to use only one square of toilet paper.

Now, I don't know about you all, but I don't think I care to get in a swimming pool with the girl.

FISHING WITH A SERIAL KILLER

Back in the early 1970’s I use to fish off a small pier behind Tom & Joe’s Sportcenter in Swansboro North Carolina. My dad, Tom, was co-owner of the bait and tackle shop. At the time, Swansboro was a quaint little fishing village set on the banks of the White Oak River.

Swansboro has grown, but it still is a small town by today’s standards. We now have a Burger King and Hardees. A stop light regulates traffic on the four lane highway which skirts the edge of town, and the Police Blotter in the Tideland News recounts four or five misdemeanors every week.

But the fall of 1974 was different. Several banks were held up at gun point in Jacksonville, a much larger town just twenty miles west of Swansboro. People were killed. Two teenage girls were found strangled, dumped on a rural dirt road on the outskirts of Swansboro. The girls had been raped before being brutally murdered.

On that same pier, the one behind my Dad’s store, as I took snappers from schools of small, needle-toothed Bluefish, the conversation usually turned to the crime spree. I remember one man in particular, Marcus, a Navy Corpsman thirteen years my senior, who always had fresh insights into the horrible deeds. We spoke at length on the subject as we fished. His teenage daughter, Debra Ann, a quiet, mousy slip of a girl, was always with him. She seemed embarrassed when her father mentioned the rapes and I figured it was partly due to her age and partly because it was her dad who spoke of such things.

Once, when a Snapper had cut his line,
Marcus tied on a new Gotcha-Plug and I noticed the holstered .45 in the bottom of his tackle box. I didn’t think much of it at the time. A lot of guys toted pistols, especially near the water where Rattlesnakes and Moccasins slithered.

Later, after the news broke, when they had that cold-blooded serial killer behind bars, I thought about that pistol. I saw it in my dreams. I smelled the cordite. I recoiled at the muzzle flash and clawed the sweat soaked sheets which bound me to the bed.

DON IMUS MUST BE PERPLEXED

A few days ago Oprah Winfrey said that white men can't dance.

And this morning the cast of The View was referring to other women as bitches.

I've been watching the news, the same networks who called for the head of Don Imus, but I must have missed the denouncements of these latest racial and sexists epithets. And the Reverend Al Sharpton has been conspicuously absent.

The Don Imus show averaged 361,000 viewers per episode. The View had over 3 million viewers last month. Oprah has the highest rated talk show in history.

I guess it's about numbers, not words.

But more troubling than the obvious double standard is the omission of these insulting remarks by television journalists; the same journalists who stripped the flesh from Don Imus in their moral fervor to eradicate bigotry and misogynistic comments from the airwaves. The talking heads are mute when it comes to reporting unfavorable comments made on shows which generate huge profits for the networks, especially when that money pays the talking heads.