Halfway following the most recent Imus gaffe – not that it’s much of a surprise, or particularly illuminating, regarding what the major media outlets will tolerate, that is, pay handsomely, for years, as long as the bigmouths pull in the advertisers – I have to admit that one point does strike me anew.

No one – no one, even among all the better-thinking persons who criticize Imus’ unfathomable remark about ‘nappy-headed Hos' – points out that, racial injustice aside, these girls are YOUNG, and Imus is SIXTY-SIX YEARS OLD.

At the risk of coining a phrase, what is our country coming to?

I have taught people these girls’ age for 25 years. I understand irritation, none better, but for the life of me I cannot understand how a man Imus’ age could bring himself to speak of very young women the way he did. This is not to shunt the race issue aside; far from it. But setting aside, if one could, the bigotry in Imus’ and McGuirk’s comments, what – oh, what – explains their unnatural breaching of the generation barrier?

Don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean. We have, all of us – and I mean, all of us – seen some crusty curmudgeon, to put it nicely, start to make an unseemly comment on the behavior of some teenager, some adolescent, of the opposite sex, and then stop, swallow it – irascibility, profanity, and general arrogance notwithstanding -- because of simply the gut barrier against attacking an individual not only of the opposite sex but also of a totally different generation.

That said, for the purpose of clarity it is essential to note that these girls were not teenagers acting out. We have all had moments of irritation, and people of a different generation, in either direction, can be irritating. We all know it. But these young women simply were not doing something wrong. They were not being somehow obstreperous, like teenagers motormouthing on public transportation. They were not vandalizing, or even just pushing and shoving each other while giggling and badmouthing in a movie line. They were not young people displaying some irritating behavior, at all. They were a BASKETBALL TEAM of young women – this is Square One -- doing what a BASKETBALL TEAM is supposed to do, at its best, ability and circumstances permitting: they played for a championship. Which is the moment at which Imus and McGuirk – striking while the iron was cold – succumbed to a momentary impulse (presumably) to say something reductive, negative, and – perhaps envious? – instead of doing and saying the appropriate, which would actually have been easier and more pleasant all around, one would think.

What degree of quintessential cowardice could induce their management to accept and tolerate this nonsense? Do any of the executives in these outlets have daughters? What blocked off and stopped up the normal degree of pity or mercy any decent person feels, toward someone with decades less of education and life experience – setting aside the fact that these young women hadn’t done something wrong, to exact extra tolerance or latitude, in the first place?

If I were CBS, MSNBC, or any other of the dickless entities nominally supervising these delirious asses – and, unlike Imus, I mean what I say, and what I’m saying has 1) validity, and 2) history on its side – I would be checking to see whether either or both of these guys had betting on the basketball games.

If those remarks weren’t sour grapes, then I don’t know Aesop.

But then of course I’m a literate media consumer, as these terms are used nowadays, and personally I’m sick of the most abject non-warriors the wealth of a resource-rich, highly organized and powerful society has ever produced parading a deranged and egocentric bellicosity as though to do so were somehow protecting the American public. (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sean Hannity, Newt Gringrich, Condoleezza Rice, George Bush and Dick Cheney all play the same role in some ways.)

The only other viable hypothesis is that some worm-eaten media celebrities of a sort were so consumed with envy and jealousy – of what? Of youth, potential, success, and achievement earned by effort and consistency as well as by kowtowing to media honchos? – that they let fly some of the least appropriate statements they could come up with, flying by the seat of the pants, and in so doing exposed their own lack of courage as well as that of the suits who keep hiring these non-warriors, for decades on end, to eat away at the public discourse the way dry rot and mildew eat away at construction.

Presumably these commentators, if you call them that, were slightly chagrined and miffed that they had not had the astuteness to predict Rutgers’ good season.

Or maybe they reversed course at the last minute, and bet on the girls. Somehow, I prefer to think that they were disappointed gamblers. You know -- losers.