The N-word

This week someone sent me one of those Internet jokes that gets passed around the world a few thousand times in an afternoon. Here it is:

Heaven's Clerk All arrivals in heaven have to go through a bureaucratic examination to determine whether admission will be granted. One room has a clerk who inputs computerized records of what each applicant did on his or her last day of life.The first applicant of the day explained that his last day was not a good one. "I came home early and found my wife lying nak*d in bed.She claimed she had just gotten out of the shower."Well, her hair was dry, so I checked the shower and it was completely dry too. I knew she was into some hanky-panky, and I began to look for her lover. I went onto the balcony of our 9th floor apartment and found the SOB clinging to the rail by his finger tips. I was so angry that I began bashing his fingers with a flower pot. He let go and fell, but his fall was broken by some awnings and bushes.On seeing he was still alive I found super human strength to drag our antique cedar chest to the balcony and throw it over. It hit the man and killed him. At this point the stress got to me, and I suffered a massive heart attack and died."The clerk thanked him and sent him on to the next office.The second applicant said that his last day was his worst. "I was on the roof of an apartment building working on the AC equipment. I stumbled over my tools and toppled off the building. I managed to grab onto the balcony rail of a 9th floor apartment, but some idiot came rushing out on the balcony and bashed my hands with a flower pot. I fell but hit some awnings and bushes and survived, but as I looked up I saw a huge chest falling toward me. I tried to crawl out of the way but failed and was hit and killed by the chest."The clerk couldn't help but chuckle as he directed the man to the next room.He was still giggling when his third customer of the day entered. He apologized and said, "I doubt that your last day was as interesting as the fellow in here just before you.""I don't know," replied the man, "picture this, I'm buck nak*d hiding' in this cedar chest.................................."

I found the joke far more curious than funny because either the person who originated it or one of its readers as it passed through, say, Iran or Saudi Arabia, was so offended at the word naked that he or she decided to neuter the word with an asterisk. Of course, we at The Nobby Works (and here I indulge the papal we) love our nakedness. There’s no love’s body without it, so I take great offense at the other end of the outrage scale that someone would f*ck around with the word naked like that.
And my outrage isn’t limited to someone messing with the word naked. I sometimes find myself in Internet threads on religion with people who insist on writing God as G-d. (Godspell, dammit!) And then in threads of quite another nature, you often come across that deliciously pungent Anglo vulgarism cunt accessorized as c*nt. I’m not much of a believer in that mythical war on Christmas (or Xmas, as it were), but I am beginning to think there’s a war on vowels afoot.
Then of course there’s the granddaddy of N-words—nigger. And it’s been all over the place these days in the wake of the major c*ck-up in the Florida justice system. Any time you turn on TV, you’re likely to hear attorneys, politicians, reporters, pundits, academics and a few actual comedians all sounding like grade-schoolers using this juvenile n-word construction.
If the country is divided between First Amendment zealots and Second Amendment zealots, as I believe it is, this is where I find common ground with my pistol packin’ fellow citizens…though I want to stress for safety’s sake that finding common ground is not to be confused with standing your ground. Especially as a writer, I guess I regard words like nigger and cunt much like Ted Nugent regards his Bushmaster. If you want those words, you’re going to have to pry my Urban Dictionary from my cold dead hands.
Literate man that I am, I totally reject the notion that any use of such words renders one a bigot—a misogynist or racist for instance. There is art and there is bigotry, and if a fool can’t tell the difference, that’s no reason for the artist to suffer. From D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover:

I knew it with the men. I had to be in touch with them, physically, and not go back on it. I had to be bodily aware of them and a bit tender to them, even if I put 'em through hell. It's a question of awareness, as Buddha said. But even he fought shy of the bodily awareness, and that natural physical tenderness, which is the best, even between men; in a proper manly way. Makes 'em really manly, not so monkeyish. Ay! it's tenderness, really; it's cunt-awareness. Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it's touch we're afraid of. We're only half-conscious, and half alive. We've got to come alive and aware.

Yes, for the sake of the delicate sensibilities how about a little edit there, Mr Lawrence? C-word awareness, perhaps. Or maybe vagina awareness? Or wait, no, how about private parts awareness. 
And this passage from my literary hero:

“And then think of me! It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see anybody from that town again I’d be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide, it ain’t no disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this, the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm…” (Huckleberry Finn)

G-d save us all from the PC police who would scramble one of the great ironic turns in all American literature into incomprehensible balderdash: It would get all around that Huck Finn helped an n-word to get his freedom???? (And, no, black man or African American doesn’t cut it there either if you’re a writer and not a school marm.)
The first job I ever went for that didn’t involve working the Connecticut tobacco fields or being a soda jerk at Friendly Ice Cream Company was at The Hartford Courant (or as they like to call it, the oldest newspaper in continuous circulation in America). This was just after the landmark Civil Rights Bill had been passed, and when I walked into HR for my interview, there was a large wall poster announcing to all comers that racial equality was now the law of the land. As the head of HR scanned my application at the very top where I’d put my address, he looked up at me and said, “Sterling Street? That’s where the niggers live, isn’t it?”
You cannot tell that story with the full impact of not just the irony, but the history behind that poster on the wall. I wouldn’t even try.