Backwash

Hey, kids, Jimmy the Fetus here, your guide to moral values in the Midwest, helping everybody see that what we learned in Sunday school really matters.

Dear Jimmy:

I’ve always felt that Kansas City’s suburbs had more than their share of swingers. (And, uh, gross.) But this weekend I was at a birthday party for a friend, and a 90-year-old woman at the celebration explained to us how she stayed together so long with her husband: They had an “open marriage,” she said, and each slept around for decades. Besides making me want to upchuck the piece of birthday cake I had just eaten, her story made me wonder. What do you think about swinging?

Annette

Overland Park

Dear Annette:

Remember what the Bible tells us: “And Ishbosheth said to Abner, ‘Why have you gone in to my father’s concubine?'” In other words, Biblical times made today’s suburban swinging scene look like a church tea social by comparison; at least that’s what the scholars tell us. Annette, the thought of your barbecue-fattened friends and neighbors sneaking around in the dark as if JoCo were one big Wisteria Lane may force your stomach to do flips, but just keep in mind that there’s a reason why the Bible Belt is a swinger’s paradise. Biblical prophecies tell us that only when the land returns to a haven for concubinage, harem-swapping and kinky bondage play (think The Passion) will conditions be right for a second coming. I may be smaller than a leather parachute, but I can hardly wait to join in.

Got a moral quandary? E-mail Jimmy at editorial@pitch.com.

The Star Gets Dirty

Last week, about a dozen uptight newspaper editors around the country made news themselves when they pulled a couple of Doonesbury strips from their comics pages because cartoonist Garry Trudeau had used a naughty word.

Naturally, one of the skittish papers was our own Kansas City Star, and managing editor Steve Shirk was even mentioned by name in the Associated Press story about the censorship of the Doonesbury strips. Shirk had, um, shirked his duty as protector of free speech because, he explained, “We thought it was in bad taste and probably unclear to a lot of people why we would be using the term.”

The term that so alarmed Shirk was “turd blossom,” a Texas witticism for flowers that grow out of cow patties; President Bush reportedly uses the phrase as a nickname for his close adviser Karl Rove. With Rove much in the news lately for being a turd of epic proportions, Trudeau’s use of the president’s own term of endearment hardly seemed out-of-bounds.

A local reader was outraged that the Star would censor the strips and suspected it was the Star‘s political sensibilities, not its taste buds, that had been offended. The reader shared with the Pitch an interesting e-mail exchange he had with Derek Donovan, the Star‘s reader representative.

In response to the reader’s complaint about the silly censorship, Donovan wrote back, “Strips are not held for political content, and the word ‘turd’ is not usually printed in any other context.”

Really? Let us count the ways, Derek.

Over the past eight years, turd has showed up at least seven times in the pages of the Star.

In 1997, hyping Chicago shock-jock Erich “Mancow” Muller’s radio show (then carried locally), the Star in two different stories referred to Muller’s sidekick, who is called Turd.

In 2003, the paper dared test the sensitivities of its Johnson County readers with a story about the large number of twins in the first-grade class at Leawood’s Brookwood Elementary School that year. One mother, describing how chaotic it can be chasing after twin boys, recalled the heartwarming story of finding her sons splashing around in the toilet: “I could hear water splashing … I thought, ‘Oh, those little turds have learned to turn the water on.'”

Also in 2003, the Star printed humorous recollections from former Chiefs player E.J. Holub, who had recently starred in a Gatorade commercial and largely ad-libbed his part. Holub said that his best joke had been left on the cutting-room floor: “During one of the takes I said that ‘I walked back to the huddle that day and felt like a turd in a punch bowl.’ For some reason, they didn’t put that in.”

And just two months before Doonesbury’s terrible transgression, the word appeared again in the pages of the Star. A May 27 Associated Press story quoted from an investigation of a Navy SEAL officer, who said he’d struck an Iraqi prisoner because another officer told him to “give this turd a knock.”

My, my. Such language.

But Donovan tells us it’s not really surprising that different sections of the Star
would have different tolerances for poopy language. The comics pages, he says, are popular with children, and so we shouldn’t be surprised that its editors freaked out at Trudeau’s choice of words. “A completely non-political ‘Get Fuzzy’ strip was held recently,” Donovan points out, “because it depicted Bucky the cat inserting his thumb into Satchel the dog’s anus. I happened to think it was a funny, dirty joke. But I also think editors were completely justified to sub in another strip that day.”

OK, we get the point. But we couldn’t help noticing that since the Star‘s Doonesbury embargo, the sewer gates have opened over at the paper of record. “Turd blossom” showed up in letters complaining about the comic substitution on both Sunday and Tuesday, and a story by Elizabeth Merrill in Sunday’s sports section quoted Chiefs coach Dick Vermeil urging fans to give Freddie Mitchell a chance to overcome his problem-player reputation: “Give him a chance unless he’s a turd bird,” the coach uttered.

Oh, but wait — it was just early editions of Sunday’s paper that carried Vermeil’s colorful term. Just when we thought the sportos at the Star might have been making their own small show of defiance to the paper’s uptightness, we saw that in later versions of Merrill’s story, the turd bird had flown the coop. (You can still retrieve the turdy version from the Star‘s Web archive, but it will cost you a small fee. Retrieving the nonturd version is still free.)

Donovan promises that his column in this Sunday’s paper will explain how all of this makes sense.