I might as well pile on, too.

Everyone and the nearest lamppost seem to have opinions about Don Imus. I do too, so what the heck, I'll toss in my two cents.

I'm old enough to remember Imus from his first big gig in New York, as morning DJ on WNBC. In my freshman year of high school, a bunch of us Queens kids who went to school in northern Manhattan got a lift with a college kid who would listen in the car to the famous, outrageous, "Imus in the Morning" show on WNBC. In 1972 it was considered revolutionary. The thing that sticks with me about it was that whenever Imus would announce what time it was, a duck would quack twice in the background. What did it mean? Damned if I know, but that was the soundtrack for my trips to school in my freshman year of high school. Strangely enough, WNBC back then was 660 on the AM dial, which is where the station he is at now, WFAN, is now located. WFAN used to be at 1050, and I honestly don't remember all the corporate buying and selling that resulted in WFAN ending up at 660. What I do remember, though, is that back in the late 70s or so, Imus was tossed off the air from WNBC. Imagine that. I'm sure that, as his professional obituaries are written this week, the history will be rehashed and my memory will be jogged about the reasons why. I'm sure it will turn out to have been appropriately sordid.

I haven't listened to the man since I was in high school. So I have no idea whether his show in recent years actually has had any socially redeeming value. He did have some high-visibility guests, so there must have been something interesting going on. But from the news accounts I have been reading it looks like Imus had something of an ethnic and racial potty mouth - every minority group of every kind, religious, racial, whatever, got razzed on the air. So that raises an interesting question: why would people like Al Gore and Joe Lieberman and goodness knows who else think it's a good idea to go on this show?

If you spend any time talking to me you know I'm not a prude. I like bawdy jokes as much as the next guy -- probably more, much to my dear wife's chagrin -- and one friend of mine who thinks I look overly serious when I wear a suit finds it anomalous that I still enjoy Cheech & Chong. In other words, I'm not the sort of guy who would find a "shock jock" all that shocking. I just don't shock that easily. Potties, severed limbs, poop jokes -- these things are more likely to draw a yawn from me than anything else.

But even with this taste for declasse humor, it never even occurs to me to make derogatory racial comments. It's not that I think the thoughts and suppress them: I just don't think that way at all in the first place. And when I hear them from other people I cringe. And I can't imagine I'm the only one, either. If you're my age or younger, you likely as not grew up in an environment that hammered into you on no uncertain terms that people had to be treated as individuals, with respect, no matter what their background.

To me, this whole contretemps means that Mr. Imus has been carrying around some pretty serious racial baggage for a long time. Think back to Mel Gibson: he was stopped by cops, he was drunk, and he let loose a string of anti-Semitic insults. Presumably, he doesn't spend his days saying bad things about Jews when he's sober, but being drunk loosened his tongue and allowed out the stuff that in normal circumstances he'd keep bottled up inside him. But Gibson had an excuse. He was drunk. What' s Imus's excuse?

Imus's excuse is that he is a shock jock. He made his name and his fortune by saying outrageous things. The more outrageous, the less decorous, the more likely he'd be able to keep his ratings high. In other words, he made good money from letting his guard down. And because he had his guard down, he might just as well have been drunk for all the inhibition he had. Whatever censor he might otherwise have had between his mind and his tongue he had to deliberately suppress in order to let the outrageousness flow and the ratings to rise.

But if you do that, and you disinhibit yourself at the same time you're harboring some ugly thoughts in your head, sooner or later you'll slip up and let some of the ugliness show. Imus isn't catching heat for having bad thoughts. If he had evil racial ideas and kept them to himself, never acted on them and never talked about them, he would still have his job. In fact, because we don't have a thought police in America, there's no reason he can't have all the bad thoughts he likes, so long as he keeps them to himself and doesn't do anything about them. But if you are walking around with ugly thoughts in your mind at the same time you're deliberately setting about to suppress your sense of decorum, well, how can anyone be surprised that something as revolting as "nappy-headed 'hos" comes out of your mouth?

What this means to me is that the world would be a much better place if people acted with some decorum. A sense of propriety keeps people civil. Even people who have truly evil ideas won't hurt others with them if they feel they have to behave with basic decency and civility when they are in public. In an age when authenticity and emotive expression are valued more highly than good manners, this is not a welcome proposition. But politeness, manners and decency serve a very useful function. It's not just that they provide a means for smooth interaction by setting rules for people. They also inculcate habits of mind that prevent people from injuring other people for no good reason. They create a boundary line in your head, and if you habitually keep behind that boundary line you're unlikely to call people things like "nappy-headed ho's." Getting in the habit of acting properly will eventually train your mind to think properly as well. Decency breeds decency.

That's why Imus was playing a dangerous game. His mental boundary was right at the edge of what was acceptable, and he kept dancing at the line, putting his toe over the other side, shifting his balance to make it look like he was going to go over the line but then shifting his weight back. But that works only for so long. If you do that all the time, eventually you'll forget where the boundary is. And when you forget that, you'll just go right to the edge of the cliff without noticing, keep right on going and tumble over the edge. You're definitely going to hurt yourself when you do that -- the only question is how many other people you're going to hurt as well.

Shock jock, indeed.