I wish George Carlin had been able to hang onto life at least through last week.

Just think about the dual sociopathologies he would have observed in (a) all the attention paid to the symbolic fate of Barack Obama’s testes and (b) the goofy journalistic soul searching that went on in reporting exactly what Rev. Jesse Jackson said he would like to do to them.

OK—we know only the most liberated of publications and cable outlets will permit use of Carlin’s seven unsayable (unprintable?) words.

Sophisticated periodicals ranging from the Chicago Reader to the New Yorker will print the four-letter word for coitus at the drop of a hat—or pair of pants. Most others use asterisks or dashes for the middle two or final three letters. Some will refer to the “F-word,” while hipper places call it the “F-bomb.”

But how about the series of words that are perfectly acceptable in one context but out of bounds in another?

We can universally say and print the word “balls” when referring to most spherical objects, especially when conjoined with words such as base, foot, soccer, basket, golf or scores of others. But it somehow becomes largely unprintable when referring to what the Spanish-speaking call “cojones,” which somehow is okay to print or say on the air.

Similar, “nuts” are fine when we’re talking about cashews, almonds, pistachios or some other crunchy seed imbedded in a Hershey bar. It’s also okay if we’re talking about lunatics or, say, political extremists.

But not, in many newspapers and on the air, when speaking of gonads. One TV station actually used “n-ts” in its crawl when reporting the Jackson comments about wanting to “cut out” Obama’s.

And, yes, we can talk about a prick when it’s something a needle does to your finger, but never the male appendage; bitch is okay when referring to a female dog, but compare a man to that dog’s male puppy and he becomes an “SOB.”

Some mainstream newspapers used Jackson’s exact words while others eschewed the hint of obscenity. Later, columnists in papers that circumlocuted, from the New York Times to the Chicago Sun-Times, flagellated either themselves or their editors and went ahead to use “nuts” in the forbidden context.

I think Carlin would have been pleased to dig even deeper into our collective psyches and wonder why it is that all the “manhood” attention seems to be focused on an African American candidate. This society has long had an irrational concern and a fear of the sexuality of black men.

So we zero in on Jackson’s remark because it is one black man threatening another’s.

But why no attention to James Carville, who, in the midst of the primary season, boldly suggested and repeated several times that Obama did not have the necessary pair to quite qualify as a male.

Hey, gang: he verbally castrated that black man for you. Wasn’t that nice of him?

Somehow, nobody complained.

Carville went further: He suggested Sen. Hillary Clinton had not two, but three.

He said on ABC’s Nightline, “If she gave him one of her cojones they’d both have two.”

Apart from the subtle racism of the statement, how about the insult to feminism?

He seems to be saying that in order for a woman to be forceful or courageous she must bear these masculine glands.

Where was the outrage?

Was it all okay because Carville was a Clinton supporter?

Why was it okay for Carville to suggest Obama was a moral castrato while Jackson gets all the heat for threatening to symbolically make him one?

Our media seems to have a double standard going here, both in fear of language and, more importantly, in psychosexual racial concerns.

George, where are you when we need you?
***
Don Rose is a Chicago Journalist and frequent contributor to the Chicago Daily Observer