EULOGY FOR THE WORD "NIGGER"

Friends, fellow congregants: We gather here today not to mourn a word's passing but to celebrate a word's life--a life lived to the fullest, lived without apology, lived so that wherever that word went, a fistfight broke out.

For that was the word Nigger as we remember him. If you went into a bar with the dear departed word, you left that bar seriously hurt, or in a body bag. Everyone knew this but they couldn't resist bringing Nigger into bars.

The word Nigger was humble, though. I remember once some big politician got fired for saying something was "niggardly." Well, the word Nigger never batted an eye. He said that if "niggardly" wanted to go getting itself all puffed up about getting someone fired, well, he just felt sorry for niggardly, that was all.

The word Nigger was good to the rest of us, too--Coon and Junglebunny and Jewboy and Slope. The word Nigger always encouraged us, even poor Gook. It was sad but after Vietnam when people stopped saying "gook" the word Nigger was nice to Gook even though nobody said gook any more, and the word Nigger would have Gook over to the house and treat him just like a regular word, and wouldn't let anybody laugh at Gook.

The word Nigger was sad when Bull Connor died the other week, too. He said no man on earth ever pronounced him like Bull. He said Bull had the secret Southern way of saying it so it rhymes with "beggar," which really gets the disdain into it somehow, but he said old Bull had a certain je nais se qua with the way he let it go, too, like the crack of a field boss's bullwhip. He said it made him nostalgic and that nobody even knows how to pronounce him any more and that maybe it was time to be moving on.

Well, goodbye, the word Nigger. We'll miss you. We'll shuffle along as best we can but the odds is gone, the measuring stick. All I know is I hope you didn't go to heaven because if you did some angel is going to get his harp shoved up his ass. Oh, and Spike Lee says he's available.