Obviously, someone has put crack in the nation’s drinking water.

What else can one think after the spasms of bigotry to which Mel Gibson, Isaiah Washington, Tim Hardaway and Michael Richards have treated us over the last nine months?

That’s a lot of stupid in a short period of time.

And then there’s radio shock jock Don Imus who, as even polar bears must know by now, last week leveled racist and sexist insults against the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, most of whom are black. Until then, the team was best known for a gritty season that brought them within a game of the championship. Now they are famous as the objects of a misbegotten attempt at banter between Imus and producer Bernard McGuirk.

“That’s some rough girls from Rutgers,” says Imus. “Man, they got tattoos …”

“Some hard-core hos,” observes McGuirk.

“That’s some nappy-headed hos there,” says Imus.

The resulting firestorm cost Imus many of his sponsors and his MSNBC simulcast. Thursday, CBS canceled his show outright.

And there are a few things that need saying here:

One, it is beyond pathetic that two grown men would use the reach and power afforded them as members of the media to mock the looks of a bunch of college girls.

Two, while it is fitting that Imus’ slur has angered and energized the black community, one hopes we’ll see this same indignation next time some idiot black rapper (paging Snoop Dogg) refers to black women in terms this raw or worse. Indeed, it’s doubtful Imus would have even known the word “ho” – black slang for “whore” – had idiot black rappers not spent the last 20 years popularizing it.

Three, to make this about Don Imus is to miss the point.

I’m sorry, but there is something entirely too precious about all this, particularly the expressions of shock and disappointment by Imus’ media friends and his corporate partners. To put it another way: What did Imus do last week that he has not done repeatedly? We’re talking about a man who has built a career on verbal diarrhea. He has slurred women and gays and blacks and Jews. He once referred to Gwen Ifill as “the cleaning lady.”

Yet none of that was enough to keep him out of radio’s Hall of Fame, nor to keep such luminaries as Tom Brokaw, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert and Sens. John Kerry, Joseph Biden and John McCain off his show. So what’s it mean that Imus is finally paying the piper, given that he has danced so long without paying a dime?

What’s it mean, all this sound and fury about the one stupid remark, when he is a pioneer and avatar of a school of “entertainment” that stretches far beyond him to video channels and bookstores and TV screens. In this school, coarseness is its own justification, rudeness its own reward. One pushes boundaries of propriety not to enlighten, not to say something vital, not even to make people laugh.

One pushes the boundaries because they are there. And the willingness to do so gets mistaken for courage and authenticity.

Don Imus ought to be ashamed of himself, but no more so than Kerry, Matthews, Brokaw, Biden and anybody else who lacked the wit to understand that the willingness to offend in and of itself represents neither courage nor authenticity. The question is, what are you offending for? If you are pushing boundaries, what are you pushing them toward?

It has been clear since last week if it wasn’t before, that Imus was pushing toward nothing, unless you count the gratification of his own ego and misanthropy. What’s sad isn’t that he was willing to lead in that direction.

What’s sad is that so many of us were willing to follow.