Save your tar and feathers for someone deserving

I don't know about you, but I am incensed at Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for what he said recently.

No, not for calling the Big Dig tunnel construction project a "tar baby," but for apologizing after saying it.

The Big Dig construction boondoggle has cost taxpayers millions, political hacks their jobs and an automobile passenger her life when part of the tunnel collapsed.

That's why Romney told a crowd of Republicans in Ames, Iowa, "The best thing politically would be to stay as far away from that tar baby as I can."

Black leaders in Boston responded so vociferously that you'd have thought the dude had tap danced on Crispus Attucks' monument on Boston Common.

The Boston Globe newspaper quoted Larry Jones, a black Republican and civil rights activist, as saying, "Tar baby is a totally inappropriate phrase in the 21st century."

Why, Larry? Why?

Most people know the story of the tar baby from the Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris in which Bre'r Fox, tired of being outsmarted by Bre'r Rabbit, constructs a doll of tar to trap him. When the loquacious rabbit happens upon the tar baby, speaks to it and gets no response, he threatens -- and then proceeds -- to hit it and kick it until he is stuck.

Captured and at the mercy of the fox, Bre'r Rabbit pleads, "Whatever you do, don't throw me in that brier patch."

Of course, he once again outsmarted the fox -- who threw him in the brier patch -- since that is precisely where he wanted to be.

The stories are actually of African origin and over time were shaped to show how the slaves -- represented by Bre'r Rabbit -- used their wits to survive.

When Mrs. Catherine Blackwell read us the Uncle Remus stories in the second grade at Leak Street School in the 1960s, we knew who was the hero of the stories and who we rooted for.

Because of the firestorm caused by Romney's innocuous comment, legitimate complaints of racial insensitivity are likely to be dismissed as false cries of "Wolf."

(Oops, I hope I didn't offend the wolf lobby out there.)

It's likely that Leonard Atkins, the president of the Boston chapter of the NAACP, lost some credibility when, in a Boston Globe article, he called Romney "completely disconnected with reality in terms of racial sensitivity."

"He obviously has lived a sheltered life," Atkins said.

Who knows? Jones, the Boston civil rights activist, may be right when he derides Romney as not being of "presidential timber," but the evidence of that is not to be found in Gov. Romney's attempt to use colorful language.

The sad thing is, if Romney does seek to occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., he'll have to defend or apologize for the "tar baby" reference 1,600 times.

Public discourse and language suffer when politicians, already lacking in eloquence, find themselves parsing their language and running it through the processor of political correctness to remove potentially offending phraseology.

Anyone who loves language and words would prefer "tar baby" to the less imaginative "sticky situation," in which, had Romney used it, he would not find himself.

Of course, even if you buy Romney's excuse that he didn't know anyone would consider the term racially offensive, you still have to wonder whether he would have said it in the Roxbury section of Boston instead in Ames, Iowa.