Aiming for the sewer

That conflict has been going on for quite some time; some say its beginnings date back to the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. But the culture wars have been raging for years.

I used to joke that I was on the side of the sexual revolution that lost. Now it’s no longer a joke; I’m actually PROUD to be on the losing side of the sexual revolution.

And it’s guys like Council that make me proud.

Council has been described in news reports as the president of a company called Froze-N-Time Productions. Recently, Council’s company put out a video that should have, indeed, been frozen in time. Like drive-through prostate exams, the concept behind this video was an idea whose time never should have come.

The title is “Booty Pop.” With a name like that, you figure things are kind of going to go downhill from there, and they do indeed. It’s a rap video, which means, as in many rap videos, there’s a black male rapping and women in bikinis shaking their rumps near his face. And he raps, “I can make your booty pop, booty pop, booty pop.”

Yeah, the Temptations’ “My Girl” it ain’t. At another point in the video, according to a story on the website of the New York Daily News, the rapper “shows off some sexually suggestive dance moves … singing ‘We can have some fun tonight because we both feeling right,’ as he brandishes a water gun conveniently held at his crotch level and uses it to spray one of the women with a stream of water.”

But here’s what makes this video stand out: The rapper is a boy named Albert Roundtree Jr., whom some news reports say is only 6 years old. Other news outlets give Albert’s age as 7 years old.

Either way, the boy is way too young to be involved in such licentious foolishness. The video was uploaded to — what else? — YouTube, where it has received more than a million hits.

“You aim for the palace and get drowned in the sewer,” Mark Twain once wrote. That was in Twain’s era; he died in 1910. In today’s America, way too many people are content to aim for the sewer and then wallow there. Two of them are Albert’s parents, who gave permission for their son to appear in the video giving his atrocious rap.

Council took dead aim at that gutter, too, thinking he was making a video that would be quite amusing.

“It’s supposed to be a joke,” Council said in news reports, “but I’d say about 30 percent of the people watching find it funny. But I still don’t regret it.”

And why would he? Council lives in a nation where vulgarities spouted from the mouth of a 7-year-old are seen as funny. Some might even consider little Albert’s performance in “Booty Pop” cute. That’s what happens when you live in a society where people constantly aim for the sewer.

The only good that might come out of Council’s “Booty Pop” video is this: Maybe now black liberals will stop asking black conservatives, “What do you want to conserve?”

I want to “conserve” those days and that time when black parents would NEVER have consented to their child appearing in a video like “Booty Pop.” I want to return to those days when love songs opened like Smokey Robinson’s “My Girl”: “I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day.”

If black liberals long for those days, then it’s high time they stopped asking black conservatives that silly question.

Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.