When I was raising kids (do we ever really stop?), the conventional wisdom was that a severely needy child would do almost anything to get attention, and if that meant doing something obnoxious or sometimes even illegal, so be it. Bad attention was purportedly better than no attention at all.

If that's true, it explains a lot about Imus and Junior and Randy Moss and Britney and Anna (RIP), Peter Pan, the Joker, et al.

We have your basic chickie/eggie thing here, don't we? I keep hearing that radio and TV and films give the public what it wants. Is that really true, do you think? Does Imus meet a need or desire amongst his listeners? And that need would be . . . ???