I Swear! What’s U.S. Coming To? MIKE DOWNEY

Boy, I sure wish one of my darned bosses had sent me to Michigan last week to cover that blasted Timothy Boomer trial.

You say you don’t know who the devil this Timothy Boomer is?

Oh, come on now, have you been living in a foggy cave or something?

Boomer is that goofy son of a gun who was convicted Friday and faces up to 90 days in jail for having a dirty mouth.

You must have heard about him. His story has been on TV and radio practically every bloody day.

Boomer is a 25-year-old guy from Roseville, Mich.-- wherever the heck that is--who was taking a canoe trip up the Rifle River last summer when, all of a sudden, his boat ran right into an ever-lovin’ rock.

Well, you’ll never guess what happened to the poor boater next.

Boomer fell right into the dadgum river!

You can just imagine how cheesed off he was. Standing there soaking wet that way, the guy must have felt like a really dumb duck.

Too bad he couldn’t keep his flapping mouth shut.

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By a quirk of fate, Michael Smith, 32, just happened to be going up the same river that day, with his wife, his 5-year-old son, his 2-year-old daughter--you know, the whole doggoned family--in another canoe.

(I used to live in Michigan. Those people back there really love their gol-darned boats.)

The Smiths were having a pleasant summer’s day. The last thing they expected, out there in the wilderness, was to have a bunch of filthy obscenities come flying at them out of some crazy ashtray along the way.

“What the Sam Hill is going on here?” the Smiths must have said to themselves, as I would have.

Smith claims that this Boomer character was standing there by the river shouting a really bad word, over and over again, maybe, holy mackerel, 50 or 75 times.

Personally, I don’t know how anyone could use such a word 50 or 75 times in a few minutes’ time, although I do remember Al Pacino in the movie “Scarface” coming pretty close.

Boomer’s friends swear that Tim was only saying this stuff in jest, the comical little rascal.

As for defendant Boomer himself, well, he admits that, sure, he was pretty steamed, but he also thought he was out of earshot. Can’t a bear even shout in the woods anymore?

The Smiths were not amused. This particularly goes for Smith paterfamilias, who doesn’t want his children to see Michigan’s rivers polluted that way.

“I was afraid for my whole family,” said Michael Smith, who must have thought they had encountered some kind of freaky lunatic.

“My adrenaline was rushing, my hands were tingling, my wife was covering my daughter’s ears and I was trying to get through there as fast as I could,” he added, remembering Michigan’s first law of water safety: Never row a canoe with tingling hands.

As it turned out, the Smiths weren’t the only ones who could hear that loony buzzard.

A deputy sheriff, Ken Socia, testified that he was at least a quarter-mile away when he could hear this consarned canoe-capsizing Michiganian cussing up a storm.

Under a state law passed way back in 1897, a person can be arrested and fined for using public profanity in Michigan. It doesn’t matter if you use it in the upper blooming peninsula or the lower blooming peninsula. They can get you if you don’t zip your lip.

Well, phooey on this tomfool law--that was my first reaction. How dare the state of Michigan deprive its people of their God-given right to make donkeys out of themselves?

But later I came to my senses. I’m sorry. Sometimes my head must be right up my hat.

I wouldn’t want people like this frothing Timothy Boomer fouling the atmosphere for everybody.

It’s like the jurist in his case, District Judge Allen Yenior, said a few months ago when he rejected an argument to toss Boomer’s case right out of stinking court:

“If Mr. Boomer’s words, when used as they were, were constitutionally protected speech, then a person could stand on a crowded public beach and shout those same words all day.”

You tell ‘em, judge.

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I don’t know about you, but I have really had it with people burning my ears, everywhere I go, with B-word this, and S-word that, and that really nasty P one. Some of these words are so dirty, I can’t even give you the first letter.

Listen, I am not the most innocent lamb there is, so there are certainly times when I stub my toe and don’t always shout right out: “Ow! Who put that very decorative but unfortunately very hard chair there?”

Some people, though, like this Boomer son of a female dog, take it too far.

He was defended in Michigan by the American Civil Liberties Union, which argued that Boomer’s right to free speech was protected under the 1st Amendment.

You know what? Sometimes I think we really abuse that damn amendment.

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles CA 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com