Pay heed, ye wags and dags and swells
Who wouldst provoke sensation
Your honed bons mots and epigrams
Will not convulse the nation
There is no call for polished jests
No need to hone your wits
For if thou wouldst true stir the mass
You simply flash your t***!!!
KEY POINTS:
The extinguished poet laureate, Mr Jam Hipkins, is welcome to his view. This is, after all, a free country and likely to remain so at least until 3pm next Wednesday.
But if the poets and the judges are entitled to an opinion on matters controversial then so too are we, the ordinary folk.
No foreign leader will ever get a briefing about our quirks and peccadilloes and if they did it would only say we are the invisible ink on the Social Contract but we can still speak our tiny minds, for crying out loud!!!!
And many of us have been speaking our minds and crying out loud about this contentious Bosoms on Bikes bizzo.
As is the nature of inconsequential things, it has whipped us into a most frothsome lather. Many of us are beside ourselves, which is never the best place to put things in context.
Perhaps this might help. It's certainly intended to, so don't be offended when you discover that the human breast is, the boffins advise us, nothing more than a rather large and highly-evolved sweat gland.
That's right! That's what it is. A sweat gland. Nothing more, nothing less. That's what all the fuss is about, folks! The things we put deodorant on.
Seen in that light, a surreal sense of calm has likely settled on your fevered brow.
"Why get my knockers in a nick about sweat glands?" you ask yourself as you pore another soothing cup of tea.
Of course, the clever Mr Crow chose not to call his silicomical event Sweat Glands on Cycles for obvious promotional reasons. Because if he had, we'd have all been spared much needless perturbation.
And he'd have got a smaller crowd.
Equally, if the deliberately provocative Boobs on Bikes had been replaced with something less inflammatory - maybe Mammaries on Machines - it would be much harder to imagine your average callow youth or haemorrhoidal voyeur exposing himself to the risk of moral corruption by trudging down to Queen St for a quick perv.
Of course, if Mr Crow really wanted to serve the public interest, he'd have asked the police to do more than merely supervise his parade. He'd have invited them to participate as well.
Or some of them anyway. Like the Wellington inspector who was, this week, proudly photographed breastfeeding at the station.
"It's meant I could remain in top management and be a working mum 11 weeks after giving birth and not miss out on anything," said the nourishing inspector, whose joy we must share even if the enlightened approach from which she's benefited does pose some obvious problems.
One can, for example, imagine her on the beat, babe at breast, when suddenly there comes the plaintiff cry, "Stop, thief!!" from a burgled bystander.
"Here! Hold this!" says the inspector, thrusting her child into a stranger's arms before proceeding, in the Janet Jackson mode, to apprehend the egregious felon.
Thus does the long arm of the law keep abreast of the times.
As it should. And must.
It is essential, in these enlightened times, that a woman police inspector can express herself "during district management meetings with my back turned in a room full of men so I did not miss any information".
And neither should we, Mr Crow.
Had you really cared about informing us, had you really cared about our social emancipation, you'd have organised Bobbies' Boobs on Bikes or, better still, to honour the great force of motherhood, Bobbies' Babies on Boobs on Bikes.
Alas, sir, you spurned such noble gestures. And we are all the poorer for that.
One final thought before we close the book on this storm in a D cup.
Mr Crow is a fairground barker. Nothing more.
And his event is a sideshow, all sawdust and sleaze.
But it's not the threat some fear it is.
At worst, it was an offensive inconvenience for one hour on one day of one month in one year.
But none of us were forced to attend this public mockery of the precepts of feminism.
We needn't fear people like Mr Crow. They merely encourage us to make occasional silly or grubby choices.
The people we should fear are the curriculum crafters, the food police, the tuckshop banners, the secret censors, the untouchable apparatchiks who make the rules and rig our elections.
It's the bureaucratic worrywarts busily banning this and regulating that at the drop of a self-righteous hat that should frighten us.
The always brilliant H.L. Mencken once defined Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy".
It's a fear that clearly preoccupies our new puritans - the ones in power.
Their enthusiastically exercised ability to supplant choice with rules is the real threat to our mental health and moral conscience.
