My tolerance for trousers riding low on the hips of young men trying to be hip is low; and if six inches or so of underwear is showing it drops even lower. When an intergluteal cleft (that's butt crack to you, Bubba) is visible that tolerance vanishes. But I must confess to rethinking my initial response to an incident last week in San Francisco where one of our University of New Mexico football players was removed from a U.S. Airways flight and arrested for refusing to pull up his low-rider trousers prior to boarding his flight to Albuquerque. My response upon reading the news article was a typical old geezer's grumbled, "That'll teach the little jerk."

But this week the San Francisco Chronicle publishes this story and picture which suddenly has me looking with a bit more sympathy at our foolish young football player and with far less lenience at the apparently discriminatory behavior of the airlines. And yes, the young man is black while you can see all too ickily that the flying faux femme is a pudgy, pasty white guy far too old to still be engaging his panty fantasies.

Making matters worse for the airline's legal department and insurance company was the candid admission by an airline spokesperson that the company doesn't actually have a passenger dress policy. I suppose it's more or less something they make up as they go along which leaves them in a questionably tenable legal posture. I'll wager there's all kinds of case law out there buttressing the principle that for corporate dress codes to be legally enforceable, they must be uniformly enforced.

Which my wife, a certified legal assistant for thirty years, confirmed by rolling her eyes and saying, "It's all over except for deciding how many zeros they're going to put on the check they give that kid." When I suggested that the question begging to be asked was if U.S. Airways would let nubile young women fly dressed exactly as was the pudgy old white guy, my sweetie said, "Of course they wouldn't-he's wearing nothing but skimpy underwear."

My unspoken thought was, "Too bad; bet they wouldn't fly with any empty seats."