There's nothing Americans enjoy more than being shocked and appalled. Thanks to our Puritan roots, every national outrage takes on a sensual dimension before running its course.

If some folks weren't constantly luxuriating in the bosom of real and imagined insults, their otherwise boring existences would be harder to validate.

Like a throbbing tooth teased by a probing tongue, life is more vivid when lived in anticipation of aches caused by intentional and inadvertent insults. The pain is exquisite.

Maybe we should adopt a national motto with a more Cartesian and masochistic feel to it: "I'm offended, therefore I am."

In her wildest dreams, Golf Channel anchor Kelly Tilghman never imagined that she would be a protagonist in a national racial drama that would co-star the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Last week, Ms. Tilghman and golf analyst Nick Faldo were bemoaning the dearth of young golfers with enough talent to make Tiger Woods sweat.

"To take Tiger on, maybe they should gang up for a while," Mr. Faldo joked. If the segment had ended with a chuckle from the two broadcasters, it would have been an inoffensive segue to the end credits.

Alas, Ms. Tilghman was determined to earn every penny of her multimillion-dollar contract as golf's first female play-by-play commentator.

Displaying a glibness typical of media types who aren't half as clever as they think they are, Ms. Tilghman tried to ad-lib a punchier ending to Mr. Faldo's wisecrack.

"Lynch him in a back alley," she blurted. As viewers winced all over America, you could tell by her vacuous smile that she was oblivious to the historic implications of putting a black man and the verb "lynch" in the same sentence.

It wasn't long before colleagues cut through Ms. Tilghman's hermetically sealed aura of racial innocence to give her the bad news.

By putting a black man at the end of a rope, even in jest, she had unwittingly volunteered her services as America's latest poster child of white racism.

Within days, Rev. Al was calling for her head. He demanded a meeting with the network so he could tell them -- on behalf of all black people -- how shocked and appalled he was.

Tiger Woods' agent issued a statement that took a different tack: "This story is a non-issue. Tiger and Kelly are friends and Tiger has a great deal of respect for Kelly. Regardless of the choice of words used, we know unequivocally that there was no ill intent in her comments."

Rev. Al was in no mood to accept Tiger Woods' magnanimity as the last word. He decided that the sense of offense was bigger than any forgiveness bestowed by the No. 1 golfer in the world.

On Wednesday, the Golf Channel suspended Ms. Tilghman for two weeks, though there is little evidence it was moved to do so by fear of an African-American viewer boycott led by Mr. Sharpton.

Though guilty of a verbal faux pas, it's clear that Kelly Tilghman wasn't thinking about the nearly 3,500 American blacks murdered by white lynch mobs between Reconstruction and 1968 when she said it.

The broadcaster tried -- and failed -- to be funny about a golfer (who happens to be black) dominating a sport that is 99 percent white.

Verbal missteps like Kelly Tilghman's happen in golf because the culture is only beginning to welcome folks traditionally barred from the formerly all-white private clubs that fostered the sport. Though Tiger Woods is doing well in that world, many blacks are still suspicious of it.

Suspicion is at the heart of every recent racial controversy. Talk radio host Don Imus admitted he was wrong to say what he said about the Rutgers' women's basketball team, but he denied there was racism in his heart.

Let's face it. At a time when a black candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination is considered not only viable in the primaries, but electable in November, the opportunities for real and imagined offense are everywhere.

When Sen. Hillary Clinton complained on the "Today" show that Sen. Barack Obama hadn't done "the spade work" to be president, was she engaging in racial code?

What about New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's complaint earlier this week that Mr. Obama had tried to "shuck and jive" the press corps? Was it an appeal to subliminal racism or something totally innocent?

Yesterday, a caller angry about a previous column I wrote about Mrs. Clinton left an interesting message on my voicemail:

"At the end of the day," an old woman's cackling voice said with barely suppressed rage, "the Silent Majority will take care of Mr. Obama. You just keep writin' your articles ..."

Now that was some unambiguous racism for you.