Political Correctness

Comment #14

Rick G — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:28:32 GMT

It will pass...just like paisley shirts, balloon pants and platform shoes....hopefully.

Comment #13

Coin Toss — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:24:31 GMT

All of a sudden radical islamists and terrorists were just hijackers, and in some cases even that was too harsh. A WW II veteran working for a company in Florida was told to remove his American flag lapel pin (remember this?), and then it came out that the company he worked for was a branch of Ford that had contracts with an Arabian company. Just a few example of thousands. Here's pc in a nutshell....try writing a report on the attack on Pearl Harbor, under the guidel... [ More ]

Comment #12

justxploring — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:58:20 GMT

Although most of us here have different political stances, at least we agree on some issues. The author used the words "nursery behavior" because we often don't realize that we are often being conditioned & molded. Although most of us remember them as movies, the books "The Stepford Wives"and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" had strong political overtones.

Comment #11

jarasan — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:45:12 GMT

P.S. JX this is a very good read. Thank you.

Comment #10

konane — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:06:45 GMT

Oh and forget the argument about how well he did as a president, when you control the press through information contained in illegally taken FBI files, the press happily parrots the empress' messages.

Comment #9

Rick G — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:52:05 GMT

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Comment #8

jarasan — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:34:20 GMT

You know what is politically incorrect? having a child cut off someones head and videotaping it and posting it on the internet. If we don't think we don't have some serious civilization problems it is gonna come knocking on our doors again. Ignoring the fact that the KGB is still going around the world and killing people it doesn't like is also very worrisome. It wasn't that it was unpatriotic not to vote for Bush, it was moronic to vote for that dolt Kerry, he sti... [ More ]

Comment #7

time*treat — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 10:52:26 GMT

Communism didn't die, it filled out a change-of-address form.

Comment #6

justxploring — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 09:28:08 GMT

I just posted on LottoMike's blog about one reason I feel many people voted for George Bush in 2004. Many believed it was unpatriotic and even anti-Christian to protest against the war and question the government. There was so much guilt, shock and anger after 9/11 that it would have almost been like using a dirty word to call the invasion a mistake and those who spoke up were labeled un-American. I certainly wasn't saying it's acceptable to use offensive language or insult... [ More ]

Comment #5

justxploring — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 04:36:28 GMT

Keep in mind that what we see in front of our eyes isn't always true. Just watch Mindfreak some night. I mean, Chris Angel doesn't really walk through glass or on water, right? <br

Comment #4

Think — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:34:47 GMT

It sounds like you are a Groucho Marxist. As Groucho said "Who are you going to believe? Me or your own eyes?" ;) justxploring said- "it's obvious that what we hear, see and read seems to be more important than logic and common sense. In 2008 I saw more distortion, more censorship, and more biased journalism than ever before during a presidential campaign. I used to be a proud Democrat. I don't know what I am these days."<br... [ More ]

Comment #3

emilyg — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:21:16 GMT

Coin Toss - well put.

Comment #2

Coin Toss — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:32:54 GMT

And the clods are clueless that they themselves are offending other people by shoving their likes, dislikes, morals or lack of, down other people's throats. One example that comes to mind are cases where veterans who fly the flag live in communities with housing associations, and invariably some bed-wetting pinko left leaning Bolshevik who has never done anything for the country finds that "offensive". The press and other media doesn't help. Been on Yahoo lately? Ever... [ More ]

Comment #1

justxploring — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:20:32 GMT

When I was in grammar school, someone told me that John Dillinger's penis was on display at the Smithsonian because of its unusually large size. Harmless story, but nevertheless I did hear that rumor all the way through high school. Well, one day I was talking a a friend's son who was about 10 or 11, and he said someone at school said the same thing. Some people even swear they've seen it! So what does this have to do with political correctness? I guess not much, except th... [ More ]

Original Blog Entry: Political Correctness

justxploring — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:19:39 GMT

On Jarasan's blog I quoted 88 year old Doris Lessing, a British author, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year. Here is an article she wrote in 1992. Just some food for thought.

I remember when Peter, Paul and Mary recorded Puff The Magic Dragon which was from a poem about the loss of childhood innocence. To this day there are many who still insist that the song was about smoking pot. This all started when a reporter at Newsweek wrote about coded messages in songs and used the song as one example. As someone once humorously pointed out, an analysis of the Star Spangled Banner could prove the same thing. I remember when Peter Yarrow said at a concert If I wanted to write about marijuana, I would have just written a song about marijuana. Anyway, it's getting really tough to say what's on your mind these days without committing a faux pas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/opinion/13lessing.html?_r=2 oref=slogin oref=sloginor

While we have seen the apparent death of Communism, ways of thinking that were either born under Communism or strengthened by Communism still govern our lives. Not all of them are as immediately evident as a legacy of Communism as political correctness.

The first point: language. It is not a new thought that Communism debased language and, with language, thought. There is a Communist jargon recognizable after a single sentence. Few people in Europe have not joked in their time about concrete steps, contradictions, the interpenetration of opposites, and the rest.

The first time I saw that mind-deadening slogans had the power to take wing and fly far from their origins was in the 1950s when I read an article in The Times of London and saw them in use. The demo last Saturday was irrefutable proof that the concrete situation... Words confined to the left as corralled animals had passed into general use and, with them, ideas. One might read whole articles in the conservative and liberal press that were Marxist, but the writers did not know it. But there is an aspect of this heritage that is much harder to see.

Even five, six years ago, Izvestia, Pravda and a thousand other Communist papers were written in a language that seemed designed to fill up as much space as possible without actually saying anything. Because, of course, it was dangerous to take up positions that might have to be defended. Now all these newspapers have rediscovered the use of language. But the heritage of dead and empty language these days is to be found in academia, and particularly in some areas of sociology and psychology.

A young friend of mine from North Yemen saved up every bit of money he could to travel to Britain to study that branch of sociology that teaches how to spread Western expertise to benighted natives. I asked to see his study material and he showed me a thick tome, written so badly and in such ugly, empty jargon it was hard to follow. There were several hundred pages, and the ideas in it could easily have been put in 10 pages.

Yes, I know the obfuscations of academia did not begin with Communism as Swift, for one, tells us but the pedantries and verbosity of Communism had their roots in German academia. And now that has become a kind of mildew blighting the whole world.

It is one of the paradoxes of our time that ideas capable of transforming our societies, full of insights about how the human animal actually behaves and thinks, are often presented in unreadable language.

The second point is linked with the first. Powerful ideas affecting our behavior can be visible only in brief sentences, even a phrase a catch phrase. All writers are asked this question by interviewers: Do you think a writer should...? Ought writers to...? The question always has to do with a political stance, and note that the assumption behind the words is that all writers should do the same thing, whatever it is. The phrases Should a writer...? Ought writers to...? have a long history that seems unknown to the people who so casually use them. Another is commitment, so much in vogue not long ago. Is so and so a committed writer?

A successor to commitment is raising consciousness. This is double-edged. The people whose consciousness is being raised may be given information they most desperately lack and need, may be given moral support they need. But the process nearly always means that the pupil gets only the propaganda the instructor approves of. Raising consciousness, like commitment, like political correctness, is a continuation of that old bully, the party line.

A very common way of thinking in literary criticism is not seen as a consequence of Communism, but it is. Every writer has the experience of being told that a novel, a story, is about something or other. I wrote a story, The Fifth Child, which was at once pigeonholed as being about the Palestinian problem, genetic research, feminism, anti-Semitism and so on.

A journalist from France walked into my living room and before she had even sat down said, Of course The Fifth Child is about AIDS.

An effective conversation stopper, I assure you. But what is interesting is the habit of mind that has to analyze a literary work like this. If you say, Had I wanted to write about AIDS or the Palestinian problem I would have written a pamphlet, you tend to get baffled stares. That a work of the imagination has to be really about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary.

The demand that stories must be about something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers.

The phrase political correctness was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it.

There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art the arts generally are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care.

Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.

A professor friend describes how when students kept walking out of classes on genetics and boycotting visiting lecturers whose points of view did not coincide with their ideology, he invited them to his study for discussion and for viewing a video of the actual facts. Half a dozen youngsters in their uniform of jeans and T-shirts filed in, sat down, kept silent while he reasoned with them, kept their eyes down while he ran the video and then, as one person, marched out. A demonstration they might very well have been shocked to hear which was a mirror of Communist behavior, an acting out, a visual representation of the closed minds of young Communist activists.

Again and again in Britain we see in town councils or in school counselors or headmistresses or headmasters or teachers being hounded by groups and cabals of witch hunters, using the most dirty and often cruel tactics. They claim their victims are racist or in some way reactionary. Again and again an appeal to higher authorities has proved the campaign was unfair.

I am sure that millions of people, the rug of Communism pulled out from under them, are searching frantically, and perhaps not even knowing it, for another dogma.

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