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Political Correctness 
There was a farce in America called Prohibition, when it was illegal to make or possess or drink wine, beer or liquor. The intent was noble, intents always are, or say they are, but the result—aside from being a self-induced disaster—was a national joke. Truth, Justice and the American Way says if a person is against drinking, that person is free to abstain, but he's not free to prevent his neighbor from cracking a beer. This isn't high-flown philosophy, it's common sense, and like gravity, common sense always wins. Everybody knew Prohibition was dumb, just the sort of thing do-gooders would impose on the rest of us no matter how unworkable. So. What did the Greatest Deliberative Body on Earth learn from Prohibition? It learned amending the Constitution is inconvenient, troublesome and unnecessary. It learned the regulatory route is more sure. That's it. That's all.
Today's Korrectness Korps bans whole categories of foodstuffs and suggest we're safer eating medical waste than, say, sugar or salt. The Korrectniks say they're saving us from 'death by donut' and rescuing society and so forth. The silliness line has been crossed and they can't turn back, the pickin's are just too easy. There was a time in America when our official gold-standard diet included meat, fish, dairy, grain and vegetables. Generation after generation grew to robust adulthood on this diet, entire nations aspired to it and we spent billions on foreign aid to help them get there. The Politically Correct now put actual food—meat, fish, grain and dairy products, in the same category as plutonium. Political Correctness advises 'just say no' to food, otherwise you're on the path to willful destruction of yourself and everything decent. By their standards Himmler and Beria were doing their victims a favor. Such repression finds its voice with the phenomenon of Political Correctness. The term dates from the Stalinist era of Soviet Russia. Folks with independent opinions were sent to reeducation camps for rigorous training in "politically correct" thought. Inmates itemized and condemned their deviant ideas through all kinds of demeaning coercion. Not charged with anything specific, they just kept confessing until they hit on it. Release depended on convincing their tormentors of newfound devotion to the party line. Stalin said that breaking a man was even more satisfying than executing him. Noel Ignatiev and other degenerate opportunists are testing this model. Political Correctness came to America in the 1970s. At first it was ridiculed, a sure-fire laugh line for standup comedians. Gradually people became aware a new generation had grown up believing Political Correctness was the default reality, if ever-more intrusive and bewildering. Knowing the latest version required close attention and it was no idle exercise to stay current, any misstep had social and career implications. Ludicrous consequences of Political Correctness such as zero tolerance spread like mold on Chinese drywall. There was a reaction to all this. Appeals to free speech were trotted out, as were scholarly appeals to our tradition of free expression generally. From time to time a minor point was conceded but in the main its opponents failed, and they continue to fail insofar as they misunderstand Political Correctness. They think it's faintly humorous 'nice talk' designed to make everybody feel good, just some clumsy and misguided rules to create a 'non-threatening' forum. Not so bad. But Political Correctness is not a free-standing code of happy-talk, it's Stalinist hard-wiring, systematic subjugation, raw domination. By containing all discussion within their margins they hope to starve free speech out of existence. Every political outfit wants to get plugged into canonical Political Correctness. It's the gold-standard. Merely questioning some detail of the Politically Correct code marks one as an aggressive cretin. Dissenters go to the leper colony. It's just here we see the nature of Political Correctness: opposing ideas aren't just wrong, they're illegitimate. NASA's James Hansen was smart enough to get a piece of that action, in some parts of the world opposition to Global Warming is an actionable offense. There came a time when serious, effective opposition arose and the PC machine revealed a debilitating weakness. Although they largely took control of the national dialogue, meaning television and newspapers, faculties and legislatures, in short, the apparatus of official conversation and decision-making, all designed to coerce people as if they were eager ciphers in some socialist collective of a century ago. This is a classic mistake. Dissenters were theoretically left without a place to stand. In times past, oppositions peddled underground newsletters and mounted street demonstrations to build support. Today such things are mainly used to lend a patina to the effort and give activists a feel-good outlet, the real work occurs long before visible tokens announce the final push over prepared ground. It begins in conversation, ordinary people talking among themselves. Perhaps someone expresses a carefully worded reservation about some aspect or another of the PC code. It builds as like-minded people find each other and speak frankly, it matures as events clarify and inform their opinions. Over time it spreads in a diffuse way, without a center to locate and attack. The internet facilitates all this, doing in a relatively short time what formerly took decades, but it's the person-to-person consensus that really matters. The establishment wages savvy operations against it to be sure but, like resistance movements of the past, a dispersed movement cannot be defeated by inquisitions and ponderous frontal assaults. There are just not enough of them. PC pillories a victim or two and beats its chest but the ground is already lost. That's where we find ourselves today. Political Correctness and the interlocking system of repression it has built is visibly faltering. Issues thought safely sequestered are reappearing among the people. Worse, their cadre sees it happening and realizes an authentic mutiny is welling up beneath their feet. Those in charge are taking note of the exits. Political Correctness is still potent, dangerous and armed to the teeth but obedience is ultimately unenforceable. There's the decisive weakness. After four decades of being effectively unopposed it has no experience with defense. Unconstrained by reality, it's held together by surface tension alone. PC has lapsed into a paranoiac state, any dissent is met with—and people notice this—wild, overwrought reactions that look ridiculous even to the otherwise disengaged. Fanatical teachers having toddlers arrested for pointing their finger and saying "bang", say, or the proposal that sugar be made a controlled substance, perhaps enforced by a latter-day Elliot Ness—a heavy drinker by the way—over at the Bureau of Salt, Transfats and Sugar. The building resistance PC has seen has caused them confusion, disarray and defections. There's a built-in advantage to taking a pot shot at Political Correctness: when confronted it has to acknowledge opposition. Once acknowledged, the questioning begins and once questioned the unraveling begins. It's well underway. In the end, common sense wins every time no matter who wrote their playbook. |
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