P.C. R.I.P. 2003 (The Death of Political Correctness)

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Doubtful. P.C. is and will be going strong for quite some time.

Hope it's ok to post this...

It's more than OK. It's a great article. Thanks.

Hi folks,

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Displaced Ohioan bump.

More than okay to post it.
Good read.
Unfortunately, the bastions of PC thought control will stay PC for a very long time.
New York being one of them.

"The political button will say: "Up Yours."

Nice article. I wish PC-think was dead, but I fear that much more will have to be done in order to drive a stake through the 'heart of the beast' once and for all.

Well, when I saw this article, all I can say is I have been waiting for this day for a very long time and it was probably more than a little wishful thinking on my part...

--perhaps the only thing that will ever really change is what is considered politically correct....

Regardless, I will always yearn for true freedom!

--especially from the current pc policing lefties...

My opinion is that hardly anybody really believes in PCNess anymore, but everybody pretends to. This is much like Communism in its last days. Once it started to crumble, it fell much more rapidly than anyone thought it could.

I'm hopeful the same thing will happen with PCness and all the associated racial, sexual and ethnic pieties.

But I'm probably just being optimistic.

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You're right. A great article, perhaps premature... but what if she's right and we've just witnessed the wind change?

The Left did throw everything they've got at this race and the voters rejected it. I saw both Clintons, Mulholland, all Dem Prez Candidates, Hollywood, the elite media... all gunning for Arnold and he still won.

Hmmmmmmmm.

Celia Farber bump

Hope she's right.

And what a wonderful wind change it would be!!

FANTASTIC article. This one's a keeper. Thanks!

Qwinn

There is no question that the root idea—of attempting to enforce strictly coded language and ideas through fear and shame—has its roots in Marxism.

That pretty much says it all! Great article!

Hi, Sis - Can you and chadsworth make it to the FReep tomorrow at the convention center?

Besides smoking cigars and his problems with unwanted touching of women, what unP.C. issues does Schwarzenegger have? I don't remember him saying one unP.C. thing during the campaign, and he sounded very P.C. on Operah.

Doubtful. P.C. is and will be going strong for quite some time.

Exactimiento. P.C. has total control over the main social institutions that are responsible for ideas, and has corrupted all the rest (private workplaces where "diversity training is given, and men can be fired for complimenting female colleagues on their attire).

When I noticed that this came from the NY Press, I felt such a relief. I hadn't read the rag in four years, and I see I hadn't missed anything. The Press was founded by a neocon named Russ Smith, who recently sold it. It "sells" itself (actually, it's a freebie) as irreverent, but mostly it's just nasty in a sophomoric kinds of way, like running columns insulting fat people, because they're too chikcen to take on the racist blacks who have been terrorizing New Yorker for over thirty years.

And while the Press projects an anti-P.C. veneer, it's very p.c. on the inside. to be exact, a black female ad saleswoman got caught skimming cash payments four years ago, and stealing colleagues' clients, among other offenses, but still wasn't fired. She ended up resigning on her own, but wasn't forced out.

ping

For more than 20 years, identity politics have dominated thought, speech and sexuality, giving rise to what Celia Farber describes as an all-consuming beast eating anything and anyone in its sight. Did Arnold Schwarzenegger’s successful campaign mark the beginning of the end for Political Correctness?

If I call them the liberal elite you’ll think I’m a neo-con, and besides, I don’t think the root, Latin word liber (free), applies to most of them. For now, let’s call them "leftists," though they’re not really that either.
Let’s call them the people whose nostrils automatically flared in horror upon learning that Arnold Schwarzenegger won the recall election in California by a landslide composed largely of the voters the media would refer to as "minorities." Most strikingly, Latinos, who voted against the rules of the "minority" mindset, and women (who are in fact a majority), who voted against the rules of the women-as-victims-of-unwelcome-sexual-advances mindset.

This was a moment of lucidity and even rebellion in American cultural life, but nonetheless, the nostril-flarers were very distressed.

I hope none of my friends comes to me with their Arnold dismay in the coming days—worried bird noises about what it means, or about the fact that he was, as the New York Times likes to emphasize, a "body builder." An action-film actor. A Republican. When they’re finished with that, maybe they’ll move on to "sex criminal," or "Nazi sympathizer." They’ll probably even try to convince me that they care who sits as governor of California—that they’ve ever even thought about it, which they haven’t.

I was downstairs in my favorite diner, American Restaurant up on 102nd and Broadway, when I read the news, and my reaction was overwhelmingly positive—but not for the reasons you might think. I’m not a Republican, and I’m not reacting to this on the scale of the left/right, Democrat/Republican duality at all.

On November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall was reduced to mere concrete, you didn’t have to be a Reaganite to be thrilled out of your skull—you just had to be a hater of communism and a lover of freedom. It wasn’t that complicated. All you really had to get straight was whether you were for or against the concept of state-sanctioned mass murder, systemic espionage into the lives of private citizens, a brutally enforced pogrom on speech, thought and the written word, and finally, the principle that the very state that is trying to kill you owns your body, so you can’t leave. If you try to escape, they get to shoot you like a rabid dog, no questions asked. Most American leftists to this day can’t quite say that communism offended their sensibilities. Not nearly so much as anti-communism did.

Just as you don’t have to be a "right-wing nut" to have been opposed to authoritarian socialism, you needn’t be one to rejoice in Arnold’s victory. Here’s what Arnold’s victory "means" to a certain type of American (and let us stand up and be counted): The beginning of the end of the totalitarian rule of identity politics. Political Correctness, to use the tired and loaded phrase. The politics of personal destruction, and the reign of terror against "offensive" thought, speech, sexuality and just about anything else a human personality might contain.

The cultural debate concerning the term "political correctness" tends to obscure its origins. There is no question that the root idea—of attempting to enforce strictly coded language and ideas through fear and shame—has its roots in Marxism. Some historians trace the phenomenon back to the 1920s "Frankfurt School" and Herbert Marcuse, who set out to facilitate the spread of Communism in the West. They decided that the greatest impediment to the spread of the new doctrine was our fixation on the individual; the way to progress was to reach in and attempt to change thought and speech patterns until the individual was obliterated in favor of the party.

Apparently, Mao was one of the first to use the word "correct" to describe the new speech, and for decades it was a staple of communist doctrine. That shouldn’t surprise anybody. Exiled from Germany during WWII, the Frankfurt School moved to the U.S., where they continued their work. Political Correctness as we know it today flowered on U.S. campuses in the wake of the 1960s and took distinct shape by the late 70s, when the new wave of punishment, fear and shaming became codified.

As a term of opprobrium, "Political Correctness" has worn thin. After being used by the right to exploit sexual impropriety, its use as a tool of sexual terror peaked in the late 1990s, by which time the average American office worker was as cowed as a woman under a burqua in Taliban ruled Afghanistan—daring only to look straight down at his shoes. Sexuality is perhaps the most interesting battleground of all, because (as the liberals learned painfully during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal) the spectral beast that is Political Correctness will eat anything and anyone.

One could never pin the new, pervasive ideology on any one party. It was a kind of mutant doctrine that grew out of the frayed wires of post-feminism and other leftist struggles. People like to say that it started out with a well-intentioned soul.

Eventually it took on an unmistakable brutality, and spread like a malignant cancer beyond universities and into the workplace, where it had, perhaps, some effect of positive reform on the most egregious kinds of quid pro quo sexual harassment. The consequences, however, were mostly disastrous: absurd, baseless, terror-ridden lawsuits that destroyed the lives of countless innocent people.

It is a weapon of hysteria, and I describe it as "spectral" because, like the Erlking in Goethe’s famous saga, it is not seen by all. Goethe’s little boy saw it and cried: "Father, father, he’s got me in his grip!" The father insisted the boy was only seeing willow trees and shadows in the mist. It ends: "He galloped home with all his might/...in his arms the child was dead." As Marina Tsvetaeva details in her essay on the different interpretations of the Erlking in the book Art in the Light of Conscience, one translation suggests the boy is killed by a real beast, another that he is killed by his own fright.

The California election showed for the first time that you can stand up to the beast, that you can throw holy water in its face by calmly and honestly addressing behaviors you regret yet not allowing your identity and integrity to be vaporized. It took a 250-pound Austrian bodybuilder to do so, and millions of fed-up ordinary Americans refused to buy the shibboleths concerning Arnold’s "character."

That doesn’t mean, necessarily, that Arnold’s character is stellar, nor that he doesn’t have "problems." Rather, the mechanisms, language, ideology and phraseology for determining what is right and what is wrong are being taken out of the hands of the long-standing elite guard and put back in the hands of ordinary people who don’t possess that long, sharp snout—that seething, cold lack of humanity. Though it’s a bit premature, I’m imagining a crane hoisting away a statue, like hundreds of Lenin statues after the fall of communism, or Hussein statues in Baghdad, toppled with bare hands.

What would the statue look like?

Because the ideology is a deep mindset that almost defies description, no single image sums it up. You’d be halfway there if you just said the Village Voice. Or Gloria Allred.

Or the Red Ribbon. The Red Ribbon that signaled a total silencing of debate or even scientific discourse on AIDS, in favor of a mute, sentimental symbol that was, unbelievably, equated with "compassion."

There’s one book I’d like hoisted away: It’s a Free Country: Personal Freedom in America After September 11, the cover of which features the Statue of Liberty gagged with a red sash. (At least they’ve got the symbology of silencing correct: a red ribbon.) It’s edited by Danny Goldberg, prefaced by Janeane Garafolo and filled with contributions by scores of well-known leftists who took a sudden and passionate interest in the freedom of speech after 9/11. Tim Robbins was dis-invited to the baseball Hall of Fame—that kind of thing.

They’re not wrong—free speech has been under siege in new ways since Sept. 11, but they’re hypocrites. These people never raised a single squeak about the pogrom on speech, thought, academic license, scientific perspective, journalistic integrity or any other kind of freedom that has been under siege in this country for two decades in the name of Identity Politics.

What else goes up?

The thousands upon thousands of speech codes at American universities. The sensitivity trainers, their programs and the mule they rode in on. People who spell "girl" with two "r"s and whoever dreamed up the patronizing phrase "of color." The ACLU—in toto. The so-called AIDS activist movement, which saw to it that there could be no honest, progressive, useful debate about AIDS—in toto. Most newspapers, magazines and members of the media, excepting a few people such as (off the top of my head): Nat Hentoff, Dorothy Rabinowitz, Lewis Lapham, Alan Colmes, Lyle Stuart, Russ Smith, John Strausbaugh, Richard Johnson (yep), Bob Guccione Jr. and others who believe that freedom, ideas and language should enjoy an unfettered relationship.

I’ve left out many names from this wailing wall, but it’s a start—a philosophical space where we can plant a new flag.

Store your own mental images in the flatbed Freedom Truck, and let’s roll it toward the cliff. Then, we’ll go for drinks. Republicans, liberals (real liberals), libertarians, anarchists, nothingniks, scientists, poets, professors… Anybody who has been chewed by the beast—anybody who even knows what I mean when I say "beast"—is invited. The new alliance meets here. The political button will say: "Up Yours."

Let’s be to the demise of Political Correctness what Charter 77 was to the eventual demise of authoritarian socialism.

I sat in the diner reading the news about Arnold, and I felt in the moment of Orwell’s "Shooting an Elephant" when the first bullet strikes and the beast doesn’t quite know what hit him. Orwell wrote of this moment in Lower Burma when imperialism was crumbling and he was a sub-divisional police officer forced to shoot: "…a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered."

They threw every imaginable weapon at Arnold, and it was as though they were suddenly shooting blanks. The L.A. Times. Gloria Allred. The whole rotten phony lot of them.

Arnold sucked on my nipple! Blam.

I’ve never been so traumatized in my life! Blam.

He’s a sex criminal! Blam.

He’s ambivalent about Hitler! Blam. Blam. Blam.

But Arnold just stood there, the bullets bouncing off his mighty Austrian chest. He expressed remorse, then moved on. And the voters chose their own bad guys—the newspaper, the L.A. Times—that dispatched a special search-and-destroy unit to get dirt on Arnold (but not on Davis) and the opportunistic "feminist" attorney who comes out like a lawn slug every time there’s a P.C. sex accusation in the air.

It didn’t work this time. The voters rose up and said UP YOURS. They sent a message to the identity thugs and the agents of political correctness. It’s like the bird flying over to Noah with the leafed twig in his beak.

Land?

You remember that young man who was shot trying to cross the Berlin Wall shortly before the liberation of the former German Democratic Republic?

I started writing this piece in the days before Schwarzenegger’s victory, and it was not going to be about the beginning of the end of Political Correctness, but rather the rising "Cask of Amantillado"-style horror of it. I’d just seen a picture in the paper of a woman whose eyelids were still fluttering from the trauma of whatever it was Arnold Schwarzenegger allegedly did to her nipples in the 1970s. There was Gloria Allred next to her, her face set in that pious frown she wears like a Kabuki mask.

Just last week, the sensitivity cops had Rush Limbaugh cuffed, if not cowed, over a statement that addressed a quarterback’s athletic performance, and the media’s coverage of it. Just last week, you could still pretend to be a better human being because you advocated his immediate removal from ESPN.

Just last week, Village Voice press columnist Cynthia Cotts could still breezily get away with viciously undermining a fellow journalist, Julie Baumgold, by describing her as a "blonde" in the very same week that Limbaugh was hauled off for "making race an issue." Cott’s use of the word "blonde" is both sexist and racist. Yet somehow her message was shot from the left. Somehow.

Cotts’ brazen misogyny, behind a thin veil of tsk-tsking about Baumgold’s supposed conflict of interests in covering the Durst trial, was so riddled with the incoherent hypocrisy of the P.C. vanguard that I actually appreciated it. I had a vague sense that maybe the mask was coming off—that the bare-knuckled, ruthless, racist, sexist, mean, grudging, petty soul of the ideology known as Political Correctness was finally being laid bare. Were people getting into something of Gdansk shipyard vibe? Could the beast’s days be numbered?

If Political Correctness can be said to have a metaphorical representation, I would submit the hideous creature that crawled out from under a rock in eastern Cuba two weeks ago, known to zoologists as Solenodon Cubanus, and nicknamed Alejandrito:

"With its long snout and tiny body covered with spiky, long brown hair, the worm munching creature known as Solenodon Cubanus has long been a mystery to zoologists, who believed it to be extinct."

That’s how the AP described the beast, which only emerges after the sun goes down, "to root out worms, larvae, and insects."

Few things in life are as enjoyable as watching despotism crumble. If Gorbachev could condemn the Soviet’s crushing of the Prague Spring two decades after it happened, I hold out hope that the identity thugs in America 2003 can come to their senses and start to make amends for what they have done.

But it seems that they have no awareness whatsoever that they have "done" anything. Then again, neither did the Stasi, the VOPO (People’s Police), the KGB or any of the myriad enforcers of communism in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. As the cliche goes, they were just doing what the State had ordered them to do, even in homicide.

Like terrorism, Political Correctness is stateless, and it lurks everywhere. Let’s not pretend it’s comparable with the despotic regimes I have cited. Of course it’s not, because it didn’t actually physically murder people.

However, as Philip Roth has documented in The Human Stain, "It’s more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you’re in its grip, it’s as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it." The victim, and hero, of Roth’s novel is a respected university professor brought down by a single word used in class. He is eventually driven to derangement and personal destruction.

More than any other writer, Roth has captured the essence and spirit of Political Correctness. He charts its diabolical effects and doesn’t make excuses. Roth should be hailed for many things, including the fact that he returned the American novel to a medium of redress. Tom Wolfe is said to have "nailed" what America was in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. It was Roth, however, who nailed the 90s.

"[I]f you haven’t lived through 1998, you don’t know what sanctimony is," "The Human Stain’s narrator observes. "[B]y a spirit no less exacting than the ayatollah’s," 1998 was the year "when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered ‘Why are we so crazy?’"

Roth is to Political Correctness what George Orwell was to the burgeoning scourge of authoritarian socialism in the 1940s and 50s: a seer. Roth alone has discerned with his eye, his ear, the "persecuting spirit," as Hawthorne called it, of a uniquely dangerous America and deploys all the right words to describe the phenomenon. Piety and purity, once tasted, and as surely as carnality itself, lead to "bingeing"—indeed, to what Roth astutely terms "the ecstasy of sanctimony."

The ecstasy of sanctimony.

After I read the Arnold news, I called Thor Halvorssen, the CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the only group I know of that has been fighting Political Correctness hammer and tong where it originated and still persists: on America’s college campuses. FIRE was founded in 1999 by University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors and civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate and has since fought more than 800 cases of P.C.-oriented speech repression at over 200 colleges.

Unlike the ACLU, they will defend the right to free speech regardless of political affinity: Christians, atheists, conservatives, hard leftists, flag wavers, flag burners and everybody in between. When freedom of speech is stomped upon at any college campus (i.e., every day), FIRE is there with a strongly worded letter reminding them about the first amendment. This usually succeeds in rolling back the beast.

"This obsession with group identity tied with anti-intellectualism that seeks to shut down debate by pretending to be saving us from offense has its origins in Academia," Thor says.

"Their obsession with externalities—race, sex, sexuality—means that they deny the most basic aspect of human life, which is individual identity and the right of the individual to define who he or she is."

"Make no mistake, Political Correctness is still alive, well-funded, destroying careers and shutting down debate. Increasingly however, the enemies of freedom are getting caught up in their own net—and ending up victims of the beast they created."

Those who say "beast" in reference to Political Correctness have more often than not been personally mauled by it. My own story is one I’d prefer to forget, but I think it sheds light. In 1994, a mammoth sexual harassment/sexual favoritism lawsuit was filed against the then-publisher of Spin magazine, Bob Guccione, Jr. He was charged with "sexualizing the workplace" and promoting women on the basis of sexual attraction. I found myself at the center of this killer twister because, several years prior, I was romantically involved with Guccione.

Over a period that stretched several years, I endured an attack so brutal that it almost killed me. Meaning, I almost killed myself. Women were degraded, attacked, maligned, slandered and even verbally raped by the prosecution’s attorneys before the bloodletting was over. Lefty attack-dog lawyer Ron Kuby was brought onboard and contributed by screaming sexual obscenities at a young woman in her deposition (who was eventually declared to not be within the bounds of permittable witnesses). She called me, in tears, to say: "If you have to leave the country then leave the country. Don’t go to your deposition. I have been raped, and it wasn’t as bad as that."

Out of 12 counts leveled at Guccione, the jury voted "yes" on just one, namely that he could have done a bit more to de-sexualize the work atmosphere at Spin. The plaintiff was said to have "prevailed."

Nine years later, I can’t honestly say that I have fully recovered.

Incidentally, two weeks ago Page Six reported that the staff at Vogue had a map of America onto which they placed pushpins indicating every geographical spot where they had "done the deed." It was depicted as cute and harmless.

My, how times have changed.
Volume 16, Issue 42