Well, it's in the top ten.
Posted on 01/30/2005 7:57:22 AM PST by gitmo
A few years ago ago I was on a Question Time panel which was preparing to pontificate to the nation from a studio in Norwich. Before the show goes on air there's always a warm-up question so the pundits can get into their stride and the audience can build up their hatred of whichever government spokesperson has been passed the black spot by the Number 10 press office. Ours was on the decision of Norwich city council to fell a fine row of horse chestnut trees, which it had branded as a public menace.
Unctuous officials justified themselves by warning that conkers might drop like cluster bombs on to passing cars, denting body work and smashing windscreens. Children might throw sticks up to dislodge them, only to be concussed as conkers and sticks came crashing onto their heads. Even if the conkers somehow managed to reach the pavement without causing fatal road accidents or brain damage, they would rot into a slimy mulch which might send innocent pedestrians head over heels.
What was interesting about all the furious speakers from the audience was that they had one phrase to sum up their local rulers. Once they would have called them 'little Hitlers' or 'jobsworths' - and imagined them to be conservative bureaucrats with stiff collars and stiffer necks. Now they assumed that the idiots in charge were the 'politically correct' - buck-toothed, snub-nosed liberal martinets, so determined to torment others they conspired to stop children playing conkers.
I protested that I was from The Observer and knew that the politically correct way to treat trees was to hug them, not to take an axe to them. The PC cared about trees, truly we did, not only in the rain forests but everywhere. The studio audience would have none of it. All the mean and stupid decisions enforced by the powerful on the powerless came, by definition, from the progressive middle class. There was no other way of explaining everyday injustice.
I thought as I looked at the angry and contemptuous faces, well, the right's done a good job. But then the right had had plenty of material to work on.
The political correct ideology was born in the defeat of the radical wave of the 1960s, and the sour whiff of failure hangs around it to this day. The middle-class left retreated into universities and other public sector ghettos where they could pretend the outside world didn't exist. There they could set their own speech codes on racism and sexism and force doubters into silence.
The freedom to dissent was of no account. Professor Stanley Fish, who is satirised as the leftish academic celebrity, Morris Zapp, in David Lodge's campus novels, gave the official line in a 1992 essay: 'There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing Too'. All concepts were political, he explained. If the concept of free speech suited your political opponents and 'can no longer be involved in ways that further your purposes' then you must see it as 'an obstacle to those purposes' and scrap it.
I doubt if anything has done the liberal-left greater harm in the past 40 years than its association with such intolerance and intellectual cowardice. Small wonder the Bush family keeps winning elections.
And yet what can justly be dismissed as repressive political correctness can also be a liberation. The paradox of the Sixties is that while politically it was a disaster for the left and ushered in a generation of right-wing leaders, most notably in America and Britain, it also began a huge advance in the condition of women, gays and others which continues to this day. The famous remark that the 'right won the economic war and the left won the culture war' is usually quoted to sum up the paradox. It doesn't quite get there because individualism won both. The right gave the individual freedom from economic collectivism, the left gave the individual freedom from collective sexual standards.
The upshot is that those who want to expand freedom face a tricky task. On the one hand they will face a deep and often justifiable popular suspicion that all they want to do is boss people about. On the other, bossy and repressive popular prejudices have to be taken on. Getting the balance right is horribly difficult. The coming weeks are going to see examples how to get it right and wrong.
The press has already sunk its fangs into Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month, which begins in the schools on Tuesday, and it won't let go until the end of February.
I'm sure the organisers and the New Labour ministers who are backing the campaign mean well, and I'd love to defend them, but everything about their campaign is hopeless.
To start with a small point: if you want to dedicate a month to educating pupils on the evils of homophobia, why pick February when children are going to be away for a week on half-term?
But perhaps it's all for the good that this is only going to be a three-week month. As with many single-issue campaigners, the organisers of the gay month will probably alienate as many people as they convince. Take this proposed lesson for primary school children. 'The pupils should be asked to sit silently and think of all the unpleasant names that they hear pupils call each other in the playground ... After a few moments the teacher should ask them to repeat them and write them up on the board. This will provoke some embarrassment from the pupils as many of the words will be sexual or swear words.'
What happens if there's a hitch and the children don't start swearing, and in particular fail to come-up with homophobic abuse? The campaign instructs that this disaster can be averted by the teacher saying: 'Well, when I was on playground duty I heard one boy call another a "poof". I'm going to write that up. Now can you think of any more?'
In other words, the children must be made to fit the campaign's stereotype and teachers must be encouraged to find prejudice where little or none exists.
Suppose you were a parent of an eight-year-old who came home swearing his head off and shouting about poofs. I suspect you wouldn't be too well disposed towards the school or the wider cause of homosexual equality if you discovered that he was repeating what he had learned in class. You could well think that liberals in authority were abusing their power over your child without your consent and find yourself muttering 'political correctness gone mad' and other Daily Mail clichés.
If you knew a little history, I suspect you would be as unimpressed by the campaign's decision to present Florence Nightingale as a lesbian and suggest that William Shakespeare was bisexual. It's true that Nightingale never married and wore sensible shoes in the Crimea. That's enough proof that she was a lesbian for some, but most historians need a bit more evidence.
As for Shakespeare, you can find suggestions of homosexual love in the sonnets, but you can also find suggestions of rampant heterosexuality and intense sexual disgust in the plays. It may be that he felt all three passions or - shockingly - that as a writer of fiction he drew all three from his imagination while remaining a faithful husband to Anne Hathaway. No-one knows.
Contrast this gift to the conservatives with the solid work of the Stonewall gay rights' group which has just begun its own attempt to tackle homophobia in the schools. It gives practical advice to teachers' and heads. It challenges sceptics with hard evidence that lesbian and gay pupils are more likely to leave school at 16, even when they have grades which would allow them to carry on to take A-levels, and that two in five say that they're going because they know that they will be beaten up if they stay.
Instead of preaching to the converted, Stonewall is trying to bring in potential supporters by emphasising that a school where gay children are beaten up is a school where all children can be beaten up.
You only have to pick up the papers to know that Stonewall won't convince everyone. There are many people, including people in positions of power, who don't give a damn if gay children feign sickness so they can avoid having the living daylights kicked out of them.
The point is not to add to conservative ranks by conforming to every last detail of the caricature of the PC prig, but to isolate, fight and defeat them.
Well, it's in the top ten.
"It's true that Nightingale never married and wore sensible shoes in the Crimea. That's enough proof that she was a lesbian for some..."
LOL!
This really nails the way the silly minds on the left think these days.
I like the part where the school teaches kids to call homosexuals 'poofs'.
The political correct ideology was born in the defeat of the radical wave of the 1960s, and the sour whiff of failure hangs around it to this day. The middle-class left retreated into universities and other public sector ghettos where they could pretend the outside world didn't exist. There they could set their own speech codes on racism and sexism and force doubters into silence.
I love the reference to universities as public sector ghettos.
What happens if there's a hitch and the children don't start swearing, and in particular fail to come-up with homophobic abuse? The campaign instructs that this disaster can be averted by the teacher saying: 'Well, when I was on playground duty I heard one boy call another a "poof". I'm going to write that up. Now can you think of any more?'
In other words, the children must be made to fit the campaign's stereotype and teachers must be encouraged to find prejudice where little or none exists.
The sub-head would have helped to understand that this mess was from GB; you know, like telling us that February over there is Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato month.
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