This is additional fine print. If you took all the stunned, rhetorically inept wankers in all the world who have ever used the term 'politically correct' spuriously, in an attempt to discredit an idea for which they don't have an actually intellectually respectable critique, and gathered them together in a room, you'd probably have a uniquely unsuitable party for a game of naked Twister. Yes, this is an old topic now for many of you. Or should be. But there are still twits so using this term. And if you ask me, one more smackdown never hurts.
Politically correct my ass
An All the donuts have names that sound like prostitutes1 production
The core of this one actually comes from the archives; it's probably around five years old as of posting. Sadly, I'm not sure it's quite as dated yet as it should be.
Noted an interesting thing about the term 'politically correct' the other day2: I don't believe I've actually heard it used with justification in several years now.
The facts are: not only is it generally misused, it's so frequently misused, I expect you'd be hard-pressed to find a proper use of it in contemporary discourse. The term has, quite simply, become nothing more than a convenient way to smear anyone who expresses views vaguely leftish, with which the speaker doesn't happen to agree.
I have, for example, been called 'politically correct' for saying (now former Ontario premier) Harris is a wanker. Never mind that actually, yes Harris is, quite clearly, a wanker. And never mind that there is clearly nothing particularly politically correct about the term 'wanker'.
And never mind that in my days in the student press, at a time when, and in an environment where the actual politically correct movement really did have some clout, I stood up on a number of occasions (once, in an incident on which some details are recorded, for a cartoonist, once for a regular columnist) when people sympathetic to this way of thinking had tried to pressure me to edit or stifle them, and it took a steady hand with the rhetoric to do so (yes, I had once to give a ten minute speech to a staff meeting on why, on balance, we really should let someone run a picture of a cross-dressing smurf, and can everyone please stop getting their knickers in a twist over this, and bizarrely, I still encounter the odd university friend who had heard through the grapevine I am some kind of raving conservative as a result of this incident — no, I'm not making this up). Apparently, regardless of my actual views on free speech, regardless of what I've personally done to defend it, in our currently rhetorically slipshod times, because I think Harris is a wanker, some pathetic loser of a modern neoliberal with a poor grasp of the niceties of honest intellectual discourse thinks he can get away with calling me politically correct.
Speaking as someone who can honestly say (and has occasionally quite clearly demonstrated) he is actually quite hostile to the fundamental idea behind actual political correctness (the censorship of speech as a means to shape political opinion), but who happens to be quite sympathetic to a number of vaguely leftish ideals a startling number of ethically challenged stunned bunnies feel they can can casually smear with this same brush (because it serves their purpose, and because far too many people are stupid enough to let them get away with it), let me be clear: if anyone tries to use this term so casually on the ideals I defend, I reserve the right to tear them into tiny, tiny shreds of raw meat, baste them, and have them for dinner. It's such transparently obvious nonsense to someone in my political position, and I can take so much damage from it if I don't, that really, I have found it unwise to do anything less. Consider yourselves warned.
Let's be clear. The taunt is so used and abused because politically correct thought is one of the ideologies you can loosely associate with leftist ideals that just about everyone hates. And that's why the taunt is now so very popular — it's useful. Ironically, it's similarly useful to the 'racist' taunt occasionally heard as a generic ploy to discredit from the left. The main difference as I observe it is, however: you generally actually need at least a shred of evidence, however tenuous, to call someone a racist. In contrast, you can apparently call them politically correct on no evidence whatsoever that they actually have anything against free speech.
I do find this phenomenon useful for one reason — any time I hear the term so casually (and incorrectly) used, it tells me one thing definitely, though little else: that the speaker is patently intellectually dishonest, and deserves my thorough and unflagging ridicule.
And let's be clear what we're talking about here. I am not politically correct, if I say your using a term everyone knows is generally derogatory -- like, let's say, <I deleted a term here of which The Well's content policy might not approve, but let's just say it's a common slur on Arabs>, to take an example that's particularly a propos these days — in a fashion clearly intended to be derogatory — frankly makes you a twit. I'd be politically correct if I told you I intend to coerce you to stop saying it with legislation at some level. And I have no interest in doing this. I happen to suspect, as do most of us who are merely sane, that this is a cure probably worse than the disease it treats.
I do, however, intend to ridicule you as a slope-foreheaded, narrow-minded neanderthal, at every opportunity I get, for the forseeable future, until you stop using it. And I do however, intend to force you to try to explain in rational terms just what it is about Arabs — to run with this example — that you think justifies this hatred.
And that, my friend, is the furthest thing from politically correct. That, my friend, is what I call free speech.
And get used to it, Bubba. As I intend to ensure that it's here to stay.
Notes
1 Tom Waits, Ninth and Hennepin
2 Believe I must have written the original version of this around 1997 or so, while working for a small paper in the wilds of Ontario's cottage country — the spur to the writing of this particular rant was observing the rhetorical habits of a certain bumbling twit of a neocon who periodically came by the office to bait the local token leftist — that, naturally, would have been me.
-- AJM (posted) 1 July 2002