Years ago, it used to take the Gestapo, the NKVD or the Kempitei and a lot of coercion, force and propaganda to insure that everybody expressed himself in the politically correct fashion. Midnight raids, informers, hero children and show trials were all trotted out to illustrate the proper path. Dissenters, Jehovah's Witnesses, deviationists, the work-shy, wreckers, cosmopolitans, defeatists, and anybody else who failed to toe the line were rounded up, leaned on and dispatched to corrective labor camps or shot out of hand for their failure to get with the program--Hitler's, Stalin's or Tojo's politically correct policy of communication.
Somewhere in the past 30 years or so, an equally perfidious set of rules governing free speech and disquisition in america--voluntarily accepted and often rigidly imposed, without any threat of force or violence--has become law, both unwritten and codified, in many of our institutions of higher learning, in much of government, in the pages of our leading newspapers, on our television screens and in our daily conversations.
These disquieting norms of political correctness now govern and invade our relations with the banking industry, our once private discussions with co-workers, the sermons of our parsons, the crank formulations of our country's history by "scholars" and their inclusion in what purport to be text books on the subject, the ongoing investigations into the names of sports' teams, the geometric growth of the industry of victimization, the unshakeable belief that all whites are inherently racist, the exclusion of specific words from daily conversation, the flowering of pseudo-intellectual idiocy like "Ebonics" and the inability to call things as one actually may see them. Opinions are to be avoided, while the accepted, oft repeated and easily learned politically correct presumptions are to be parroted from rote, like passages from Mao's little Red Book, key phrases from a Kerry speech or lines lifted from a pithy Howard Dean speech on the perils of economic Bulwarism.
These self-imposed strictures have bred a long list of enforcers--the informants, finks, nay-sayers, tut-tutters, flunkies, gadflies, bathroom barristers, stooges, liberal know-it-alls, class action lawyers, government prosecutors, and others--whose sole purpose is to hound the recalcitrant into submission and to insure the survival of our homegrown brand of political correctness. and they have become as successful as any carload of Gestapo agents, without the rubber truncheons, brass-knuckles, the accents and the camps because we are too collectively cowed to say no their outlandish demands.
Scholarship, of an acceptably politically correct nature in many universities, has degenerated into the mere omphaloskepsis of new age folderol, anti-historical and pseudo-scientific tommyrot, which is buttressed by false scholarship, phony historiography and the spurious research of other so called "experts" in a particular field of study. as a result of this transparent tomfoolery and academic rubbish, there are actual races to land mountebanks of a noted stature before other "universities" can grab them from the want ads for the trophy cases in their make-believe specialties.
So, now, we hear that Harvard has kicked out Lawrence Summers. This stunning, yet expected, turn of events is another triumph for the liberal minority and is a clear example of a small, vocal and shrewish, but still politically correct, bevy of whiners--like the old hall monitors of our childhoods who continually shushed us on the way to the bathroom--to control and shape the discourse in the hallowed vestibules of higher learning to their personal and narrow liking. That they succeeded is testament to the power of PC thought, the retreat of reason and John Locke, the failure of Mr. Summers to possess the proper arts and Sciences corridor permit for free passage throughout his own University and the abject cowardliness of the remainder of the faculty for their shared timorousness.
and now Yale has let good old Rahmatullah Hashemi, the veritable Baghdad Bob of the Talibani netherworld of murder and mayhem, enroll at Harvard's sister, or is it brother, institution, whatever is most PC.
What'll his flouncing around in his robes and turban do to the PC crowd? Will the co-eds be empowered to dress like him? Will kids go home for the summer and lounge around the yacht club or the stables similarly attired? Will the undergrads tell the old man what the Taliban think? Will he be tapped for Skull and Bones? Will any professor worth his salt dare give him anything other than a gentle-Taliban's B? Will he be expected to maintain the same level of stellar scholarship as, oh, say John Kerry? Who can say, but I'll bet you that he'll have a blast, that he'll taste the forbidden liquor if not the fruit, do just fine and get a scholarship to boot.
The New York Times has recently announced, with all the political correctness it can muster, and with all the glib advice that it alone can dish out to the unwary and the politically limited, that of course we can live with a nuclear Iran and the happy go lucky lemmings running that particular sanitarium. It'll be just like wandering the PC halls at Harvard or sitting next to the lad from the Taliban in French class--you know, really simple stuff and they've got it all down.
all we have to do to keep the mullahs happy and their stubby little mitts off the nuclear trigger is the time tested PC way--to watch what we say, don't rock the boat, no more of that cartoon business, easy on the thoughtless gibes, keep an eye on what you eat, don't fence them in, walk very softly and tip-toe whenever possible, always let them crowd ahead of you in line, lend them whatever money they want, offer to do errands for them--hey, up to now it sounds like the dormitory sheep dealing with the football jocks. always give them the credit they need for more uranium enrichment, never interrupt them when they're on a long anti-Semitic denunciation, never dip the bullets in bacon fat, nod in synchronization with the other PC dupes--I mean believers--when they hold the next anti-Holocaust get together, go about your business as if they don't have a nuclear bomb and an effective delivery system capable of incinerating NYC, always let them get away with the small stuff like jumping the turn-styles and shaking down their neighbors, never rat them out to the UN, and if they hit you first, fall to the ground and assume a hedge hog-like position of determined acquiescence.
Political correctness inhabits the classrooms and the corridors of the world, all right, and it's always been good for everyone. Unless, of course if you're Larry Summers or the one at the wrong end of the gun, looking down the barrel and into the faces of the guys with the PC eyes who have come for you.
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