Tag: political correctness

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Whose Political Correctness

One of the most brilliant achievements of the right in the U.S.– like it or not– was convincing some people that “political correctness” consisted mostly of liberals browbeating conservatives and censoring conservative opinion. Yes, it’s a brilliant achievement, because while there definitely is some left-wing suppression and censorship, all you have to do is consider patriotism, national anthems, flag pins, war protests, peaceniks, environmentalists, and so on and so on to realize that political correctness is and has always been the issue par excellence of the right.

Nobody censors more and more often than conservatives, whether it be books in schools, or dramas at a theatre being built in the new World Trade Center, or cutting off the microphone when a Democrat wants to ask a question at a committee meeting, or destroying evidence so it is impossible to appeal capital crime convictions, or preventing the appointment of a person to the office of Surgeon General because she once expressed concern about the number of gun deaths in the United States: conservatives adore censorship and suppression of dissent.

But it is always a great strategy to accuse your opponent of your own most cherished practices.

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Condoleeza Rice and the Temple of Doom

Condolezza Rice backs out of commencement address at Rutgers University after students protest.

I am sure Fox News will seize upon this story as another example of the hypocritical left suppressing free speech when it’s speech that they don’t like. They eat this stuff up, because it’s exactly what they do and they are embarrassed by it and nothing eases embarrassment more than finger-pointing.

And Fox News will, of course, act as if no conservative university or institution ever cancelled or banned a speech by someone they didn’t like. When is Bob Roberts University going to invite Noam Chomsky to give an address? And they will act as if a majority of reasonable students and faculty at Rutgers wanted to hear Rice and their wishes are being denied by a minority of rabblerousing environmental extremists and peace activists.

If what we had at Rutgers, was a case of a conservative woman invited by a group of students and faculty and offering a speech expressing his or her views and another group of students who didn’t want to allow people to hear that speech, I would agree with them. And, at some level, that is what is happening, and it is disgraceful. But that’s not the essence of this issue.

I recently discovered that an organization I work for has helped arrange a video-conference in Toronto that will feature, among others, Laura Bush as a guest speaker. Laura Bush? That celebrated authority on …. what? Libraries?

Well, we know what her expertise is: on being married to a mediocre former president who led his nation into two ill-advised wars that still haven’t ended and nearly destroyed the world’s economy. When she was chosen, what criteria was applied: people will want to see her, because she is a celebrity. Someone who is famous for being famous.

So I would be quite happy to organize a rally to protest the selection of Laura Bush as guest speaker at this event– if I cared enough about it. But my protest would have nothing to do with her political views and everything to do with the fact that she is ridiculously unqualified to proffer her expertise on anything other than, perhaps, being a librarian (which she was before she married George Bush). It is an offense anyone’s sense of decency and fairness and class to see celebrities proffered as “experts” on anything.

Condoleeza Rice has a few more credentials: she is a mediocre former secretary of state whose performance was also decidedly mediocre. In particular, she heartily commended the incredibly costly and disastrous invasion of Iraq based on rigged evidence. She had no major foreign policy achievements, no great influence on anyone except other mediocrities who sided with her conservative ideology. Her views on the cold war and the Middle East were worst than uninformed: they were ignorant. But George Bush liked to work out with her and so she acquired significant influence in the White House.

So, she wouldn’t be worthless as a guest speaker, if she were to comment insightfully on the workings of the State Department during the later years of the Bush Administration. But I very much doubt that someone with her record is going to want to provide the audience with anything but self-serving spin.

Why was she chosen? I would guess that there would be several reasons none of which would include the possibility that she was a smart person with a lot of interesting things to say about foreign policy, international relations, or peace in the Middle East. More likely, the reasons would range from the fact that she is well-known (a celebrity), that she served in high government office (including a stint on the National Security Council for George Bush Sr.), that she wrote books on foreign policy, that she was a black woman serving in an administration dominated by white men, to the fact that Chevron named a 129,000 ton supertanker after her (after she helped them score some oil fields in Kazakhstan).

But part of the selection process relates to the whole culture of elites, of celebrities, of speakers’ bureaus, of self-promotion and mutual self-interest.

Rice was not selected by students and faculty because they were interested in what she might have to say, but by President Robert Barchi, who then gets to host her for a luncheon and have his picture taken with her and introduce her to his wife, and tell all his friends that, as he was saying to Condi the other day….

So the students are quite right to protest. Why is Barchi using the University’s resources to gratify his own vanity, instead of selecting a speaker who can help further the educational mission of the school?

Rice will agree with a selfie because that is exactly what this is all about and she understands that. She understands perfectly that she is not going to receive thousands of dollars to provide “intellectual property” that has a value because it either has no value or can’t be transcribed into a selfie.

Her selection was an “honor”. The first thing she would have said in her speech was how “honored” she was to be there. But the honor was not given by the captive audience forced to sit there and become part of the obscene tableau of famous people collaborating in the arrangement of tributes to themselves: many students and faculty rightly found the entire idea distasteful.

The students and faculty should have played a role in selecting the commencement speaker, and if they had chosen Rice, any protesters would have been their problem. They are right to stand up and ask, “why are we honoring a woman who is most famous today for endorsing a war that is now widely regarded as a monumental mistake and disaster?”

Why are we being forced to be part of this shabby little theatrical exercise?

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“Smothered” on PBS

PBS recently showed a documentary (“Smothered”) on the struggle between Tommy Smothers and CBS brass over content of the “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” shown on CBS from  1967 to 1969.

You might have expected a fairly ideological blast at the network heavies for crassly suppressing the free-spirited higher consciousness of the rebellious 60’s but the film is actually fairly nuanced and even-handed. For example, it shows us that CBS actually permitted Pete Seeger– who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era– to appear on the show. And then it excised “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” for it’s allusion to Johnson in Viet Nam: “and the old fool said ‘to push on'”. And then, after the Smothers Brothers protested to the print media, allowed them to show it after all. Clearly, CBS brass was concerned about getting flack from someone– the White House, most likely– about a song that slyly and cleverly attacked the Viet Nam War and Lyndon Johnson himself. Yet, in the end, they let it go on.

The contract Tommy Smothers signed with CBS gave him “creative control” over the show, so CBS was clearly not within the spirit of the agreement to continue, through the life of the show, demanding cuts and excisions based on it’s own programming and practices code. On balance, however, the documentary is not shy about pointing out Tommy Smothers’ own ornery contrariness over the issue. Certainly, he wanted cutting edge writers and comedians, and he wanted the show to be daring and relevant. But he also seemed to actively court controversy and at times he was clearly arrogant about his own perceived power– “The Smothers Brothers” shockingly ousted long-time champion “Bonanza” from the No.1 spot in the television ratings.

You come away with the impression that CBS wasn’t all that bad. They allowed Joan Baez to appear, but cut out her comments about her draft-dodger husband. They nitpicked a lot. Maybe they expected Smothers to eventually just give in and self-censor: “oh, they’ll never let us do that anyway, so let’s take it out”, which is what most television people did. Tommy Smothers astutely observed at one point that America liked to have some dissidents on TV to show that they were a broad-minded, tolerant country… but not in prime-time.

“The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” never used canned laughter or applause, and treated their guests with respect. Tommy Smothers recruited some the best young comedic talent in the business, including Rob Reiner, Mason Williams, and Steve Martin, and clearly influenced the development of Saturday Night Live a few years later.

And it was one of those young talents– David Steinberg– that finally drove CBS over the edge, with a “sermon” on Jonah and the Whale. Knowing that CBS would never allow the sketch (after a torrent of angry letters about an earlier, similar sketch about Moses), Tommy Smothers refused to turn in the tape of the show early enough to allow CBS censors and the affiliates to preview it. CBS used the technicality to cancel the show. The Smothers Brothers sued CBS for breach of contract and eventually won.

By the way, the documentary left out the funniest line of the Moses sketch. Moses stands before the burning bush and God asks him to remove his sandals. But the ground was hot and burned Moses’ feet. And for the first time in the Bible the words “Jesus Christ” were uttered.

How about that– more than 30 years later, I still remember that line.

Don’t forget– Bill Maher’s show “Politically Incorrect” was cancelled when he said something that really was politically incorrect (that the hi-jackers of the planes on 9/11 were, whatever else you say about them, courageous). And in spite of the fact that conservatives would love you to believe that it is the liberals, the feminists, and so on, who promote political correctness, it is almost always, in fact, the conservatives who ban and censor and harass those who disagree with them. (After all, one of the liberal values that conservatives dislike is the attitude of tolerance of diversity.)

Do you think James Dobson would ever have Naomi Klein on his show? Would Liberty University ever invite Hillary Clinton to speak?  Would John Hagee offer a spokesman for the Palestinians to discuss his views on Israel?

Anne Coulter might like you to believe that the liberals in control at some universities won’t invite her to speak because she is so, so… controversial. No, it’s because you’re a feather.

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Allan Bloom & Leo Strauss and Real Political Correctness

The 20th was a century unlike any other.

I am this moment interested in one particular difference– the democratization of knowledge– the massive influx of middle-class and poor students into post-secondary institutions of higher learning that occurred in the 1960’s, and our ever-so-sweet, controversial, apocalyptic moral decline. Here we are. We’ve declined. We have the morality of alley cats. How did we get here?

For all the white noise and rhetorical flashes over the issue, it’s really not all that complicated. Until the 20th century, only the children of very rich, very privileged people could receive a higher education. These were children of people who benefited from the status quo. They were the status quo, either the church or the aristocracy. And all intellectual conversation took place on their terms, in their language, in a manner congenial to their ultimate self-interests, especially when it concerned noblesse oblige.

And then suddenly you have democracy and a prosperous middle class and suddenly children of hard-working middle-class parents get to go to college, and buy records, and go to movies, and read books, and suddenly Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom are whining about the tragic loss of culture and learning when what they really mean is that their privileged little ivory towers no longer command the landscape, and those suckers, those helplessly inane but physically peerless farmer’s boys, were no longer mindlessly willing to go immolate themselves on spears and in trenches in order to preserve Allan Bloom’s right to buy $4,000 dinner jackets, smoke Cuban cigars, and troll the streets of Paris looking for rough trade.

The same elitist attitudes certainly exist today. There has been no decline. If anything, there is probably more elitist achievement and behavior today than there ever was before. But the elitists are outnumbered. And they hate it. They just can’t stand the fact that Bruce Springsteen sells more copies of his songs about seducing New Jersey girls named Sandy with tight unzipped jeans, than the Chicago symphony will ever sell of any work by Beethoven. More people have seen “Blade Runner” than will ever see “Hamlet”. Besides, I’m not all that sure that “Hamlet” really is more important, or more of an indication of sophisticated and developed taste than “Blade Runner” is.

The bottom line is never surprising. Neo-cons like Bloom and Strauss and their disciples (who don’t occupy quite as many positions within the Bush administration as they used to) want to build a world in which their social and political class get to dictate culture to the masses. For all their bitter complaining about the “nanny state”, they are far more authoritarian, and far more willing to over-rule popular taste.

They are and always have been the real advocates of “political correctness”: patriotism, chastity, prurience, and consumerism.

 

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Monument to Conformity: The WTC Memorial and REAL Political Correctness

Was there ever a better illustration of the rank hypocrisy of the Republican Party than this: they are building a monument to “freedom”– upon which they lavish their tearful adoration– that will exclude anybody they don’t like.

The museum, the “International Freedom Centre”, is out of the new World Trade Center. Gone. Excluded. Rejected. Dismissed. Because in spite of the efforts of “patriotic” Americans like George Bush, because it was being built in a tax-payer funded government owned building, it would and could not guarantee that it would only ever pander to and praise those patriotic values espoused by the paragons of virtue, Tom Delay, Dick Cheney, George Bush, and his fellow Republicans.

The law is clear: it would have to actually allow for freedom of speech.

Yes, Governor Pataki put the fix in, not only for the museum, but for every occupant of the new building, who must now pass a litmus test of political Republican orthodoxy before being allowed in. Naturally, some of the tenants have declined to give enlightened people like Bill Frist or Donald Rumsveld a veto over what sort of speech should be permitted there. The Republicans, you see, identify mindless obedient conformity with true “patriotism”.

A patriot does not stand for freedom of speech.

Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles, a pilot of one of the 9/11 planes, had screeched that she must be the one who decides what may or may not go into the new World Trade Centre because anyone who disagrees with her shrill views on the meaning of 9/11 just isn’t American like her, even if they too lost relatives in 9/11.

This is so ridiculous, and repulsive, and absurd that it strains credulity, as they say. The monument to American freedom must be unfree, and cowards who cannot abide the slightest dissidence must control the design of a monument to courage, and puritanical Republican harpies must control the expression of democracy.

Don’t let conservatives bullshit you: this is real political correctness.

 

Here is what Debra Burlingame and Governor Pataki and Anne Coulter would deny you: freedom to consider both sides of the issue– a link to a website with eloquent discussion of the issue.

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Baseball McCarthyism

Dale Petroskey, a former Reagan Administration official (who hates it when you mention that about him, in this context) has decided that Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins will not be allowed to attend a 15th Anniversary commemoration of the film “Bull Durham” at the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

If read that carefully, the word is “attend”. Sarandon and Robbins were not scheduled to speak. They were simply going to attend. Without polling anybody in baseball, Petroskey decided that because both Robbins and Sarandon had made antiwar statements, they can not be allowed to be seen by baseball fans.

It is entirely predictable that the first words out of Petroskey’s mouth in defense of his action will include phrases like “I am in favor of freedom of speech” and “I am against censorship” and so on and so on. Have you ever talked to a racists? The first words out of their mouths, on the topic of race, is invariably “I am not a racist”. Think about, “it is not about oil”, and “clear skies act”, and “security forces”.

Of course he is against free speech. That is exactly what Petroskey is doing: suppressing free speech. He is punishing people with whom he has a political disagreement, and trying to prevent baseball fans from being exposed to any ideas other than his own.

This is political correctness.  Don’t let conservatives fool you into thinking it’s a left wing issue: the right is far more “politically correct” (wearing your flag lapel pin, are you?  standing for the national anthem?  pledge of allegiance?) than the left ever was.

Petroskey is not entirely stupid. He immediately announced that no “pro-war” speeches would be allowed… either. This, after inviting Ari Fleischer, the White House chief butt-kisser, to speak last year about the noble Bush agenda. But Robbins and Sarandon were not scheduled to speak. To be truly consistent, he would have to announce that nobody in favor of the war will be allowed to appear at any ceremony at the Hall of Fame either. However, since everybody is either in favor of the war or against the war, that would limit attendance, don’t you think?

In a bizarre twist on an already twisted perspective, Petroskey said that the appearance of Sarandon and Robbins could put U.S. troops “in danger”. It would be tempting to make fun of the statement, but it’s hard to even imagine a satirical explanation for that comment. Does he seriously think Saddam Hussein has some of his spies monitoring Cooperstown for signs of irresolution on the part of the U.S. Marines?

It’s a dark moment for our times. Yes, it’s funny and stupid and bizarre, but it’s also a dark moment. This is McCarthyism plain and simple. We don’t actually lock up dissidents (not yet, at least) but we deprive them of podium, profession, or credibility.

You may recall that Michael Moore’s book “Stupid White Men” was suppressed by his publisher, Harper Collins, in the aftermath of the World Trade Centre attacks. I’ll bet that among the first words out of the publisher’s mouth were the phrases “against censorship” and “believe in freedom of speech” and then he went and did the opposite.

You might have been able to argue that Michael Moore’s book might not have been welcomed by an America still reeling from a terrorist attack.  What difference does that make?  Let the market speak.  However, when the librarians of America finally insisted that the book be published (I’m not kidding), it shot to the top of the best-seller lists and stayed there for 9 months.

That’s the real danger, isn’t it, Mr. Petroskey? When Americans do get a chance to be exposed to decency and common sense, they might just reject assholes like you. Crawl back into your hole where you belong.