The Black Hole of political correctness
Have you heard the one about the Dallas mayor daring to use the term "black hole?"
Quote:
At a recent meeting of city officials in Dallas County, Texas, a small racial brouhaha broke out. County commissioners were hashing out difficulties with the way the central collections office handles traffic tickets. Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield found himself guilty of talking while white. He observed that the bureaucracy “has become a black hole” for lost paperwork.
Fellow Commissioner John Wiley Price took great offense, shouting, “Excuse me!” That office, the black commissioner explained, has become a “white hole.”
Seizing on the outrage, Judge Thomas Jones demanded that Mayfield apologize for the “racially insensitive analogy,” in the words of the Dallas Morning News’s City Hall Blog.
Houston Chronicle science blogger Eric Berger notes that everyone should be “very glad that the central collections office has not become a white hole, a theoretical object that ejects matter from beyond its event horizon, rather than sucking it in. It wouldn’t be fun for Dallas to find itself so near a quasar.”
Maybe so, but speaking metaphorically, if it were a white hole, that might suggest central collections was actually doing its job, ejecting paperwork in a timely fashion.
Call me nostalgic, but there was a time when this sort of stupidity actually generated controversy. Remember the Washington, D.C. official who used the word “niggardly” correctly in a sentence only to lose his job? That at least generated debate.
But these days, stories like this vomit forth daily and, for the most part, we roll our eyes, chuckle a bit, and shrug them off.
Obviously, there’s something to be said for ignoring the childish grievance-peddling that motivates so much of this nonsense. But the simple fact is that ignoring political correctness has done remarkably little to combat it. Meanwhile, people who make a big deal about it are often cast as the disgruntled obsessive ones.
See the rest of the column here.
Call me nostalgic, but I think it would be sweet for the next similar PC victim to refuse to apologize when they've done nothing wrong. I'd give them a standing-O. Aside from the stupidity of this incident, and by stupidity I mean taking offense at the mayor's comment in the first place, Goldberg makes this point:
Quote:
Now, I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush. There is stuff that gets labeled political correctness that is entirely defensible. Because of the erosion of traditional authority that has marked the last half-century, for good and ill, society has been forced to re-create what defines good manners largely from scratch. Women, blacks, and other historically marginalized groups have finally and deservedly gained an equal place in society. Treating fellow citizens with respect and dignity shouldn’t be lumped in with the more radical agenda that also exploits political correctness...
But there’s a separate agenda that parasitically clings to the more defensible aim of crafting new good manners. The Left uses Western society’s admirable desire not to offend to bludgeon competing ideas and arguments. Inconvenient facts are ridiculed as “insensitive.” Refusal to go along with the multicultural agenda, for example, is cast as a sign of backwardness and bigotry. We’re told we must have a frank conversation about race, but when conservatives take up the challenge, they are immediately demonized for the insensitivity of their honesty.
I agree with Goldberg wholeheartedly and I would argue that it wasn't Bush, it wasn't the evangelicals, it wasn't the neocons, it wasn't the GOP's divide and conquer partisan politics that have divided this country, it is decades of the left bludgeoning us with their culture and intolerance of "competing ideas and arguments". No?
