Kiss 'politically correct' goodbye

The new year, century and millennium are here -- time to bring out the resolutions. My own resolution, which I always keep, is not to make any resolutions. But I have one to suggest to everyone else: it's long past time to put the meaningless phrase "political correctness" out to pasture.\n When I first encountered the term "politically correct" back in the 1970s, it was used by feminists and gay people to make fun of opinions they didn't like. It was a self-congratulatory way of making themselves look moderate, compared to radical wackos who went too far. This was ironic, really, since all the people who used the term would have been considered radical wackos who went too far by most Americans. They were also being defensive: "Hey, I might be a gay man who spends his free time having sex with dozens of other men in bathhouses, but at least I'm not a wild-eyed radical who thinks that men should be allowed to marry each other. Let's not go too far!"\n In the 1980s, I noticed liberal straight students disavowing "political correctness" to show how moderate they were. They agreed that racism, sexism and homophobia should be eliminated, but they didn't believe that we should all have to be politically correct.\n They were extremely vague about what "politically correct" meant, and couldn't point to anyone who had held up political correctness as a goal. \n In the early 1990s, right-wing commentators and activists (who, of course, wanted to impose their own True Political Correctness on American society) discovered the term, and the mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon. \n Armed with (mostly fictional) anecdotes of hapless straight white males victimized by black lesbian fanatics, they raised the alarm against the plague of political correctness that threatened to turn American colleges and universities into hivelike matriarchies. The Right had warned for years that if we gave equal rights to Negroes, before long everybody would be demanding them; it seemed their dire prophecies had come true.\n By now, just about everybody is using "political correctness" this way. Even the socialist feminist Barbara Ehrenreich, who lost her slot as a columnist for Time magazine because of her excessive political correctness, relies on the term to put down pacifists, other feminists and any straying progressive who embraces a position she dislikes. \n Once you've declared someone to be politically correct, you have established that they are truly politically incorrect, with no further discussion needed. You also get to imagine yourself Politically Incorrect: a bold, independent thinker who goes against the tide, scorning the fads and fancies of the sheeplike many, secure in the knowledge that all right-thinking Americans agree with you.\n "Politically correct" is the perfect sound bite, the right-thinking American's equivalent of such venerable Marxist abuse as "enemy of the people," "counterrevolutionary" and "imperialist running dog" -- except that it's less imaginative, as a right-thinking American's opinion should be. Nobody knows what it means, but that's part of its beauty: it means you can't argue with it, let alone prove your innocence of the charge.\n In my view, using "PC" is a declaration of a person's refusal to engage in serious, reasoned discussion. I don't know or care whether my own beliefs are "politically correct." But I am perfectly happy to be considered an extremist, which puts me in company with such PC wackos as Martin Luther King Jr., who embraced the label of "extremist" in his letter from Birmingham jail. \n To paraphrase King, I'd rather be "politically correct" in the cause of justice than be "politically incorrect" in the cause of injustice.