SERIOUSLY

I must get to the point right away because the world we live in and the society we have become is now almost behaviorally immobilized by some inexplicable fear that is so difficult to deal with, or even recognize with a clear definition because what seems to be perfectly all right to say or do today could be by tomorrow a deplorably wretched thing to put into words or even attempt to act on.

I will not sprinkle this musing with hints and little clues or tap dance around the subject because this is about political correctness gone mad.  It is not political correctness, let me be clear, if we are simply and rightfully observing proper manner of speaking and acting politely in a way civilized society expects civilized people to behave.  I am talking about what only a few people might openly discuss in public but what the majority of folks have in their mind and choosing to keep it there because in a nutshell what we have today and where we are is captured in the following anonymous quote:

“The world is a magical place full of people waiting to be offended by something.”

Perhaps not exactly “full of people” but this is what makes it so ironic because it is actually not the majority of people who are so easily offended.  In fact, never has social behavior now being influenced by so few. I modified that phrase from and hereby thank Winston Churchill for his quote on a different subject.  Let me mention, of course, that although Churchill was not the first to be politically incorrect, he made that a sporting event during his career.  Centuries earlier Plato said the following,

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors”.

That, as far as I know, is the earliest reference to being politically incorrect that happens to directly address politics.  We only have so few politicians, thank goodness, but that does not keep them from making the lives of the general population deliberately drastic.  And it gets worst when the very same population is curtailed from speaking out because:

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize”. (Voltaire)

Since I am just musing here and hopefully you can go along with it, let us find out where this all started. We may begin at how our government functions. The public expectation is that whoever serves the taxpayers must focus some, if not most, of their efforts to disambiguate legalese so as to be easily understood by the average citizen.  Instead …

Bureaucrats started it all.

They began by filling the ranks of government bureaucracy with appointed, faceless, academics of every variety that turned the evolutionary path of language (English, in our case) to mud and quake sand. What they’ve achieved was to invent an exclusive world of “Bureaucratese”. 

For example, we found one such sentence like this to describe, “An act of a legislature authorizing money to be paid from the treasury for a specified use: “In 1977 the Pentagon tried slip funding for the neutron bomb unnoticed into an appropriations bill by calling it an enhanced radiation device”. Slip funding was, of course, a euphemism for hiding a budget item from close scrutiny. While a neutron bomb already sounded less lethal, enhanced radiation device made it looked even more benign. By the way, only in government where a simple word like cash or money is called a funding stream while a tax increase is enhanced revenue and we all know that when a politician calls for investing in this or that they actually mean spend on this or that. The military bureaucracy was very good at sugar coating what would otherwise be a weapon of mass destruction.  Rockets tipped with hydrogen bombs with a flight span that covers halfway around the globe were simply called ICBMs for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles without ever having to say “bomb”.  And when there is a cluster of bombs at the tip of even more massive rockets that could hit several targets, the acronym MIRV came to mind, or Multiple Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicle.  As we can see, bombs with the destructive power of many thousand tons of TNT sound like a space probe returning to earth; and indeed these rockets are launched into space only to come back down on a parabolic path to disperse several deadly nuclear warheads. These are all precursors to politically correct language. These were not too bad but it went downhill from there.  Two decades ago, government and scientific “experts were working in the anomaly investigation”.  That “anomaly investigation” was the explosion of the Space Shuttle ‘Challenger’.

Then we now have:

The Dis-Mantling of an otherwise Great Language

English is the ultimate survivor, proving to be the fittest and most efficient in the evolution of language.  If Latin was the dinosaur, English is the modern day bird. But now it is under indirect assault as a collateral victim of political correctness.  It is suffering from the unintended consequence of a misplaced effort at propriety.  I’ll make an example of the military once more because once it used to have immunity from “gender-mandering”.  I made that up from gerrymandering – a political ploy to manipulate a districting advantage for a political purpose.

The U.S. military just recently mandated the revision of certain military ranks, such as the abolishment in the Marine Corps the designation of Infantryman to Infantry Marine. That is just one of already several changes, with many more to come, as the military is being asked or required to remove from the rank male gender designations that, up to this point, had prevailed through centuries of military tradition. Soon the once unambiguous meaning of military manpower may no longer suffice.  So far, but perhaps not for very long, the Naval Academy may have to revise the designation of midshipman which has always been a rank for everyone enrolled there for over two centuries. Today, whether male or female at the U.S. Naval Academy he or she is a midshipman by rank. Arguably at some future time it is not too farfetched to anticipate that application forms for military service may have to be revised from when it used to have either of two box options to check, M or F for male or female applicants to now having to choose from six boxes. And we better not pretend to not know what the additional four boxes are for.

Will future dictionaries and reference books be several pages lighter because words like maneuver, manage, manipulate, mandate, demand, even mentor, and many more will be expunged? And, is it all right to keep mendacity because it connotes something only men are capable of doing? This is just musing, mind you, but who would have thought that infantryman as a rank can be so discriminatory?  I can add more but let your imagination come up with more threatened words in English.

Are we getting closer to George Orwell’s “1984” thought police?  Not yet but we definitely have “Newspeak”.  There is a glossary of Newspeak that the book defined so clearly but in a doublethink way.  If you’re confused by that that is exactly what an Orwellian world is like. You see, “Doublethink is the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in distinct social contexts”.  Observe very carefully when politicians talk, particularly answers given by the current President. It gets eerie because from the book we read, “A thought-crime is an occurrence or instance of controversial or socially unacceptable thoughts,” or when a face-crime is an indication that a person is guilty of thought-crime based on their facial expression.  I am not making this up – these are from “1984”, written in the aftermath of WWII. Facial expression could today simply be someone’s unspoken reaction to what he or she thinks of the new age social value or liberal behavior that the few and the elite have begun to embrace. Face-crime and thought-crime were Orwellian as today’s liberal go-to phrase of bigotry once conservatives express disapproval of or disagreement with progressive ideas. It is very difficult to argue against “Newspeak” that uses what used to be a perfectly acceptable but profoundly deep expression of fear because when one harbors an opposite view or sentiment, one is adhering to xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia etc. Phobia used to be within the purview of psychological analysis; today it is another liberal’s Newspeak word – “duck-speak” – to speak without thinking.

George Orwell wrote the book because he actually feared for another totalitarianism to rise up, even as the demise of Hitler was thought to have been the end of it.  Totalitarianism or Leader-worship can only be possible today, despite the free flow of information, if that flow becomes monolithically unidirectional – when the media can be controlled. Big Brother – a very significant element in an Orwellian landscape – was thought to be a farfetched idea decades ago that is not so improbable anymore.  The new totalitarianism will employ Newspeak to control social and political behavior.

New Rules at the “Corporatory” and Universities

Over the last two decades or so millions of dollars had already been spent by corporations, school administrators and government agencies on diversity and sensitivity training.  This is because one day many years ago deep thinkers and academics and behaviorists recommended that such places of business and learning should adopt new sets of behaviors so as not to offend anyone. That about sums it up, doesn’t it? They simply ignored centuries of societal development arrived at by natural progression of good behavior, which brought us today’s civilization. In other words, bad conduct and crude behavior have a way of self-annihilation because the general population will reject them in the end.  Forcing behavior upon society by the elite and self-appointed intellectuals to determine ethical or just simply refined behavior in the eyes of the few is usually not effective.  Totalitarian societies have always failed.

We know it has gotten out of hand when we hear folks warning and correcting for micro-aggression or demanding safe space for people deemed to be vulnerable to deep emotional hurt because of what they hear or see.  Those phrases should be called out for what they are – versions of “Newspeak” from “1984”.  We are not talking about racist or bigoted comments that these vulnerable individuals claim to suffer from.  Just wearing a T-shirt or cap endorsing a candidate or commentary criticizing any kind of social agenda or ideology at a university cafeteria or campus activity is being micro-aggressive. Saying something about anything but well within the rights to free speech, protected by the First Amendment, could be construed as an invasion of safe space of certain individuals who happen to hear or see them.

Another Newspeak is black-white- The ability to accept whatever "truth" the party puts out, no matter how absurd it may be. Orwell described it as "...loyal willingness to say black is white when party discipline demands this. It also means the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know black is white, and forget that one has ever believed the contrary."

What used to be one sovereign nation’s prerogative to protect its border is now labeled xenophobia, or emigre-phobia. People should realize that attaching phobia to almost anything liberals can think of is Newspeak.  Newspeak is the liberal’s most potent weapon against other people’s ideas or beliefs.

George S. Patton was a brilliant commander and patriot but much of his accomplishments were sometimes overshadowed by his politically incorrect statements. 

He said this, “Politicians are the lowest form of life on earth …”

I push back a little bit on that because indeed it is not true of every politician.  They have a role in a democracy and they provide continuance of policies or revisions of such, succession and stability in the functioning of government.  However, today many of them fall into using Newspeak because that is what gets votes and political incorrectness could be a lethal political blow to their career.  But if we continue to find that acceptable and acquiesce to too much political correctness we will be followed by a generation of extremely social and political compromisers.  A weakened society is one that is gripped by fear of expressing an opinion because someone may be offended.  The founding fathers offended a very powerful world power at that time and had they stayed politically correct this nation may not have been born. 

Here is another Anonymous quote:

“PC stands for:

1)      Politically Correct or

2)   Petrified Chicken … meaning … so frozen with fear that they don’t even know they’re petrified chicken!

 I end with a quote from another famous general of the Greatest Generation:

“History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster”.

General Douglas MacArthur

Speak but not newspeak,

The Idle Mind