A Plan to Save America From P.C. Extremism
Barry Farber
Tuesday, July 17, 2001
During the Korean War a group of American prisoners was marched into a classroom every day and lectured by their Chinese communist captors on the evils of America. Those sessions originated the term "brainwashing."
One day the Chinese lecturer had an especially triumphant smile on his face.
"Look at this!" he fairly barked, and held up what looked like a cocoon-shaped object made of something like papier-mache.
"This proves you Americans are committing germ warfare. Your denials are now exposed as a lie. Your airmen dropped tens of thousands of these poison pellets yesterday all over North Korea. Why, there's enough poison in this one little capsule to kill every man, woman, and child in a Korean city the size of ..."
He never finished the sentence. At that instant an American GI in the front row jumped up, grabbed the pellet out of his hand, and – in front of the whole group – SWALLOWED it!
He knew we weren't waging germ warfare, and he wanted to slam that particular morsel of communist propaganda back into communism's face. Mission accomplished. It used to be I wanted a poster with that man's face to put on my game room wall.
That's not enough anymore.
We've got to locate that man and make him president!
I shall now present a plan to save America. If you hate America, fear not. This plan – effective though it would be – will never be implemented. Democrats won't be interested, and Republicans don't have the guts.
We're beginning to feel the strangulating effects of what sounded light and fluffy back at the beginning when we began to call it "political correctness." It started out as kind of parlor game; you lose a point if you call a woman a "girl"; you go back two squares on the board if you call a black person a "Negro." It would be a delight to return to that kind of "political correctness," just as it would be a delight in this age of school shootings to go back to 1940s-style "juvenile delinquency."
That little monster called political correctness, once cute, has grown. It now has this society locked in a full nelson. When the military meekly consents to its feminization, when the sucker fish is treated preferentially to the Oregon farmer in the allocation of scarce water, when a mother who drowns her five children enjoys media sympathy, when the suggestion that it might be a good idea to have borders and control who enters is viewed as a hate crime, when policemen doing their jobs are accused of killing members of minorities deliberately, when an innocent office compliment can become a sexual harrassment suit, when the telling of an ethnic joke in front of the wrong people can knock a demonstrably unbigoted candidate out of the race, when the laudably commonsensical proposal to uphold English as a national language is viewed as archie-bunkerism against all other languages, when Western civilization is trashed on college campuses as fascist and oppresive, when the Boy Scouts are out and the Hell's Angels are in, and when the so-called conservatives – the Republicans – content themselves with trying to appear only slightly less in favor of these affronts than the Democrats, it's no longer "political correctness."
When hordes of Americans who know better want the job, the grant, the appointed position, the tenure, or the vote enough to cock back their head, the better for the conformity surgeons to fit the ring though their nose, it's no longer political correctness.
It's a slow-motion philosophical Pearl Harbor gathering speed and achieving crescendo.
Pretend it's my turn now to speak at a top-level White House meeting convened to deal with the falling ratings of the president. I would first point out some good news. The best time to counterattack is when the enemy has overreached.
German general Erwin Rommel chased the British clear across North Africa to within 40 miles of Cairo. Hitler cheered, but only for a while. That dazzling success, you see, caused Rommel's supply lines to stretch out like saltwater taffy at break-point. British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's counterattack sent the German forces into the longest and fastest retreat in military history.
Likewise Stalingrad. Hitler was so eager to take the city that bore the name of his enemy he ordered all-ahead-full and no retreat. That overreach allowed the Soviet Red Army to slice through the German rear and surround the Germans ganged up at Stalingrad. Their inevitable surrender was the turning point in World War II.
The tougher political consultants in the room would be yawning by now, but I'd beg one more moment of attention.
The forces of political correctness have themselves now overreached. Forget Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the pro-endangered-species-but-anti-endangered-farmer crowd, the organized feminists, the open-border crowd, the anti-English-language crowd, the post-partum-depression-excuses-everything crowd, and the "Boy Scouts are bigots" crowd. THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF AMERICANS KNOW THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG HERE, AND THEY'RE NOT BUYING IT.
Now it's our turn. No more wimping around in hopes we can succeed in appearing a smidgen or two less wimpish than the liberals. Here's where we hit and hit hard.
Let our leader, our candidate, our president – whoever agrees to mount the charge – clear his throat, take a sip of water, lean into the microphone and say: "Defeminize the military by noon tomorrow. Roll it all back to where it was before we lost our bearings – say, the Korean War; women into women's missions, men into men's missions.
"Repeal the Endangered Species Act and let the water flow instantaneously to Oregon's parched farms and farmers.
"Murderers are unworthy of sympathy, even if their victims are their own children.
"Our borders will hereinafter be defended. Illegal crossers will be prosecuted, jailed, and then deported. A nation that cannot control its borders does not deserve the respect of those who cross those borders illegally. Meanwhile, we'll work out an equitable guest-workers program modeled on the post-war European guest-workers programs, which, in turn, were all modeled on our own excellent Bracero Program initiated in 1943, before we lost our bearings and went temporarily insane.
"All policemen found guilty of exercising their personal bigotries resulting in the shooting of those of other races will be prosecuted ruthlessly with EXTRA sentences applied because they've violated their public trust. All cops who obey professional guidelines, regardless of outcome, will be defended and possibly promoted even if they are white and the suspects they shoot are black or Hispanic.
"Mild, non-aggressive flirting will be relegalized among consenting adults, even in offices.
"We're fortunate in America to speak the leading language of the world: English. By executive order, it will be our official language at noon tomorrow, just like the official language of Mexico is Spanish and the official language of Estonia is Estonian.
"All bilingual programs should be abandoned immediately. When you find a winner, you don't need losers crowding the awards podium. Immersion into English is the proven winner. Let's go with it.
"There's no way to mandate it, but university professors who still have enough sense to teach are hereby urged to quit retreating balefully when the barbarian hordes start chanting, 'Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civilization's got to go!' They are, instead, urged to point out respectfully that in all of God's history the only system that ever achieved within itself the capacity to eliminate its own evil is, precisely, that Western civilization.
"Black heavyweight champ Muhammed Ali was importuned by communists to denounce white imperialism after he won the gold medal at the 1960 Rome Olympics. He refused, saying, 'Man, if it wasn't for the white man we'd be living in grass huts fighting off alligators.' That's a little jarring even for those who mean to jar, but much history indicates Ali was botanically and zoologically correct!
"And, by the way; this country is going straight back to MERIT while a few of us still remember what that word means. No more divvying up the spoils according to your skin color or ethnicity. Those most qualified will get the best jobs. The next most qualified will get the next best jobs. The unqualified will, forgive an old American expression, start at the bottom and work their way up. All we guarantee is that the means to acquire excellence will be coequally available to all."
That's what I want said.
And the motion would be thrown out, followed by me!
Why? Well, the political bean-counters would say, "Don't recent elections prove that such talk is extremist and upsetting and, above all, certain to lose votes from voters who want things nice and moderate?"
Indeed, they do; but don't forget that THOSE RECENT ELECTIONS ARE THE ONES WITH THE 50 PERCENT OR LESS TURNOUT!
What about those who don't vote? The non-voting half of the country surely contains the ignorant, the apathetic, and those who wouldn't vote if you marched them to the polls at gunpoint. That non-voting half, however, ALSO contains people who long ago despaired of hearing anything like a blanket repudiation of political correctness and would kick land mines out of their way to go vote for whoever enunciates that repudiation and knocks the political correctness tyrants all the way into the cheap seats.
It's like a child's view of religion; do the right thing and whatever you want will come showering down upon you from Heaven. The abnegation of political correctness is the right thing.
Whence cometh my help? Not from a few military ballots and hanging chads. Our help cometh from millions of heretofore uninspired voters once the piñata of political correctness is forcefully smashed.
We're not aiming, mind you, for a few forgotten pockets of unwooed voters. Our target is HALF the electorate. Do you hear me? HALF!
I'd urge the political consultants to quit looking at me as if I'm crazy and calculate what would happen if HALF of the non-voters came to the polls to reward us for having the courage to echo their own inner feelings. How about a third? A fifth, perhaps? George W. Bush would have won by an unambiguous and uncontested popular and electoral landslide if a FIFTIETH of those non-voters had answered the call.
The Republicans have fear.
I have faith.
Mark Twain told us: "Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered.
"No one was there." |
