Daniel Henninger, in his weekly Opinion Journal column, call for a truce in the PC wars. I don't think he'll get one, but he makes a pretty good argument that political correctness has become toxic and should become, itself, a victim of political correctness.
Don Imus, Bernard McGuirk, Trent Lott, Larry Summers, the Duke lacrosse team, Jimmy the Greek, the kid who yelled "water buffalo" at Penn, Howard Cosell, Jon Stewart, Chief Illiniwek, Jackie Mason and "South Park" all have in common only one thing: They have not been Politically Correct.
Some were brought down by it, and some have made a living from it. Today, there are people who even say that the satire on shows such as "South Park" or the "Daily Show" have made political correctness a harmless amusement. We have become so cool that we can simultaneously abide PC's merciless strictures against saying the wrong things about the right people even as we laugh at our subjugation to PC.
Despite the ironic mockery, political correctness still packs a punch. Say the wrong thing today and you can be gone tomorrow, your status as a top broadcaster, university president or politician obliterated. It happens in the small space of a sentence–defrocked, banished, gonzo. Outside a courtroom, I'm not aware of many other forces in American life that can do that……..
…….Duke was a particularly virulent strain of PC. It was breathtaking how fast the Duke incident broke into a politically correct scenario: privileged, women-baiting white males humiliate and assault a disadvantaged black female. Once rooted in the press, this "narrative" crushed the lives of the accused students, ruined the career of the team's coach and almost trumped the criminal justice system. For a falsity, that's pretty potent.
At a scholarly meeting two years ago, then-Harvard President Larry Summers suggested that women are underrepresented at the top of science and engineering because of what he described as the evidently more men than women who are "three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean." I recall back then reading the transcript of Mr. Summer's remarks, which is filled with caveats, obeisances, impenetrable prose and tangled logic. From this morass, it was possible to extract a big PC faux pas. But to think Mr. Summers was led from this turgid speech to the pyre, where his entire career as president of Harvard was immolated is, well, striking.
This is the way we live now: The only place where speech can occur without fear of job loss is on a cartoon show or in stand-up comedy. This means only the self-identified nuts can say what they want. Welcome to the asylum.
Henninger goes on to make an appeal to stop depriving people of their livelihoods over a stupid comment. Stop letting the Al Sharptons of the world cheerfully apply their raging double standards in such a ruthless fashion. Like I said, I doubt very much Henninger will get results, but maybe, eventually, if enough people rebel against this PC run amok, maybe it can at least be kept to a minimum.
