<i>Commentarii de bello</i>

Commentarii de bello

Commentaries on the war for the transformation of human life and attainment of absolute politically-correct purity:

To criticize purity is to embrace its opposite. It follows that there can be nothing wrong with the goals of the war. Any problems are due to other factors and the failure to pursue the goals with sufficient singlemindedness. As Newsweek senior writer Seth Mnookin points out, those who question the foregoing are rabid ideologues. After all, since the goal of the exercise is diversity, those who doubt it can’t be a legitimate part of the diversity to be achieved. There’s no place for them, they’re just mad dogs who have to be put down.
But how do you ensure universal Gleichschaltung? At first, with formal procedures. Pro sports is heavily black, but some pockets are still too white. Diversity means you can’t have that. So you start by raising questions, and asking for explanations: baseball minority hiring initiative requires teams to provide a list of minority candidates for upper level posts.
If raising questions isn’t enough, you impose financial sanctions. For example, diversity means that there can be no principles of social order other than rational markets and bureaucracies. In particular, the universal practice of recognizing human sexuality as a fundamental principle of social order must be eradicated. Sex is to be simply what the individual makes of it, and diversity requires suppression of all thoughts and practices that suggest the contrary. That is why the Miami-Dade Boy Scouts have lost their annual United Way funding. They aren’t willing to accept that homosexuality and the normal development of sexuality are equivalent, so they have to be squashed.
Financial sanctions imposed on organizations are obviously not enough to transform human life comprehensively. Total control of the soul is needed. To that end, we must be trained from childhood to accept that we are in the custody of those who know better and will look out for us. In particular, we must be trained to avoid thought and feel only horror in connection with anything that hints at forceful action. And that is why a 6th grader who found a 2-inch pocketknife in his backpack, and puzzled over it with his friends for half an hour before showing it to a teacher, was, in an act of politically-correct child abuse, grilled at length and then suspended.

Posted by Jim Kalb at May 15, 2003 10:10 AM | Send

Comments

“These folks are not stupid, they’re like members of some weird cult. You can’t dent their worldview with reality. It’s like trying to talk to the people who followed David Koresh. They are, at long last, the perfect unpoliticians — they don’t compromise, they don’t deal, they don’t look for the middle way, they don’t give a damn about accommodating anybody else. Because they believe they’re right. And they won’t go out for a beer after work. They think it’s them against evil. And everybody who ain’t them is evil. “

Wow! That’s probably the best description of Democrats that I’ve ever heard. The only problem is that it’s not a description of Democrats. The next line reads:
“These are Shiite Republicans.”

Rush didn’t say it. This is from Molly Ivins, ultraliberal columnist writing for the Fort Worth Telegraph. And much of what she says is perfectly true. Increasingly, conservatives do perceive that their opponents are not the loyal opposition but are in fact an alien species that is the source of great evil. Furthermore, that’s exactly how liberals look upon conservatives. We’re no longer Americans with differing points of view. We are, rather, people who have nothing in common who inhabit the same piece of land (I think Pat Buchanan once said that). Sort of like, for example, Yugoslavia. And like Yugoslavia, perhaps one day our culture war will become more than a metaphor.

Already, in Washington Democratic filibusters against important judicial appointments signal that they are unwilling to abide by the democratic process if that process results in the defeat of liberalism. The same thing goes for the recent departure of the Democratic House of the Texas Legislature to Oklahoma. It is becoming more evident than ever that their goal is total victory and that they will refuse to live under a conservative regime peacefully.

Honestly, with the examples that Jim Kalb has given, it is an open question of how much longer conservatives will be willing to peacefully put up with the kind of politically correct domination that is coming to pass. Sooner or later, someone is going to say “No more”. And though it’s impossible to say what the circumstances will be, or what reaction will ensue, it’s going to be pretty bad, making the 1968 Democratic convention or George Wallace standing in the courthouse door look like a tea party.

Americans of any stripe do not easily resort to extreme measures, but pushed too far, we will snap. With general civility and the political process breaking down, we seem to be heading down the road toward exactly that result.

Posted by: Gary on May 15, 2003 3:52 PM