Saturday, January 22, 2011
Not feeling it..
Lost in the wake of the horrific shootings in Tuc son was a modest battle in the culture war: The State Department quietly decreed that some passport applications would henceforth be gender neutral. No more "mother" and "father"; such terms were apparently too retro, too judgmental for the Foggy Bottom bonzes. Instead, Parent One and Parent Two would do just fine.
Previously, I thought passports were simple tools, records that allowed people to travel freely between countries; a transparent description of citizenship and identity that could be understood worldwide. Silly me. They apparently contain "thousands of years of cultural history".
Henceforth, I would like "thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's ass" holographically imprinted on my driver's license. Let us not throw our traditional aversion to ass-coveting under the bus of political correctness.
In addition, while we all have fun with Godwin violations on the House floor, can we tone down this rhetoric?
But cultural vandalism is the order of the day. Like the Bolsheviks rampaging through the manor houses and dachas of the nobility after the Russian Revolution, the PC police gleefully consign history to, well, the ash heap of history, confident that they're in the service of . . . what, exactly?
I'm in favor of preserving Huck Finn, and verbally scandalizing the neighbors in general, much more than the next guy. But perhaps the Russian Revolution analogy is a bit overwrought?
3 Comments:
By 
Gary Rosen, at
Sat Jan 22, 03:01:00 PM:
Life as parody, it's like the SNL Coneheads' "parental units".
By Gary Rosen, at
Sat Jan 22, 03:02:00 PM:
"thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's ass"
Isn't is "thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife's ass" ... no wait, that was the one against adultery.
By 
, at
Sat Jan 22, 04:09:00 PM:
I like it. The similarity between the Bolshis and the PC is the assumption that whatever they do in the present will soon result in a resplendent future much better than the benighted past. But as the Bolshis executed millions, and thus far the PC have merely shamed millions, I can see how the comparison would grate and could be counterproductive.
