Beauty Queen Called Beautiful — PCists Panic
My mission as a science fiction writer is foredoomed if the creatures in real life continue to behave in a fashion more alien than any three-eyed Martian, more crazy than the ‘Crazy Years’ Heinlein’s future history predicted, more absurd than even the darkest of dystopian satires could possibly satirize.
I am referring, not to the sinister and meaningless ‘Kabuki Theater’ of the current hysteria over Victim Disarmament (formerly known as Gun Control) nor over the equally sinister absence of hysteria over the fact that a bankrupt nation ruled by a lawless criminal elite continues to go deeper into debts so astronomical that they can only be expressed in scientific notation, but a matter of far more wide-ranging significance and longer lasting impact.
Someone said a Beauty Pageant Queen was beautiful.
And our self-anointed Politically Correct conformists had a psychotic episode.
Obviously this is not the most important topic of the day, but it is the one which gives me the most plausible excuse to post pictures of beautiful women.
Brent Musburger, a sports announcer, during a dull game, fearful of dead air time, saw the cameraman pointing the camera at what, to any normal eye, would seem to be a drop-dead gorgeous brunette in the stands, called her “goodlooking” (which is an understatement) and “lovely” (which is an understatement). She happened to be the girlfriend of AJ McCarron, quarterback for the Alabama team, sitting next to his Mom.
Here is the football quarterback and his sweetheart the beauty queen.
Here is the clip, lest I be accused of exaggerating or understating the case:
One might think the young lady in question would not happen to be to my tastes, because she is not dressed like the Catwoman in a skintight leather costume. But keep in mind that as the founder of the Space Princess literary movement, I must approve of any young lady who looks good dressed in the classical fashion.
But tastes differ, and yet I am confident any reasonable judge of feminine pulchritude would find Miss Webb to be healthy, hale, comely, and appealing to the eye.
The young lady in question happens to be one of the most beautiful women in Alabama and has the credentials to prove it. That is, she is Miss Alabama of 2012 in the Miss USA pageant.
In other words, not only is she alluringly and alarmingly gorgeous, she is gorgeous as a matter of nature, nurture and vocation on a state and national level, that is, professionally gorgeous.
In response to calling a gorgeous woman goodlooking, many of the Politically Correctists objected. I kid you not.
And in response to the objection, ESPN issued in apology. Again, I kid you not.
Here is an image of the woman ESPN expressed sorrow and contrition that one of their employees called pretty (see below).
I would not make this up if I could, because I would not hope to be believed, and I could not make this up if I would, because frankly my imagination (whether that of a stalwart scientifictioneer or no) is simply not wide, wild, or warped enough to believe this. And I do not believe it.
Here is the apology: http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2013/01/08/espn-bcs-championship-brent-musburger/1818455/
“We always try to capture interesting storylines and the relationship between an Auburn grad who is Miss Alabama and the current Alabama quarterback certainly met that test. However, we apologize that the commentary in this instance went too far and Brent understands that.”
Got that? His bosses are apologizing because a sportscaster called this woman attractive (see below).
Let us depart the areas of grace and sanity and look more closely at what the objection was.
Here below is from an entity named Travis Waldron, presumably an occupant of the same universe as the rest of us, albeit the presumption requires a bit of effort. I select him because he is convenient to hand, not knowing whether this is typical of the objections voiced which impelled ESPN to the apology. http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2013/01/08/1412861/brent-musberger-katherine-webb-and-footballs-culture-toward-women/?mobile=nc
Musburger’s reaction isn’t puzzling in the beer-wings-and-women culture of college football, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t troubling. There is a culture of domestic violence and sexual assault in football, and one need look no farther than the game Musburger was announcing to find evidence of it. At the NFL level, instances of domestic violence and sexual assault outpace the national average.
Painting Webb as merely a perk of the job, as nothing more than the Alabama beauty queen dating the quarterback of the Crimson Tide, only enables that culture. It’s a culture that views women as nothing more than chattel, a commodity to be won by the best player even if she isn’t a willing participant. It fosters a sense of entitlement to women and their bodies that only ingrains the rape and violence culture deeper into the game. Before the end of the game, for example, an NFL player had already tweeted his phone number to Webb’s account and offered to take her to a strip club.
That sense of entitlement contributes to, if it doesn’t cause, incidents like the Steubenville rape case, the murder of Kasandra Perkins, and the cover-up of a potential sexual assault on Notre Dame’s campus. It contributes to efforts to redefine rape…
That is the objection. Let us say what this is not before we say what it is.
The point being made here is not that Mr Musburger overstepped the bounds of gentlemanly propriety, and exposed a young woman to embarrassment by too fulsome a compliment broadcast too publicly.
I would respect, and even salute, any man man enough to have uttered that criticism in public. Gentleman do not express lust over the wives and sweethearts of other gentlemen, but may only express respectful admiration. This is because a true man, a man of nobility expressing the best of masculine character, is a paragon of self control, and a wary guardian of the virtue and the sensitive character of the weaker sex.
No doubt my last sentence sounds like a parody to you, does it not, dear reader? If so, you can understand why the objection to Mr Musburger’s comments were not criticized in these terms. My sentence comes from a chivalrous and indeed a Catholic worldview, which affirms both the greater strength and dominion and therefore the greater humility and duty placed on the male sex. For Christian gentlemen, men lead and rule, and leaders are servants who give all they have, body and soul, even unto death, like a shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. (We Christians are also much sexier in every way than the wimpy agnostics and their sad barbarian machismo, and our women are fertile, nubile, feminine, and cute, and make better mates and mothers and human beings than the neurotic unisex tramps from your world, heathen losers. Deal with it.)
Such a Christian worldview cannot be criticized or discussed in the modern world because it cannot even be understood, and more than speakers of Newspeak in Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR could understand criticism of Big Brother. The chivalrous objection is not cast in terms of rights and power-struggles. It is too selfless to be understood.
In this case, I will forgo my usual polite habits, so I will not be referring to Mr Waldron by the name Mr Waldron, because he did not call Miss Webb by the name Miss Webb. He merely called her ‘Webb.’ I merely call him ‘creature.’
Let us now turn to what the creature Waldron’s comment is. What it is, is illogical.
The logical error involved is irrelevance. The words here are strung together to form an emotion impressionistic mood, like a blurry cloud of passion, without sharp edges, definition, or necessity.
For example, the first sentence asserts that Mr Musburger’s comment that quarterbacks often attract an attractive girlfriend is said to be “not puzzling” in something identified as the “beer-wings-and-women culture” of college football.
What is the point of this particular string of terms?
Why, for example, are fans of football (some of whom, or so I am told, are indeed women) not described as a culture of “athletics, statistics, and team spirit” or something else related to the sport?
Why mention beer and wings, as opposed to, say, hot peanuts and hotdogs and crackerjacks and Coca Cola, which fans (or so I am told) also consume at games?
Why mention “women” in the same line, as if attraction to women is something only athletes or fans of athletics find themselves prone to suffer? (There are Muslims who have touched more pigskins than have I, but I assure you that even science fiction fans do indeed like women. We just like them dressed as Slave Leia brasskinis because we look more like Jabba the Hutt and less like AJ McCarron) There is nothing about football or sports which makes it a “women” culture, whatever that means.
No, the rhetorical point here is merely to sneer at the crude and loutish tastes of the hoi polloi.
The creature Waldron is not telling us any facts about the world or any deductions about ideas. He is telling us about himself. He is asserting his superiority over the rest of us.
Since the creature Waldron betrays the crudity and loutishness of a barbarian himself, one is perhaps permitted a supercilious smirk at the irony of his presumption of superiority.
Presumably, albeit I cannot fathom why, this superiority consists of being someone who avoids beer, wings, and women.
Now, I have as much respect for teetotalers, vegetarians, and celibates as can be, and indeed, I have considerably more respect for asceticism and self-discipline than does the culture, if it may be called that, surrounding me. So one would think me to be in sympathy with the creature Walloon or whatever his name is.
But no, for the thought, if it can be called that, the creature continues with is that Mr Musburger’s comment that a stalwart quarterback will often attract an attractive girlfriend is “troubling” on the grounds that “there is a culture of domestic violence and sexual assault in football.”
As an attorney, I am always delighted when the prosecution makes a vague rather than a specific claim, because it can be summarily dismissed by the defense. The claim is this case is not that Mr Musburger was aiding and abetting any acts of wifebeating and sexual assault, but merely that the average for such crimes is higher among someone or something associated with the National Football League than the national average.
The creature Waldron does not say specifically that NFL players or fans or sportsannouncers or owners have higher rates of conviction for wifebeating and rape than the national average: he merely makes a windy assertion that there is a nebulous something he calls a “culture” which, it is implied without being said, somehow applauds or enables such violent crimes.
The statement is a lie, and an outrageous lie, and, in a civilized nation or age, a football fan would challenge the creature to a duel with sword or pistol, as a warning to others to mind their words before they slander gentlemen of good character.
Now, I do not know if the statement is literally false. It may indeed be that, taken as a group, any random selection of healthy young men will have a higher incidence of violent crimes, including rape, than the national average, on the grounds that the national average includes old ladies who rarely beat their wives and never commit rape.
I am not a statistician, but I am given to understand that if the average rate of violent crime is higher among healthy young men, than among invalids, elders, and women, then any group which has a disproportionate number of healthy young men, such as stand-up comics, cowboys, midshipmen, firemen, lumberjacks, bridegrooms, blacksmiths or seminarians will have a higher average rate, without there being anything about the so called ‘culture’ of seminarians, etc, which encourages sexual assault and domestic violence.
So if one group consists of ten football players, and another group of the same size consists of nine football players and one grandmother from Peoria, then the average incidence of rape and wifebeating among the first group will exceed that of the second group. (As a point of logic, even this does not show a correlation between football and rape; instead it merely a correlation between grandmaternity and non-rape.)
The implication the creature means for us to draw is not that women rarely have, much less beat, their wives, nor that women rarely have the equipment needed to commit rape, but rather that there is something about football in general, including the consumption of beer and chicken, and something about what Mr Musburger’s observation that beauty queens are pretty, or that athletic heroes attract damsels, which causes or enables or applauds rape.
But please note that no cause and effect chain is posited by the creature, not even alleged, between the idea that jocks win the hearts of maidens fair and the idea that various horrid crimes mentioned here are permissible. The lack of logic is beyond astonishing, and well in the area of being transcendental and unearthly: it is almost like a Zen koan.
This is the accusation: If you compliment a women, you are a rapist. If you think girls find athletes attractive, you are a rapist. If you wish to attract the eye of the opposite sex with your virility at sports or your self discipline to excel at a sport, you are a rapist. If you drink beer, you are a rapist. If you eat fried chicken wings, you are a rapist. If you are a man, you are a rapist.
Obviously, no one in his right mind believes this accusation nor utters it expecting to be believed. That is why it is not uttered, only implied.
That is why the language used by the creature is both so gassy and vague and yet so pointed and accusatory. Someone, it is not clear who, is being accused of a crime beyond misdemeanor, beyond felony, beyond enormity, beyond abomination, and yet it is not clear what this crime is.
Is the crime the fact that Mr Musburger taught and encouraged AJ McCarron that quarterbacking gives one the right to rape beauty queens? That possessing a beauty queen as an unwilling harem slave was part of the wages offered by the Illuminati to successful quarterbacks?
But, on the one hand, Mr Musburger did not say anything remotely like that, and, on the other hand, the Illuminati do not exist, having been destroyed by the UFO people who live in energy pyramids beneath the Bermuda Triangle.
The remaining paragraphs quoted from the creature Waldron are self-parody. My powers of imagination are insufficient to mock them, because neither I nor the creature who wrote them have any intention of taking them seriously.
The words include emotional buzzwords referring to women as chattel, accusing someone (by design, it is not clear who) of regarding men as entitled to possess and rape the bodies of women, and to redefine rape in some way (by design, it is not clear in what way) that makes this capital crime more socially acceptable.
The words also include throw-away references to a case where no guilt has been found yet, which makes this gossip; a case of an allegation about a cover up where nothing has been found yet, which makes this airy gossip; and a case where a cuckolded man killed his lover and himself, making this a case that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything being discussed. Except the murderer there was a football player.
If football caused rape and wifebeating, one would think the cases of non-rape and non-beating would not be included. One would think a comparison between crime rates among young men who play football, and, say, young men on welfare or young men who join labor unions, would be instructive.
We could then compare the “culture” (whatever that means) of those who practice the exacting discipline of sports to the “culture” of welfare or the “culture” of labor union thugs. Who is more violent, again, exactly, between these several groups, on average?
Or (dare anyone say it?) young men who are urban blacks from broken homes, or the children of single mothers, or the broken flotsam of the shipwreck of the Sexual Revolution. Then we could compare the culture of civilization to the byproducts of Politically Correct social experimentation with human lives. That would be indeed most instructive.
One would think some sort of cause and effect aside from an entirely imaginary “culture of rape entitlement” would be alleged. Ah, but to look at any real cause and effect would not serve the Cause.
But the fact that the accusation is entirely imaginary is a feature, not a bug.
Now, there would be no point for me further to dissect the rest of the article, or any others like it, any more than there would be a point in arguing rationally with a commercial advertisement.
No one actually thinks, Hostess bakers least of all, that Wonder Bread builds bodies in twelve ways. Therefore it would be pointless to demand a list of the twelve ways and ask for empirical evidence to support that assertion. The words in a commercial advertisement are emotive and manipulative, an attempt to influence human action without engaging human reason.
The words of the creature are likewise an attempt to influence human action without engaging the human reason.
Nor will I bother to find other like examples of such rhetoric and sophistry and ritual phrases floating about the internet or the media. They are Legion. (By that I mean not that they are countless, but that they are diabolical.) Instead I will direct the readers attention to three pressing questions here.
First, what is the meaning of the creature’s objection to calling a beauty queen beautiful? Why were the words written?
Second, what is the philosophy or worldview which leads, step by step, from relatively well intentioned concerns (for example, not wishing a young lady to be treated disrespectfully) to pure, stark, raving, pop-eyed, screaming, Lovecraftian insanity and pure and putrid evil (for example, equating compliments with rape)?
Third, during the step by step process which leads from relatively well-intentioned concerns to pure and putrid evil, why are there no brakes, no halts, no inhibitions, no sobriety, nothing to check the process before it dashes headlong over the brink of insanity into the yawning abyss of unfathomable dementia?
Let us address each question in order:
Why were words like the creature quoted above written? I believe I understand this perfectly, because I recognize it as if in a mirror reflection.
I am a Roman Catholic. We are often criticized, even by ourselves, for engaging in rote prayers and recitations. Such criticism mistakes the meaning and purpose of ritual words.
When I pray the Magnificat, I am not asking God to cast down the proud, nor does the infinite mind of the Creator need a reminder of the good deeds and mighty works He has done in the past for Abraham’s seed. I am not engaging in an argument meant to convince a skeptic. I am not describe a fact nor a deduction of facts to a curious juror. Nor am I exposing the products of my artistic imagination to the applause or otherwise of the world.
I am adoring. It us adoration. It is a love letter. The purpose of ritual is worship.
The creature Wubble (or whatever his name) and other creatures like him write the words like those seen above not to persuade, nor to describe, nor to express. They were words of worship, using the same rote phrases and ritual words his cult uses to glorify the empty world view of self regard they have in place of any divinity to worship. He was trumpeting his moral superiority by uttering gibberish.
It is detestation. It is a poisoned pen letter.
The paragraphs are ritual phrases used to express sneering hatred and contempt, and to express loyalty to the ideals of political correctness, not to convey a thought from one mind to another.
That the hatred and contempt are written in the lifeless, plodding, whining, wheezing, and insufferably boring style of an etiolated intellectual rather than with the fiery power and condemnation of a true demagogue is a sign of the inadequacy, not of the writer, but of his philosophy.
It is an essential part of the nihilist philosophy called Political Correctness that stupid people try to talk like smart people. Not being smart themselves, they do not know how we talk.
They imagine our talk to be something like that of Mr Spock on STAR TREK, using big words and dull language and making references to statistics so as to sound all scientificky and stuff.
The PCists are not really sure what science and statistics are, or what they prove. Listen to them discuss THE BELL CURVE by Herrnstein and Murray, or MORE GUNS LESS CRIME by Lott, or the reliability and medical side effects of contraception, and you will hear about anything but the statistics. But they crave the prestige being able to quote an authority.
But they cannot pull off sounding grave and sober, so they just sound dull. Sometimes they make reference to imaginary statistics, but usually they just pretend that the statistics are out there somewhere, and pretend that the statistics support their case, and, while they are at it, they pretend that they have already made the case, so that all they need to write is the summation and concluding remarks to the universal applause of all right-thinking people.
Remember, Political Correctists are not thoughtful people, they are conformists. They are attempting to establish and maintain a uniformity of thought and outlook.
All this pretense of authority and faux-intellectual gravity would all be quite a pathetic tactic, except that, (1) it works, and (2) two entire generations have been indoctrinated in a set of reflexes (I will not call them beliefs) to ensure the pathetic tactic works on them better than on any previous generations of man.
No savage tribesman of Scythia nor Boeotian slave would believe something told him by a random and anonymous stranger. The average American, however, thanks to modern schooling, believes what he hears on television and radio, or the findings of committees and commissions whose loyalties and agendas and qualifications he could never begin to discern, and these so called experts, as long as they are anonymous, will be believed with an unbelievable gullibility.
There are still grown men with good education, for example, who believe DDT is somehow harmful, and who see nothing wrong with Rachel Carson’s house is still being a national monument. There are no monuments to the countless millions dead of malaria due to her junk science, however. This is the Age of the Gullible, one made insufferably hypocritical by pretending to be an Age of Reason.
Happily, or unhappily, to some degree and in some circles the pretense at being an Age of Reason has been dropped, and the brutal, empty reality of being an Age of Nothingness has been admitted. Few writers of this modern faction openly admit their loyalty to nonreason, but many, even most adopt some or all of the conclusions of the doctrine without identifying, perhaps without knowing, the foundations on which those conclusions are based.
This nicely introduces the second question. In any conversation with a Political Correctist, the same pattern is followed:
He seems to be a man of normal judgment at first, merely one who worries unduly about remote or unlikely or trivial dangers, and who is unduly nonchalant about immediate or likely or substantial dangers. He seem at first to be a trifle otherworldly or ill-informed, but ironically fancies himself well educated and current with the news.
He seems to be a man of normal reasoning power at first, merely one is somewhat distracted, or unable to concentrate, or unable to answer any question put to him directly, as if a toothache makes him unable to focus his thoughts, or some annoying noise inaudible to you.
He seems to be a man of ordinary moral compass at first, merely one slightly more forgiving in some areas where a reasonable man thinks the moral law is strict, and slightly more strict in areas where a reasonable man thinks the moral law should allow for some leniency, or admit of certain exceptions.
All these impressions are aided by the fact that Political Correctists do not ever admit their loyalties, and, in some odd way I cannot understand, seem not to be aware of them.
They do not think of themselves as conformists to an ideology, perhaps because it is one of the maxims of their ideology that they are all freethinkers who independently arrived at coincidentally uniform conclusions.
Or perhaps because another maxim of their ideology is that their conclusions are scientific, resting on the authority of nameless experts, whereas any rival point of view is not merely unreal but a sign of mental aberration, usually fear (as in homophobia, Islamophobia, Reactionary, etc.)
Whatever the case, even a brief attempt at a sober and rigorous conversation will dispel these first impressions and reveal the disorienting and alarming abyss which yawns between the rational man and the Political Correctist.
Rather than possessing a balanced and moderate judgment, the Political Correctists exists in a state of screaming hysteria about dangers that are utterly imaginary and harmless, such as Global Warming, and bovine, nay, a morbid indifference to clear and present dangers, such as enemies with the means and motive and announced intention to destroy us, communism in days not long past, jihadism today.
Rather than being well-informed, the Political Correctist is not only ignorant of matters of common knowledge, he is abysmally ignorant and, at times, apparently proud of that ignorance.
He prefers to believe conspiracy-theory styles of “secret” history to explain the world and the doings of his fellow men. These theories have an headsplittingly unimaginative, even boring, monotony to them. All human actions are reduced to power struggles between the oppressed and the oppressors, and the “secret” motive of the oppressors is a malign powerlust.
Often, however, the PCists are too lazy even to invent any motive for those not in their faction. Any disagreement is attributed to xenophobia, homophobia, Red Scare, Witchhunt-Mania, Islamophobia–it is like listening to a child too unimaginative to come up with a new or interesting lie, but instead merely insists on saying that smaller child he attacked hit him first “for no reason.”
And, when it comes to morality, the conversation always follows the same pattern again. Something will start off sounding like a reasonable, if unusual, concern for the justice or compassion for some group or another, and then end up in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of total moral inversion, where disgusting sexual perversion is laudable and worthy of fiercest defense, and normal sexual behaviors, customs, emotions and passions are condemned on the most frivolous reasons imaginable: as here, where complimenting a beauty queen on her beauty is seen as being a signal encouraging rape.
The moral inversion applies to all areas. Lies from Rachel Carson or Walter Duranty are applauded, truths uttered by Senator McCarthy (or, for that matter, Thucydides) are condemned. Violent riots are applauded, and peaceful protests are falsely accused of being violent, as with the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements.
And the impression that the Political Correctist is interested in a rigorous, or even a sober, conversation is soon dispelled. These creatures exist only to make the most extreme of accusations. To them, everything is a crisis, everything an emergency, everything a matter of absolute principle where no compromise is possible and any discussion on the matter is treasonous, if not insane, a sign of some phobia or another.
I remember a philosophical discussion with an editor, sane-sounding at first, about the need for self-control as a virtue, including self-control in the sexual areas. I was arguing that society needs formal and informal sanctions, including peer disapproval, to channel the sexual impulses in man into harmless and useful areas. His reply was that I intended, like Hitler, to march homosexuals into concentration camps and exterminate them.
This was not a bad man, nor an insane man, nor an unreasonable man, and yet after a few exchanges of point and counterpoint, he was soberly worried about the coming global anti-unchastity holocaust led by John C Wright, Master of the Spanish Nazi Inquisition of Mordor and my endless radioactive ape armies.
I remember an argument on this blog where a reader, sane-sounding at first, wrote in to object that showing the funnybook character Marvel Girl using her X-Man powers to do housework was demeaning to women, and, when asked why, the reply was that showing girls doing housework, or encouraging respect for motherhood, was the same as forbidding them by law from entering the professions.
Isaac Asimov likewise one said having distinctive dress or hairstyles for women had nothing to do with femininity, but was the attempt by men to pin the Nazi’s “Yellow Star” on them. No doubt this was because women were Jews, and men were Nazis, and we men dream night and day of nothing but humiliating and killing women, preferably after torture.
I have been in a conversation with a man who objected to my using the word “Chinaman” to refer to the people ruled by Mao, but was nonchalant, even innocently puzzled like a wide-eyed kitten, that I or anyone would think there was anything wrong with Mao’s genocide of countless Chinamen. (For the record, his numbers far exceed Stalin’s.) The first was a matter worth shrieking like a steam whistle about, whereas the second was a meaningless historical oddity having nothing in particular to do with the advantages or disadvantages of totalitarian socialism.
The pattern recurs again and again. Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, which no one whose heart was not stone could watch without being moved, could not be condemned for some simple or ordinary reason, some criticism of the craftsmanship of the film or the excessive bloodiness of the images. No, even though it was was nothing but a very faithful rendering of the Passion narrative, and the line were lifted directly from scripture, it had to be condemned as racist and antisemitic. A lesser accusation is not enough, is never enough.
Again, any attempt to deter voter fraud is caused by race-hatred. Any criticism of tax-policy is caused by race-hatred. Patriotism is race-hatred. Any desire to prosecute a war against a ruthless and fanatical aggressor is caused by Islamophobia, which is race-hatred, unless it is caused by McCarthyist Witch-Hunt Red Scare fears, in which case it is Reaction, or Class-Interest, or hatred of the poor.
Complimenting a pretty woman is rape. And misogyny. And race-hatred.
And these kind of lunatic accusations are made routinely.
Likewise any evil of any kind whatsoever, which ordinary moral codes would discourage, deter, or forbid, is assumed to be utterly innocent and natural, or, better yet, noble and brave. Of course, the act of making a moral judgment is condemned, as endless examples show, as being motivated by a desire for powerlust. The moral judgment is always assumed to be not only false, but contemptible, a mere figleaf for the true motive, which is fear and hatred and malice.
Surely a desire to see to the equality and fair treatment of women and blacks and the poor, a desire to alleviate the unneeded guilt of the wrongly-condemned and establish their self-esteem, a desire to conserve natural resource and live in peace and brotherhood with all men, are not only reasonable, but are the most noble and elevated of sentiments.
Why is it then, if these are the true motives of the Political Correctists, that their chains of reasoning (if they can be called that) end up opposing just wars and applauding unjust riots, opposing monogamy and applauding sodomy, praising individualism and enforcing conformity, expressing compassion for the poor while doing everything imaginable including open violence to grind their faces and keep them low, miserable, dependent, starved and weak? Why? Why do they see a man compliment a beauty queen and think the rape riots of the Nazi Patriarchy is about to start?
Why can’t they put on the brakes?
The Political Correctist cannot be content to accuse rivals and opponents of small misdeeds or evils of a human proportion; the evils must always be absolute evils, the motives must be utterly vile; and we who stand against the impious filth and nonsense of Political Correctness, well, we are not merely vermin and enemies of man, we are perfect devils to the core.
There are a number of rhetorical and psychological reasons which make an intemperate and unreasonable accusation easier and cleaner and more efficient than a carefully considered accusation, not the least of which is the continual astonishment of the accused at the reckless unfairness, even the insanity, of the accusation.
If you want the jurors to ponder the evidence, make an accusation that is based on evidence. If you want a mob to burn a witch, accuse her of every mishap and ill, real or imaginary, the spleen of man can invent, including stark absurdities like flying through the air or copulating with demons. In that way, the mob can congratulate itself on its degree of faith in you, by being willing to believe stark absurdities, and can turn on any mob member who feels pity, under the excuse that pity is weakness.
You make an insane accusation if you want to panic your mob into frenzy. And insane accusations need no brakes.
Is each an every member of the Politically Correct movement, including those who deny, even to themselves, that they are members, this extreme, this absurd, this lacking in judgment? Of course not. People are people. They vary. It is the philosophy I am discussing, not the people.
But when a moderate PCist attempts to check the frenzy of an extremist PCist, please note the amazing lack of conviction.
There is no logical reason to be given in that frame of mind to justify moderation.
An example: Many socialists of the Fabian type dislike the mass murders of socialists of the Communist type, but they can articulate no reason to distance themselves from their violent brethren, and their condemnation of Communist violence is weak to nonexistent. The last socialist I asked about communism spent the rest of a dreary and predictable conversation accusing me of every sin he could invent, but not a single word of condemnation was spent on Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, or the socialist’s many brothers-in-spirit.
In addition to rhetorical and psychological reasons, there is one overwhelmingly logical reason. Once you agree in principle (for example) that the state has the right to ignore private property rights, no principle can be announced for any other rights to be honored. In effect, you have just announced that totalitarianism is right and just in principle. And once totalitarianism is right and just, there is no logical stopping point that can be held based on practicality or sentiment or something other than principle, because everything is weaker than principles. The slippery slope has no traction. There is nothing to grab. There are no brakes.
Likewise for everything else in the PCist worldview. Once you agree, in principle, that all human action is a Darwinian competition without quarter or mercy between helpless yet blameless victims and sadistic oppressors who lack both human compassion and any instinct of self preservation, who, in effect, have no rational motives at all, in effect, you have announced that the oppressors are not human beings in any sense of the word, not even beasts who can be domesticated, not even vermin whose depredations can be tolerated.
Once you agree to the Darwinian analysis of history as announced by Marx, and see all human relationships (including courtship and marriage) as a pitiless power struggle between the exploited and the exploiters, there is no reason in principle to treat the pitiless enemy with pity. Peace is not logically possible within the worldview: it would be like a lamb playing pattycake with a lioness. You have in effect agreed that courtesy or justice is impossible between human beings. Quarter is impossible. Retreat is impossible. Negotiation is impossible.
It is simply easier, and much more fun, just to call the accused a witch, and burn him. Besides, he is guilty in some abstract metaphysical way of participating in past injustices, because of some alleged privileged position all his race and nation and class and sex enjoy. Mr Musburger never actually counseled anyone to commit a rape, but Simon LeGree kept black slaves, so Mr Musburger is jointly and severally liable for these wrongdoings, as well as guilty for exterminating the Neanderthal.
Why does anyone believe a worldview that dispenses summarily with justice and moderation and prudence in this way? Who speeds away in a car with no brakes?
We can dispense with three theories about the lack of brakes right away.
First, these creatures are not stupid. They are the victims, in many cases of an abundance or superabundance of education. They can calculate sums, compose a grammatically correct sentence in English, and, in areas unrelated to their particular mental blocks or blindspots, can use a syllogism to draw a rational conclusion from a given set of premises. They only talk stupid. Really, really, really stupid.
Second, they are not insane. They are oriented as to time, place, and person, which is the medical definition, and they know the moral nature and moral consequences of their actions, which is the legal definition. They only talk neurotic or psychotic. Really psychotic.
Third, they are not evil. While they support and offer specious apologetic for and applaud the most sadistic regimes in history, and while they support and offer specious apologetic for and applaud the most depraved crimes and criminals imaginable, they themselves rarely or never commit genocide, thefts, abortions, infanticides, and acts of sexual perversion. But they talk like evil men, they rejoice in evil, and flatter evil, calling it good.
(They do, however, lie, and they are willing to lie about anything and everything, at any time, including at times when they know full well no one, not even them, believes their lie.)
There is the paradox: intelligent men who talk nonsense, sane men who talk madness, good men who worship evil. How is it possible?
How could any intelligent, sane, good man look at Miss Webb, see her beauty, and call it wrong to compliment her? Then, with an awe inspiring lack of any sense of proportion, call it not mere wrong, but a crime akin to aiding or abetting rape?
The paradox lies in the mystery of the will.
The PCists are intelligent but, in certain areas and on certain topics, they steadfastly refuse to think with a self discipline and stubbornness that is beyond belief, perhaps beyond estimation. I know many who would rather die than think, and many who would rather go to hell than think. They will not think to save life or soul.
They are sane but, in certain areas and on certain topics, they prefer insanity.
They are good men, despite how they talk. I am sure any one of them is no more likely to cheat on his wife or snub a beggar than your average Christian. Why do they applaud and adore disgusting, vile and absolute evil, men like Che and Castro and Mao, bullshit theories like Socialism, believe bullshit artists like Noam Chomsky and Peter Singer? Why do they give Father of the Year awards to crooked little adulterous weasels like President Clinton?
Again, the PCists are good men, but in the area of the blindspot, they chose to support evil. It relaxes and soothes and flatters them. They love evil. It makes them feel strong, enlightened, wise, and progressive.
The reason is a matter of metaphysics. The reason for anyone to surrender his will is always metaphysical, rather than, say, utilitarian, because surrendering the will surrenders the whole being. In this case, the Political Correctists surrender and pervert each man his own conscience, his capacity for logic, and the exercise of his judgment.
One does not surrender this, which is the totality of one’s life, the totality of one’s worldview, except to a god, or the functional equivalent thereof.
Many Political Correctists are nominally Christian, even Catholic, despite the paradox and absurdity of claiming to be the member of a body you hate which serves a God you secretly fear and despise. However, with the surrender of the rational faculty, the Political Correctist avoid the logical implications of thinking merely by avoiding thought. They can be a nominally Catholic politically publicly committed to forcing Catholic employers to pay for abortion-inducing drugs, or can be a nominally Christian man who join a denomination that encourages gay marriage. In any case, they do not follow Christian tradition or Catholic teaching on the central matters of the Christian faith. They are “spiritual” rather than “religious”.
And that, my dear friends, is the first clue.
The word “spiritual” is a code word for someone who does not hold any one Church or any one creed in special esteem. Is it one who suspends his judgment in such matters in hope of avoiding debate, disagreement, tumult and bloodshed.
Likewise, to them, the word “religious” does not mean a man who devotes his life to Christ. It means someone who takes a fundamentally arbitrary and personal opinion, no more meaningful than which end of the egg, big end or little end, to crack open at breakfast, and for the only motivations which exist in the Political Correctist universe, namely, fear, hatred, and powerlust, seeks to exterminate any and all men of any contrary opinion.
The second clue is that real fanatics, either of the Communist or Jihadist strain, men who will lie, defraud, torture, kill and kill themselves and kill their children in order to exterminate capitalists and Jews, are, for the Political Correctist, either partially good guys who have an unfortunate bad habit of mass murder, or who are faultless victims of the oppressor, therefore thoroughly good guys.
Now put the two clues together, and we can discover the name of the god to which the Political Correctist devoutly yields his life and mind and soul.
The first clue points to the simple Devil’s bargain famously promised in the famously idiotic John Lenin song ‘Imagine.’ Rather than reciting the nauseating lyrics, I will sum up: If nothing is true, and nothing is false, then there is no basis whatsoever for disagreement or difference of opinion. If nothing is true, there is no truths which divide us, no property, no nations, no creeds, hence we can all live in perfect unity therefore perfect peace.
The absence of conviction is the presence of harmony.
By this theory, to make peace between two children quarreling over a toy is not to establish who owns the toy or whose turn it rightly is. The secret is not to get a second toy. The secret is not to teach the brats unselfishness.
No, the secret, by this logic, is to wish into existence creatures who look like children but who do not play with toys because they have no desire to play. They just sit in the corner with their eyes open, not blinking.
That is what they want for the children of men to be.
The technical name of the doctrine that there is no truth is nihilism. The appeal of nihilism is the promise that eliminating the various things worth living for, such as truth and virtue and beauty, the goods earned by one’s life’s work, the contents of one’s mental and spiritual growth, and passion of love of homeland and love of family, and most of all the all-consuming love of God — if we give all this up, then we can avoid messy debates, civil disturbances, political compromises, civil wars, world wars, and all unhappiness.
If we only give up everything that makes us happy, we can be happy.
But it does not work. If you give up your private property, all that happens is that the strongest and cruelest man among you, Stalin or Mao, enslaves you and takes your property. If you give up nations and patriotism and love of home, you do not achieve some ecumenical Christendom, all you get is that the group among you with the strongest sense of self identity, that is, the most ruthless nation, becomes your nation, and the world is Dar al-Islam. If you give up all religion, all that happens is that Political Correctness becomes your religion.
If we only give up everything that makes us happy, we can be happy.
It is the stupidest idea of all time. Because it is stupid, anyone who clings to it must decide to avoid being rational, at least rational when facing any politically correct topics. Reason can exist on other topics and chains of thought, which is why the Political Correctist only has selective blindspots in his thinking.
If we only give up everything that makes us happy, we can be happy.
It is the most ignorant idea of all time. No one with a twelfth grader’s knowledge of human nature and human history could possibly believe for a microsecond that such a bargain has even the smallest chance of working. Because it is ignorant, anyone who clings to it must decide to avoid knowing facts, at least knowing any politically incorrect facts of history or human nature.
History now becomes a simplistic myth about a long evolution out of the darkness of superstition to the enlightenment of political correctness. Human nature now becomes the endless oppression of the victims by the irrational and phobic authorities who could not imagine there was no heaven. Now that we are all brave enough (yes, this is how they phrase it) to imagine there is no heaven, all authority is debunked, and all oppression ceases.
Facts about history and human nature can exist on other topics and chains of thought, which is why the Political Correctist only has selective blindspots in his thinking. I have a friend work who, indeed, knows more about Byzantine history than anyone I have ever met. But when asked why the Hostess company when out of business, or what caused the Great Depression, he ascribed it to the self destructive or malign greed of the rich and powerful, no doubt dressed like Rich Uncle Pennybags from the Parker Brother Monopoly game in top hat and monocle. It is like listening to a witch doctor carefully diagnose the cause of inflammation as being due to the malevolence of wicked but invisible fairies.
If we only give up everything that makes us happy, we can be happy.
It is the most evil idea of all time. Because it is evil, anyone who clings to it must decide to avoid being morally straight. The conscience can be allowed to speak on other topics, which is why the Political Correctist only has selective blindspots in his conscience.
He is also plagued by guilt, and a gnawing inner knowledge of his own surrender to evil, which is both why he assumes the posture of moral superiority whenever possible, and why he accuses any honest men he encounters of the most repellent imaginable enormities of total evil imaginable.
That is another reason why is it not enough to say that giving a beauty a compliment is bad taste; the Political Correctist has to say it is rape. That is why it is not enough to say that urging girls to wear skirts is an imposition and an annoyance; the Political Correctist has to say it is pinning the Jewish Star on them, a prelude to slavery and torture and mass murder.
The second clue is their love of evildoers, their slobbering, unsightly, infatuated lust for sadism on a grand scale, a lust so unholy, it which would make even a catamite blush.
You see, the only thing the Islamics and the Soviets and the peace-loving vegetarian sodomites have in common is that they hate the Christ. In every other way, they are opposite and opposed fiercely to each other.
Please take a moment to wonder at the vehement apologetic poured out upon monsters like Stalin and Mao and Castro, or Saddam, or Che, or any other infatuation of the Political Correctists.
Please take a moment to recall the countless times you have heard the bleeding hearts weeping at the unfairness of the oppressions of the we Christian White Male oppressors. But no tears are shed over the kulaks, whom Stalin starved to death, or the Cambodians butchered by Pol Pot.
Please then take the final step, put the final jigsaw piece in place, an ask yourself when, if ever, any Russian or Arab was subjected to oppression in America. When did Mr Musburger ever oppress Miss Webb?
If Mr Musburger never oppressed Miss Webb, or even offended her, then what was the point of the apology?
To hear the accusations of the pious PCist creature, the offense and the oppression was part of a vague nebula of evil issuing from the culture of football, which tells athletes that they have a right to couple with nubile slavegirls, and rape and kill any toothsome trollop unwilling to submit to their inhuman demands. But this had no relation to reality and is not meant to. It is symbolism and ritual, an act of worship. What is being symbolized? What is being worshiped?
The symbolism is to identify some harmless act as a an act of oppression, and to identify some unharmed person or group as a victim of oppression. The ritual then demands an overthrow of authority, in order to end the oppression.
Who is the authority that all the Political Correctists fear and hate and seek to escape? It is not the Republican Party, or the White Man, or the West, or Big Business, or President Bush, or the Pope, or Christendom, or anyone else you can name or point to.
All these and many more will serve as stand-ins if need be, and any can be symbolically dressed in the pointed cap and rags of the symbolic Authority, but clearly no human person can concoct or organize all the evil of human history.
The Political Correctists do not fear political authority, since their every political act is made to increase the power of the state and erode any institutions or constitutions which might hinder the operation of that power, from private property to marriage to the Second Amendment. They are not anarchists, or, rather, not simply anarchists in a worldly sense. It is not legal authority they hate. Caesar they adore.
So what is the Authority?
There is an evasive quality at the very heart of all Political Correctist thinking, and this spills over to all their thinking, from the smallest things to the greatest, and even appears in the most casual and trivial of matters, such as the one we are discussing now.
The evasion is the unwillingness to admit, perhaps even to themselves, what is behind all this talk of rebellion.
The Authority they hate is Christ.
They are otherworldly anarchists, spiritual anarchists. While they will gleefully sell themselves and their children into slavery in return for the most specious promises of earthly happiness to Caesar, and trust Caesar despite infinite evidence of untrustworthy nature of world utopias and earthly paradises, they will never trust Christ. They are bomb-throwing anarchists of the spiritual and mental realm, mistrusting all laws and all logic, all thought and all discipline, and most of all, regarding all moral uprightness with horror and contempt.
Their motto: Non serviam. I will not serve.
That is it. That is the final clue, the answer, the center of the puzzle, the home of the maze behind all their tortured reasoning, the explanation for their hysteria and their dullness, their arrogance, their ignorance, and everything else surrounding this odd phenomenon of good men who adore evil.
Of course they are good men. They are seeking social justice and other good things. And of course they worship evil. Once you turn away from the light, you walk in darkness. There is no other third option.
Of course they are learned men who make themselves ignorant; they evade the knowledge of their self-betrayal, their treason against all which is best inside them. Once you abandon wisdom, all that is left is folly and wind. There is no other third option.
Of course they are reasonable men who have lost all sense of judgment and proportion. The hungry heart longs for God; so our Creator created us. When a man denies himself the feast of divine love and peace, he has nothing but hellish hate and pandemonium inside him.
God is too rational and obvious a concept to deny, so those who deny Him (even nominal Christians who praise Him with their lips and deny Him in their politics) must abandon the faculty by which men see what is rational and obvious. They surrender their judgment.
Who, then, is their true god? What do they worship?
They worship nothing.
I do not meant that they lack the act and impulse to worship. I mean that they are devout, and in thought and word and deed, they pay their adoration to their idol.
Their idol is The Abyss, the nothingness, the emptiness of spirit and the void of meaning which is at the center of their lives. It is it the Pit to which they freely cosign themselves, now and hereafter.
For the Nothingness promises peace and ease. If nothing is true, you need not bother your head about the confusions and discipline of thought and reasoning.
The Nothingness promises can never be wrong in an argument again, only oppressed. And you get unoppressed not by correcting a wrong (which is difficult) but by shaking off an oppressor (which, when you are not actually being oppressed at all in any way, is actually quite easy).
The Nothingness promises high self esteem. If there is no better and no worse, no one is above you, no saint merits your respect, no father merits your obedience.
The Nothingness promises liberty, endless liberty, infinite and indefinite liberty. If there is no truth, then there are no rules, save those we make ourselves, to suit ourselves, but only for so long as the rules suits us.
If there is no reality, we are the creators, we are gods. Gods can do anything they want whenever they want.
The Nothingness promises that there are no consequences, no comeuppance, no judgment, no costs. Eat your free lunch in the restaurant of life, and there is no reason to pay. Someone else will pick up the tab.
And the Nothingness flatters with soothing flattery, smooth and sweet as honey. You can be morally and mentally superior to your betters because, if there is no truth and no standards and no obligations and no duties, there are no betters. Anyone who does better or gets richer or wins more fame is obviously a cheater on whose hard work, now decreed illegitimate, it is lawful for you to rob and feast upon, or even an act of civic responsibility.
The flattery of the Nothingness, by abolishing all morality, reason, and judgment, at once appeals:
(1) to the pride, which is disguised as self esteem;
(2) to the envy,which is disguised as a concern for fairplay and even distribution of wealth, or the rectification of historic injustices;
(3) to the wrath, which is disguised at righteous indignation against authority on behalf of the oppressed;
(4) to the sloth, which is disguised as a desire for the unearned of both material goods and spiritual honors, which is why everyone gets a trophy in modern contests;
(5) to the avarice, which is disguised as a demand for one’s rightful due from the communal treasures. This demand for communal distribution one’s due includes not only material goods under a socialist scheme. More sinisterly, it includes such imponderables as the language and history and ancestral honors, which is why the word “man” is now misinterpreted to mean only males, or why Cleopatra is now a Negro, or why NASA praises Arabic contributions to science, but not German;
(6) to the gluttony, which is disguised as a desire for self-expression or self-medication or a shortcut to so called higher states of consciousness. The drug culture, which is the leitmotif and hallmark of nihilism, is merely gluttony writ large;
(7) and to the lusts, which is disguised as so called sexual liberation, as if humiliating women from their once-high position, and removing all social and legal protections and inhibitions against male sexual predation were a freedom rather than a degrading slavery.
I hope, dear reader, you understand now why this wretched and rank nonsense both never admits its own motivation and yet rules our world and, absent divine intervention, will ruin our world? The Nothingness has these seven allies in every weak and frightened human heart, and the most natural and normal thing in the world is to bow down to them and accept their lovely, lovely chains and fetters.
But more than anything, and most of all, the Nothingness gives its worshipers the freedom, and license, and encouragement to hate. That is why hate is nearly the only thing they ever accuse their accusers of: it is the main motive they know.
They hate anything that reminds them of Christ in the same way and for the same reason the devils in Hell hate the Sons of Adam, who are made in the image and likeness of their great enemy, that authority against whom they rebelled, whose glory and beauty and majesty forever torments them, and their memory of lost bliss.
They hate beauty. Go into any modern art museum if you doubt me.
They hate virtue. Read any modern novel.
They hate reason. They hate, hate, hate the truth and regard claims to know to truth to be violent lies. Talk to them and see.
Why hate such delightful and salutary things, things man cannot live without? It is because God is the source and summit of reason, truth, virtue, and beauty. And they would rather die than think, would rather go to hell.
They hate masculinity. This is because God is masculine. They hate superiority and inferiority. This is because God is superior and we are inferior. They hate fatherhood because they hate the Father.
Hating fatherhood, they hate femininity. What else can the sweet and nurturing nature of the female be for them, aside from a Yellow Star of oppression?
Hating motherhood, they hate children. Go to an abortion mill and see. Listen to their absurd overpopulation fears, now in a day when we suffer underpopulation. Hear how they talk as if childbirth is punishment. Look at how they try to sexualize children as quickly as possible and keep grown men infants as long as possible.
They hate man, the idea of man. Look at how they rally to the rights of animals, all the while proclaiming man is nothing but an animal.
Do not be deceived, dear readers. The Leftist hate us with a deep and abiding hatred. They hate everything about us, from sunshine to pretty girls to brave boys to solid gold to warm firearms to truth, beauty, and virtue. Everything good, they call evil, and everything evil they call good.
They even hate calling a beautiful woman a beauty.
But it is not because they are evil, or illogical, or insane, or unwise. It is because they have lost their way. They have gouged out their eyes, and complain the noon is dark. They have locked themselves in a cage and thrown away the only key. They are lonely for divine love, and homesick for heavenly wonders.
The shepherd of heaven is seeking to for them with more craft and stealth and subtlety than you or I can imagine. Choirs of angels more numberless than the stars themselves, and older, will peal songs to shake the orbs of heaven when even the least of these lost is found.
That is precisely why they hate us and we dare not, despite all temptation and deserving, return their hate. That is why they condemn us and hold us in contempt, and we pray for them. We have the secret of infinite joy, the grail of endless life. All we need do is lure the lost close enough to scent the savor, the elfin fragrance of amaranth and ambrosia, and they will thirst for the wine of the Lord of Light, and hunger for the bread of life.
Condemnation is what the fools deserve. Prayer and charity and forgiveness is what they will get from us, and if we call them fools, we are in danger of the hellfire. I do not want what I deserve; let us wish the infinite justice of an infinitely just monarch on no man. We are finite beings. The justice would burn us up like trash.
Let us praise God that He placed such sublime examples of beauty and virtue in our midst as the Daughters of Eve, knowing we have done nothing to merit such an inexpressible gift.
When the lost fret over beauty queens, let us rejoice. Even to look at such loveliness is a reason for gratitude and a cause for devout reflection on the goodness of the world we Sons of Adam have marred.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
