This Just In: Nation Not in Danger from PC Yet (though plain meanness and muck-raking run amok)

Po Lick Tickle Wreck Test?

“PC” came into my world as an acronym for “political correctness” about the same time it seeped into common usage for “personal computer.” For some reason, my resistance to the abbreviation in either case was immediate. Maybe too much like the British “wc” or our “RC,” to which I was partial on a July day. The latter term has now been eclipsed by brand names (HP, Apple – oops – Mac) and more design-specific terms like laptop, pad, tower. I suppose that eclipse is because the former term has so permeated our public dialogue that it hogs the field.

At first, I saw “politically correct,” especially in reference to speech, as a useful term, if employed precisely, a way to distinguish real correctness (right reasoning, manners, considerateness, civility, respect) from feigned correctness, the pretense of sensitivity or hypersensitivity. But it didn’t work out as I’d hoped. Almost anywhere I look up the term, it’s immediately identified as a pejorative (and combative) term deployed to assail anyone who is presumed (or imagined) to be speaking with a calculated desire to mollify and avoid offense to minorities and other groups, especially those with little income but significant ballot power. A kind of band wagon insincerity. It seems we have Dinesh D’Souza (with a little assistance from liberals who used it as an ironic in-joke) to thank for this, largely, and the result is that genuine empathy and fair-mindedness get conflated with the manipulative espousing of respect extended to a person or group whose favor one wishes to curry (a term, I should point out, I borrow from equestrian usage rather than the vocabulary of cuisine).

pogoHate speech, racial profiling, stereotyping – certainly these are public, and therefore political, issues. But first they’re personal. They’re rude, and it’s no surprise that a politician who would bloviate about having no time for political correctness would be quick to add that an entire nation has no time for PC. Maybe we’d better slow down, if that’s what it takes to become deliberative and gracious, to grant and display dignity. In political circles, I suppose this is called being diplomatic. Such pronouncements as the “no time” claim are always in a charged context and usually furnished by people whose diction, figures of speech and style of delivery all suggest that they would have little time for real correctness – compassion or politeness – so urgent is their agenda, so certain their mission.

Heaven knows, the excesses of what is called PC are invitations to satire, such as the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that “Baa Baa Black Sheep” is offensive, and in the fierce and divisive culture wars that have permeated this century so far, political correctness, moral correctness and even conventional rectitude have become weapons rather than tools of investigation. To call someone politically correct is tantamount to saying he or she is a panderer, insincere, a con artist.

As a teacher and writer, I have a dog in this fight. Maybe two dogs. I want my classes to feature both candid discourse and sensitivity (with diplomacy and accuracy). A hard balance to strike, if the participants have reasons to fear or despise common cause and mutual understanding. Fortunately, that doesn’t often happen. Students who take my courses in editing or the writing of poetry and fiction are usually attuned to the lovely and deadly possibilities of words. I give them early on this wisdom from Scott Russell Sanders: “The work of language deserves our greatest care, for the tongue’s fire may devour the world or light the way.” I vote for light. It’s important that we limit words’ use as weapons, for once the fire ignites, winds may blow, lightning snake and everyone may get singed.

My second dog in the fight has to do with the actual writing done in such classes. I don’t know how writers who wish to explore the human condition in a significant body of work with admirable range can do so without on occasion presenting characters whose language is sometimes coarse, objectionable, even despicable, but it’s up to the writer (no small charge here) to make it clear that the character may not be the narrator and that the narrator may not be the author. There’s no record of an audience stoning the actor who plays Iago particularly well, though we scorn the character, while being provoked and mystified by him, even learning from his speech and behavior. It’s a tricky business. Though Huck is Twain’s moral center, the boy’s language behavior is often no better than that of the ruthless scoundrels in the story (not to mention the well-meaning but misguided and naïve parrot-folk who haven’t come to Huck’s experience of brotherly love). How does Twain make certain the reader understands that the author trusts Huck’s heart more than his tongue? It’s powerful difficult, but Twain cannot persuade us that his story is 14 carat and not fool’s gold if Huck refers to slaves as “African Americans.” Twain crosses on the thin ice, as artists often must do. We keep our fingers crossed.

If it seems that I’m tiptoeing around here, being PC myself, I’m aware of it, and I hate it. In a classroom I will utter the offending syllables in quotations and direct conversation about them. In an imaginative text – a story or a poem in which the persona is at some remove from my vocabulary – I’ll seldom hesitate to go for the realistic, even (Cormac) McCarthyesque vernacular over the euphemism. It’s seldom a pleasure to do that, but often medicinal necessity, for the vitality and authenticity of the story. As the culture wars have progressed, I’ve spent more time contemplating how much offending speech my characters need to be allowed, and at what point it is akin to piling on. Lenny Bruce makes a cogent point when he writes about his obscenity trial for uttering a particularly coarse phrase in public. Over and over the prosecutor and judge repeat the offending phrases, and Bruce comes to understand that they like saying them, with impunity. That’s only natural, I suppose, but there’s no free lunch, and freedom of speech comes with responsibilities. We do indeed need to calculate about what we say, but not to curry favor or invite approval, not to camouflage enmity as righteousness. Certainly we owe something to the ideas we wish to express; we owe them precision, thoroughness and some deftness of expression, but we also owe our audience and our subjects common human decency. We owe that even to ourselves.

enemyIt’s moments like this I miss cartoonist Walt Kelly’s Pogo (Ponce de Leon) Possum, his ever-refreshing if oblique take on things, but maybe I should just remember his revision of Oliver Perry’s victory proclamation after the battle of Lake Erie: “We have met the enemy and they are ours. . . . ” Kelly’s version is: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” A hit, a palpable hit. Perry, by the way, is also remembered for his battle flag: “Don’t give up the ship.” Don’t know what Kelly would have said on that one, but it seems sound to me, so we sail on, trying to use language with fairness, thrift, precision, finesse, wisdom but without losing the human heat. Now there’s a thought. “Excelsior!” as Kelly’s Alfred Gator would say.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.