At a recent meeting of city officials in Dallas County, Texas, a small racial brouhaha broke out. County commissioners were hashing out difficulties with the way the central collections office handles traffic tickets. Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield observed that the bureaucracy "has become a black hole" for lost paperwork.
Fellow Commissioner John Wiley Price took great offense, shouting, "Excuse me!" That office, the black commissioner explained, has become a "white hole."
Seizing on the outrage, Judge Thomas Jones demanded that Mayfield apologize for the "racially insensitive analogy," in the words of the Dallas Morning News' City Hall Blog.
Houston Chronicle science blogger Eric Berger notes that everyone should be "very glad that the central collections office has not become a white hole, a theoretical object that ejects matter from beyond its event horizon, rather than sucking it in. It wouldn't be fun for Dallas to find itself so near a quasar."
Call me nostalgic, but there was a time when this sort of stupidity actually generated controversy. Remember the Washington, D.C., official who used the word "niggardly" correctly in a sentence only to lose his job⢠That at least generated debate.
But these days, stories like this vomit forth daily and, for the most part, we roll our eyes, chuckle a bit and shrug them off.
Obviously, there's something to be said for ignoring the childish grievance-peddling that motivates so much of this nonsense. But the simple fact is that ignoring political correctness has done remarkably little to combat it. Meanwhile, people who make a big deal about it are often cast as the disgruntled obsessive ones.
The only people allowed to take political correctness seriously are the writers for "South Park," "Family Guy," "The Simpsons" and the like. But nearly everywhere else, the rule of thumb is that we should either defer to this stuff or quietly ignore it.
Now, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. There is stuff that gets labeled political correctness that is entirely defensible. Because of the erosion of traditional authority that has marked the last half-century, for good and ill, society has been forced to re-create what defines good manners largely from scratch. Women, blacks and other historically marginalized groups have finally and deservedly gained an equal place in society. Treating fellow citizens with respect and dignity shouldn't be lumped in with the more radical agenda that also exploits political correctness.
But there's a separate agenda that parasitically clings to the more defensible aim of crafting new good manners. The left uses Western society's admirable desire not to offend to bludgeon competing ideas and arguments. Inconvenient facts are ridiculed as "insensitive." Refusal to go along with the multicultural agenda, for example, is cast as a sign of backwardness and bigotry.
In Britain last week, the National Children's Bureau advised that day-care centers treat aversion to unfamiliar foreign food by children as "racist." It was also reported that two children were punished for their bigoted refusal to kneel and pray to Allah in a religion class.
This strikes me as something beyond mere tolerance. This is will-to-power masquerading as tolerance. This sort of thing needs to be resisted because there is no end to where thinking like this can lead. Indeed, if it doesn't cause too much offense, one could even say it's a black hole.
Jonah Goldberg is the author of "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning" (Doubleday).
