When it comes to political correctness, we're caught in a squeeze play between Left & Right. The joke: each side believes it's the other side's problem--exclusively.This makes Centrists like me roll our eyes. To be sure, on college campuses (outside the alternate universe of Christian conservative colleges) Leftie PC rules with an iron fist. But the Right's flava of PC rules the airwaves (outside the alternate universe of the few "progressive" media outlets).
And in the battleground of public school textbooks, both the Left and Right have tacitly conspired to squeeze the life out of social studies and English texts.
As a result, our school textbooks are now unreadable. Kids loathe them--reading them is like trying to eat cardboard. They never say anything about anything for fear of offending someone loud who has equally loud friends. Both Rightie and Leftie organizations police textbooks from a common viewpoint: (1) "fairness" means the book should indoctrinate students with my point of view and present it as if it's the only legitimate viewpoint; (2) if I can't get that, the book should say nothinig. Japan, BTW, has chosen the latter course. Its history textooks end with the Meiji era in the mid-19th century. They make us look bold by comparison.
On the other hand, we're the only advanced nation on Earth whose biology textbooks make no mention of evolution except in a special chapter, which is typically not taught outside urban/college town areas. So even the sciences are being made unintelligible, with biology reduced to a series of descriptions without a compelling narrative to explain why living organisms are the way they are. And now the same efforts are being made to expunge anything alluding to the possibility that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old, which will effectively neuter geology.
If you're a parent with kids in school, look at their texbooks and see if I'm not right. See if any of them are anything but a perfect cure for insomnia.
So here's yet another example of how the whirly-eyes hate liveliness, hate anything with idiosyncracies, hate any form of humor because they have no sense of humor beyond nastybaiting the other side...
A pox on both their houses. May they spend a millenium in purgatory with nothng to do but read the very textbooks their meddling ruined.
So--to the point of this blog--whenever the issue of the Perils of PC comes up, be sure to probe the speaker about his own side's sins in this area, and not just the other's. If you get your facts straight beforehand you can turn the speaker's trimphalism into a publicly embarrasing retreat from onesidedness.
2 comments:
American fundamentalists and cultists and sects like the Amish would be replaced by more practical civilizations if they were stand-alone nations. Instead, their worship of their own ideas is defended by the armed might of the USA. This insulated them from any friction with reality. But I don't like it.
This is a real problem in countries with a universal draft, such as Israel. There, ultraorthodox youth are exempted from the draft. This is the sort of thing that happens in a parliamentary system when small splinter groups wield tiebreaking authority, and use it to wring concessions like draft exemption from the ruling party.
I'm not so worried about it here--except I do believe we should have a universal service draft (not exclusively military). And as per your other comment, if we did have such a draft, and it included resident aliens (and it should), nutjobs like Cho would never get through an 18 month service requirement without his insanity showing up.
And then of course we have to insitutionalize such people.
Post a Comment