DAVID LEHMAN
599
Not only does everything have a political dimension; more emphatically,
everything is primarily (and structurally) political before it is anything
else.
Defenders of the PC faith take it for granted that they have justice
on their side. They tend to sound righteous , aggrieved. "I consider
'political correctness' to be a term created by the European American far
right in order to maintain its position of power and privilege in this so–
ciety, a position achieved by a long legacy of racial and sexual oppres–
sion," writes Velina Hasu Houston in her introduction to
The Politics oj
Life,
a collection of four plays by Asian-American women. Hers is the
rhetoric of special pleading, the language of victimization, and it is rou–
tinely used in committee meetings when grants and fellowships in the arts
are decided. Advocates of multiculturalism act as if a discussion of merit
is beside the point in the case of a candidate with the right demographic
credentials. Committee members critical of a work on the ground that it
is meretricious or superficial or technically incompetent are themselves
denounced on the ground that they are incapable of responding to the
"non-linear" thinking or the "anti-Western metaphysics" in the work in
dispute. This is smokescreen talk, owing something to warmed-over
Derrida and other gurus of the moment. It is meant to disguise the fact
that artistic works are being judged not by real critical criteria but by
something else, something resembling touchy-feely boosterism.
It is assumed that the enlightened citizen of the intellectual world is
highly political in nature, strongly leftist in orientation, and willing
to
purchase the whole package of contemporary academic opinion with its
many deep prejudices and its deconstructive bent. The citizen is enlight–
ened, in other words, to the exact extent that he or she holds the right
opinions. If that is at the heart of political correctness, it is not exactly a
novel phenomenon. Flaubert anticipated it (though not the specifically
political form it has taken) in his
Dictionary oj Receilled Ideas.
The idea of systematically subjecting opinions, political and other–
wise, to standards of correctness depends on a Manichaean conception of
the social world: history consists of an unbroken series of incidents pit–
ting victims and oppressors, us and them, the enlightened and the be–
nighted. It is not terribly sophisticated; victims and villains are substituted
for the heroes and bad guys in the shoot-em-ups targeted for the preteen
audience. This vision of a stark and simple dualism in the universe, this
science of victimology, is one thing that Marxism has to offer. Taken
together with other fashionable
isms
and
ologies
of our moment, it, the
old reliable, can teach you how to line yourself up unerringly on the
right side of any given issue.
There is a plethora of Marxisms on college campuses, and they differ
