656
PAI<"TISAN REVIEW
Thus, in June of this year
The New York Times
reported that a
teacher's decision to show an anti-abortion film to seventh-grade stu–
dents in Westchester County outraged parents and ignited a larger com–
munity debate about how "politically sensitive" issues should be ad–
dressed in the public schools. And in the July issue of
Vogl/e,
mention was
made of a prominent New York socialite who was spotted wearing "the
world's first politically corrrect charm bracelet (featuring the acronym C
for Choice; H for Housing; A for Animal Rights; R for Racial
Harmony; and M for Money to Fight AIDS).
It
was also this summer
that I received a note from an editor at
The New Yorker
telling me an
essay I had submitted was too "ethnocentric" - the trallslation being
that it was too "Jewish." What stopped me short was that I couldn't
imagine the word being applied by anyone but a liberally-inclined assimi–
lated Jewish editor to anything but an essay on a Jewish theme.
If
it's
Jewish, I thought to myself, it's the wrong kind of ethnocentrism. Next
time around I'd try writing as a black Muslim and see who'd dare call
me
ethl1ocClltric.
...
Clearly, then, there is a whole hierarchy of pieties and subterfuges
that accompanies the phenomenon, and one locates oneself according to
which level of "correctness" one's antennae have picked up on. One
doesn't, in other words, call blacks "Negroes," unless one wants to
demonstrate a state of utter indifference to the post-sixties
Zeitgeist.
One
doesn't call blacks "blacks" either, but rather "African-Americans," unless
one wants to exhibit a somewhat somnolent attitude to the more recent
developments in the nomenclature of penitence .
(The Nerv York Times,
it's interesting to note, can't make up its mind in the course of one and
the same article whether to employ the former or the latter term, as
though a designation alone could redress a piece of history.)
The part of the world that
has
heard of "PCism" and its attendant
disturbances is either at pains to distance itself from the host of implicit
and explicit opinions that go along with being a convert to what isn't
so much a movement as a singular, heavily media-influenced shift in ordi–
nary modes of cognition (for example, "I know this is very un-PC of
me, but I really think most women still want to get married by the time
they're twenty-five"); or they're caught up firmly in its grip and can't
imagine who would choose the darkness of the pre-PC epoch over the
enlightenment of multiculturalism and gender studies.
To ascertain how thin PCism really is, one has only to look at the
thinness of the criticism of it. (Camille Paglia, for instance, has gotten as
far as she has with her thuggish mode of anti-feminism because the stage
is otherwise empty.) Political correctness has, with a few rare exceptional
instances, confounded any critique of itself because it has so successfully
