DAPHNE MERKIN
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carried off the intellectual spoils of a global consumer democracy - with
that system's implied promise of equal choices for all and its denial of the
continuing realities of power, violence, and class. Jacques Attali, in his
provocative jeremiad,
Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming
World Order,
touches upon some of the unresolved imperatives underly–
ing a market society such as ours, which includes a basic refusal to deal
with the politically incorrect fact that there will always be haves and
have-nots: "To be sure," he writes, "a central conundrum remains: how
to balance economic growth with social justice."
The real trouble with "political correctness" as it is played out in
the media is that it so often appears to be a done deal - the triumph of
cultural osmosis over
realpolitik .
What one knows and feels to be the
truth about contemporary life - for example, that AIDS is not only a
tragic plague but also a darling of the press, attended to with an insis–
tence other ravaging diseases (such as breast cancer or schizophrenia) have
failed to garner for themselves - is not only resisted as a notion but de–
fined by the continual assertion (most recently made by a writer in an
interview in
The New York Times,
several days after his sensationalistic
piece about having contracted AIDS appeared in
The New Yorker)
that
AIDS is ignored by the reigning powers-that-be.
I can think of no other disease the symbol of which - the telegenic
looped red ribbon - is worn tirelessly, pinned to lapels and collars, at
occasions and events which have no connection whatsoever to the sub–
ject of AIDS. Hollywood has embraced it as a
platform nonpareil,
but so
have less likely tribunes. "AIDS awareness" has overtaken the arts to a
degree that verges on the automatic. Last year, as a judge of the
National Book Critics Circle, I was handed a pre-pinned red ribbon to
wear on stage along with the other judges, minutes before the cere–
monies began.
It
simply hadn't occurred to the person who had ar–
ranged for this homage to inquire beforehand whether there were any of
us who were disinclined to wear the ribbon.
Of course, just as AIDS is a PC illness if ever there was one, so the
pro-choice movement in all its uncalibrated stridency is a perfect PC
cause. When I suggested to the editor of
Mirabella,
one of the more lit–
erate women's magazines, that it would be interesting to write a piece
from the other side - from the point of view of a woman inside the
right-to-life movement - I was told that the magazine had a policy of
not acknowledging such views. The credentials of both the pro-choice
cause and the AIDS cause are impeccable, since both imply a subversion
of the conventional assumptions of the body politic without directly at–
tacking those assumptions. Both touch, as well, on the all-important is–
sues of class, race, and gender - that trio of analytic cudgels used, in a
