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more acadenuc context, to smash the daylights out of a canon perceived
as being composed of too many benighted late nineteenth-century and
twentieth-century
Obermenschell.
What is unfortunate is that the quality of irreproachable moral supe–
riority which is one of PC's more insidious characteristics has effectively
muffied a frank atmosphere of debate and silenced those who have
qualms about its operating principles. To even begin to question the
prenuses of either of these holy causes is to risk being branded a shrill and
heartless troglodyte. To suggest, for instance, that in America, at least,
AIDS continues to be a very specifically induced, localized disease largely
affecting homosexuals and intravenous-drug users and has
/lot
passed into
the heterosexual population in the manner initially predicted and might,
therefore, not be the paradigmatic casualty of our times; or to suggest
that the right to abortion on demand has had little effect on inner-city
mothers who, ignoring the hard-won option of terminating unwanted
pregnancies, continue to bear children at a breathtaking rate without
the means to care for said children, is to come up against a horrified
reaction to one's "homophobic" or "racist" views.
This brings me, curiously enough, to the not unconnected matter of
why I fled the academy. I attended Columbia University as a graduate
student in English in the late seventies, just when political correctness -
not to be given its
soi-disallt
identity for another decade - was beginning
to get a toehold. One might have imagined the university to be, a
decade after the turmoil and disenchantment of the sixties, if not quite a
haven of higher learning, certainly restored to its original disinterested
purpose of educating. But if nature abhors a vacuum, nature particularly
abhors a vacuum when the playing field is smaller rather than larger. I
sensed the glimmerings of a new style of repressive order in very specific
ways: In the first day of a seminar on the British moderns - Samuel
Butler, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, and so on - my hip, cowboy–
booted professor approached the writers under discussion with all the
guilt-ridden hostility of a card-carrying Weatherman. How, he wanted
to know, did these writers produced by the British class system account
for or deal with the fact of European hegemony - the global dominance
of Empire, with George the Sixth straddling the top and the Third
World down at the bottom? Although this was not the first time I had
heard the Third W orId referred to in this way or the free world referred
to as "the 'so-called free' world," it was certainly close to it. (If this
strains the imagination, remember that this was still in the seventies, be–
fore "texts" took over where "novels" had once stood. Too, I had
graduated from Barnard College which, with a few exceptions, had
continued
to
teach English literature not as an offshoot of a larger
COI1-
