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Political Correctness
STOP IT, YOU'LL GO BLAND
By Kaz Cooke

(This article is mercilessly nicked from a book called DIY Feminism by Kathy Bail. Outraged copyright holders are invited to e-mail me abuse. But in my defence, I think it’s bloody brilliant and I agree with it 110%.)

Can't we have a moratorium on the phrase 'politically correct', punishable by cattleprod? It's just about the laziest form of insult I've ever heard. I've been accused of political correctness because I don't drink coffee. For Gods sake, I just don’t like coffee, okay.

'Political correctness' is used with purse-lipped fervour by all those right-wing fogies who complain about any other import from America. 'Isn't it outrageous that those filthy, mindlessly slavish children wear their baseball caps backwards? They should all be flogged and forced to play silly mid-on, now there's an Australian sports tradition. 'Yeah, right. The phrase is used as an all-purpose, censoring insult. 'Girls should be able to wear trousers.’ Ooooh, politically correct, shut right up. 'It's probably a good idea not to chop down every tree in the country.' Ooooh, politically correct, be embarrassed about your opinion. 'Maybe black people shouldn't be spat at in the street.' Ooooh, really politically correct, go to your room. When a Liberal Party advisor, commenting on the fact that there was only one Labour vote in an electorate, said last week that she didn’t know the identity of the 'nigger in the woodpile', a reporter described this as politically incorrect. It wasn't politically incorrect. It was racist, it was thoughtless, it was just plain dumber than dumb. A reviewer of a CD-ROM game claimed that because all the heroes in the game were female, this was 'in keeping with the politically correct nineties'. Well, how about 'refreshingly different considering the 458 trillion sexist, violent games mostly available in the reactionary nineties' or 'astonishingly enough, this could be fun for girls'?

Football commentator Sam Newman thinks it's 'politically correct' to suggest that commentators could be commentators too. What if it's just a good idea? Or an interesting idea? Or makes good marketing sense for a TV channel interested in attracting more viewers? If he thinks women are more stupid than men, why doesn't he just say so? Oh, he does? That's not 'politically incorrect' (and therefore a bit naughty and thrilling), that's old-fashioned and kind of tedious.

A Canberra journalist assumes that some art lovers will think an exhibition of portraits of socialites and 'beautiful people' to be 'politically incorrect'. How about boring? How about fascinating? How about let people make up their own minds? How about read a dictionary and see if you can find some words that don’t start with a 'p'?

A car reviewer described a new BMW as a 'politically correct compact that comes in under the $50000 luxury tax level'. Oh, speak English, why don't you? It was impossible to tell from the article exactly why this phenomenally expensive vehicle is 'politically correct' except perhaps because the cigarette lighter and ashtray are an optional extra, or because the car, I swear this is what he reckons, has a 'willingness to participate in events'. Say what?

A correspondent to a newspaper wants to know if the Prime Minister's use of the word 'myopic' as an insult is 'politically correct'. How about rude? Ineffective? How about 'less alarmingly obscene than the Prime Minister's usual insults'? There's always a word or phrase that could be substituted that would actually make sense, if that's not too radical a concept.

If this goes on they'll be making keyboards for journalists with a button for 'politically correct'. The very phrase is the Patterson's Curse of our age, a flourishing, unnecessary imported nuisance. Not unlike Michael Bolton records. If language was a palette, any sentence with politically correct' in it would be beige. Whenever you feel the phrase leaping to your lips, stop or you’ll go bland.

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sunday Age, March 1995.

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