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There comes a time with every decade – usually 20 years on or so – where pop culture, ever more out of original ideas, decides to strip mine a previous generation's formative years for cultural riches.
As you may or may not have noticed it's been the 1980's turn for some time now. Having experienced my most coagulative years during this time this in some ways reinforces the sense of nostalgia we all feel to some degree for the past and in other ways sickens me immensely. Few things make you feel old and insignificant faster than watching something like The Wedding Singer and hearing yourself say “You know there were more than five songs written between 1981 and 1990.”
Or, watching the recent NBC remake of Knight Rider, wondering why it sucked so hard, and then remembering – Knight Rider was always garbage. You just didn't realize it when you were twelve.
And then there's another, seldom mentioned by product of the 1980s that like Chernobyl and Fine Young Cannibals nobody wants to talk about but to this day has left an indelible scar across modern society that may never be healed.
I speak of course about that wretched form of social Marxism called Political Correctness. Now permanently stamped onto society's back end like a bad graduation night tattoo, believe it or not Political Correctness did not always exist. Oh, it's been a part of leftist thinking since early in the 20th Century but it didn't really begin to permeate American culture and manifest itself into the law books and the general social lexicon until the 1980's.
Great. I was born just in time.
You remember when fraternity movies were funny because they were able to make fun of how exclusionary and yes – sometimes racist many fraternities are? (Yes, satire works best with holding a mirror up - tongue in cheek - to the ugly truth). Do you remember when hard rock was more fun because it was sexist and apolitical? (Anyone who takes that sort of excess seriously has their own issues. The password is: repression!) Do you remember when people were just black, white or Asian instead of Something-American? (Yet the people who were here originally aren't referred to by their tribal association, just ubiquitously as 'Native Americans'. Another gift from their European conquerors!) When the only girls on the field during football games were holding pom-poms? (Reporters used to wait till after the game to ask players how they 'feel'.) When Ace was the place with the friendly hardware man? (Yet they still use the song...) Or how about when 'developmentally challenged' people were simply retarded?
Really, despite the available pejorative meaning, 'retarded' already means 'developmentally challenged'.
Yes, those were simpler times.
All that has changed now – people feel that by limiting what we can say or how we say it that it will somehow prevent us from also thinking it and thereby eliminate it from existence. If you can prevent people from expressing what they're thinking, it will somehow keep them from thinking it. You know, the way placing electrical tape over your check engine light will fix your engine. Slathering a nice layer of socially repressive cement into the faults between us will do us more good than actually talking about them.
Yes, the virulent social deconstruction that is Political Correctness is pernicious not just because it aims to homogenize society into a bunch of docile, myopic intellectual peasants – it also threatens to drive the way real people think and act underground, making normal human behavior seem subversive.
Why do you suppose shows like The Simpsons, South Park or Family Guy are considered so subversive – or for that matter are animated? Because animation is still considered an innocent form of entertainment by most Americans and therefore is – ironically – one of the last refuges of free thought in American society. A live action show could never get away with the things the Griffin family does on Family Guy. But the truly sad thing is how many of us enjoy watching a cartoon family think and act the way most of us already do not as an act of admission but because the subversion lies in pretending we're not really watching ourselves!
But there's a point to this intellectual treadmill I am on and I should get to it. The widespread tidal forces in society that beg us not to offend one another by thinking honestly, acting true to our nature or speaking forthrightly have now begin to infest the food we eat. I now know the end of Western Civilization is truly at hand. When even your food begins spouting Marxist pabulum at you it won't be long before the crossing guard is goose stepping your kids cross the street. I speak now of fortune cookies.
I ordered Asian-American® food today and after finishing my spicy shrimp whatever it was found a couple of fortune cookies. Curious, I opened them to find the following two sayings:
Huh? Okay, full disclosure – I have eaten at this place before and have noticed that all their fortune cookies are full of soporific blather like that. I remember reading somewhere – and it may be myth – that the normally honest, occasionally thought provoking Confucianism of traditional fortune cookie sayings like...
...was off putting for many people, to the extent that fortune cookies more commonly appear stocked with hackneyed nonsense like what I found. Great, so first of all are you telling me people actually think that a dessert can predict your future? Second, you're telling me they believe it to the point that like a true friend, they'd rather their dessert coddle them with banality rather than inform them with the truth?
Yes, it's true. Your food is now PC. Since the key to self improvement – as an individual or a society is to face your weaknesses and shortcomings, come to terms with them honestly and grow as a result is too hard, we prefer to cover it all up with revisionism and euphemism. Most people used to be lazy, unmotivated or stupid. Now everyone has ADHD! Just take a magic pill that removes your personality and not only will you become less ignorant, you'll no longer be responsible for your constant lack of achievement!
No, you can't call that person handicapped, even though 'handicapped' simply means 'disabled'. You need to call them 'disabled', which of course means 'handicapped'. Rejoice! You're not a 'trash man', you're a 'sanitation engineer'! Not only would I love to hear Stephen Hawking explain some of the governing scientific principles of 'sanitation engineering', I'd like to point out that 'trash man' means 'man who picks up trash'. That's what you do. If you don't like it then do something about it rather than relying on me to soften the blow by calling you something you're not.
And one more thing – and I am talking to you, Jesse Jackson - I'm not African-American (for those under 30 - no, that's not really me in my profile photo). I've never set foot in Africa in my life and my blood is enough of a social cocktail of influences I'm comfortable simply calling myself – are you sitting down? - an American.
And if you don't like it, here's a fortune for you:
Now there's something you could still say in 1985. I think I'll go pop in The A-Team season one and fondly reminisce about the America I knew as a boy.
1 comments:
Funny, I was just thinking about this fortune cookie issue the other day. Trying to find out when Chinese witticisms were replaced by horoscope level character observations. Nice post.
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