PC: The Backlash against the Backlash

You pick up your newspaper or switch on the television these days and there's a good chance you'll encounter an attack on political correctness - or "PC".
PC, you'll gather, is a form of intellectual tyranny, rampant in the United States and beginning ominously to take root on this side of the Atlantic, too. It's being used to intimidate journalists, academics and plain ordinary folks who just want to use the words which come naturally to them but who are put in fear of being denounced if they do so by the thought police of the PC movement.
A while back I saw my old chum Chris Hitchens on the BBC's Late Show warning sternly that the campuses of the US were becoming "concentration camps of the mind", as feminists and black cultural nationalists maintained non-stop surveillance on lectures and seminars with a view to taking reprisal action against anybody who dared to speak out of turn.
Chris was supported by the Palestinian-American writer Edward Said, who complained that US intellectuals "don't explore ideas any more in case they find themselves in forbidden territory".
The "quality" press in Ireland and Britain has taken up the same cry. The averagely competent columnist need never be short of a subject when there's always a thousand words (easily) to be hacked out of the latest loony example of PC extremism. I've read half a dozen pieces in the last few months highlighting the efforts of PC zealots in the US to have Shakespeare banned from university curricula on the grounds that he was a white, male European . . . (Interestingly enough, none of the pieces identified the college or colleges where this daft nonsense was supposedly happening.)
Of course none of us needs to concern ourselves too much about what's going down in the Sunday broadsheets or on BBC arts programmes. The problem is that this sort of runny stuff tends to trickle right down through the layers of society, until somebody in the guest area at Tramore (and let's face it, that's really deep down) tells you "Don't give me any of that PC bullshit", when you've objected to him boding towards a woman and saying that "I wouldn't mind ripping the knickers off that".
Objecting to the "tyranny" of PC has become a means of making sexism and racism acceptable again.
To say that we should watch our words doesn't mean that we shouldn't use the words which come naturally to us. It's just that the words which come naturally to us will tend to reflect the reality around us, and there's ugliness and oppression around which we should be concerned about.
To call somebody from the Travelling community a "knacker", for example, is to express a particular attitude towards Travellers. Similarly with "Yid" for Jew, "coon" for black people, etc. etc. Words don't create oppression, but their casual use can confer a seeming legitimacy on oppression. That's what we have to watch.

The reason the argument about PC commonly slides over into an argument about feminism is that the feminists added an extra dimension to the discussion of language away back in the sixties. Words which were deliberately abusive of particular groups were already being filtered out of the language of anyone who wanted to be on-side with the spirit of the age, but the Women's Liberation Movement went further, and pointed to language which wasn't deliberately abusive or demeaning but which expressed the unthinking prejudices of society as a while.
The use of "he", for example, for people of both sexes, or "chairman" for a woman who happened to be chairing a meeting, or "mankind" for the whole of humanity: this clearly was insulting to women - as is now generally recognised. Few people would any longer refer to Maire Geogeghan-Quinn as a "spokesman" for the government. It just wouldn't sound right - so much so that you have to make a conscious effort to recall that just a few years ago "spokesman" was automatically, invariably used to describe every organisation's spokesperson, irrespective of the gender of the individual involved.
The success of the drive against oppressive language did have one drawback. Precisely because it was so successful, it led on to a wild over-emphasis on the way relationships were described and expressed. This became more and more pronounced as the sixties' wave of radicalism receded and the gains made by women, gays, blacks and other oppressed groups came under threat from the New Right - the ideologists of the Reagan-Thatcher axis.
Many sixties radicals retreated into the universities, journalism, publishing and so on. The more they disengaged from struggle in the material world, the more obsessed they became with preserving the major gain of PC language. Political Correctness became a substitute for political involvement. (It isn't a coincidence that this happened at the same time as the Women's Liberation Movement ceased to be a movement at all in any recognisable form, and that the word "liberation" was dropped from the title/)
As John Molyneaux has noted: "In the academic world (this) produced a tremendous concentration on 'the text', in film, video and the media, on design, signs and images on all the various reflections of the material world rather than the world itself".
It is against this background that PC can be pilloried, its adherents depicted as prim and prissy censorious sorts, with neither cop-on nor street-cred as they strive to impose their own boring orthodoxy on the rest of us.
But their deficiencies shouldn't blind us to what's at stake here. There is a determined, conscious effort under way to create space in public discourse again for the expression of sexist and racist ideas. Jeering at PC is part and parcel of this effort. And it's working.
I couldn't prove this, it's my impression that just a few years ago nobody back-stage at a rock festival would have dared nod casually towards a woman and express a desire to sexually assault her. At least not unashamedly and out loud.
Certainly, he wouldn't when challenged have had his pat ideological defence at the ready. But reference to "PC bullshit" can now provide instant sanction for the expression of violent hatred.
In these circumstances it seems to me that we should stand up for PC - while remembering also what too many PC people have forgotten, which Marx told us all those years go: that the main point is not to interpret the world, the main point is to change it.
I WAS delighted to hear that Nicky Kelly has at last won a decent settlement from the Irish State. I hear three quarters of a million quid mentioned, which is fair enough if Nicky thinks it is.
This amounts to an admission of grievous wrong by servants of the State, but I won't be holding my breath waiting for the State to try to identify the culprits and bring them to book.
All very odd. If you or I were to cost the State three quarters of a mill. as a result of grievous wrong-doing, I think we'd be pursued to the ends of the earth and farther.
There's a couple of boyos who were up to their necks in the #750,000 grievous wrong-doing in this case, and whose names are as well-known to the Department of Justice as they are to me, and who should now be locked up. It wouldn't do them a damn bit of harm, but it would do my heart good.
The only other thing I have to say about this happy end to a major chapter in the Nicky Kelly story is this: Nicky, is there, like, now that things are getting sorted out, is there any chance of that fiver?
Tramore . . . Many among the ecstatic throng who will be able to tell their grandchildren that they were at the first Tramore will have noticed that the entire festival was filmed. But do not seek to discover where a copy of this historic filmic document might be hired for copy.
The film-makers were positioned to the right of the main stage as you faced it, on a wooden platform behind the security fence, their camera peering over the fence. Their choice of vantage point had me puzzled for a time. They had the narrowest of angles onto the stage, able to cover only the very front of the apron . . .
Then I noticed that this didn't matter much, since they had the camera pointed out al the time at the audience, sweeping over it, then seeming to zoom in on particular clusters or groups.
Cut a long story short, turned out they were cops. Which raises a number of questions. Why were they there? What were they at? Who gave them permission? And what the fuck is going on?
I think we should be told. I don't care who by. I just think we are entitled to an explanation of why the fucking fuzz is filming us at rock festivals now.
More from the Fleadh Mor . . . Joan Baez referred to Woodstock as "the Mother Festival" and went on to sing "Blowin' in the Wind". How boringly fucking predictable can you get? Is this the most boring singer in the world, or what, shaking her voice at the audience like a finger wagging?
If we have to have Joan Baez, why not the warbling nun, Mary O'Hara, as well? Joan Baez could be a nun, too, I think. I'd have checked this out but there was nobody from the Nun Spotters' Association in the vicinity at the time.
Don't believe what you read anywhere else. The big hit of the festival was The Pale. Sharp, witty, loud, tight, dancily anthemic, manically magic, enormous fun and just bloody brilliant.
Mind you, not even Matthew Devereux could come close to Simon Carmody in the bullshit department. I think it should now be acknowledged that Simon is not just a rock and roll bullshitter but the perfect epitome and overall archetype of the rock and roll bullshitter.
His performance was sheer bliss for bullshit connoisseurs. This was bullshit in the best traditions, quintessential bullshit, bullshit par excellence. He even did that bit where he sits down and says stuff like, "OK!!!" and "Awl Rrright!!!, and mentions "These guys who maybe did something good like twenty years ago and they tell you gotta pay like fifty quid, ma-an, to hear this guy, well I say no fucking way. You unnerstan what I'm talkin' 'bout here?"
Des Byrne was playing with his back to the audience, maybe Making a Statement, maybe laughing his ring off. It is not easy, no matter what anybody says, to do rock and roll bullshit well. If it was easy everybody would be doing it well. Simon Carmody doesn't do it well. Simon does it perfectly. (This is positive stuff, Simon.)
As often as not, Bob Dylan sings his songs to the wrong tune now. Why does he do this? And why do people describe this as "innovation"? If Shane McGowan did it nobody would say it was innovation. They'd say he was arseholes.