8 Things I Wish I’d Known (or Remembered) When I Was a Leftist
, which Mark Steyn calls "a must-read."
#4 Humor isn’t enough
Isaac Davis: Has anybody read that Nazis are gonna march in New Jersey? Y’know, I read this in the newspaper. We should go down there, get some guys together, y’know, get some bricks and baseball bats and really explain things to them.
Party Guest: There is this devastating satirical piece on that on the Op Ed page of the Times, it is devastating.
Isaac Davis: Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point.(Manhattan, 1979)
Don’t get the wrong idea: the gang I hung out with had no more time for political correctness than the average NewsReal Blog reader. It smacked of Maoism and Orwellian thought crime. We wanted fewer rules, not more of them. When PC started creeping into our lives, we thought we could mock it into submission.
So when an earnest young girl objected to the name of the group’s “Women’s Caucus” because “‘caucus’ had the word ‘cock’ in it,” we literally rolled around on the floor laughing.
That was back in the 1980s, and as I don’t need to tell you, political correctness has gotten worse, not better. Yes, some of us joke about it, but we do so in whispers around the office coffeemaker, lest we risk our jobs. How’s that been working out?
I wish I’d known sooner that more than humor was needed to fight a lot of evils, political correctness being one of them, radical Islam being another. That’s because our opponents are humorless and are therefore impervious to ridicule. Our jokes are simply more evidence of our decadence and ignorance, as far as they are concerned.
