Confession

 Confession

 First published in Column 8 on the 11^th February 1994

 I confess! I’m conservative, dogmatic and opinionated. I’m middle-aged, illiberal (un-liberal?, non-liberal?), and semi-quasi-fundamentalist. I’m a closet reactionary redneck and almost an elderly old guard. I’m pig-and-bull-headed, cocksure, mulish and hard-nosed.

Worse, I don’t even know if I’m culturally safe – I don’t even know whether that means I’m supposed to be safe from some culture or keep it safe from me.

PC propaganda is finally raising my consciousness, and what it says must be true. However, I’m having more trouble learning the nuances of How To Be Correctly Political than I am learning the peculiarities of the Russian alphabet.

I mean, how would I ever have guessed that I should be upset by a belch at the end of a Kentucky Fried Chicken advertisement? Yet supposedly a ‘significant section of the community’ were, according to the decision of the Advertising Standards Complaints Board. This belch was in extremely poor taste, we’re told, and the ad is banned.

Perhaps the belch affected the ozone layer, and repeated screenings were making the hole larger. Did the belch offend the greenies? How difficult these things are to understand when one is used to being imperious, obdurate and peremptory.

Phew! I think I’ve got hold of that – now let’s consider this: a naughty American lad in Singapore scrawled graffiti over cars in a vandalistic spree, and was caned for it.  

But everyone knows we don’t cane anyone anymore. Caning causes us to become child abusers and to take it out on the next generation. If we stop caning the next generation, instead of damaging people, they’ll only go out and damage property. And this will have the useful effect of teaching the rich to ‘practise modesty in their show of wealth.’

So we must avoid any form of discipline, otherwise hidden addictions may appear in the younger generation.

And talking of addictions, I was dismayed to learn that a man in Maine who suffered a permanent mental disability of sexual addiction (I kid you not) lost his job as a teacher because he insisted on kissing his students (the female ones, anyway).

He says the school is illegally discriminating against his mental disability. Perhaps they’ve confused it with a disorder I seem to recall from my pre-PC days; I think it was called Lust, but I’m a bit confused myself.

However, in cases of confusion, there’s always plenty of PC material to learn from. Polytechnics, for example, are wonderful places to find out about how to live in a PC worlds.

Waikato Poly is having a little trouble with a couple of tutors who, I’m told, have been paid exceptionally well to keep their mouths closed about the way the nursing course is run. But are they satisfied with all that money? Not likely. One of the naughty fellows has begun to blow whistles – no wonder they don’t want him on the course. Loud, noisy whistles are the last thing most patients want to hear when they’re sick.

And in Nelson Polytechnic there’s a very PC dispute over which colour one should be to go on a fishing course. That’s easy: I don’t have any colour, so I won’t be eligible. What a relief! I’d hate to pay for a course others get for free. It would make them feel so embarrassed, wouldn’t it, when I started flashing all my colourless money around.

How difficult it is to keep up with all the legal niceties of Correctness that is Political. I’m now beginning to appreciate how the Chinese felt when Mao-Tse Tung present them with the Little Red Book.

 

()()()()()()()()()()

 

7.2.25 This could have been written yesterday, with the PC replaced by Woke. See also Profane but PC on a similar note.