“Political correctness is a mixture of mental judo, verbose blandness, and yoga, and is very useful for politicians who are trying to convince the voters that they are the least obnoxious of the various assholes currently running for office.”
“Adam, you are becoming a lot more wordy than you used to be. You’re swearing more, too.”
“Current circumstances have deprived me of anything better to do with my time than to spend it on furthering your sadly neglected education. The minor profanity simply enhances the descriptive accuracy.”
The wind picked up a bit, and Adam adjusted the rudder and stern sheets, while I decided that the jib was okay for now.
“The subject of this conversation was magic, not the speech patterns of assholes,” I said. “Now then, the symbol involved may be a physical object, like the wax doll used in so many kinds of magic, but the most powerful symbols we humans use are words. We communicate in words, we think in words, we perceive the whole universe filtered through our words. And the people who believe in magic believe that if you can change the word, the symbol for a thing, you can change the thing itself.”
“Talk about being wordy . . .”
“Take a neutral example, a group of people that nobody hates, like handicapped kids. Sometimes, because of some chemical screwup in a kid’s DNA, or something going wrong while the fetus was in the womb, a kid is born wrong. It’s usually nobody’s fault, and certainly the kid didn’t do anything wrong, but there it is. And in a lot of cases, there isn’t anything we can do about it. Someday, maybe, the medical types will learn enough about the process and we can fix it. Or maybe not. We all feel bad about it, but what to do? The politically correct have an answer. They say that if we can’t fix the kid, we can at least try to make him happy, and the place to start is to be less rude about what we call him. We won’t call him `handicapped’ any more. We’ll call him `special,’ and that will make it all better. In one swell foop, the whole problem of handicapped children is solved, and we don’t have any of them to worry about any more.
“Of course, we now have a problem with all these `special’ kids hanging around, but we can forget about that since nobody will start an Association for the Advancement of Special Kids for a while. If sometime later somebody does get bitchy about it, we can always solve the problem again by calling the little gimps `challenged.’ The fact that the kids involved still can’t play like the other children doesn’t bother them, but the kids themselves are not that stupid. What they know is that `special’ is now just another word for `handicapped,’ and nothing else has changed. What the kid never knew was that `handicapped’ started out as a politically correct word for `crippled,’ and `crippled’ was once the politically correct way of saying `gimpy.’
“I could give you dozens of examples of how these people are trying to make things go away by changing the symbols we use on them. Leman. Whore. Prostitute. Lady of the Night. Hooker. Each word was supposed to correct the problem, and if you didn’t use the currently correct term, you were not only inhumane and insensitive, you were downright nasty and wicked. However, the change in wording hasn’t eliminated the problem of women selling sex on a short-term basis, and those women who sell it on a long-term basis, called wives, are still horribly offended by the ladies who are still taking it in lying down. But don’t give up hope, since I have no doubt that they’ll be coming up with another new word soon.”
“Working girl.”
“Eh?”
“Working girl. That’s the new word for hooker. The good General Hooker’s descendants can now rest easier, because of the kind ministrations of the politically correct,” Adam said.
“Thank you. As I was saying. Moor. Blackamoor. Nigger. Negro. Colored. Black. Afro-American. It’s the same story again exactly. What should be perfectly obvious is that reality is not about to change just because we changed the symbols we used on it.”
“I think I see what you mean,” Adam said. “Like the only way that you can get a dinosaur to move is to get another dinosaur to kick it. But don’t bad-mouth these word switchers too much, Treet. Think about it. The entire United States Army Corps of Engineers worked their balls off for two hundred years, attempting to drain the filthy, disease ridden swamps in the U.S., trying hard to turn them into useful farmland, and they only got about twenty percent of the job done. Then the politically correct came along, and bam! There suddenly isn’t a swamp left in the whole country!”
“Yeah, but the mosquitoes are still a nuisance in the `wetlands,’ and malaria is on the rise.”
“Details.”
“All this playing with word games takes the emphasis off working on the problems themselves. If we spent as much time and energy working on engineering solutions to some of these problems as we do on half-baked social `solutions,’ we’d be a lot better off.”
The wind freshened up again, veering a bit more from the south. Adam played with the rudder and the main sheet while I tightened up on the jib.
Adam said, “Most folks don’t know how to work on engineering solutions. The people you’re bitching about don’t know how to do much of anything except walk around with signs designed to attract airtime on the news shows, and free airtime just naturally attracts politicians the way shit attracts flies. The people you hear making all the noise are the people who don’t count. It doesn’t matter what they do, since all of their time is always wasted anyway. The productive people in this world are already doing all they can. I mean, personally, I don’t know of any really good engineers who are out of work. Most of us are working longer hours than we want to. Getting uptight about what the useless people do with their time is just being neurotic. Treet, your problem is that you don’t have any sense of humor.”
“I don’t think malaria is funny, so therefore I don’t have a sense of humor. Remarkable.”
“Sure. You don’t seem to understand that laughter is the normal human reaction to pain. Preferably, someone else’s pain, but pain none the less. Think about it. Think about any joke that you thought was funny, and you’ll end up with somebody having to endure pain.”
I said, “I don’t feel like thinking about anything just now.”
“Then chew on this for a while. Consider the fact that we human beings are members of the only species on earth that expresses pleasure by exposing our fangs.”
The wind came in hard, and for a minute I thought that the back stay would part. It held, and then we were busy furling the sails, taking down the mast, and stowing it all as best we could.
The waves were getting huge, taller than five-story buildings, and every time we went over the top of one it seemed like we were airborne for an inordinate amount of time. I was getting worried about something being thrown out of the boat (like me, for instance) when Adam broke out the boat cover and we both got busy fastening it down. This cover wasn’t part of the boat’s original equipment, since The Concrete Canoe had not been mounted on The Brick Royal’s deck, but was rather in its own special, covered compartment. It was something the fishermen, or maybe Roxanna, had seen the need for and had had made. It was made of Super-Hemp, and we were very glad to have it. Once it was on, the boat might be upside down, but at least it would be floating and all in one piece. Having it on meant that we had to crawl around the bottom of the crowded boat in a few inches of water, but I got to bailing again while Adam took the anchor off its rope, replaced it with the fishing net the fishermen had left aboard, and trailed the net and about a hundred yards of the rope off our stern.
“The wind’s blowing from the southwest,” he shouted. “We’re heading in about the right direction, and I figure that a little drag on the stern should keep us pointing in the right direction.”
“I bow to your wisdom,” I shouted back as I continued bailing.
In a while, I could switch from a bucket to a can, and then to a sponge. Within a quarter of an hour, the interior of the boat was fairly dry, despite the torrential rain and spray coming down hard on the boat cover, inches above our heads.
“We’re not getting stuffy in here,” Adam said, “but we’re staying dry. There must be some kind of semi-permeable coating on the boat cover. Do you know anything about it?”