From: TITWILLOW@MIKADO.CHINEE   
      
   'I have the impression that most PC advocates and enforcers in this country   
   are women in their thirties or forties, with some education of a red-brick   
   or white-tile nature, no longer young enough to be much interested in sex   
   but old enough to have acquired a certain modest authority in their work,   
   which is overwhelmingly in the state sector, and often unmarried or   
   childless (a significant section of the rank-and-file is employed in making   
   it difficult to adopt children, an area where PC rules are enforced with   
   peculiar ferocity). I would also describe these women as unappealing   
   physically, non-orgasmic, disapproving and fastidious by nature, embittered   
   by personal misfortune or slights real or imaginary, overwhelmingly agnostic   
   or atheist, women who in an earlier age might well have been nuns but are   
   now fanatics for whom class warfare and hatred of Christianity form a   
   fulfilling creed. They are mainly bureaucrats, in the state-education   
   system, both local and national, librarians, office-holders in the   
   administrative side of the NHS, minor potentates in town halls and   
   government agencies, law centres, environmental pressure groups, charities   
   and other religion substitutes. There are a signicant number on the New   
   Labour backbenches and three or four in the government, though on the whole   
   PC zealots tend to remain anonymous, even furtive. But we are beginning to   
   see the first PC chief constables and judges, ambitious but mediocre   
   individuals who sniff which way the ideological wind is blowing and trim   
   their decisions accordingly.'   
      
   Slaying the Dragon of PC   
   Spectator Xmas '05   
      
   The most striking work in the spine-tingling show at the National Gallery,   
   'Rubens: A Master in the Making', is the enormous painting of St George   
   slaying the Dragon (Prado). What I like about Rubens is that he always goes   
   over the top. Here, the head of the saint's charger, and especially the   
   mane, is a creative phantasmagoria of hirsute auxesis, and balancing it is   
   the monster's crazy head, especially the mouth, already skewered by St   
   George's lance, and exhibiting catastrophic cavities of such horror that it   
   ought to hang in dentists' waiting-rooms as an example of what happens if   
   you don't scour your teeth with a yard-brush.   
   The dragon is a bestialisation of political correctness, and St George, a   
   ferocious fellow in a magnificent helmet and plume, is giving it hell with   
   his claymore, and rightly so, for the PC fanatics have just declared him   
   Public Enemy Number One. What they particularly object to is not only his   
   dragon-slaying, which is (I quote) 'a peculiarly nauseating blood-sport,   
   especially since it is aimed at an endangered species', but, still more, his   
   cross of red-on-white, an emblem of Crusaders and thus 'unbearably   
   provocative'. From the PC underground HQ in the basement of University   
   College, London, the edict has gone out: get St George and his cross. Among   
   the objects of the campaign are renaming Charing Cross, King's Cross Station   
   and St George's Chapel, Windsor, taking down the big cross on top of St Paul   
   's Cathedral (the Dean has already given his assent to 'an appropriate   
   ecunemical gesture') and a general 'revision' of Shakespeare to eliminate   
   such 'unacceptable' lines as Henry V's racist slogan 'Cry God for Harry,   
   England and St George!'   
   Joking apart, there is in fact a determined and carefully thought-out   
   movement to ban from state schools any little girl who wears a cross,   
   however tiny, round her neck. The disposition, among the PC high command, is   
   to blame fundamentalist Christian parents for permitting or encouraging   
   children to wear religious symbols which are an incitement to sectarian   
   violence. I rather doubt if such crosses have much religious significance   
   among those who wear them. I am still haunted by the story I heard a few   
   years ago of a young woman who went into a cheap jewellers and asked for a   
   cross: 'Not a plain one, but one of those pretty crosses with a little man   
   on it.' As a child I recall wearing, for some years, a silver St Christopher   
   medal given me by my godmother to keep me safe journeying to and from   
   school - St Christopher being the strong man who carried the infant Christ   
   safely across the river and was astonished by the child's weight, bearing   
   all the sins of the world. But this symbol, too, is now objectionable, as   
   are all Christian medals, if visible.   
   It may be asked, who are these politically correct gauleiters who are   
   determined to interfere in the most minute details of everyday life, and   
   apparently have the power to do so? By what right, and with what authority,   
   do they impose an ideology which, increasingly, has a totalitarian flavour?   
   We used to treat political correctness, an extremist form of secular   
   morality which emerged from the American civil rights movement of the 1960s,   
   as a joke, and its activities often reflect humourless puritanism which is   
   itself risible. But I no longer find the thing funny. PC rules have an   
   increasing habit of getting themselves enshrined in statutes, and enforced   
   with rigour on bewildered offenders.   
   I would like to read a thoroughly researched historical and sociological   
   study of PC and its militants, tracing its growth and the backgrounds of its   
   members. Until this is done, analysis is bound to be impressionistic, but I   
   have a feeling that its adherents spring from the lower-middle-class sources   
   which have provided similar pressure groups in the past, such as the   
   Puritans who made themselves so powerful in early 17th-century England and   
   exercised a good deal of power during the Commonwealth. They were prominent   
   in New England too, and provided the driving force behind the Massachusetts   
   witch-hunting craze which convulsed Salem and other towns at the end of the   
   century. Witch-hunting of 'racists', 'male chauvinists', 'bigots' and other   
   categories of evil-doers forms an important dimension of PC, though it is   
   blended with human rights idealism springing from the Revolutionary Terror   
   of 1790s France, which produced the prototype PC enforcer in the shape of   
   Maximilien Robespierre, and led to the guillotining and murder of so many   
   innocent victims. He was the 'sea-green incorruptible', as Carlyle called   
   him, and personal purity has always been the characteristic or claim of   
   those seeking to impose totalitarian norms, such as Himmler and his SS high   
   command and the top echelons of the KGB.   
   I have the impression that most PC advocates and enforcers in this country   
   are women in their thirties or forties, with some education of a red-brick   
   or white-tile nature, no longer young enough to be much interested in sex   
   but old enough to have acquired a certain modest authority in their work,   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)