Introductory: A Genealogy of Postmodernism

Abstract

At first one thought that political correctness (PC) was but an absurd, and hopefully ephemeral, travesty: a collection of kitsch euphemisms patched together in order to cover, in the manner of fig leaves, the obscenities of contemporary America: her barbarism and racism. We know the story: Mrs. and Miss turned into Ms., gal became lady, colored people minorities, guy gentleman, blacks African-Americans, fat heavy (or big), Spics Latinos (or Hispanic-Americans), skinny slender, Wops Italian-Americans, Third World countries developing countries, Orientals Asians, short petite, et cetera. This was yet the folk aspect of the change. Initially—in the early eighties—all this sounded ludicrous, but one might have granted the benefit of the doubt to the whole effort and inferred therefrom that PC was but the expression of a movement that sought, in spite of all, to correct the errors and hatreds of the past by starting with the words themselves, with speech. Soon it became clear that the shift was never meant to go further. It was rhetoric all right; some kind of manneristic foreplay to the habitual doublespeak of the “Liberal democracies,” which, in their ploys of international conquest and social imbalances, always come to justify imperial intrigue in the name of “freedom” and “human rights” on the one hand, and to blame economic inequality on “culture,” on the other.