The Fall of Western Civilization, Episode MCXVIII: Nobody is Overweight
Am I the last person to hear about the doctor being investigated for telling his patient she was overweight? I've heard now that the doctor apologized, which is regrettable and absurd. The patient is an idiot, and the doctor should have stuck to his guns on this one. (Apparently he did, praise Jebus, refuse to be packed off to a sensitivity re-education camp.)
Conservatives blame this kind of insanity on liberalism. Although it's not an inevitable consequence of liberalism, there does seem to be some sense in which liberalism has nudged us in this direction. Initially, liberals noted that words could harm, and that a good person would refrain from saying certain--e.g. racial and sexual--things. After that, however, things began to get a bit out of hand. Now we've got a bizarre cultural obsession with "sensitivity" that has generated the case at hand--and I think liberalism has to take some of the blame.
Now, if the doctor had pointed at the patient and said something like "yo, lardass, dump some tonnage" that would be a different matter. But that's not what happened. Now I'm wondering how long before I'm censured for telling students that they've misunderstood the course material...
You might think that this is a comparatively innocuous problem, but I'm not so sure. It's so patently ridiculous...so downright surreal...that it has to make us wonder about the zeitgeist. And note: this isn't just one crazy woman--the New Hampshire Board of Medicine sent the doctor a "letter of concern," and tried to get him to go to sensitivity school. I can't imagine any rational person not being infuriated by such irrationality.
Am I the last person to hear about the doctor being investigated for telling his patient she was overweight? I've heard now that the doctor apologized, which is regrettable and absurd. The patient is an idiot, and the doctor should have stuck to his guns on this one. (Apparently he did, praise Jebus, refuse to be packed off to a sensitivity re-education camp.)
Conservatives blame this kind of insanity on liberalism. Although it's not an inevitable consequence of liberalism, there does seem to be some sense in which liberalism has nudged us in this direction. Initially, liberals noted that words could harm, and that a good person would refrain from saying certain--e.g. racial and sexual--things. After that, however, things began to get a bit out of hand. Now we've got a bizarre cultural obsession with "sensitivity" that has generated the case at hand--and I think liberalism has to take some of the blame.
Now, if the doctor had pointed at the patient and said something like "yo, lardass, dump some tonnage" that would be a different matter. But that's not what happened. Now I'm wondering how long before I'm censured for telling students that they've misunderstood the course material...
You might think that this is a comparatively innocuous problem, but I'm not so sure. It's so patently ridiculous...so downright surreal...that it has to make us wonder about the zeitgeist. And note: this isn't just one crazy woman--the New Hampshire Board of Medicine sent the doctor a "letter of concern," and tried to get him to go to sensitivity school. I can't imagine any rational person not being infuriated by such irrationality.
posted by Winston Smith at
8:48 AM
9 Comments:
Winston,
As some are wont to say, "ditto".
I think the key distinction here, which I don't really have time to flesh out, is between liberalism and "political correctness". I'm a big believer in the former, not too keen on the latter.
Good point, Azael--except for the weird part about how I wouldn't correct this if it turns out to be false. Which is false.
But--and this should have been obvious before--this IS just too crazy to be true. There HAS to be more to it than this. If the story we've got is straight and complete, then the New Hampshire Board of Medicine is insane. Presumably that isn't true, so we've got to guess that there's more to it than this.
Now, the PC crowd IS wacko, of course--I've had plenty of personal encounters with 'em that you just wouldn't believe--and that's why it's easy to be incautiously credulous here...
Fortunately, time will, presumably, tell what's really going on here.
Whereas the liberal PC is excruciating in its wackiness, most of the time the consequences are a bad joke. Whereas on the conservative side--well, look at AIDS, sex education, and Iraq.
On the bright side, A, nobody but a handful of kooks reads this blog...
But I agree with everything you say.
I live in academia where PC was quite powerful for awhile and is always percolating somewhere beneath the surface...how far beneath I'm really not sure.
It certainly doesn't have the same kinds of consequences that right-wing insanity tends to have, but remember where it mostly exists. We don't blow things up around here, but wer're in a particularly good position to ruin people's minds...AND drive them into the arms of the right wing on the occasions that we let the nutty lefties take over.
Incidentally, I don't think of PC as a liberal movement, but an extreme leftist movement. That smacks of a self-sealer, though...
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