Hearing impaired, surface technicians, blacks and other misnomers

Do you sometimes get fed up with the oppressive political correctness in our world?

Nobody is deaf any more, but hearing impaired. Surface technicians are the sweepers of old. Blacks are African or African Americans, or anything but black (As I recall, black is a color, not an insult. Maybe we will eventually have a traumatized eye and an African coffee? What if it comes from Colombia: African Colombian coffee? That's if Colombia becomes too synonymous with drugs, then it will be African coffee from South America, or maybe "Sleep Prone Remedy from Somewhere"?  ).
Shell shock is no more. Nobody is handicapped or old or retarded. Everything is dandy, and as long as the appropriate term puts a veneer on things, all is good. Another good one is "authorities". Since when is Public Service an "Authority"? They are supposed to SERVE, not order around, but then maybe it's me who misunderstood?

There is a great book that deals with this, along with many other issues of how we went from the age of enlightenment to total horseshit: Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul (the full title is Volataire's Bastard: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West). Basically the book analyses the shift from reason to system, from free thinking to the straightjacket of organization, and the corresponding shift in language from clarity to "lingo".

Lingo is a way to appear knowledgeable. It's a code, used by specialists to communicate amongst each other and keep the rabble out of the conversation. Every profession has its lingo, codes, specific terminology, which could very well be expressed in layman's terms, but sounds so much better when interlaced with words that make the whole topic totally unintelligible.

This applies to professional communication, political rhetoric, and certainly to mankind's issues. Why can't I be critical of Israel without being labelled an anti-Semitic bastard? Why is Black a term to be used only as a primary color? Why is a senior or "third age" person not old? When one starts hiding facts behind cosmetics, and one is not allowed to address issues as they are without becoming the target of hundreds of pressure groups that will take exception to anything that is not smack on their agenda, human debate becomes sterile and progress becomes impossible. That's if I don't end up outright in jail...

I think one consequence of this very insidious process is that we are regressing back to the age prior to the enlightenment. These were times when dogma was prevailing over reason (religious dogma, royal autocracy, etc...). Now it's another form of dogma: the systemic one, where once the book is written, one has to stick to the book, never mind that it makes no sense any more, or never did.

In our travels, we have been confronted to rules and regulations in various countries that clearly make no sense, even to those who are supposed to implement them. But it's in the book, so it has to be done. Examples?

8 copies of every passport page (even the blank ones) to enter India by boat, plus 8 copies of the detailed inventory of how many cans of peas and beans and tomatoes we have on board, plus 8 copies of the list of navigation equipment - including serial numbers... That's about 4 inches high worth of paper, which gets filed in huge piles with nobody ever looking at it.

Or the story of this Thai girl trying to fly home to Bangkok from Grenada, via Trinidad and the USA, being held at Miami airport for 4 hours (when her confirmed onward flight to Bangkok was only 2 hours after her arrival), and then sent back to Trinidad because she had no "transit visa". Upon arrival in Trinidad, she applies for a transit visa, pays 120$, waits for a week (in a shitty hotel next to the airport - she speaks hardly English and has very little money), and her visa application gets rejected because she entered the country "illegally" when she first tried to get home. She ends up flying via Bogota and god knows where, and misses the cruise ship she was due to work on upon arrival in Bangkok. Wouldn't it have been easier to let her board her scheduled flight, she'd been out of the US two hours earlier...

Want more? Mandela's funeral was a grand event, as he deserved (although let's please remember he WAS a "terrorist" at one point)*, attended by all the great leaders of our world, most of whom have a serious problem with any dissidence on their own turf. Obama was standing tall but meanwhile Julian Assange is in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, basically a prisoner, and Edward Snowden is a host of the great Russian democracy. Will they be honored at some stage when it becomes clear that there is more than one way to be a good citizen? And by the way, what about what the ANC is doing to South Africa? How come the whole world went up in arms against Apartheid but remains perfectly still when it comes to the massive racism many African and Caribbean countries show towards the white (is that a Caucasian?), South Africa being a prime example...

My point is that seemingly minor lingual evolutions can be extremely dangerous. When one cannot call a cat a cat any more (we still can, I think, but I'm sure it will be "domestic feline" soon) one opens the way to a level of hypocrisy that leads to a loss of all we have gained over the 200 or so years when Western mankind liberated itself of some of the chains of dogma.

Society is moving towards a new form of dogma: the politically correct, the veiling of the truth in lingo and the drowning of liberties in loud assertions of concern for security. All these become a "System", where rational thinking takes second place to the "Rule", however stupid, irrelevant or counter-productive.

Reminds me of this joke where a female journalist interviews Ray Charles and tells him: "Oh Mr Charles, you are such a brilliant man, I admire your work so much, what a pity you are blind". And he answers: "It's OK my dear, it could be worse, I could be black"

Next blog: Security, Al Qaeda, airports and other nonsense. Hi NSA guys. You busy today?


* The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter depends on who wins in the end, not on the means used to achieve victory. Terrorists of the past include American colonists, French freedom fighters, PLO, ANC amongst others. At the same time Stalin's, Mao's or Genghis Khan's rule never were that bad, were they? How about water boarding or NSA snooping?