Knowing your place.

Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club reminds us that the issue is not right or wrong, it's knowing your place:

Some humans are better than others and we all know who they are. Not inquiring into animal behavior is of a piece with not asking people who show up in our living rooms what they are doing carting away the TV set or asking why they’re climbing over a border fence. It has to do with who’s doing the carting or who’s the climbing. Everything, guilt or innocence, morality or immorality is judged not by what is done, but by who did it. Alternet has an article by a rape victim who thinks her Haitian attacker was justified because she was white and deserved to be punished. Others are above it all. If Roman Polanski does rape, is it really rape?


The need to judge every act within the new hierarchy means only one real crime is left in the world: not knowing your place. Hence when a Muslim spray painted a British war memorial calling for Islamic world domination, the murder of the Prime Minister and the praising Osama Bin Laden the only accusation that could politically stick was the allegation of racial crime. It was madness to consider treason, incitement to murder or aiding and abetting terrorism. Those are judgmental things. Even terrorism is now referred to as human-caused disaster; so that’s out. And certainly nothing so quaint as charging him with defiling the memory of those who died for their country could even be considered. That’s so yesterday. Since no racial epithets or religious insults were spray painted, what crime could there be? And so he walks.


Political correctness is gradually replacing common sense and natural law with an unstated but controlling code of manners. Certain things cannot be said; certain illegal things are legal and vice versa; things though evident may not exist. Go to the eye doctor. Nothing to see here, just move along. Doubts are driven underground; dissent is expressed in secret. It’s a cave of whispers, the new Sound of Silence.