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July 20, 2015

Politico's European Edition: The West's never-ending political correctness wankfest now aims to make America's lamest generation ever even weaker.

Personally, I wish I had more time to blog about certain issues but work keeps interfering. "Political correctness" is one. PC culture has turned some of my smarter liberal friends into precisely what they claim to despise: intolerant and extreme right wingers with a seemingly religious zeal to control language. They apparently believe that dictating what is safe to say and write--and not safe to say and write--will speed our progress towards a more equal and less hurtful society. And now this madness is getting woven into our 50 or 60 truly great American colleges at the level of the great books read by 18 to 22 year olds. It threatens to turn what is, charitably put, our hands down most sheltered, most thin-skinned and most anti-intellectual generation ever into even bigger half-bright wimps. With great restraint, Michael Moynihan at Politico's European edition offers us Western Lit, shot to death by ‘trigger warnings’. Subtitled: "American universities discourage reading of Ovid, Lolita and The Great Gatsby." What he's reporting here is embarrassing--but it's exactly what we can keep expecting from the West's Never-Ending Political Correctness WankFest. Moynihan begins:

Boring bien pensant opinion in Europe has long maintained that low-brow American culture--all the greasy fast food, oafish Hollywood shoot ‘em up films (often starring a muscle-bound Austrian, Belgian, or Swede), and schlock television--has done incalculable damage to highbrow European culture. And it has happened with the assent of the average European, who happily scarfs down a McRib sandwich, feet swaddled in Air Jordans, while queuing for the latest “Transformers” film.

But there is a more pernicious American cultural invasion, as irritatingly destructive as the North American gray squirrel and, unlike the Hollywood blockbuster, wholly immune from free market pressures. It was noticed in 1994 by a reporter for Reuters, who gravely reported that the scourge of political correctness, “an American import regarded by many Britons with the same distaste as an unpleasant virus, finally seems to be infecting British society.” First it poisons the local universities, then within a generation wends its way into the broader culture, wreaking havoc on the native intellectual ecosystem. It’s the most odious, implacable, and least remarked upon manifestation of American cultural imperialism.

Politically correct

And so here we are a generation after that Reuters report, with sensible Europeans now fretting over a mutated strain of that old virus. Writing in the left-leaning magazine The New Statesman, British academic Pam Lowe worried that a new fad in American academia called the “trigger warning” would soon touch down in the UK, requiring the sensible professoriate to valiantly resist the boneheaded ideas of activist students. In his new book, appropriately titled “Trigger Warning,” British writer Mick Hume warns that trigger culture has already “spread across the Atlantic,” and supine European college administrators have given in faster than Marshal Pétain.

Posted by JD Hull at July 20, 2015 07:48 AM

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