As anyone who has ever been so emboldened as to write a political column has long since discovered, it’s impossible to please all the people all the time. Even your natural allies find fault. In the almost two years I’ve written for the Daily News, I’ve grown acutely aware of this.
Taking shots from both sides is a place I find familiar and curiously comfortable. After almost 30 years of writing opinion pieces for local newspapers, most of my illusions are gone and my targets are real. With Hillary’s misbegotten, losing campaign and Trump’s ham-handed running amok, I lurched further to the left than ever before and that made fair-minded writing more challenging.
The Donald did what four and a half turbulent years at Berkeley in the late 1960s failed to do; I now found myself a firebrand radical. Except I wasn’t. Not on all issues. To buy into a dogmatic syndrome of beliefs and accompanying lifestyles had never been my path.
For instance, there’s the issue of capital punishment. If there has been grave injustice in the way it has been put into practice, then fix the problems. Sorry, my friends. There are just some sons of bitches who need killin’.
I often part company with a lot of my left-wing comrades over lifestyles. I drink unapologetically and with fair regularity, don’t subscribe to Zen or vegan diets, I smoke cigars when I feel like it, love American football, and have made most of my living by keeping classic gas guzzlers of the 1950s and 1960s on the road.
I also feel that the policy wonks inside my Democratic Party have found more ways to lose elections than old Carter had liver pills. Like making a huge fuss over tearing down Confederate monuments. Or taking up the causes of miniscule fringe groups which always alienate huge swaths of the voting public and prevent our nation from moving forward with agendas which would benefit hundreds of millions.
This column is just one more excursion into the netherworld of policies embraced by my left-wing chums which I feel are wrongheaded and suicidal at the polls: political correctness.
The phrase was coined decades ago I’m sure, but (having shunned ALL social media and, years ago, taking John Prine’s advice and blowing up our TV) Katherine and I don’t have much opportunity in Palouse to encounter face-to-face political correctness.
Sometimes, however, it is brought directly into our home. Mostly by my two wonderful daughters who are very much hip to whatever slight cultural variants are the current rage. Raised to speak their minds, they never hesitate to correct their father’s antediluvian coinage of speech.
I first sensed how far I was out of touch with contemporary forms of speech when I referred to Eastern literature as “Oriental.” I was immediately set straight. “Asian,” it seems, was now the only correct and acceptable way of referring to all things “over there.” Since I saw no harm in falling into line, I gave up “Oriental” completely.
Where I refused to budge however, was when my girls informed me that a new lexicon had arrived and I could no longer recite the old nurturing nursery rhyme: “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water … Jack fell down and broke their crown.” Well wait a damned minute. English grammar tells me that the aforementioned broken crown belonged to Jack and — in the absence of evidence to the contrary — Jack was definitely male.
I’m a writer. I won’t bow before the mavens of political correctness and I refuse to distort the grammar of an English language which I cherish. I say NO! to their bullying. With a wink and a nod by way of apology to my fellow lefties, I say: Go and torture your mother tongue to placate the sensibilities of contemporary culture all you want. I ain’t a goin’ there.
And I’ll be happy just to sit, with two aces in the hole, chewing on my Antonio Cleopatra Grenadier, as I swill my C.C. on the rocks and raise my crony’s two deuces showing. And I’ll be glad to feel normal within the circle of old, left-wing renegades like myself.
McGehee, a lifelong activist, settled here in 1973 and lives in Palouse with his wife, Katherine. His work life has varied from bartender to university instructor to wrecking yard owner.
