Born a Ramblin’ Sam: One of the Most Popular Coolpowers Blogs of All Time

Of all the incessantly repeated, self-parodying slogans used by Republicans today, perhaps no single line is stupider than the assertion that ‘political correctness’ has struck again in some situation. Well, there’s no reason to side with the so-called ‘politically correct’ no more than there is to side with the conservatives, because this alleged liberal fascist movement doesn’t even exist.

That’s right. There is no movement trying to ban every term that isn’t under some sort of hippie guideline to living. There may be people who want you to stop saying ‘retarded’ or ‘that’s so gay’, just as there was an effort in decades past to phase out terms like ‘n*gger’ & ‘negro’, which is all fine and good, but as far as I am aware there never was a major movement to get rid of terms like ‘fireman’, ‘blind’ or anything along those lines, as George H.W. Bush alleged there was in 1991. The only reason people say ‘Native American’ instead of ‘Indian’ for those called that, but not actually from India, is because calling them Indian would be incredibly inaccurate now that we know they never came from India. It may never have had anything to do with the term being offensive at all.

To further prove that it doesn’t exist, let’s go back and see where its usage first dates to: none other than the Daily Mail, right at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s administration in 1986. The snooty editors decided it would help to further absurdly demonize liberals by calling them ‘liberal wackos’ doing away with the perceived offensiveness of the song “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, supposedly having it retitled “Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep” at a school for racial equality, or some such nonsense story along those lines. In reality, this was a complete fabrication; according to a teacher in the school, it was only retitled that to turn it into an action rhyming game, not because the term ‘black’ was somehow offensive to African-Americans. Why would they interpret it that way? The term in this context has absolutely nothing to do with race, rather the color of a sheep’s wool. Do these Daily Mail people think the rest of the world is stupid? Well, during the Thatcher years they apparently, arrogantly so, thought ‘the liberals’ were a bunch of tie-dyed hacky sack playing hippies, blissfully unaware of the ‘real problems’.

Fiendish as this complete lie was, it spread like wildfire in America at the dawn of the Bush administration in the late 80’s. People who just wanted some universal appeal or, God forbid, sensitivity, not to mention accuracy in their words, were branded ‘politically correct’, and in many cases they weren’t even in a sensitivity-minded situation, rather finding themselves branded that way by a press that picked up the Daily Mail’s idea to cook up a bunch of ridiculous myths. Nobody on the ‘politically correct’ side of things ever walked by the stupid banner at all; it was only ever used (and is, to this day, only ever used by dusty, sloganeering conservative wheezebags) by greedy politicians looking for votes & support. What were merely a few isolated incidents of either an attempt to be sensitive, an attempt to not conform to cliched terms, or just using different words, pretty much, became part of this so-called ‘movement’ in the eyes of the public.

Political correctness is a myth. Just because we ought to cut out insanely overused dumbass talk like ‘retarded’, ‘negro’, ‘gay’ in the insulting sense, etc. doesn’t mean anyone is going to really force you, unless certain terms are banned in a workplace or something like that. There’s no hippie SS who are gonna slap you & punish you if you say “that’s retarded” or “that’s so gay”, even if it makes those who use the words sound ignorant, bigoted and insensitive. Nobody is any sort of sensitivity fascist, for that matter. There is no sensitivity police. Nothing, nobody, nada, doesn’t exist, ain’t gonna happen anytime soon. Relax, offensive comedians, nobody can touch ya, especially and unfortunately not the all bark & no bite act of Denis Leary. I believe people should stop saying ‘retarded’ and ‘gay’, simply because it’s unintelligent and, if unintentionally, hateful talk. If some beautiful woman somewhere said ‘that’s so gay’, it wouldn’t make the word glamorous. Nothing can justify the words’ use. But am I going to stridently lecture you, the average guy in the street, about how it’s wrong to say this or that? No. No one is, unless they’re assholes about their own fine & good personal belief. And nobody is going to be imprisoning you in a concentration camp for the ‘politically incorrect’, replete with hippie prison guards with suede-denim suits leading you to some sort of organic poison gas chamber (as Jello Biafra humorously yet frighteningly sang about).

And for the conservatives who propagate this myth, we’d like to ask you to not blow things so far out of proportion as you’ve done for so long now, and start merely telling the truth. Stop making up stupidass stories about how ‘liberal wackos’ are supposedly out to destroy “family values” with their co-optation of the “gay agenda”. Or else we the sensible American people start telling true stories about how you were behind the “Freedom Fries” name change during the Iraq War.

And they’re calling the liberals overly sensitive with words? Hypocrites, hypocrites they are.