Many if not most of us recall childhood dares, drinking pond water, burning cigarettes on our arms, sticking fingers through fences for angry dogs to bite, shit like that. Most fundamentally the ritual of dare is a common agreement to 'believe' that all randomly thought-up unpleasantries are necessarily and unquestionably a perfectly valid challenge to a boy's emerging manhood. Refusing to take on a given dare was bad enough, would get you laughed at for a weekend or so. But the more unforgivable crime by far was to call out the naked emperor, dare not to dare, point out that it was all ridiculous bullshit and everyone knew it. Such heresy gets one shunned and bullied for months on end; even a childhood entire.
As with the boy so with the man. Those who most passionately denounce 'political correctness', who hold it to be far more than a silly neuroticism at worst, but as a uniquely menacing evil or historically extreme tyranny do not really believe these grandiose things they say. They equate a willingness to condemn abstract strangers with heroic honesty because they have never outgrown the need to 'win' at invented measures of toughness, and they resent those of us who have achieved this particular maturity. That would be the meat of what's it's all bout anyhow.
No comments:
Post a Comment