Political correctness officers on the prowl POLITICAL correctness is back with a vengeance. The Radike Samo farce is just one example of its rise, as jackpot bullies thrive around us and cyberspace.
JUST when we thought political correctness was on the way out, ridiculed to death by South Park and Borat and a cynical generation Y, back it comes stronger than ever.
The resurgence of culturally mandated conformity creeps up on you unawares, like when you don't take the full course of antibiotics for an infection.
The virulence of the PC disease was seen this week in the Radike Samo blackface furore, which made headlines around the world.The treatment of the two hapless Wallabies fans who donned Afro wigs and painted their faces black to honour their favourite player, who is of Fijian heritage, serves as a cautionary tale for anyone who believes we live in relaxed times.
Cultural wowsers went feral on Twitter after Wallabies sponsor Qantas posted a picture of Brisbane man Charles Butler and his friend dressed like Samo and declared them the winners of a competition for supportive fans.
Qantas, being a typical lily-livered corporate, issued an abject apology. The young men were publicly shamed as "racists", despite the fact Samo loved their tribute to him and even posed for pictures with them.
"These guys were actually paying me a tribute. It was a bit of fun and I think it's great that they regarded me as their favourite Wallaby," he said. "I don't know why anyone's getting worked up, that sort of reaction is just silly."
Yes it is silly. But it is also sinister that a reflexive flexing of muscles by troublemaking, self-righteous busybodies on a microblogging site should be so rewarded.
Another storm a few days earlier erupted when Channel 9 presenter Karl Stefanovic made a bawdy joke about colleague Richard Wilkins in a speech to launch his memoirs.
"I know three things about Richard Wilkins: great bloke, big hair, massive c---," was his opening line to an audience of media types in Kings Cross club Kit and Kaboodle.
The joke may have been a bit off-colour for polite company, but Wilkins didn't mind. The crowd roared with laughter, but then the tut-tutters began to make trouble.
Calls were made for Stefanovic to explain himself. To his credit, he refused. "Mate, I'm not going to stop having a good time in life. I just hope we're not turning into a society of wowsers." Good for him.
Wowsers have always existed just under the surface of this former penal colony, and emerge when political and social conditions are right, as they are now under the Green-Gillard coalition.
The state is jumping in too, with Victoria's charter of rights one official method of paying lawyers $13.5 million in taxpayers' money to enforce political correctness.
The control freakery is not just about correcting people's behaviour. It's about using language to correct their thoughts.
For instance, a friend who is studying education was astonished to find in one of her textbooks, that the new national history curriculum is to require people to use the term "BP" from now on, rather than the traditional "BC".
BC, of course, was the historical term used to denote the time "before Christ", that is, before the birth of Jesus.
This is now deemed to be an offensive idea, which must be erased from the minds of Australian children. So instead we are to replace it with the nonsensical term BP, which stands for "before present", in an effort to stamp out Christ in the new curriculum.
History is always ripe for politically correct redesign, as we saw in Sydney City Council's rewriting of all its official documents to insert the term "invasion".
And, as the 10th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks looms, there is even a quarrel over whether Muslims should be mentioned.
Never mind that the men who flew planes into New York's twin towers were all Islamist terrorists bent on jihad against the satanic West.
Those inconvenient facts must be sanitised from a colouring book for children, which has drawn the ire of America's PC brigade.
The book, titled We shall never forget 9/11 states that "freedom-hating radical Islamic Muslim extremists" attacked America because they "hate the American way of life", which is a pretty accurate statement of the terrorists' motives.
But the Council on American-Islamic Relations has joined a chorus slamming the sentiment as dangerous. The book hasn't yet been banned.
THE executive producer of the popular ABC Sunday night British drama Midsomer Murders wasn't so lucky. Brian True-May was suspended and ultimately lost his job because he told an interviewer that the detective series was successful because it represented the "last bastion of Englishness" and suggested it wouldn't work as well if the cast were more ethnically diverse.
True-May's employers, ITV, immediately suspended him for these "inappropriate" comments, and announced he would be leaving the show at the end of the current production run.
Embracing homosexuality in all things, especially marriage, is another cultural imperative of the wowsers. It is now "homophobic" to say that a child is entitled to a mother and a father, as a questioner on the ABC's Q&A recently put it.
And woe betide anyone who objects to the push to get Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie to have a gay wedding.
It used to be just the "N word" in Huckleberry Finn or the golliwogs in Enid Blyton's writing that were verboten.Hmm, Aussies KNOW the N_word!? Now it's the word "faggot" coming under fire, with the Dire Straits hit song Money for Nothing banned from Canadian radio earlier this year by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, because the word appears three times.
Even bogans have become sacred cows, with a three-minute Queensland tourism ad recently coming under fire for poking fun at "Aussie bogans, hicks and hillbillies".
Social media has merely amplified the wowsers' power and control. You can no longer make a joke without the twitterati taking it out of contest and maliciously using it to make trouble.
This is why so many people loved Charlie Sheen, who is wild and reckless enough to snub his nose at all conventions because these days the most powerful establishment is the one that enforces political correctness, because it is the fastest way to change our culture.
Wowsers have replaced the churches as guardians of morality; only theirs is a chaotic set of vaguely defined mores with no obvious benefit to society. They just trap the unwary, and force everyone to become more guarded. (Yuh don't say!?)High dudgeon is encouraged. Overblown outrage is clearly the order of the day.
Taken to its extreme, the new wowserism becomes a form of totalitarianism, in which people are punished for "thought crimes".
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/pc-officers-on-the-prowl/story-e6frfhqf-1226126813108devinemiranda@hotmail.com
