By Margaret Carlson
It’s in the nature of pendulums to swing too far.
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Remember political correctness, that long-ago effort to extend the manners of the drawing room to those not previously on the receiving end of thoughtfulness. Before long, PC was treated as a joke, a symbol of how thin-skinned groups were being indulged by a bunch of squishy liberals intent on not offending anyone.
That’s not to say it wasn’t fun to lampoon excesses, like using “chair” instead of “chairman.” The Bill O’Reillys of our day built a cottage industry out of mocking such things, all the while congratulating themselves for their bravery in telling it like it is.
It was a facile way to discredit social change. O’Reilly’s stance is so prevalent now that all sorts of people are spouting bigoted and senseless things and then acting surprised if someone is offended.
U.S. Sen. George Allen, R-Va., finally apologized after two weeks for ridiculing at the only dark-skinned member of the audience at an event. He had called him “macaca” and mockingly welcomed him to the United States, where he was born.
Allen went through all the stages of denial, then grudgingly issued an apology designed to put blame on the oversensitive insultee, not the insulter.
Then there is former United Nations Ambassador and Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, who decided to defend his employer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., by claiming that small merchants had been “overcharging blacks for stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and retired to Florida. … First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs.”
Amazing that all these corner-store owners, who worked from dawn to midnight trying to get a leg up in their adopted country, are now lounging around in mansions on Palm Beach’s Ocean Drive and we didn’t know about it.
Sure, those at the very bottom might resent people one step up. That wasn’t Young’s point. This civil-rights leader accused whole groups of people of “ripping off” his community. For reasons different from the cable-television hosts, having been a victim of prejudice, he may have felt justified in dispensing a dose of bigotry himself. Or it could be that coarse and insulting language is so commonplace now, he just assumed his would pass unnoticed.
There’s worse to come. Utter and complete offensiveness is moving from cable to the networks. CBS, once known as the Tiffany Network and former home of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, has just announced that its fall season of the program “Survivor” will feature a race war. Apparently, just eating bugs and living in filth lost the ability to enthrall viewers, so come Sept. 14, those marooned will be segregated into ethnic groups.
There is hope that we aren’t going the way of “Survivor.” Young resigned from his Wal-Mart post. And there are signs of weakness in the ratings of some cable shout shows.
Even movie stars are being called on their offensive behavior. Mel Gibson has been crudely anti-Semitic for years, but it wasn’t until he did it on the record to a police officer he assumed was Jewish that he got nailed for it.
I’d like to think that someone at CBS remembers the day when we stopped belittling people for fun and ratings, the days of yore when we decided that physically challenged was better than crippled, and African-American better than negro, and that it wasn’t acceptable to sort and ridicule people based on gender, race and religion.
In the absence of that, let’s hope “Survivor” bombs. That’s the only language some people understand.
Margaret Carlson is a Bloomberg News columnist.
