The Light’s on at Signpost

by George MacDonald Fraser

  “Guidelines” from the Lord Chancellor’s office to judges have discouraged the use of the word “British”, and leniency has been urged in dealing with Rastafarians convicted of smoking pot, apparently on the ground that it is part of their culture. (I resist the temptation to speculate facetiously on what guidelines the Lord Chancellor’s office might suggest if some enterprising worshippers of the Indian goddess Kali decided to revive the ancient cult of thugee, whose culture included ritual murder.)

  In view of the above it is perhaps not surprising to hear that the Foreign Office, whose record of blunder, stupidity, and sheer perversity is unmatched in the history of British institutions, should have considered changing “British Embassy” to “United Kingdom Embassy” for fear of wounding the devolved parliamentary bodies of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

  The Archbishops of Canterbury and York are instructed in “race awareness”. It would be interesting to know just who is considered fit to teach their Graces anything on a subject which is surely at the very heart of Christian thought.

  Policemen are cautioned against asking outrageous questions like “Are you married?” and “Do you have a girlfriend?” in case they wound the feelings of homosexuals. The use of nicknames is discouraged so that people of different races may be spared such wounding appellations as Mick, Jock, and Taffy, and feminist sensibilities are catered for by changing “manning the phone” to “staffing the phone” to avoid “sexism”, which also substitutes the nonsensical “chair” for “chairman”, and prohibits such disgusting words as policeman, fireman, foreman, and, presumably, mankind. And “Ploughperson’s lunch” has appeared on a pub menu.

  The length to which the p.c. lobby will go not only in discovering, but inventing causes of offence has been demonstrated by the college which reportedly frowned on “taking the mickey” and “nitty-gritty” on the entirely false grounds that one is anti-Irish and the other refers to sexual intercourse with black women. In fact, “taking the mickey” has nothing at all to do with Ireland or the Irish, but derives from a vulgar piece of rhyming slang anent one “Mickey Bliss”, while “nitty-gritty”, though possibly from black American vernacular, carries no sexual connotation whatever, being simply an expressive piece of slang, slightly onomatopoeic, meaning the heart of the matter, the essential.

  The same seat of learning, incidentally, disapproved of “lady”, “gentleman”, “crazy”, “mad”, and even “history” (which presumably is sexist in excluding the alternative “hertory”).

  Nor should we forget the diktat that those working with infants must not use the word “naughty” because of its negative quality. So a magnificent, expressive, universally respected word with a currency of five centuries in English, is banned at the whim of some trendy idiot; this is as splendid an example of p.c. as one could wish—perverse, stupid, and thoroughly dishonest. At this rate, no word in the language is safe.

  A mad world, my masters? Yes, but along with the misguided, frightened, and brain-dead, it has some very nasty, unscrupulous people in it, intent on destroying traditional values and established truth—but for what reason is not clear. Perhaps simply sheer perversity, or an obsessive dislike of Western (and especially British and American) civilisation, or possibly the p.c. brigade are carried away by that destructive impulse so often detectable in supposedly progressive and enlightened thought. It should be noted that p.c. is rarely found on the Right; it is almost entirely a psychopathy of the Left, and if it seems too dramatic to suggest that they are out to overthrow democratic society, one should bear in mind those liberal apologists for communism who used to pooh-pooh “reds under the bed” with such amused disdain, and managed to overlook the fact that the doctrine they so admired was dedicated to just such an overthrow, by any means, violent, criminal, or deceitful.

  But the “why?” of p.c. is less important than the thing itself, with all those subversive and malevolent fatuities which it has tried to impose, with considerable success, on a society frightened to stand up for sanity and honesty and simple decency in case it incurs the hostility of the new children of Goebbels. Even the British press, while denouncing them, is not immune to their influence, or to the incessant, insidious propaganda with its weight of censorships, proscriptions, and downright follies dreamed up to pander to the prejudices of special interest groups such as feminists, racists, animal rights activists, and every vocal crank and mischief-maker clamouring to assume the role of victim.

  Many of them, of course, are good for a laugh—or were, in the days when W. S. Gilbert, casting about for the most nonsensical taboo he could imagine, conceived of the death penalty for “all who flirted, leered or winked”.

  Gilbert, thou shouldst be living at this hour, when a glance or a compliment or the most inoffensive of gestures can be described as “sexual harassment”, often with demands for compensation.* Whatever became of the girls (oh dear, female persons) of fifty years ago, who responded to unwelcome attentions with a wisecrack, a sarcasm, or, in extreme cases, a left hook? And no hard feelings or whines for protection; they could take care of themselves, and if anyone had recommended that they complain in p.c. terms, they would have fallen about, the brazen little hussies.

  Come to think of it, Gilbert would have had a field day with Cool Britannia, ethical foreign policies, Lord Robertson and Mr Hoon sticking close to their desks as they ruled the Queen’s navee, people recommending themselves for peerages, asylum-seekers costing more to keep than Etonians, and the word going forth to museums and galleries that they must meet quotas of visitors from ethnic minorities and the poorer classes—a decree which raised the spectre of Asians, Africans, and ragged bums being rounded up and forced to stare at glass cases of Roman coins, while museum police barred the doors against Anglo-Saxons and the wealthy. (How would they deal, we wondered, with a Pakistani who arrived in a Rolls Royce?)

  This lunacy, designed to achieve a racial and social balance to satisfy the Secretary of State for Culture (a title which told us we had been delivered into the hands of the Philistines) was introduced in 2000, to the horror of museum and gallery directors: some were told that 40 per cent of their visitors should be from “non-wealthy” backgrounds, and the Tate Gallery was warned that its annual £25 million grant was conditional on its ability to prove that 5 per cent of its visitors were from ethnic minorities.

  Sanity prevailed the following year and the decree was dropped after the museums had pointed out the difficulty of determining what an ethnic minority was (Scots? Welsh? parties of French schoolchildren?) and the further problem posed by some of those officially categorised as poor (pensioners, students, et al.) who in defiance of bureaucratic definition were actually quite well off, and even rich, damn their impudence. The Secretary for Culture, Mr Smith, described the abandonment of the scheme as a “move away from lots of detail”.

  So that was all right, and what this p.c. experiment cost in money, time, and stress, it is best not to ask. But we may wonder what kind of moron thought of it, blind to its obvious impossibility, and thank heaven that the Culture Department, which is also responsible for sport, didn’t think to apply the percentage demanded of the Tate Gallery to the England football team, since this would have limited it to .55 of a black player. (And if a racial yardstick can be applied, why not a feminist or ageist one—why are there no women or pensioners in the England team?)

  It’s all very well my being facetious. The politically correct ding-a-lings are perfectly capable of demanding these things, and a few more I haven’t thought of.

  My personal encounters with p.c. are of comparatively recent date. Thirty years ago, when I resurrected Thomas Hughes’ bully, Flashman, p.c. hadn’t been heard of—not by me, at any rate—and no exception was taken (apart from one mildly concerned American publisher) to my adopted hero’s character, behaviour, attitude to women and subject races (indeed, any races, including his own) and general awfulness; in fact, it soon became evident that these were his main attractio
ns. He was politically incorrect with a vengeance, and nowhere more flagrantly than in his descriptions of native peoples, of whom he used language which, while perfectly acceptable in the Victorian era, has been outlawed (quite literally) in our own time.

  Through the seventies and eighties I led him on his disgraceful way, toadying, lying, cheating, running away, treating women as chattels, reviling and abusing inferiors of all colours, with only one redeeming virtue, the unsparing honesty with which he admitted to his faults, and even gloried in them. And no one minded, or if they did, they didn’t tell me. In all the many thousands of readers’ letters I received, not one objected.

  In the nineties, a change began to take place. Reviewers, interviewers and commentators started describing Flashman (and me) as politically incorrect, which we are, though by no means in the same way. This is fine by me; it’s my bread and butter, and if Flashman wasn’t an elitist, racist, sexist swine, I’d be selling bootlaces at street corners. But what I notice with amusement is that many reviewers and interviews now feel themselves obliged to draw attention to Flashy’s (and my) political incorrectness in order to make a point of distancing themselves from it. This isn’t to say that they dislike the books; they have been much more than generous, but where once the non-p.c. thing could pass unremarked, they now feel that they must warn readers that some may find Flashman offensive, and that his views are certainly not those of the reviewer or interviewer, God forbid.

  I find the disclaimers interesting and just a little alarming. They are a novelty of a new age, almost a knee-jerk reaction, often rather a nervous one, as though the writer were saying: “Look, whatever I may say about Fraser’s books, please understand that I feel a proper loathing for Flashman’s character and behaviour. I’m not a racist or a sexist, and hold the right views, and I’m in line with modern enlightened thought, honestly…” They don’t admit to being politically correct, and indeed I’m quite sure they’re not, and despise p.c. for the dishonesty it is; some may even sympathise secretly with Flashman’s dreadful outlook—but they will say nothing to which the p.c. lobby could take exception. That is what alarms me: the fear evident in so many sincere and honest folk of being thought out of step.

  But that, thank God, is as far as the British literary world goes in the direction of p.c.—an acknowledgement that it exists, no more. In America, it seems, the cancer has gone much deeper, as I discovered when I wrote a book called Black Ajax in 1997. It was based on the life of Tom Molineaux, a former slave in the US, who came to England in 1810 to try to wrest the heavyweight championship from Tom Cribb, was cheated out of the prize, and died after a rapid decline into drink and debauchery. A sad tale, but one which I thought, in my innocence, that the American public would respond to with enthusiasm, since its central figure was a simple black man exploited, patronised, cheated, and ruined by villainous whites. In view of the racial climate in America, it seemed a natural.

  But it wasn’t. It was readily accepted by British reviewers, who took no exception to the subject matter, and sold reasonably well, but in America it couldn’t even find a publisher at first; one described it as offensive, and seemed to think I was trying to make racist jokes, and only after much work by my agent was it taken on by a small publisher, who did well enough with it. That doyen of boxing writers, Budd Schulberg, wrote not unkindly of it in the New Yorker, and I received a favourable post from American readers. So how to explain the blank refusal of leading US publishers to have anything to do with it?

  The answer, of course, was p.c. I had written the book in the first person, or rather persons, using witnesses such as Cribb himself, William Hazlitt, various English pugilists, and other voices, real and fictitious. They told Molineaux’s story, and since they were pre-Regency Englishmen for the most part, their language and attitudes, being of their time, were politically incorrect, to say the least. They used words like “nigger”, and treated Molineaux with contempt, mostly, and while this was an absolutely true and fair reflection of the time and place and state of mind, American publishers could not see beyond the awful words and racist behaviour; no use to tell them that this was how it was, and that any historical novel which pretended otherwise would be false and useless.

  But even if they understood that, and that a writer either presents historic truth or fails in his duty, they were still in the grip of p.c., and victims of what I believe is nowadays called “denial”. They knew the book was true, but they didn’t want to believe it, because of this ridiculous obsessive guilt that they seem to have about their country’s past, with its slavery and cruelty and exploitation and oppression of black people; they would rather forget that, or pretend it was different, and so they chose the easy road, and just ignored it.

  I am not complaining. I wouldn’t want my book published by that kind of publisher, and it did perfectly well without them. What alarmed and depressed me was to discover what a grip p.c. had taken in the US; that truth was no defence if that truth was deemed offensive to modern fashionable taste and reminded it of a history it would rather forget. It’s profoundly worrying when people refuse to look history in the face because they’re frightened of what they’ll see there, and feel uncomfortable. It is akin to the kind of prejudice that bans Huckleberry Finn and Oliver Twist from library shelves because the politically correct are offended by what they call racial stereotypes, true though they may be.

  I have run across the same sort of thing in Hollywood, where the Roman Catholic Church, and fear of picketing by ethnic minorities, both wield a powerful influence. I fell slightly foul of the churchmen when, in a TV movie about Casanova for Richard Chamberlain, I depicted the debauchery and corruption of certain clerics—which was historically true, and I had chapter and verse, but that didn’t matter. It had to go, so the bishops and others in my Casanova behaved themselves, more or less, but the film, while it did well on US television in its bowdlerised form, has never to my knowledge been shown in Britain.

  The Lone Ranger, on the other hand, never even reached production, and while the weird vagaries of the movie industry, contractual foul-ups, etc., were to blame for that, political correctness stormed onto the scene, red in tooth and claw, at an early stage in the writing. I had given John Landis a script in which I had used a piece of Western history which had never been shown on screen, and which was as spectacular as it was shocking—and true. The whisky traders of the plains used to build little stockades, from which they passed out their ghastly rot-gut liquor through a small hatch to the Indians, who paid by shoving furs back through the hatch. The result was that in short order, frenzied, drunken Indians who had run out of furs were besieging the stockade while the traders sat snug inside, and did not emerge until the Indians had either gone away or passed out, leaving the little fort surrounded by intoxicated aborigines.

  Landis was all for it—and then informed me that word had come down from on high that the scene wouldn’t do. It would offend “Native Americans”.* Their ancestors might have got pieeyed on moonshine, but they didn’t want to know it, and it must not be shown on the screen. Damn history, in fact; let’s pretend it didn’t happen, because we don’t like the look of it. I still say it would have made a splendid sequence, and I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn’t present the picture they would like. Hang it, my Highland forebears were a fairly primitive, treacherous, bloodthirsty bunch, and as David Balfour said, would have been none the worse of washing. Fine, let them be so depicted, if any film-maker feels like it; better that than insulting, inaccurate and dishonest drivel like Braveheart.

  But that’s another story, equally politically correct in its way, in that it pandered to false prejudices and myths. P.c. comes in many guises, some of them so effective that the p.c. can be difficult to detect—the silly euphemisms, apparently harmless, but forever dripping to wear away common sense; the naїveté of the phrase “a caring force for the future” on poppy trays, which suggests that the army is some kind of peace corps, whe
n in fact its true function is killing; the continual attempt to soften and sanitise the harsh realities of life in the name of liberalism, in an effort to suppress truths unwelcome to the p.c. mind; the social engineering which plays down Christianity, demanding equal status for alien religions; the selective distortions of history, so beloved by New Labour, denigrating Britain’s past with such propaganda as hopelessly unbalanced accounts of the slave trade, laying all the blame on the white races but carefully censoring the truth that not a slave could have come out of Africa without the active assistance of black slavers, and that the trade was only finally suppressed by the Royal Navy virtually single-handed; the waging of war against examinations as “elitist” exercises which will undermine the confidence of those who fail—what an intelligent way to prepare children for real life in which competition and failure are inevitable, since both are what life, if not liberal lunacy, is about.

  P.c. also demands that “stress”, which used to be coped with by less sensitive generations, should now be compensated by huge cash payments, lavished on griping incompetents who can’t do their jobs, and on policemen and firemen “traumatised” by the normal hazards of work which their predecessors took for granted; that “grieving” should become part of the national culture, as it did on such a nauseating scale when large areas were carpeted in rotting vegetation in trumped-up “mourning” for the Princess of Wales; and that anyone suffering even ordinary hardship should be regarded as a “victim”—and, of course, be paid for it.

  Closely related to the grieving craze (for it is no less) is that of forgiveness. P.c. does not permit anyone to harbour resentment or hatred for an injury, however malicious and atrocious, or to seek retribution. This is also part of the Christian ethic (doing good to those that despitefully use you, turning the other cheek, and so on), and I suppose it’s a bit late in the day to point out that it’s an often contradictory philosophy* imposed only by centuries of religious browbeating on Northern peoples whose natures are more in tune with the Old Testament and who believe that the best reply to an injury is retaliation in kind, preferably with interest. That is politically incorrect (with a vengeance, literally). It is also natural and human and logical, and anathema to the new p.c. morality which requires expressions of forgiveness from victims or relatives when some peculiarly vile crime has been committed. It’s as though there were a deliberate attempt to institutionalise forgiveness, to create a climate in which a good old-fashioned hatred of evil is never expressed. Forgiveness has become a wonderful excuse for inertia in the face of wickedness; indeed, it makes tolerance of wickedness a virtue—and that is the road to hell.