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From John C Wright's blog:
http://www.scifiwright.com/2012/12/retrophobia/
Storytelling is the art of casting a magical spell to enchant your audience so that the false story you are inventing will seem real, if not to the listener, at least to his imagination...
The magic spell is beautiful and brittle like glass. One wrong word can shatter it.
I have been happily reading a ‘magical realism’ story set in the 1960′s upstate New York, and then the author gives a date not in A.D. but in A.C.E., a terminology no one used in the Sixties, and which was obnoxiously politically correct.
Even though I was on the last chapter of a four book series it had taken the author decades to write, it was too late. The spell was broken.
I realized I was not in the magical faraway hills of New York in the Summer of Love, but listening to crap propaganda from an enemy of Christ who was so bitter against Christendom that he could not even bring himself to refer to the Gregorian calendar honestly.
I was yanked out of that mysterious fairyland back into the quotidian realm.
Even thought I had only a chapter to go, I put the book on the shelf, and have not been able to bring myself to open it again.
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7 comments:
He did the right thing. All this unwelcome cultural marxist background noise trying to intrude in the everyday lives of normal folks.
My mother worked with mentally handicapped children in the 70's. She's not been switched to referring to "learning difficulties" instead (a stupid phrase in my opinion) as she's retired so seldom comes into contact with the thought police.
And why would she give it a second thought, it's an accurate term to use and (in the 70's) there was not the slightest objection from the parents, who were probably unaware they should be "offended by it."
Close the book, change the channel and shut it all out.
Ignorance is bliss. I was recently unfortunate enough to be in earshot of a grown man (a manager) trying to tell another chap that "we cannot say 'brain storming' as it is not PC." I think that was what's known as a "double whammy" as I also hate "management speak!"
I hate the C.E and B.C.E notation with a passion. How laughable can PC people go? What is the next step? They want to rename days of weeks or months because they are named after pagan gods (Thursday is Thor's day and March is Mar's month). Of course not. The hate is only against Christ.
Whenever I encounter feminine pronounds used as generic pronouns (except in situations where it makes sense to employ them, as with a generic mother or nun), I find it difficult to continue. It is so repellent that I usually refuse to read further. This sadly happens often in the secondary literature that I am supposed to read.
I suppose that these sorts of things are like tribal markers -- a shibboleth in the contemporary Canaan of the spirit. They're therefore useful flags to let you know when you are in enemy territory. When you hear folks' talking about "empowerment," head for the door.
@JA - Twenty years ago I was attending a seminar on how a vast government grant had been spent on empowering the people living on a particularly nasty housing estate by having professional empowerers, improving the environment by nicer paths and gardens, proving drop-in centres and so on. I did a quick sum of the size of the grant divided by the number of people on the estate, and suggested that - since poverty was the problem (supposedly) then why not divide the grant among the people on the estate - this amounted to a couple of years worth of the average national salary. At the very least the decent people there (about half) could use it to escape somewhere better. The response was interesting: complete silence for an embarrassingly long period, then a couple of embarrassed hems and haws and remarks about this being 'too simple'; then back to business as usual.
"Too simple"... The perfect example of how practical those people are... Would you care to expand on the anecdote unless you did already?
@Joseph A.:
Whenever I encounter feminine pronounds used as generic pronouns (except in situations where it makes sense to employ them, as with a generic mother or nun), I find it difficult to continue. It is so repellent that I usually refuse to read further.
Me too.
Very good piece from Mr. Wright! I want to note, for the benefit of any lingering readers who may be considering altering their entertainment and media consumption habits, that it is extremely gratifying to reach the point (as I have) where you have so removed yourself from daily reinforcement of PC tropes that you are a little bit shocked or taken aback when you do see them. My wife and I watch the latest movies sometimes, but infrequently enough that the PC moments always strike me like a blow to the face - and it feels great, because it makes me realize that this is evidence that my worldview is healing.
@SDR - I think that they don't consider giving money to the people they purport to help, because they believe that the money will be spent on alcohol.
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