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Since words are about all I have to sell, I try to keep track of them. Sometimes I need guidance, and if the learned editors at this newspaper cannot help, I call Ananias Ziegler, the media relations director for the Committee that Really Runs America.
I'm having trouble discerning the difference between
'political correctness,' which is bad, and 'historical
accuracy,' which is good,
I confessed.
Ziegler pressed for an explanation.
If a college cancels an appearance by someone like
Linda Chavez or Charles Murray because some minority
students claimed to be offended and might protest, that's
bad, right?
Of course,
Ziegler said. We cannot allow
dedicated scholars in pursuit of the truth to be muzzled,
in violation of our constitutional rights, by organized
political pressure groups. That's PC at its most
evil.
That sounded fair to me, and I went on. So all those
organized political pressure groups who succeeded in
shutting down the planned National Air and Space Museum
presentation about the dropping of the atomic bomb on
Hiroshima 50 years ago -- they're just as PC and evil as
those protesting students and professors?
Ziegler's retort shook the phone. How dare you try to
compare the two? How can we ask Americans to support such
jaundiced interpretations of our own history? Imagine
trying to tell people that the bomb might have been used
partly on account of domestic political considerations,
rather than only to shorten the war and to save American
and even Japanese lives.
I pointed out that many of President Truman's advisers had observed that the bomb had to be used, once $2 billion had been spent on it, and that if Germany, the original target, had been defeated, then it had to go somewhere. Those domestic political considerations would have to be reflected in any accurate presentation about the wartime uses of that weapon of mass destruction.
Quillen, it's only a weapon of mass destruction when
it's in the hands of someone like Saddam Hussein.
Otherwise, it's a defensive deterrent.
I'm starting to understand these fine
distinctions,
I said. Now can you tell me why it's
fomenting a wicked 'class war' to propose increasing the
minimum wage or raising taxes on the wealthy, but it is
'empowering the hard-working normal people of America' to
attack 'arrogant elitist institutions' like the National
Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting? Isn't it the same thing, stirring up
class-based resentment?
Not really,
Ziegler said. Let me explain.
There are three classes in America.
Upper, middle, and lower?
No. In those terms, everyone is middle class. The
three that the committee uses are Underclass, Chattering
Class, and Regular People.
The underclass I understood. The Chattering Class is
people like William F. Buckley, George Will and Patrick
Buchanan, nattering nabobs who make big money by telling
the wealthy what they want to hear?
The phone shook again. No, Quillen. The Chattering
Class consists of liberal professors and commentators, as
well as the Biased Liberal Media.
Why are the media always considered liberal when the
conservative writers haul down big money and have so much
influence?
I asked. And you know, I've been around
the newspaper industry for more than 20 years, and in all
that time, I've met dozens of newspaper owners -- and out
of all of them, there were maybe two Democrats. How can you
say the industry is liberal when it's owned by
conservatives?
It's 'liberal' when it prints anything we don't like,
and it's 'pandering' when it responds to market forces like
other businesses,
Ziegler explained, but it's
'accurate and responsible' when it reports what we like.
Got that?
I told him so, and moved back to the old subject. So
if I understand you correctly, then the Regular People
class has common folks like Rush Limbaugh, who made $18
million last year, or Newt Gingrich, who got offered $4.5
million to put his name on two books?
You got it, Quillen. You'd probably do a lot better
financially if you became a professional 'Regular
Person'.
I understood the new class structure from the Committee,
and I had another question. I gather that the Comittee
supported the legislation which put Congress under the same
employment standards as the rest of America.
Of course we did,
Ziegler said. We can't have
a privileged elite making regulations that they don't have
to follow themselves.
I agreed. So I gather that all the senators and
representatives who supported that act voluntarily canceled
their government-paid evil socialist health insurance, so
that they'd have to live like the rest of us, worried about
ever-rising insurance payments, or getting by day by day
without any insurance at all, hoping that we don't get sick
or that none of the kids falls off a bicycle?
Well, no, that didn't happen,
Ziegler said.
And I'm not even going to try to explain. There are some
things you'll just never understand.
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