Warren Kinsella has called me “an unsightly gnome” and much worse. Plus, one of his best friends is taking me and some blogger friends to court in an HRC-related suit.
However, I hope this controversy doesn’t turn into an HRC complaint.
Look, every day on my blog, I insult groups of every ethnicity. Why? Well, because it’s funny, dammit. I grew up watching Don Rickles. What can I say?
But also because I don’t accept the notion of Group Insult.
Political correctness is a threat to national security, not to mention an encroachment on our ordinary lives, where we feel inclined to whisper constantly like we’re living in the Soviet Union. Political correctness must be undermined at every opportunity if we wish to survive.
Should Kinsella fall victim to the Professional Ethnic Victimhood Police, those of us who dislike him may get a little thrill for a moment.
But that makes us just as bad as the censors we’ve spent months and years castigating.
If Iggy fires Kinsella, I feel it is none of my business — it is his staff and campaign. I’ll feel bad for Kinsella’s family, because times are tough. I suspect my political/blogging views and/or obnoxious, irreverent “tone” have/will cost me a couple of “straight” jobs. That’s the risk I take.
Much as I dislike Kinsella, not so much for his multiple jabs at me but for his bizarre personal vendetta against Ezra, I do NOT want to see this end up in the HRCs and will publicly defend his right and everyone else’s to make stupid old ethnic jokes on the internet.
“Finally, they came for Kinsella…” as it were.
PS: frankly, I’m “offended” that we live in a country in which we encourage the existence of entities with names like the “Chinese Canadian Conservative Association.”
More balkanization, more division, more ethnic ‘gotcha’ police.
That’s FAR more insidious than a dorky teenage joke on K’s blog.
UPDATE: Mark Steyn responds to Kinsella’s increasingly desperate re-writes:
[Kinsella] should have said, “Look, I’ve been coming to this joint and doing cat jokes for 30 years. It’s as funny now as it was in 1974, but so what? I’ll be doing it when I’m in here for my 100th birthday. Hey, I like barbecued cat. Why d’you think I keep coming back?”
Evidently, the owner and the maitre d’ and the busboy don’t mind. Who cares if some no-name grievance group three time zones away gets its victimological knickers in a twist?
But instead he obliterated his genially nostalgic post about the “hangout of our youth” and replaced it with a piece of generic unfelt flattery and (being Kinsella) a vicious boot in the bollocks for his accusers, dredging up ancient slurs nobody cares about.So much for the PC utopia: A stereotypical but affectionate and human reminiscence is replaced by the usual Kinsella thuggery. As the contrast between those two posts makes plain, prostration before the gods of political correctness actually makes for a more ugly world.
Why didn’t I hoover my PC faux pas the way Kinsella did? Because that way lies madness. You can never tiptoe lightly enough once you start building a world of eggshells. PC makes communication impossible. It renders a people literally illiterate: The conventions of language used by functioning societies throughout human history — irony, indirect quotation, period evocation, and, yes, even obsolete comic stereotype — are all suddenly suspect.
Kinsella was hoist by his own petard, which is amusing. But he was scared enough to panic, which is just sad. And a bleak comment on the Trudeaupia he helped build.
To which I’ll simply add: Kinsella allowed himself, even briefly, to pen a nostalgic and properly un-p.c. musing about “the hangout of our youth”, a youth which coincided with mine.
So why aren’t I “allowed”, likewise, to fondly recall my youth, in which, as I’ve written on numerous occasions, “multiculturalism” meant, well, “ordering Chinese food of a Saturday night”?
Because I’m a “conservative” and Kinsella is a “liberal.”
