Recently…Beautiful, educated, articulate, culturally diverse and you cannot make them any dumber. That sums up the light of the weekend morning talk shows, Melissa Harris Perry in full social justice warrior regalia. I am willing to bet a hypothetical subscription to the New Yorker Magazine that Ms Perry has never experienced a day of prejudice of the go to the back of the bus kind in her whole thirty something existence, but there she goes pointing the lance of language to pop the cherry of Alfonso Aguilar, no bird of prey, I assure you. The discussion centered around Paul Ryan’s future leadership of the House. As debates go, quel bore. Would have changed channels but some little birdie told me fireworks were coming and sure enough…Alfonso blundering his way into the I have a compliment for everybody category described RepRyan as a“hard worker,” much in the same spirit as “you can say anything you want about Hitler, but you got to admit he built the Autobahn.¨ Well, Alfonso did not escape the wrath of MSNBC’s Athena that morning when Perry coughed up an unintelligible response to the browbeaten Aguilar’s mincing compliment thus immediately transforming a perfectly ordinary and legitimate English phrase into a shibboleth of political correctness. Her objection to hard worker stems from “an image (she keeps) of the folks in the cotton fields on her office wall because it is a reminder of what hard worker looks like”. Therefore the inference – I look at slaves in the cotton fields because I get by doing nothing. Well, I ‘ll happily grant her that, given her probable mega salary, unless you consider making a very public ass of yourself hard work. Then Perry with the ease of Scarlett O’Hara lacing up a corset, perilously slips into “the context of relative privilege” and into the stew go “the Moms who don’t have healthcare and that are working… we don’t call them hard workers, we call them failures, we call them snucking (whatever that means) on the system” Ok, I grant Perry the right to dislike the term, but why should she have the right to project her likes and dislikes on the rest of the population? I feel sure that scores of educated people who above all do not want to offend will banish the expression from their vocabulary. To those people and to Perry I recommend defecting to North Korea. However, my view of the end of the world was somewhat softened by , of all people, a guy from Oklahoma, a university president faced with one of those crybabies, a student, who felt “offended by a homily on love because it “made him feel bad for not showing love.” “Shut your privileged trap, Doctor Piper enjoined, this is a university, not a daycare.” Bravo Oklahoma! Would MSNBC follow your example.
