Sherry Chandler

Juan Cole points us to one of Dr. King’s great sermons: Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution. Dr. King said this:

I want to say one other challenge that we face is simply that we must find an alternative to war and bloodshed. Anyone who feels, and there are still a lot of people who feel that way, that war can solve the social problems facing mankind is sleeping through a great revolution.

Dr. Cole says this:

The United States is a peculiarly war-like country. In the last a little over a century it has militarily intervened in other countries, it is said, some 100 times. If true (and it depends on what you count as an intervention), that is once a year! It is also the industrialized democracy with the greatest gap between the wealthy and the poor, where enormous corporations that make money off war have disproportionate influence on government through lobbying and campaign donations and graft. Is there a connection between these two statements? Dr. King seems to have thought so.

I recommend that you read the sermon and read the gloss.

Mick Kennedy sends e-mail:

The Heartland Review has extended the deadline for the 2007 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize to Feb. 5. Plz go to http://www.elizabethtown.kctcs.edu/pubs/heartland/index.html for details.

We are also seeking artwork/photography and fiction for the summer 2007 issue.

Mick Kennedy, editor

Let me recommend to you, on the MLK holiday, this oldy but goody from Zuky on the nature of the one cliché to rule them all:

The phrase “politically correct” can be used in two distinct ways: either with its original literal meaning, or with the mocking sarcasm that’s common these days. I’ll get to the former in a moment, but I’ll begin with the latter. As it’s commonly used, “PC” is a deliberately imprecise expression (just try finding or writing a terse, precise definition) because its objective isn’t to communicate a substantive idea, but simply to sneer and snivel about the linguistic and cultural burdens of treating all people with the respect and sensitivity with which they wish to be treated. Thus, the Herculean effort required to call me “Asian American” rather than “chink” is seen as a concession to “the PC police”, an unsettling infringement on the free-wheeling conversation of, I suppose, “non-chinks”. Having to refer to black folks as “African Americans” rather than various historically-prevalent epithets surely strikes some red-blooded blue-balled white-men as a form of cultural oppression. Having to refer to “women” rather than “bitches” lays a violent buzzkill on the bar-room banter of men preoccupied with beating on their chests and off other body parts.

There is occasional, ahem, conversation in this household about that b word, which I argue is as lazy, tired, and imprecise an insult as a-hole. For that reason, I love this next paragraph:

In this context, the conceit that “political correctness” constitutes a violation of free speech is particularly zany; as though society’s marginalized groups wield oppressive power over the dominant mainstream. Actually, as far as I’m concerned you’re free to call me “chink” and I’m free to call you “moronic racist loser” (and more if necessary, but I’ll leave that aside for now in the interest of false civility). Free speech is the straw man of choice for intellectual bums of all stripes too fragile and vacuous for critical engagement. Calling someone who says or does bigoted things “a bigot” isn’t censorious, it’s descriptively accurate, like calling a bad movie “a bad movie”, even if the bigot didn’t intend to come off as bigoted and the movie didn’t intend to come off as bad.

Read all of this lively post and learn the true origin of the term “politically correct.” Link by way of Sour Duck through The Primary Contradiction.