We cultural conservative types take a lot of heat for being uptight. My buddy Dawn Eden, for example, got smeared (along with religous conservatives in general) by the enlightened progressives at Pandagon as a sex-hater; and this bit of uninformed, deceptive bile from the Nation's Katha Pollitt says we just hate women:

...right-wing Christians increasingly reveal their condescending view of women as moral children who need to be kept in line sexually by fear.

Yes, grown-up people actually believe that stuff.

So we're condescending? The funny thing is how often leftists like Pollitt turn out to be exactly the sort of shrill, uptight moral scolds that they make us out to be. Exhibit A is the recent Larry Summers fiasco at Harvard, where a university president was nearly fired for suggesting a controversial hypothesis about the differences in men and women, and only escaped after a 50 million dollar ransom to the aggrieved constituency. Academic freedom is alive and well there at Cambridge Community College, where academics are free to say exactly what the leftist and feminist pressure groups allow them to say.

Exhibit B just arrives from Australia. Douglas Wood, in a press conference about his ordeal as a captive of Iraqi insurgents until he was freed, referred to his barbaric captors as "assholes". Aussie blogger Tim Blair tells us that didn't sit too well with Andrew Jaspan, editor of a Melbourne paper called the Age, who said:

"I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas WoodÂ’s use of the a---hole word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill-thought through and I think demeans the man and is one of the reasons why people are slightly sceptical of his motives and everything else.

"The issue really is largely, speaking as I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive."

Insensitive? Insensitive? You mincing, useless Ayyyy-hole! He was fed well! Well, shut your sensitive mouths about Guantanamo Bay by all means, for those poor lost lambs are fed better than our own troops!

Criticize the coarse language of a rock star, a rapper, or a comedian and you're a philistine and a prude. But call those terrorists (who just kidnapped you and held you for months and forced you at gunpoint into making propaganda films for their murderous nihilistic cause) "assholes"* and you're coarse and insensitive.

There is a time and place for foul language. Primetime TV isn't it, and I'm insulted when Janet Jackson thinks she can just flap her Bedazzler'ed mammary at me when I'm trying to watch a football game, or some cosmically insignificant Cristal-addled rock star decides to drop the ol' f-bomb in an awards show. But Mr. Wood, on the other hand, has earned full leave to call those murdering bastards whatever he wants, whenever he wants. (His fellow kidnap victim, a Swede, has gone even further in expressing his displeasure and offered a $50,000 reward for the death of the kidnappers.)

There's a great scene in Aliens where the Marines are defending themselves deep inside a base overrun by unseen, creeping, face-sucking beasts, and orders come down from above that due to the risk of accidentally setting off the base's reactor, they can't fire their weapons.

"What are we supposed to use?" one Marine pipes up. "Harsh language?"

If the candyass bluenose sensitivity police like Jaspan have their way, then no. Not even that.

*Counting the number of hyphens--or are those dashes, Jeff?-- in Jaspan's quote, it is possible that Wood actually said "arsehole" instead of the more American "asshole". Both terms refer to the type of posterior orifice in which Mr. Jaspan's head is irretrievably impacted in ostrichlike oblivion.

Posted by: seedubya at 03:25 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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