The populist authoritarianism that is the downside of political correctness means that anyone, sometimes it seems like everyone, can proclaim their grief and have it acknowledged. The victim culture, every sufferer grasping for their own Holocaust, ensures that anyone who feels offended can call for moderation, for dilution, and in the end, as is all too often the case, for censorship. And censorship, that by-product of fear - stemming as it does not from some positive agenda, but from the desire to escape our own terrors and superstitions by imposing them on others - must surely be resisted. - Jonathon Green, Did You Say 'Offensive'?
As is his wont, Kevin Myers has placed another torch beneath the tinder box where many of us seem to store our emotions. The slightest friction is sure to ignite a conflagration which can only be doused with the blood of the pyromaniac.
By midday I had not yet read the article that has caused so much ire. A friend had asked if I liked Kevin Myers. I responded that I did but could never agree with him on much that he wrote. My friend had hoped to lead me into expressing admiration for the content of Myers’ writing and then ambush me with his comment about Africa contributing nothing to the world but AIDS. He would agree with Myers on this matter whereas I would not. His was a humorous attempt to recruit me to his side of the debate. There was nothing in it that would send either of us off in search of wood for the pyre.
A couple of years ago Myers came out with his famous or infamous ‘bastards’ comment in relation to children born out of wedlock. Amongst his critics were people who for decades had labelled other people legitimate targets and who somehow thought it was better to be called that than a bastard. So the sanctimonious fury that Myers provokes in the politically correct is something that I have come to pay little heed to. Such is their disposition to being upset that even the Life of Brian is an affront to their sensibilities. Poor things, cursed to struggle through the only life they will ever have with skins as frail as eggshells.
When I arrived home this evening, having been dropped at the house by my Myers-lauding friend - both of us having forgotten the banter of earlier in the day - I noticed an e mail urging me – and whoever else was on the sender’s mailing list – to write complaints about the offending Myers piece in the ‘Irish Times’. In his eagerness to be first to kick Myers off the scaffold the distributor of the chain e mail failed to notice that the article appeared in the Irish Independent. When did Myers last feature as a columnist in the Irish Times?
The sender asked in particular that we all write to the Office of the Press Ombudsman. He further urged that we refrain from copying and pasting what he sent us so that we could at least pretend our outburst was spontaneous rather than prompted. Well, as the notion to write complaining about Myers never struck me earlier in the day, I have no intention of writing now because somebody else thought it was a good idea. Perhaps what Myers had written was racist but I was certainly not enamoured to the suggestion that it was offensive. I have come to learn that the cry of ‘offensive’ is the great wet blanket of the censor. A couple of nights ago watching a recording of Ali G wind up a group of religious hallions, I found myself shouting ‘debate killer’ at the dog collared cleric each time he told G he found his views on religion ‘offensive’.
In any event I had no intention of doing anything before I had a chance to read the piece by Myers. When I did I found it shocking. But I have always found a piece that shocks, rather than soothes, a much more intellectually stimulating read. It jump starts my faculty for thinking in a way that the bland and the boring never manage.
John O’Shea, who Myers has a pop at in the column when he is not hammering the Africans, is a person whose political views on the African situation are closer to my own that the Myers perspective which is light years away. Yet there is no reason to strangle at birth the Myers view before it gets a chance to filter into the public mind where it can be intellectually dismantled rather than emotionally suffocated.
Myers cruel Malthussian solution to the problems that beset Africa lack the wit and irony of the 1729 Swiftean satire, A Modest Proposal, which urged Irish parents to eat their own children as a solution to the problems of penury. And the extent to which he has warped a complex network into one way traffic leaves him stum on the Rwandan genocide being something given to Africa by the United Nations, France and China.
Yet, this is what we are supposed to be afraid of. Myers is such a threat to intellectual life that its autonomy must now be eroded so that it may lean on the crutch of censorship. I don’t think so. I will not be joining the Myersophobic mob so intent on raising the stakes so that writers may be burned at them.
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