Everything Must Be Renamed
One nation, triggered right and left and then some...
Great George Will piece in the NY Post on all the PC violations everywhere:
We have a new national passion for moral and historical hygiene, a determination to scrub away remembrances of unpleasant things, such as the name Oklahoma, which is a compound of two Choctaw words meaning "red" and "people."Connecticut's state Democratic Party has leapt into the vanguard of this movement, vowing to sin no more: Never again will it have a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner.
Connecticut Democrats shall still dine to celebrate their party's pedigree but shall not sully the occasions by mentioning the names of two slave owners.
The Washington Post should join this campaign for sanitized names, thus purging the present of disquieting references to the past.
The newspaper bears the name of the nation's capital, which is named for a slave owner who also was -- trigger warning -- a tobacco farmer. Washington, DC, needs a new name. Perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt, DC.
She had nothing to do with her husband's World War II internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were native-born American citizens.
...So, let us move on.
To Massachusetts perhaps, which should furl its flag. Massachusetts' flag shows a Native American holding a bow and arrow, a weapon that reinforces a hurtful stereotype of Native Americans as less than perfectly peaceful.
This is liberalism's dilemma: There are so many things to be offended by, and so little time to agonize about each.
Mass hysteria, or smart politics? Gin up an endless supply of grievances, whip the electorate into a frenzy, offer cost-free solutions, strike a moral pose, and win re-election. Who says politicians are stupid?
Jim Simon at September 6, 2015 10:07 PM
Eleanor Roosevelt District of an enslaving white European imperialist?
Conan the Grammarian at September 7, 2015 12:46 AM
The Democrat Party invented the KKK, supported Jim Crow laws, supported racial apartheid, and filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I hear 'racist' every time I hear the word Democrat. So it should be expunged from history and from the present because it is racist and therefor offensive.
steve in tulsa at September 7, 2015 6:11 AM
Eleanor Roosevelt's uncle was President Teddy Roosevelt, and he hunted and killed animals for sport. So her name can't be used for anything.
Nick at September 7, 2015 7:27 AM
Lets do what the IT computer password people do. Rename everything with an unmemorizable string of symbols. Mount a8J&pl%4. Not to be confused with mount a7Ju*o4 of course.
Or take relativism to it's ridiculous conclusion and make all references relative to the speaker. Hello person I met last Friday. Or, I want to buy some break. I think I'll go south by southwest for a while. They always have good bread. Eventually we can end up with a language solely of metaphors. Jalad at Tanagra when the walls fell.
Ben at September 7, 2015 7:31 AM
Washington and Lee University in Virginia was named for
- George Washington, a slave owner, and
- Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general
So that's a double whammy for that college which should be renamed and punished for using those names.
Nick at September 7, 2015 7:42 AM
I think we should just rename everything in French, except in Lousiana of course, where it already mostly is.
The French haven't won many battles in the last two hundred years, and they hate everyone else on the planet equally (including some of their own countrymen) , so French would be perfect.
On the other hand, the language police philistines in this country are so stupid they don't understand that many of the terms they object to are euphemisms for other terms their cultural predecessors objected to.
Retarded replaced Moron, which has now been replaced by *special needs*.
Isab at September 7, 2015 8:20 AM
As I read this article yesterday, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher/201509/wound-collectors , talking about how a frequent commonality among extremists, terrorists, mass killers, and the like is that they are frequently "wound collectors."
"What is a wound collector? In essence these are individuals who go out of their way to collect social slights, historical grievances, injustices, unfair or disparate treatment, or wrongs—whether real or imagined."
As I read this, I couldn't help but be reminded of the ever-offended, micro-aggression police running around college campuses.
Dwatney at September 7, 2015 8:24 AM
"Eleanor Roosevelt, DC" won't do; she was a rich white woman!
And the "DC" could no longer stand for "District of Columbia" since the Columbia honors Christopher Columbus.
How about we rename it to "Cesspool, DC"? And the DC could stand for District of Crap. Now that might be a more accurate description.
charles at September 7, 2015 2:15 PM
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