Perhaps NAACP now stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Cursing and Profanity. Don Harris is the white head (yes, he really is white, and reminiscent of a pustule, and, unlike Rachel Dolezal, even identifies as white) of the Maricopa County Chapter of the NAACP. He’s also very concerned about injudicious use of language, which is why he was on hand to try to collect the scalps of six Desert Vista High School girls who lined up to spell the word “ni**er” with letters and asterisks printed on their shirts, on their recent picture day. The girls were suspended for a complete school week, but this wasn’t good enough for left-wing activists.
Change.org circulated a petition reading, “[The girls’] punishment was 5-days suspension. This hurtful use of a racial slur is a complete disregard for the dignity of the black community in Arizona and across the nation and the punishment does not fit the total ignorance and cruelty of the crime[*].”
*Some exceptions may apply: please ignore the “dignity of the black community” when rap thugs and their wannabes use the word continually.
And despite the picture having been taken without the school’s knowledge, the petition continued, “We demand the resignation of the school’s principal, Christine Barela, immediately for deeming this 5-day vacation from school an acceptable punishment.”
Yes, the girls and their principal should be drawn and quartered and their body parts scattered in the far reaches of the realm. That’ll show ‘em!
So Harris, the white head, participated in an event last week in the Tempe Union High School District to discuss why the powers-that-be didn’t go medieval on the girls. But after the meeting, The American Mirror writes, “while participants were speaking with the media, he was caught on camera saying Channel 12 reporter Monique Griego had ‘nice t[**]s.’”
Hey, I think Howard Stern has just found his next guest.
But here’s where it really gets amusing. When Phoenix’s New Times called the NAACP office to ask about Harris’ remark, he replied, “The meeting was over. I apologize if anyone was offended. I could have said nothing. …I’m really f*****g sorry.” Maybe that’s how little Don learned to apologize at home. Caught with his hands in the cookie jar? “I’m really @#$%&! sorry, ma!”
Harris wasn’t done, though. Since he’d pledged $5,000 for the “n-word effort” (whatever that means, in practical terms), the New Times, being politically correct itself, asked if an effort should be made to eradicate “sexist” language. Here was his response, as the paper relates it (I’ve cleaned it up):
“I’m going to slash my wrists,” he spews. “Better yet, I’m going to throw myself out of a f*****g window, except I’m on the first floor …I’m one of the best god****d people in the state.”
“They’ve seen me now, they’ve seen what I’ve done. I’ve given up my law practice. I’m down here six, seven days a week. That’s what my commitment is. I support NOW, the women’s organization — god***n! — are you sh*****g me? Are you going to write this up?”
Now, I very much like Harris’ first two propositions. Instead of following such a course, however, something else is more likely; as the New Times amusingly put after mentioning that the vulgarian abruptly hung up the phone, “No doubt he’s back working to eradicate an offensive word” (not, however, in the service of the NAACP; he resigned shortly after the scandal).
To be clear, I don’t come at this from a politically correct perspective. Rather, the operative principle here is common decency, the kind George Washington (who never used profanity) and our grandparents generally exhibited. For instance, the aforementioned Mirror ran the very clever headline, “OMG: NAACP leader uses F-word to apologize for using T-word after N-word meeting.” Well crafted, but I could respond, “Writer uses God’s name in vain to criticize NAACP leader for using F-word to apologize for using T-word after N-word meeting.” And that’s the point: what should our social standards for speech be?
The problem with the politically correct thought police is not that they use social pressure to stifle some speech; again, whether it’s stigmatizing the use of profanity or something else, every group does that.
The problem is that the PC code is almost entirely wrong, quite stupid and allows for great contradiction.
Leftists descend to the very nadir of inanity, sometimes objecting to terms and names such as black hole, niggardly, Easter eggs, Christmas Trees and crippled as they rail against “microaggressions” and stigmatize substantive speech (“safe areas” and speech codes). And they sometimes do it via profanity-laced tirades that would make a drunken sailor blush. They have things backwards. “Niggardly” and other legitimate terms relate qualities and concepts; profanity is simply verbal violence and ugliness.
Of course, some will roll their eyes at my “God’s name” comment and, as one respondent who emailed me years ago mockingly put it, Little Lord Fauntleroy standard. But note that I grew up in the Bronx and have heard it all — I also ultimately saw through it all. Moreover, aren’t such comments reminiscent of when leftist Bill Maher said about a decade or so back that the Boy Scouts should be tolerated because the “squares” need some place to go? We’d do well to remember C.S. Lewis’ observation: “In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. …We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” I’d add, we mock virtue and are surprised when vice reigns supreme.
That the respondent in question was no liberal illustrates an important point: more and more conservatives today are using profanity publicly, with it appearing even in commentary as they play the caboose to the engine of liberalism. That is to say, it apparently means nothing to them that it is liberals who mainstreamed vulgar language; they’re more than happy to embrace and defend yesterday’s liberals’ cultural norms and scoff at those who object, coarsening society along the way. This gets at the true relationship between the processes known as liberalism and conservatism, as G.K. Chesterton so colorfully explained:
The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins.
The reason this two-step-dance process of national death occurs is simple: reference to taste and not Truth. This is illustrated perfectly by Harris. It’s not surprising he thinks he’s “one of the best” people in his state and polishes up his credentials by saying he supports NOW; this is reminiscent of Bill Clinton and ex-senator Bob Packwood, both of whom supported feminism publicly and abused the feminine sex privately; it also reflects research showing that while leftists rail against greed in principle, they’re defined by it in practice. They seem to believe they can indulge their beloved personal corruption and then expiate it with public displays of faux virtue.
More to the point, however, is that they exemplify that modernist mistake of self-deification. A person who believes in Truth (by definition absolute) uses it as his yardstick for morality. Now, when he looks around at others, he sees that they pale in comparison to this perfect standard.
But so does he.
Thus, he realizes that he and his fellow man truly are brothers in sin, both needing salvation, and can honestly say “But there for the grace of God go I.” But what about when someone is a relativist and doesn’t believe in Truth? What is his yardstick for behavior?
It’s usually himself. Not believing there is an objective standard for morality — and thus not really believing in morality, properly defined — the only yardstick he has left is emotion. This is why, as this study shows, most Americans make what should be moral decisions based on feelings.
This often leads to great arrogance and contempt for others. Having a behavior standard reflecting your emotions is just another way of saying it merely reflects you. This makes it easy to view yourself as perfect, for it’s relatively hard to be out of conformity with yourself. A yardstick never fails at being three feet long.
Yet since no one is a carbon copy of you, others will always fail to measure up to your “truth” the way you do. So you look in your ethereal mirror and see this font of virtue, and you look down on the Lilliputians below and see vice. And you have thus put yourself in the place of God and have reduced others to disobedient children in need of your guidance and discipline.
This explains the infamous superciliousness of those we call leftists, but remember that many “conservatives” are just a bit behind the twisted curve. It’s sadly amusing to ponder a film such as Idiocracy (whose creation itself reflects descent into idiocracy), which portrays a degraded, vulgar, dystopian future, and think that all and sundry are making it prophetic. And if we haven’t yet destroyed ourselves and are still doing the two-step dance of civilizational death in 30 years, it’s easy to imagine conservatives shouting @#$%&! and @#$%&! and @#$%&! at those who point out that they’re politically and linguistically just like yesterday’s Hillary Clintons.
Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com
EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of Don Harris. Source: KPHO/KTVK.
