When planning my nephew’s birthday party, we made a few considerations in advance.
He’s not a fan of broccoli, for one — so that was nixed without much fuss from the crudite platter. He’s really big on Legos, so we made sure there were plenty of those to step on. And, he being a fun-loving kid who loves to laugh, we made sure not to hire a live wolverine as the entertainment.
Let me explain: Wolverines, though in steady decline, are one of nature’s strongest performers — with thick oily fur that allows them to thrive in freezing temperatures, sharp teeth that let them tear through even the most densely frozen carrion, and disproportionate physical strength that makes them formidable predators in the wild.
But the performance skills of the “nasty cat’’ stop short at magic tricks or balloon animals. In fact, there’s a fair-to-good chance that a wolverine — even a generously compensated one, to whom I gave zero notes on his or her act — would try to eat my nephew, his friends, and the cat. Some birthday!
So we got a clown instead. Only slightly less scary, but way less violent when confined to an enclosed space with multiple soft squishy lunch options.
I guess it’s just one of my strengths as an event organizer — knowing when not to involve wolverines. It’s the kind of management savvy you don’t see too often these days, when the growing trend appears to be hiring wolverines whenever possible.
Take Roseanne Barr, who had a fantastic past few days after discovering that whilst spirit questing on sleeping pills, she somehow let slip one of the most plainly racist insults I’ve ever seen anyone drop in public, ever, against former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett. ABC responded by canceling the highly successful reboot of her eponymous sitcom, setting off a firestorm of real and fake outrage online.
After a good night’s sleep, Barr may have been surprised by her own tweets, but many of us weren’t. Anyone who had followed her account across her tenure on Twitter was already well aware of her predilection for bonkers conspiracy theories, outright racist slags, and countless other acts of seemingly semi-intentional trolling. Indeed, the only thing that made Barr so ripe for a comeback was the stink from her Twitter feed. It was a tease of the kind of offense they could soon market as entertainment.
Still, the same executives who now call Barr’s recent tweets “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values’’ were thrilled to welcome Barr when the attention she attracted was general enough to cash in on. Barr represented a way for the network to appeal to white people alienated by the network’s appeals to non-whites. Somehow we collectively process this dynamic as balance. And this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this play out.
Take the case of Kevin Williamson, the fiery conservative scribe hired and fired by the Atlantic after the magazine required a few days to really process the notion that its new hire was on the record as “absolutely willing to see abortion treated like regular homicide under the criminal code’’ (and that what he “had in mind was hanging’’). Or take Quinn Norton, the technology writer-turned-opinion writer hired and fired by The New York Times so quickly over a string of offensive (and yes, already well known) tweets that it felt more like some fancy cooking technique than a PR disaster.
Williamson blamed the “Twitter mob.’’ Norton blamed “context collapse.’’ Barr blamed Ambien. And through it all, the furious right, wrists pink from the routine slaps, blamed the shushing specter of political correctness for silencing these voices — a claim that Lindy West promptly dismissed by puncturing the term in the Times as “a rhetorical device to depersonalize oppression.’’
“Political correctness is just people reacting to other people,’’ West writes, “parents protecting their children; the oppressed and underserved advocating for themselves.’’
It’s worth noting that proper pre-Internet “political correctness’’ was constructed by the sensitive left as a kind of stop sign of primordial wokeness: A signal to please pause and consider which direction you were planning to proceed in the interest of everyone’s safety — i.e. maybe don’t run down the people in the crosswalk.
A quarter-century later, “PC’’ has been flipped by the right into shorthand for something more like a speeding ticket — a lame attempt by word-police hall monitors to tame the wide open road of your big mouth. The mere mention of “political correctness’’ — essentially the standing societal expectation for a degree of mutual respect across differences — hits some ears like an open invitation to trigger the most vulnerable among us.
But it’s also worth noting that the forces of political correctness aren’t really responsible for what’s happening to Barr and others who bring heinous ideas and insults to the party. The real problem is that we keep hiring wolverines to do jobs better suited to clowns. (Or columnists, whichever.)
Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter: @MBrodeur.
