Political Correctness: The Moron Files
Ages ago, Howard Cosell used the common old-timer’s phrase “little monkey” to describe an NFL wide receiver who was quick and agile. Unfortunately, that receiver also happened to be of a certain race that fake-sensitive white progressives are just sure needs to be protected from old-fashioned compliments that might seem, to complete morons like themselves, to imply a racial stereotype. Ask those fake-sensitive white morons what that racial stereotype might be, and they’ll draw a blank, since to name “it” is to confess that they, and not Cosell, were the only ones thinking of the expression “little monkey” in racial, let alone racist, terms.
Those were the good old days, when everyone just got annoyed about the politically correct nonsense, pretended that maybe some player out there might really be dumb enough to be offended by such a phrase (though no one could explain why without branding himself a racist), and the incident could pass without anyone really thinking Cosell would lose his job over it.
Today, of course, the political correctness thought police are out in full force, always and everywhere, and eager to sniff out potentially-offended sensibilities under every bed. So it is that we get this insanity from the aptly-named Yahoo Sports:
There were many ways to analyze Masahiro Tanaka’s performance during Game 2 the ALDS, but TBS announcer Ron Darling ended up taking an unfortunate route given the New York Yankees pitcher’s Asian descent.
“A little chink in the armor for Tanaka here. It’s the first inning where he’s lost a little of his control,” Darling said. He did not appear to realize what he had said could be seen as offensive and later said the choice was unintentional.
The unfortunate phrase came near the end of the fourth inning, when Tanaka fell behind 3-0 against Eduardo Nunez. Darling was noting that Tanaka, who is Japanese, appeared to have lost some control.
“Earlier tonight I used an expression while referencing Masahiro Tanaka’s recent pitching performance. While unintentional, I apologize for my choice of words,” Darling said in a statement released to Yahoo Sports.
“A little chink in the armor,” a centuries-old, completely non-racial expression, is now supposed to be offensive to a Japanese (not Chinese) pitcher. Why? Because certain fake-sensitive white progressive morons like Yahoo Sports’ Jack Baer (and a much smaller number of token racial minority tag-alongs) choose not to understand the English language and wish to pretend that some sort of offense occurred, although no one on Earth was actually offended, either objectively or, I would wager, subjectively?
Though this is not relevant to anything, since we are talking about a non-offense, it is also amusing — in that last laugh before I take my own life kind of way — that it is Darling himself, rather than Tanaka, who is of part-Chinese ancestry!
But if, for that matter, Darling had spoken of the Japanese Tanaka needing to “nip his first-inning problems in the bud,” would that have been “racially insensitive”? Why? Because the sound “nip” used to be used by some people as a derogatory word for “Japanese”? But it isn’t being so used here, so the offense would be entirely an imaginary “association” in the mind of a hearer, not an actual impoliteness by the speaker.
Here we see one of the practical reasons that post-moderns are so keen to destroy the concept of “authorial intention,” i.e., the “interpretive bias” in favor of understanding spoken or written language according to the intended meaning of the speaker or writer. If words mean primarily or essentially what the speaker meant by them, and only secondarily or accidentally any other associations those words might have, then no one can be found guilty of a language crime by the political correctness police unless he can reasonably be shown to have wanted his words to carry the meaning the pseudo-aggrieved party ascribes to them.
For example, since, in this case, Ron Darling used the word “chink” in its proper non-racial meaning (in fact, the slur “chink,” though sounding and spelling the same, is an entirely different word), and used it within the most famous and well-established English idiom containing that word, and used it in a context in which the idiom and the word “chink” were perfectly and properly applicable, there is no justification whatsoever for charging Darling with any offense at all, and nothing for him to apologize for — since he did nothing wrong.
However, if we obliterate the concept of authorial intention — i.e., that the speaker’s intended meaning is the only thing that can be pinned on him — then Darling may be accused of insensitivity for uttering a sound that might “trigger” a negative racial thought in the mind of someone other than himself, such as in the minds of the fake-sensitive white progressive morons who go around finding imaginary moral crimes in everyone else’s minds and speech, when they are actually the only ones thinking that way.
The way spectator sports have been, and have allowed themselves to be, co-opted into the progressive social justice thug operation — the moral purity and ideological cleansing regime of the neo-Marxists — is truly sickening, not to mention frightening.
Consider that a few fake-sensitive white progressive morons with their heads full of racial, gender, or climate slurs — people who should simply be ignored or laughed out of every room they ever enter — were able to exact from Darling, a famous expert commentator and former all-star pitcher, a contrite apology, later in the same broadcast, for having “given offense” to Asians with his entirely non-racial remark. In other words, he apologized not because he had actually done anything wrong, but because he was judged to be unconsciously guilty. Consider further that his apology shows, of course, that the broadcast corporation that hired him, and probably also the Major League Baseball head office, demanded that Darling make this apology. An apology for doing absolutely nothing but invoking an overused expression to describe an athlete’s poor performance.
From this day forward, thanks in part to that apology, Darling will carry the stigma of being “the man who used a racially insensitive term to describe a Japanese player” — even though he did not do that. That is how this works. Everyone is guilty, whether he knows it or not, and whether he intended it or not. Everyone must therefore be punished, must accept his guilt, and must, within his own mind at least, wear the arm-band designating him as guilty forever.
Interestingly, this ridiculous story of a non-offense against the Chinese, uttered by a man of Chinese descent, and misdirected at a Japanese player, comes one day after the legitimate news story that the former president of Interpol has been “disappeared” by the Chinese Communist Party for unspecified offenses against China’s tightening moral purity laws. As I noted at the end of my article about that story here in Limbo yesterday, if you think the Chinese form of Maoist tribunal justice can’t happen “here,” you are not only dreaming, but dreaming about a world gone by. The West is already here.
Welcome to the Orwellian world of social justice, aka the tyranny of the fake-sensitive white progressive morons.