[John Whitworth]

Philip I was born in Bombay. Many Indians still call it Bombay. Mumbai duck indeed! If the Scots become an independent nation (hah!) do you suppose Edinburgh will become Embro, because that's what we call it. I was born in Edinburgh too. Well, not born but brought up. Anyone for Lunnan? I lived there as a child too.

By the way, Americans all. Do you say New Orly-ans or New Orleens as in Way down yonder in New Orleens? I say the second and, frankly, will go on saying it whatever you say, in deference to the jazzmen. But I'm interested anyway.

Re child abuse. I was abused as a child, and i my cub uniform too. Who can I sue?

[Roger Slater]

"she was allowed three, four minutes of television time and nobody really got stuck in to say what the rest of us watching wanted to say, which was something like, 'Don't waste our time"

It seems to me that your complaint was simply with the stupid decision of the news broadcast to allow a woman with a stupid point of view time to say stupid things. Those stupid things were by no means "PC" if you and the entire viewing audience recognized them as stupid things. As far as I know, she is not part of a movement that is seriously pressuring anyone to implement her stupid ideas and Dustin Hoffman is still the go-to actor to play someone of his age with Aspergers. Your story might be worth relating, and we can all shake our heads n wonder, but what this has to do with the topic of political correctness is beyond me. I'm wondering how, according to you, we distinguish idiocies that are PC from idiocies that are merely idiocies?

To flog the dead beast further, it seems possible that her foolish views may have resulted not from a desire to advance the disabled, but from artistic concerns. One might believe that it is desirable, to the extent possible, for purposes of realism and authenticity, to have actors who share the qualities of those they are portraying. No one wants to hear an American actor doing a bad British accent. No one wants to see an actor who is six foot four starring as Napoleon Bonaparte. This is not because we want to advance the cause of short actors, but because it would in many ways be ridiculous to portray Napoleon moaning about his height while gazing down on the foreheads of those he addresses.

[John Whitworth]

Yes Roger, but why did the news broadcaster make that stupid decision? They made it because they thought she had a case? Why did they think she had a case? Because, according to me, it is PC to give certain members of society holding certain views more rope than other members.
Robert Conquest wrote a definitive history ofthe Gulags. But it was ignored for years, until the fall of the Soviet Empire, because the PC thing was to see the US and the Soviet Union as morally equivalent, one as bad as the other. Stalin may have killed 30 million but the Americans had Senator McCarthy. So it's six of one to half a dozen of the other. Do you see what I'm getting at. PC is something you do without thinking. When I was young everybody who was anybody thought Chairman Mao was a regular guy. On what evidence? You didn't need evidence. You just knew. I remember arguing with somebody about this. He just dismissedany evidence as American propaganda. When I was of the left (when I was eighteen or so) I KNEW the USA was the Great Satan. How did I know? I just did. Who was the aggressor during the Cuban crisis? Mad Kennedy. Of course he was.

[Roger Slater]

I'm still having a lot of trouble understanding what the concept of "PC" is adding to the mix, John. If your point is that history gives us many examples of foolish notions being widely believed on scant evidence, or in the face of contrary evidence, I don't think anyone would disagree with you. But I don't get the feeling that you would use the term "PC" to describe this phenomenon in all its incarnations. Unless I am mistaken, you are reserving this term of opprobrium for just some of the examples history provides of foolish notions that were widely believed, which is how most people use the term, but I have yet to discern a principle beyond that of left versus right, with wrongheaded leftish ideas alone being considered PC in the negative sense of the word.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, most people in America were convinced that Iraq had WMD, though it turned out not to be true. But I don't think anyone looks back and says it was "PC" to think that Iraq had WMD. No, it wasn't "PC" -- the right wing believed it, too, which means it was not political correctness but somehow true even though it was actually false (as Steve Colbert put it, it may not have been literally true, but it was truthy). The small minority of left wing voices who expressed doubt about the WMD, however, were accused of expressing left-wing PC notions based on the presumption that left wingers are too soft and naive to face up to the fact that Saddam was evil and dangerous.

My point, in a nutshell, is that PC is not a genuine concept but a propaganda term scornfully uttered by right wingers to dismiss what they would have you believe is the zany, knee-jerk liberalism of those with whom they disagree.

[Maryann Corbett]

Is there a way we could re-incorporate the topic of Eliot, or at least of poetry, to the conversation here?

[Philip Quinlan]

Nothing could be simpler Maryann.

I consider myself on the side of the Angels but I say the poems are what matters.

TSE lived in another time, and a strange one at that, and isn't around to give a considered response to our retrospective views of his politics etc.

Scratch deep enough there is something of the xenophobe in all of us I suspect.

I have a sense from the poetry of a man with quite a broad scope rather than a narrow mind.

Not sure that advances things one iota but at least jumps the train back on the tracks.

Ah, well - back to work.

Philip

[Roger Slater]

I don't see why we can't let the conversation evolve away from Eliot, given that I don't perceive any disagreement about him and no discussion about him has been cut short or hijacked. Everyone admits that Eliot said some pretty bad things, but no one is claiming that any of this should affect the way we read his poetry.

So there you have it. We can keep saying this over and over again, or allow the conversation to flow naturally into other sidelines that present themselves, the way people do when they get together to talk.

[Michael Cantor]

I agree with Roger. The thread had morphed into an interesting, intelligent, adult conversation. Nobody had been insulted, nobody was complaining. It's what happens in any discussion. It wasn't hijacked by somebody with a one-track cause, and people were actually talking to each other, rather than posturing and preening. And it's not as if the thread was being sidetracked - it's been up for months, and has almost 100 comments - and has now shifted focus. Why can't we simply go with the flow of a lively and thoughtful interchange?

[Maryann Corbett]

You can. But I'll state my personal preference for being able to come to this board to find conversations about poetry, like the ones that appear if we go back to Mastery's earliest days. GT is available for political talk; I find it disturbing that politics has to take over other boards as well.

[Mary Meriam]

I'd just like to say that I find this whole thread fascinating, and please look again at Maz's poem at post #31. Rigidly trying to divide poetry from life is not so easy to do, and perhaps not the best thing to do.