Robert Kirby : Loose cannon
I want to begin by repeating a truly dreadful politically correct word and see where it takes us. I understand this particularly bumsquint coinage has been lying around in PC wordbins for a few years now, but that doesn’t excuse it. The word is “draughtspersonship”.
Think about “draughtspersonship”. Try to imagine what sort of mournful breast- beating, what tortured guilt-therapy- alignment sessions went on, what nightstalks of the democratic non-sexist gender-empowerment dynamic and paradigm took place, what fevered pluckings and pensive jerks at the conscience, before some titbrain seriously considered distorting “draughtsmanship” into a word as irreproachably grim as “draughtspersonship”. She must have felt like Neil Armstrong did on the moon. One giant stumble for a feminist, one small leap for personkind.
By this I am not in any way suggesting that (Ms) Marilyn Martin – director of that fine post-Eurocentric repository of graphic curios which goes under the name of the South African National Gallery – actually made up “draughtspersonship” herself. That would be stretching creativity to at least a 7 on the Joyce Ntobe scale.
It’s just that Marilyn Martin is the only person I’ve ever seen who has been reckless enough to actually scratch out “draughtspersonship” from among all the other PC gender-obliterating surrogates and put it to use. This was in an article she wrote a year or three ago in the gallery’s cultural tourist’s guidebook, Bonani. I can’t tell you which issue as my copy long since was hijacked by one of our families of ceiling-mice who tore it up for a nest.
Now let’s think with alarm about someone else. Not exactly about someone else but about what someone else has said. Here is a quote, from a hideously undervalued book. Published in l994, A Culture of Censorship is subtitled “Secrecy and Intellectual Repression in South Africa”. Having spent 218 pages accurately smashing previous South African censorship into smithereens, its author, Christopher Merrett, reflects on his penultimate page that in a future South Africa “there will be wide scope for subtle intellectual repression in the guise of a need for reconciliation, reconstruction and unity”.
There’s no doubt Mr Merrett knew just how ominous are the undertones to that sentence. Why he chose such mild terms is what surprises, for what he referred to is what now threatens to destroy an already dangerously modified facility for human discourse in this country. Now that the PC brigade has joined forces with television and radio and a good section of the media, it’s getting worse by the day.
There is, of course, simply not sufficient space in even a hundred of these columns to pour enough scorn on politically correct behaviour, attitudes and particularly its specialised perversion of language. Or even to begin to speculate on what the true ends of the South African mutation of PC might be – apart from helping Jeremy Cronin’s poetry look ferocious.
Can anyone really believe that the whole PC fashion is much more than an attempt to reduce everyone to a race of bland pudding- brains who live in constant fear of saying or thinking anything which smacks of being original? PC is fascist censorship in its most malignant camouflage yet, made far worse by its pretensions to being liberal. The reverse is actually true. The tenets of politically correct behaviour are in direct conflict with individuality. Having been the subject of both the old and the new in censorship, I’m starting to get very nostalgic for dear old Jannie Kruger. At least Jannie had a sense of humour and washed himself regularly.
I am going to start working on the editor of this newspaper to run a sort of “arsehole of the week” feature in which the latest most appalling, most patronising PC statement, reaction or example is given loud exposure. In this case the PC would stand for Particularly Cuntish. Words like “draughtspersonship” would be a perfect candidates for inclusion.