Mad Men

Back when men were 'Mad Men'

By Mary Mcnamara, Los Angeles Times

HOLLYWOOD - The pilot of AMC's new original series "Mad Men," airing tonight, is not so much a pilot as an hourlong seduction. First there is the light, a dim and golden radiance that softens the Brylcreemed gleam of adman Don Draper (Jon Hamm) as he sits in a bar, scribbling notes for a Lucky Strike campaign on a cocktail napkin. The crowd is steeped in smoke and swinger jazz, a cocktail of 100-proof nostalgia.

Which, at first glance, seems to be the show's leitmotif. Set in a Madison Avenue ad agency in 1960, "Mad Men" has the storied look of "The Apartment," "Bewitched" and a retro boutique all rolled into one. Men in slim suits and white shirts, women in pointy bras and sweater sets, all sideways smiles and white hip patter amid the rattle of ice cubes and the tiny clatter of lighters - oh, the hepcat wonder of it all.

But wait, Draper is trying to talk to his black waiter about cigarette preferences and is cut off by the disapproving maitre d'. Back at the office, his new secretary Peggy (Elizabeth Moss) is appraised as if she were a heifer on auction by everyone from the guys in the elevator to the women on the switchboard. "A girl with sweet ankles like yours," says veteran secretary Joan (Christina Hendricks). "I'd figure out a way to make them sing."

Later that day, a Jew must be conjured from the ad agency's ranks to make a meeting with the owners of Menken's department store more comfortable. "I had to go all the way to the mailroom, but I found one," says Roger Sterling (John Slattery), Draper's boss. The meeting turns out to be a bust because the Menken representative is a woman, who questions Draper's campaign plans and ability. "I will not allow a woman to talk to me like that," he says, storming from the room.

But his pique is understandable. For one thing, the modern women's rights movement is several years away, and for another, he has that Lucky Strike account to contend with. A report published in Reader's Digest has concluded that cigarettes will kill you, superior filtration systems and two-pack-a-day doctors notwithstanding, and it's up to Draper to figure out a way to make that an ad campaign.

Given our post-millennial fondness for political correctness, "Mad Men" would seem more like History Channel fodder, but that's where the powers of seduction come in - great writing and acting create a heady mix of glamour, irreverence and responsibility, a word rarely associated with a sexy drama.

Creator Matthew Weiner wrote "Mad Men" several years ago; it was the script that landed him the job writing for "The Sopranos," and it's easy to see why. Not since Cary Grant's Mr. Blandings have we seen an ad guy to swoon over.

Hamm's Draper is duplicitous, yes, shallow, certainly, but he stands up for Peggy, he has an independent-gal girlfriend (just look at her tied-at-the-waist white shirt and Audrey Hepburn pants!), and he tells off the most obnoxious of the office wolves. He is also a war hero, and his eyes are haunted by more than the fear that the younger guys at the office are ready to leave him on the ice floe.

And it is a relief to be able to enjoy a return to the nifty accouterments of yesteryear - from the switchboard to the Old-Fashioneds, from the steno pool to the skinny ties - but in context.

Yes, much that was cool and adult about that world is missing from ours. But the reasons for the coming revolution - the women's movement, the civil rights movement, the hippie-driven counterculture - were real and devastating.

"Mad Men" has found a strange and lovely space between nostalgia and political correctness and filled it with interesting people, all of them armed with great powers of seduction.

And terrific lighting.

Associated Press

Matthew Weiner (center), creator of "Mad Men," is joined on the show's set by stars Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss.

James Dean

WERE THEY LOVERS?
Maybe, maybe not......but you have to consider that Dean was a bisexual and Mineo was gay, so your guess is as good as mine. If they did have an affair, I think Jimmy would have been a top man.....LOL!

"Do not fold, spindle or mutilate"

"Do not fold, spindle or mutilate":

A cultural history of the punch card

• Introduction
• Early History
• Punch cards go public
• The '60s
• Conclusion
• Notes

Introduction

One hundred years have passed since Herman Hollerith invented the punch card as a way of tabulating the 1890 census. That's also, almost exactly, the lifespan of the technology. Punch cards are almost completely gone from public view. With only a few exception, the last few businesses that still use punch cards are phasing them out, replacing punch card systems with computers, optical scanners, and magnetic storage media.[1]

But punch cards live on, in a very curious way. One aspect of the era of the punch card has invaded the national subconscious; they've left us one ironic cultural legacy. We remember the punch card era in the phrase "do not fold, spindle, or mutilate." The phrase, and the feelings it represents, have outlasted the technology--not to mention the billions of cards on which it was printed. The cultural manifestations of technologies often outlast their material manifestations (Consider the many expressions based on outdated transportation technologies: "copper-bottom guarantee"--a reminder of the copper sheathing on wooden ship's hulls--or "under steam.") Culture changes more slowly than technology.

This cultural legacy is an important vestige of the Hollerith machine. Symbols are composed of equal parts reality and mental image, and so they capture attitudes, feelings, and beliefs--immaterial things sometimes hard to find in the historic record. The phrase "do not fold, spindle or mutilate" has stuck so in our heads because it captures a significant facet of American belief about automation, computerization, and bureaucratic society. The history of the phrase can help to explain popular reaction to the computerization of American business and society.

Early History

We have the Census Bureau to thank for the first use of punch cards. Though the machines attracted some attention, for their complexity, the public never saw the cards; they were punched from the traditional written reports of census enumerators. Hollerith machines soon found wider use in offices both public and private. The government used hundreds of machines during World War I. The army used them to keep inventory and medical and psychological records, and the War Industries Board, which controlled much of the economy during the war, did its accounting on the machines.[2]

But even more than the government, businesses used punchcards to keep track of business. The period after 1890 was one of enormous growth in the American economy, and businesses changed their internal accounting procedures and inventory techniques to keep up with the changes. Railroads, for example, kept track of operating expenses, the location of rolling stock and goods in shipment at first with complicated systems of paperwork, and, starting about 1906, with punchcard tabulating machines. Insurance companies were not far behind: the Aetna Life and Casualty company used Hollerith machines to compile mortality data starting in 1910. The machinery found great favor with management: using language that we wouldn't be surprised to find in a modern-day report on computerization, one author wrote in 1926:

Punch card systems are a proved means of economically producing facts and figures vital to operating a railroad intelligently, from which business records can be quickly and accurately classified and presented to the executives at the time they are needed in the form best suited to enable action.[3]

Punch card machines were modern and efficient--what we'd call today "high tech." It's easy to see how they came to represent, to stand for, all that was up to date and businesslike.

These early punch cards had no warning written on them. The cards Hollerith used for the first automated Census in 1890 were completely blank, unreadable except to machines. (Either an attempt to save money, or a piece of bravado, that; but Census clerks soon learned to decipher the holes almost as quickly as the machines could.)[4] In only a few years cards had a variety of symbols on them, to indicate the meanings of the holes, but it was not until the 1930s that the first warnings appeared. This is, as far as I can tell, exactly the same time that the public began to see punch cards. The two events are, of course, related; the public needed to be taught how to deal with the new technology. They had to be taught to respect it, and not to get in its way.

Punch cards go public

Among the earliest cards to "go public" were those used by New Deal agencies. New Dealers, drawing on the successful World War I experience in mobilizing and directing the economy, put punch card machinery to wide use. The first "punch card checks"--among the first punch cards to be distributed to the "end user," the man and woman in the street--were issued by the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in 1933. Social Security checks, issued starting in 1936, were also punch cards, and before long, from World War II until just a short while ago, all federal checks were punch cards.[5] [Figure 1] The public's first introduction to punch cards was in connection with the introduction of the biggest and best publicized--and perhaps most controversial--new bureaucracies. The technology was still exotic, though; the New Yorker ran a story in 1940 that mentioned the crowds gathered in front of an office-supply store in Albany to watch punch-card sorting machines in action.[6]

Card punch technology became more widespread in the 1940s. Libraries began to use punch cards to keep track of books.[7]Saturday Evening Post referred to the Los Angeles Police Department's Hollerith machine as "a mechanical Sherlock Holmes," a "crime-hating robot," "The Detective Who Never Sleeps."[8] The 1940 Census starred in a Colliers Magazine article that called the punch card machine a "statistical sausage grinder," "the most amazing fortunetelling machines ever devised."[9].

But it was in the 1950s, after the invention of the computer and its widespread business use, that everyone began to see punch cards. Companies sent punch cards out with bills: the telephone company, utility companies, and even department stores realized that they could save a step in their billing process, as well as making it easier for them to process the returned check, by using the cards themselves as the bills.[10] By the 1960s, punch cards were familiar, everyday objects.

While company employees could be trusted to take care of the cards, the person in the street could not. Warnings were necessary. In the 1930s the University of Iowa used cards for student registration; on each card was printed "Do not fold or bend this card."[11] Cards reproduced in an IBM sales brochure of the 1930s read "Do not fold, tear, or mutilate this card" and "Do not fold tear or destroy."[12] I'm not sure when the canonical "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" first appeared; it's one of those traditions whose author and origin is lost in the mists of time. Let's consider the words one at a time, stop and take them seriously.

"Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate." Folding seems clear; you might fold a card to fit in an envelope, or a pocket. But you're not supposed crease these cards; that would jam the machine. Punch cards aren't to be used in your ways, for your purposes, but for those of the company that issued them. "Spindle" is the word that most confuses people today. Spindling is an old filing system; a clerk would have a spindle, an upright spike on his or her desk, and would impale each piece of paper on it as he or she finished with it. When the spindle was full, you'd run a piece of string through the holes, tie up the bundle, and ship it off to the archives. (The custom still survives in some restaurants; the cashier spindles the bills as customers pay.) But you shouldn't spindle the cards: they are part of someone else's system of paperwork, not your own; they demand special attention.

"Mutilate" is a lot stronger than the other words. It expresses an angry intention on the part of the mutilator, or, from the viewpoint of the punch card user, a fear; people might take out their frustrations on their punch cards.... (Indeed, punch cards were mutilated: users could buy machines advertised to "recondition mutilated punch cards."[13]) Why would people mutilate punch cards? Punch cards were the interface between the public and the billing system. Metaphorically, they were where the person meshed with the corporate world. They became symbolic of the whole system. Earlier, it was the machines that were the focus of attention; in the 1960s the cards took center stage.

The '60s

Punch cards became not only a symbol for the computer,[14] but a symbol of alienation. They stood for abstraction, oversimplification, and dehumanization. The cards were, it seemed, a two-dimensional portrait of people, people abstracted into numbers that machines could use. The cards came to represent a society where it seemed that machines had become more important than people, where people had to change their ways to suit the machines. People weren't dealing with each other face to face, but rather through the medium of the punch card. All of the free-floating anxiety about technology, the information society, "Big Brotherism," and automation attached themselves to punch cards. Examining the metaphorical ways in which punch cards were used lets us understand some of the reaction and resistence to the brave new information world.[15]

The first place that "do not fold, spindle or mutilate" was taken off the punch card and unpacked in all its metaphorical glory was the student protests at the University of California-Berkeley in the mid-1960s--the "Free Speech movement." The University of California administration used punch cards for class registration. Berkeley protestors used punch cards as metaphor, both as a symbol of the "system"--first the registration system and then bureaucratic systems more generally--and as a symbol of alienation.[16] The Berkeley student newspaper recognized their symbolic importance when it put the punch card at the top of the list of student lessons: "The incoming freshman has much to learn" the paper editorialized to new students in Fall 1965, "perhaps lesson number one is not to fold, spindle, or mutilate his IBM card."[17] The punch card stood for the university, and, of course, students had begun to fold, spindle, and mutilate them.

The Berkeley Free Speech movement had its start in late 1964 when students were prohibited from raising funds for political causes on campus. It was opposed to what it saw as the increasing conformity and alienation of American society and, more specifically, to the pro-business policies of the University of California's president, Clark Kerr. Mario Savio, a leader of the Free Speech Movement, wrote that the main internal reasons for the revolt

derive primarily from the style of the factory-like mass miseducation of which Clark Kerr is the leading ideologist. There are many impersonal universities in America; there is probably none more impersonal in its treatment of students than the University of California.[18]

Opposition to the bureaucratic organization, standardization and automation of the university, and by extension, modern industrial society, were central themes of the protestors' philosophy.[19] In the most famous speech of the movement, Mario Savio used a memorable technological metaphor:

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, it makes you so sick at heart, that...you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon wheels...and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.[20]

Savio's speech is famous, but few have realized that "the machine" he had in mind was not merely a mechanical metaphor for society; it was, at least as much, a metaphor for information technology.

Berkeley students were well aware of the standard 1960s notion that the United States had become an "organizational society." They believed, with most of the popular sociological writers of the day, that "the shape and tone of our society, indeed the very way we think is dependent upon the products and information processed by large organizations"[21] The university, wrote one student, was "a bureaucratic machine."[22] Another called it a "knowledge factory": "mass production; no deviations from the norms are tolerated."[23][24] Punch cards were the symbol of information machines, and so they became the symbolic point of attack. The "information machine" metaphor was made explicit in Hal Draper's history of the Free Speech Movement. Draper, a participant in the movement, wrote that the student in the "mass university of today" feels that it is "an overpowering, over-towering, impersonal, alien machine in which he is nothing but a cog going through pre-programmed motions--the `IBM' syndrome."

Punch cards, used for class registration, were first and foremost a symbol of uniformity. Mario Savio wrote that individuals were processed by the university, emerging as IBM cards with degrees.[25] A student editorial suggested that the inflexibility of the bureaucracy and the impersonal grading system" might make a student feel "he is one out of 27,500 IBM cards in the registrar's office."[26] The president of the Undergraduate Association criticized the University as "a machine...an IBM pattern of education." [27] A cartoon from a flyer printed by Berkeley's W.E.B. DuBois club showed the university as a card punch machine run by big business, its product students as identical to one another as IBM cards. [Figure 2] It took a professor of sociology, Robert Blaumer, to explicate the symbolism: he referred to the "sense of impersonality...symbolized by the IBM technology.[28]

By extension, punch cards also came to represent the students themselves. (After all, that was, in the students' eyes, the way the University saw them.) In part, this was an attempt to claim the authority that had been invested in the punch card. Punch cards were, after all, the visible part of the bureaucratic system, which held power at the university.[29] People deserved at least the same rights as punch cards. One student at Berkeley pinned a sign to his chest: "I am a UC student. Please don't bend, fold, spindle or mutilate me."[30] The punch card, its protection by the Establishment guaranteed by the words printed on it, became an ironic model for emulation. But the metaphor of the punch card cut both ways. An editorial welcoming new students to the university in 1964 suggested that there was small chance of surviving Registration without being "torn, mutilated or spindled by an IBM machine."[31] At least one student felt she had failed: she complained, after registration, "I feel like a small number stamped on a computer card."[32]

Because the punch card symbolically represented the power of the university, it made a suitable point of attack. Some students used the punch cards in subversive ways. An underground newspaper reported:

Some ingenious people (where did they get this arcane knowledge? Isn't this part of the Mysteries belonging to Administration?) got hold of a number of blank IBM cards, and gimmicked the card-puncher till it spoke no mechanical language, but with its little slots wrote on the cards simple letters: "FSM", "STRIKE" and so on. A symbol, maybe: the rebels are better at making the machine talk sense than its owners.[33]

Students wore these punch cards like name tags. [Figure 3] Another form of technological subversion was for students to punch their own cards, and slip them in along with the official ones:

Some joker among the campus eggheads fed a string of obscenities into one of Cal's biggest and best computers--with the result that the lists of new students in various classes just can NOT be read in mixed company.[34]

These pranks were the subversion of the technician. The students were indicating their ability to control the machines, and thus, symbolically, the machinery of the university. But it also indicates, like the students' and administrations' shared use of the machine metaphor, something of the degree of convergence of student and administration beliefs and methods. This sort of metaphorical technical subversion rarely rises above the level of prank.[35]

Perhaps more radical, or at least with less confused symbolism, were students who destroyed punch cards in symbolic protest: the punch cards that the university used for class registration stood for all that was wrong with the university, and by extension, America. Students at Berkeley and other University of California branches burned their registration punch cards in anti-University protests just as they burned draft cards in anti-Vietnem protests.[36]

The alienation symbolized by punch cards at Berkeley was an aspect of a broader feeling of alienation, the "depersonalization" of being treated like a number, not an individual. This reaction to the demands of information processing technology can be found back at least as far as the introduction of serial numbers for prisoners and members of the military, and of Social Security numbers. The prisoner who loses his name and becomes "just a number" is a staple of country music and prison blues songs. These earlier precedents no doubt influenced reaction to the introduction of social security numbers: a cartoon shows Uncle Sam insisting that a citizen give his number when asked for his name. [Figure 4] The impersonality of identification numbers became a staple of 1960s counterculture: Phil Ochs sang "You've given me a number and you've taken off my name."[37] The same feeling reached into popular culture: Prisoner Number 6 on the TV show The Prisoner repeated: "I am not a number; I am a person." He summarized his stand against the "system" by saying, in the first episode: "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own."[38]

The depersonalization of the punch-card era found its catch phrase in the words on the cards; its ubiquity gave it instant familiarity. One observer of the period wrote that marijuana, the '60s escape from the rigors of the real world, let you see "the strangeness of real unfolded-unspindled-unmutilated life."[39] "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" became shorthand for a whole realm of countercultural experience. The ecological movement of the early 1970s, a child of the 1960s counterculture, picked it up too: a popular poster for Earth Day 1970 showed a picture of the Earth taken from space with the legend "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate."

Punch cards as symbols found their way into everyday use by people well outside the counterculture. A murder mystery from 1970 was titled Do Not Fold Spindle or Mutilate apparently because its publishers thought it would sell books: the only punch-card related part of the story is a mention of computer dating.[40] A book of advice to parents about their children was not only entitled Do Not Fold Staple or Mutilate! but was even shaped like a punch card, complete with the top left hand corner chopped off![41] Stan Rogers summed up white-collar work in his "White Collar Holler": "No one goin' fold, bend or mutilate me."[42]

When punch cards moved beyond the counterculture they took with them their peculiar juxtaposition of contradictory symbolism. They symbolized modern computer civilization, but also a notion of reaction against the "IBM culture." Consider a birthday greeting card from 1968 [Figure 5]. The front shows a punch card punched with large holes in the shape of candles; inside, the greeting reads " That's I.B.M. for happy birthday!". Punching holes in the card is subversive; everyone knows that you're not supposed to do that. Consider also the short-lived tradition of using punch cards as Christmas tree ornaments, or even, combined together, as Christmas trees![43] They show the acceptance of the prime symbol of computerized bureaucracy, the welcoming of it into the home. But the cards are being subverted to uses beyond those allowed by the companies who issued them; there's an undercurrent of disobedience in the popular use--more accurately, misuse--of punch cards.

The same ambiguity can be seen in the ways that images of the punch card were used in advertisements for one of the more peculiar fads of the sixties, computer dating. [Figure 6]. The punch card became the symbol of the modernity of that process. But the punch cards pictured in ads for computer dating services are always changed a little bit. One advertisement for computer dating showed Cupid holding a punch card, with his arrow shot through it; another showed fashionably dressed young men and women overlaid on a punch card.[44] These ads, by blatantly mutilating the punch cards, suggest that the people behind the cards are more important than the cards, and that the computer behind the cards isn't to be taken too seriously.

Across the Atlantic, punch cards had a completely different career--one in which punch cards became a much more serious symbol of oppression. Germany, like the United States, used punch cards in the censuses. [Figure 7] The German censuses of 1930 and 1940, though, were rather more terrifying than the American ones--especially for Jews or Gypsies who were asked to provide their religion or national origin. The Nazis were superb record keepers, and punch cards were the best technology for keeping records. According to testimony at the Nuremburg War Crimes trials, one of the first things that arriving prisoners at the death camp at Treblinka saw was a clerk sitting at a Hollerith machine, punching cards to keep track of prisoners.[45]

The story of punched-card record keeping by the Nazis was lost, or largely forgotten, until the 1960s and 1970s, when there was an enormous backlash against against census-taking and record keeping in Germany and Holland. "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" never became a slogan there, and the reaction against punch cards was not merely against the bureacracy and anonymity they represented, but, more seriously, against the power of the state that stood behind them.

Conclusion

And now we are at the end of the punch card era. The punch cards have disappeared, and all that's left are the words, the slogan.[46] Is there a moral here? I think that there is. Culture outlasts technology; the human reaction to machines can last longer than the machines. The punch card--or more accurately, the words on the punch card--became a convenient metaphor for all that people disliked about the computer and computerized big business and government: its narrow focus on easily quantized details; its refusal to deal with customers or citizens as people rather than bundles of information; its inclination to abstract, mechanize, and computerize; to worry, at best, about the "human interface" and not the human.

Understanding the strength of the cultural legacy of "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" can help us understand the reaction to computerization. Symbols are important, and the survival of these few words as a part of popular culture suggests the depth of ambiguity about computerized progress.

---

Notes

[*]An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Bureau of the Census's Hollerith Machine Centennial Celebration, June 20, 1990. My thanks to Lori Mann for research assistance.

This paper was published in the Jounal of American Culture, Winter 1992

[1]On the earliest use of the punch card by the U.S. Census Office, see Keith S. Reid-Green, "The History of Census Tabulation," Scientific American, 260 (February, 1989), pp. 98-103 and Geoffrey D. Austrian, Herman Hollerith, Forgotten Giant of Information Processing (New York: Columbia University Press), Punch cards have found a niche in a few places where it seems they'll remain for a while, for example, in voting for All-Star teams at baseball games.

[2]M. Campbell-Kelly, "Punched Card Machinery," in Computing before Computers. p. 144. Also conversation with Jim Cortata.

[3]Arthur L. Norberg, "High-Technology Calculation in the Early 20th Century: Punched Card Machinery in Business and Government," Technology and Culture 31 (October 1990), pp. 766-767. The quote is from "Railway Accounting with Punch Cards, " Railway Review 79 (September 4, 1926): 353-54, quoted therein.

[4]Austrian, Herman Hollerith, p. 63.

[5]E.F. Bartlet, Accounting Procedures of the US Government (Washington: Public Administration Service, Chicago, 1940), p. 29; James Beninger, The Control Revolution:Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 409. On the end of the punch card era, see James Schwartz, "Goodbye, Punch Cards; Treasury Begins Conversion to More Secure Paper Checks," Washington Post, December 3, 1985, p. A17. In 1985 the Treasury Department issued 600 million punch card checks.

[6]Angelica Gibbs, "Punch With Care," The New Yorker, Feb. 17, 1940, p. 54ff.

[7]The first experimental system was installed in the Montclair, N. J. Public Library by IBM in 1941. "Automatic Book Charging," Library Journal vol. 66, September 15, 1941. See also Dorothy Waugh, "Business Machines in the Public Library, Wilson Library Bulletin, January 1942, pp. 366-367.

[8]Keith Monroe, "The Detective Who Never Sleeps," Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 10, 1953. The St Louis police department was the first to use punched cards for to identify criminals, in 1947. (Joseph P. Soraghan, "Modern Equipment for St. Louis Police," The American City, February 1949.

[9]Amram Scheinfeld, "It's in the cards," Collier's Magazine, May 20, 1944, p. 18.

[10]See, for example, the many articles in Data Processing Annual: Punched Card and Computer Applications and Reference Guide (Detroit: Gille Associates, 1961-64).

[11]G. W. Baehne, Practical Applications of the Punched Card Method in Colleges and Universities (NY: Columbia University Press, 1935) p. 32.

[12]"Modern Machine Accounting for the Manufacturer," (n.d, n.p.), pp. 6 and 4. In the collection of the Division of Computers, Information, and Society, National Museum of American History.

[13]Advertisement for the Cummins Carditioner, Cummins-Chicago Corporation, Data Processing Annual: Punched Card and Computer Applications and Reference Guide (Detroit: Gille Associates, 1961), p. 45.

[14]Robert MacBride, The Automated State; Computer Systems as a New Force in Society (Philadelphia: Chilton Book Co., 1967), p.24.

[15]See George Terbourgh, The Automation Hysteria (Washington, D.C.: Machinery and Allied Products Institute and Council for Technological Advancement, 1965), and MacBride, The Automated State, chapters 2 and 3, for a contemporary summary of the great automation debate. See James Gilbert, Another Chance: Postwar America, 1945-1968 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), pp. 175-181, for a historical perspective. A key document of the debate was Donald N. Michael, Cybernation: The Silent Conquest (Santa Barbara: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1962).

[16]On technological metaphor, see David Edge, "Technological Metaphor and Social Control," in George Bugliarello and Dean B. Doner, eds., The History and Philosophy of Technology (Urbana, IL: The University of Illinois Press, 1973), pp. 309-24, and Bernward Joerges, "Images of Technology in Sociology: Computer as Butterfly and Bat," Technology and Culture 31 (April 1990), pp. 203-27, especially footnote 6.

[17]Daily Californian, Sept. 15, 1965, p. 8, cited in William Rorabough , Berkeley at War: The Nineteen Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 18.

[18]Mario Savio, "Introduction" to Hal Draper,Berkeley: The New Student Revolt (NY: Grove Press, 1965), p. 2.

[19]Ibid, and The Free Speech Movement and the Negro Revolution, pp. 19-25. More generally, see Hal Draper, Berkeley: The New Student Revolt (NY: Grove Press, 1965); Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: the Life and Times of the Underground Press (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).

[20]Cited in Peck, Uncovering the Sixties, p. 28. The Free Speech movement made wide use of machine metaphors: the university was a "factory," a "machine," students "cogs." (See, for example, "We want a university," an anonymous brochure reprinted in Hal Draper, Berkeley: The New Student Revolt [NY: Grove Press, 1965], pp. 188-196. In this, they were, to some extent, picking up on widespread belief: the Free Speech Movement's arch-enemy, University of California's president Clark Kerr, had described the university as a Knowledge Factory, "a mechanism--a series of processes producing a series of results--a mechanism held together by administrative rules and powered by money." (Quoted in Hal Draper, "The Mind of Clark Kerr," in Draper, Berkeley, p. 204-5. As David Edge has noted ("Technological Metaphor and Social Control," p. 310-313), it's not uncommon for one metaphor to mean exactly opposite things to two groups of people. Edge suggests that this indicates basic agreement on the way the world works; I believe that was, to a large degree, true of the Free Speech demonstrators and the University administrators they opposed.

The most widespread use of the machine metaphor was in reference to the war in Vietnam: the Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee, successor (in some ways) to the Free Speech Movement, used as its motto: "Stop the War Machine." Jerry Rubin, Do It; Scenarios of the Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), p. 33. The "Yippie" branch of the `60s protest movement also used machine metaphors, but to a more radical end: they didn't care if "the machine" ran or not, as long as they weren't part of it. For example Peter Berg, leader of the Diggers, a San Francisco radical street theater group, told a 1967 Detroit meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society: "Don't let them make a machine out of you, get out of the system, do your own thing." Or Abbie Hoffman, swearing at the boring New Left at the same meeting: "You guys are fags, machines." Free [Abbie Hoffman], Revolution for the Hell of It (New York: Dial Press, 1968), p.35 and 38.

[21]C. Michael Otten, University Authority and the Student; The Berkeley Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), p. 6. On the belief that the United States was an organizational society, see, for example, Clark Kerr, et al., Industrialism and Industrial Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960). For the university as a managerial bureaucracy, see Otten, University Authority, chapter 7.

[22]Eric Levine, "The Lines of Conformity," The Daily Californian, September 15, 1964, p. 12.

[23]Quoted in Draper, Berkeley: The New Student Revolt, p. 40.

[24]Draper,Berkeley: The New Student Revolt, p. 153. IBM, by far the largest computer manufacturer, became in itself a symbol of computerization and dehumanization. "Our lives," wrote one student, are "manipulated by IBM machines." [Michael Shaffer, "Brakes Next?," The Daily Californian, Feb. 26, 1965, p. 13]. Another referred to Berkeley's "allege `IBM atmosphere'." (Val Miner, "UC Time Sharing Computer," The Daily Californian, Nov. 21, 1966, p. 2.) The use of IBM as symbol of the modern age went beyond the Berkeley campus, of course: Tom Wolfe refers to the kids in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s "participat[ing] in discussions denouncing our IBM civilization." (Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine -Flake Streamline Baby [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1865], p. 307.)

[25]Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, photograph caption after p. 50.

[26]"The Big U," The Daily Californian, April 7, 1964, p. 8.

[27]Larry Gartner, "Undergraduate Association to tune up the `Machine'," The Daily Californian, February 15, 1965, p. 9.

[28]Konstantin Berlandt, "Why FSM? Impersonality," The Daily Californian, February 16, 1965, p. 9.

[29]When registration lines moved slowly, students blamed it on the "IBM punch card duplicators." (Joel Shearer, "Reg Lines Move Smoothly," The Daily Californian, February 4, 1965, p. 13.)

[30]"Letter from Berkeley," Despite Everything, Special Letter, January 1965, p. 12; also in Draper, Berkeley, p. 225. Todd Gitlin, in his history of the 1960s, sums up--and dismisses--the Free Speech Movement as a protest against "suburban blandness, middle- class impersonality, and folding-spindling-and-mutilating universities." (Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage [Toronto: Bantam Books, 1987], p. 164.)

[31]"The `Welcome,'" The Daily Californian, September 15, 1964, p. 12.

[32]"Registration, Lines, Both Begin," The Daily Californian, September 16, 1964, p. 3.

[33]"Letter from Berkeley," Despite Everything, Special Letter, January 1965, p. 12; also in Draper, Berkeley, p. 113. Some of these punch cards are illustrated on the album cover of the record put out by the Free Speech Movement, "Songs of the Demonstrations" (FSM-Records Dept., 1965).

[34]Konstantin Berlandt, "IBM Enrolls Phonies," The Daily Californian, October 20, 1964, p. 1. The notion of getting back at computers by punching new holes in the cards that came as bills was widespread: see, for example, John P. Troxell, "Don't point that Computer at Me," Stanford Graduate School of Business Bulletin, Autumn 1965, pp. 24-29.

[35]The technical prank--or "hack" as it's known at engineering schools--generally serves to reinforce the importance of technology than to subvert it; hackers are, for the most part, playing on the surface of technological systems rather than trying to undermine them. Phone hackers in the 1960s and 1970s and computer hackers in the 1980s are good examples of this phenomenon.

[36]Conversation with Susan Bradley, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 1990.

[37]Phil Ochs, "I'm Going to Say it Now," from "I Ain't Marching Anymore" album, 1965.

[38]Mathew White and Jaffer Ali, The Official Prisoner Companion (New York: Warner Books, 1988), pp. 9-11. For a discussion of the phrase, see pp. 154-155. The rock group Iron Maiden turned the expression on its head in "Back to the Village": "I don't have a number, I'm a name." (Ibid., p. 132).

[39]Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 202.

[40]Doris Miles Disney, Do Not Fold Spindle or Mutilate (Garden City, NY: Published for the Crime Club by Doubleday and Co., Inc, 1970).

[41]Dolores Curran, Do Not Fold Staple or Mutilate! A Book about people (Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 1970).

[42]Stan Rogers, "White Collar Holler," on "Live Between the Breaks" album.

[43]Women's magazines often had instructions on how to do this. (Interview, Sharon Darling, 1990).

[44] The Daily Californian, October 18, 1966, p. 14, and November 29, 1966, p. 11.

[45]This information is based on research by Sybil Milton of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. A punch card machine will be featured in that museum's exhibits. My thanks to her for calling this to my attention.

[46]The most recent place I've seen it used is on a 1990 mailing label from Microsoft, Inc., one of the largest manufacturers of computer software. The mailing label reads "Do not fold, spindle, mutilate, or x-ray." Folding, spindling, or mutilating make no sense in this context, and so I feel sure that Microsoft is using the expression with an awareness of its historical echo, and with humorous intent. My thanks to Kenneth Lubar for bringing this label to my attention.

Re: Sesame Street Is Too Much/ We Are Raising A Nation Of Pussies

"The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998...."----From the previous article.


Is it me, or is there something wrong with this statement? Never in all my years on this tiny planet would I have ever dreamed of coming along this sentence.

So, the question that I raise is thus: What kind of men will the next generation be like? A bunch of pussies??

Political Correctness

Political correctness or, the perils of benevolence - EssayRoger Kimball

All good people agree
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are We
And every one else is They.
--Rudyard Kipling
"We and They"


THE TERM "political correctness" is such a familiar piece of moral shorthand that it is easy to forget that the phrase has been with us for only about a dozen years. "John or Mary or the University of Lagado is so PC"--it's never a compliment, but exactly what does the charge of political correctness imply? To a large extent, the familiarity of the phenomenon has bred, if not contempt, then at least an unhealthy indifference. Political correctness--the phrase and even more the idea--has had a curious and circuitous career, and the more we know about it the more distasteful and alarming it seems.
Indeed, we are often assured that political correctness--whether or not it posed a threat in the past--is no longer a menace. It has, the argument goes, either been defeated or simply faded away like a Cheshire cat with a scowl. Oddly, however, this soothing assurance generally comes from people who approve (or approved) of political correctness, so their relief at its disappearance is both disingenuous and unpersuasive. They succeed only in making one feel like the female water-skier on the poster for Jaws H who is unaware of the huge shark surfacing behind her over the words "Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water."
Today, most of us tend to associate the phrase "political correctness"
with the conservative assault on efforts to enforce speech codes, to promote affirmative action and to nurture other items high on the wish-list of multicultural aspiration. You know the menu. Page 1: Guns, no; school vouchers, no; patriotism, no; George W.. Bush, capitalism, the United States, No, No, No. Even mention the war to depose Saddam Hussein and liberate the Iraqi people and you get the hysterical keenings of someone like Harold Pinter, Susan Sontag and Paul Krugman.
On the other side there's Brussels, Kyoto, Durban, Wounded Knee ... like Molly Bloom, the very place names tremble with an excited "Yes." All this is marvelous fodder for the conservative satirist. For example, Fox News regularly features "Tongue Tied", which their editors describe as "A column from the front lines of the wars over political correctness, free expression and culture." In England, The Spectator runs "Banned Wagon", a weekly column devoted to exposing "restrictions on freedom and free trade." Other repositories of anecdote, analysis and anathema are legion. Ridicule of the ridiculous is the order of the day.
Indeed, the fact that criticism of political correctness occupies an important place in the armory of conservative polemic is one reason we are regularly encouraged to ignore it.
This effort takes a couple of forms. First, there is bald denial. We are told that really, at bottom, there is no such thing as political correctness: it is all an invention of, well, people like me: right-wing fanatics bent on turning back the clock of progress. This is the position of the politically-correct John K. Wilson, whose book, The Myth of Political Correctness, is still a standard for the PC crowd. The author's goal throughout its pages is to relegate the fact of political correctness to the realm of dragons, hippogriffs and Republican nightmares.
Second, there is the reliable "Yes, but ..." rejoinder. This comes in two basic versions, deflationary and defiant. The deflationary position says "Okay, political correctness does exist, but it is harmless, hardly more than an effort to avoid offending people: critics have exaggerated both the extent and the gravity of political correctness."
The defiant alternative, on the other hand, says "Yes, political correctness exists and is widespread, and thank God for that: it is not a bane but a boon: it just shows how enlightened attitudes about race-gender-class-ethnic-sensitivity-peace-homo -sexuality-the-environment-and-mustn't-forget-the-plight-of-foxes are spreading." Perhaps this is what Martin Amis meant when, writing in The New Yorker on July 12, 1993, he suggested that "at its grandest" political correctness is "an attempt to accelerate evolution."
In any event, because we tend to associate political correctness with attacks upon political correctness, it is worth noting that the epithet seems to have originated not with conservative commentators but with impatient college students in the late-1980s and early-1990s. "Politically correct" described the self-righteous, non-smoking, ecologically sensitive, vegetarian, feminist, non-racist, multicultural, Birkenstock-wearing, anti-capitalist beneficiaries of capitalism--faculty as well as students--who paraded their outworn 1960s radicalism in the classroom and in their social life. Mostly, it was a joke. Who could take these people seriously? It was also overwhelmingly an academic phenomenon, a species of rhetoric and behavior that flourished chiefly in and around the protected redoubts of the university. Thus it is that the acronym "PC" first won widespread notice in a student cartoon strip out of Brown University, an institution still distinguished for its abundant display of political correctness, if little else.
Of course, the roots of political correctness go back a long way. To some extent, I suppose, political correctness can be seen as part of the perennial human attraction to moral conformity, to be part of what the American art critic Harold Rosenberg memorably called the "herd of independent minds."
Political correctness can also be enlisted in what Alexis de Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America, called "democratic despotism." In pre-democratic societies, Tocqueville noted, despotism tyrannized. In modern democracies, it infantilizes. Democratic despotism is both "more extensive and more mild" than its precursors: it "degrades men without tormenting them." In this sense, Tocqueville continued, "the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world."
Tocqueville's analysis, although written in the 1830s, seems remarkably contemporary. Let me quote a few sentences. The force of democratic despotism, Tocqueville wrote, would be like the authority of a parent if, like that
authority, its object was to prepare men for
manhood; hut it seeks, on the contrary, to
keep them in perpetual childhood.... [I]t
every day renders the exercise of the free
agency of man less useful and less frequent; it
circumscribes the will within a narrower
range and gradually robs a man of all the uses
of himself.... [T]he supreme power then
extends its arm over the whole community. It
covers the surface of society with a network
of small complicated rules, minute and uniform,
through which the most original minds
and the most energetic characters cannot
penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will
of man is not shattered, but softened, bent,
and guided.... Such a power does not
destroy.... but it enervates, extinguishes,
and stupefies a people, till each nation is
reduced to nothing better than a flock of
timid and industrious animals, of which the
government is the shepherd.
Thus Tocqueville, who might have been writing about the latest initiative from the European Union.
Yet the impulse to conformity and democratic despotism are only part of the story. We come closer to the heart of political correctness--to the reality if not the phrase--with figures like Robespierre and St. Just. They and their comrades sought to bring post-Revolutionary France into line with what they called "virtue", the heady feeling that one was in the vanguard of enlightenment, an angel of truth, a beacon of uncommon wisdom.
It was--it is--a daring as well as an intoxicating vocation. In The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau had warned that "Those who dare to undertake the institution of a people must feel themselves capable ... of changing human nature, ... of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it." Robespierre & Co. thought themselves just the chaps for the job. The fact that they measured the extent of their success by the frequency that the guillotines around Paris operated highlights the connection between the imperatives of political correctness and tyranny--between what Robespierre candidly described as "virtue and its emanation, terror."
Nearer our own time, Chairman Mao, with his sundry campaigns to "reeducate" and raise the consciousness of a recalcitrant populace, offers a classic example of political correctness in action. Add to those efforts the linguistic innovations that George Orwell described in the Afterword to 1984 as "Newspeak" and you have limned the basic features of political correctness. The purpose of Newspeak, Orwell wrote, was to make "a heretical thought ... literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words." The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it
could only be used in such statements as "this
dog is flee from lice" or "This field is free
from weeds." It could not be used in its old
sense of "politically free" or "intellectually
free", since political and intellectual freedom
no longer existed even as concepts, and were
therefore of necessity nameless.
Just so, the politically correct of our own day seek to bring about a moral revolution by changing the way we speak and write about the world: a change of heart instigated and embodied by a change of language. Examples are legion. We are told to scrap the phrase "learning disabilities" and replace it with "learning differences." The announced hope is that little Johnny, who is a bit backward, poor thing, will not feel stigmatized; the secret hope is that by refusing to speak the truth, we can change the truth. The BBC tells its employees that they must use the word "partner" when referring to their wife or husband, since using "wife" and "husband" might seem to imply that the married state was somehow preferable to other possible modes of sexual cohabitation. Major newspapers in the United States refuse to accept advertisements for houses to let that mention that their property has "good views" (unfair to the blind), is "walking distance" to the train (unfair to the lame), is on a "quiet street" (unfair to the deaf). I know it sounds mad. It is mad. Nevertheless, it is true.
But to return to the sources of political correctness: Robespierre, Mao, 1984--what a grisly confraternity. Is it too grisly? In some ways. It does not seem quite right to describe Robespierre as "PC." Or does it? How about Mao? Or Orwell's enforcer O'Brien? Were such sinister figures "PC" within the usual meaning of the term? Not quite, perhaps; and yet, almost. Certainly they represent one important strand of the phenomenon: the moralizing, virtue-intoxicated side--bolstered, as many garden-variety PC-ers are not, with abundant means to impose their will on others. The dissonance we feel about describing such figures as PC is matched, I believe, by the eerie sense that they are, after all the qualifications, defining examples of the species.
Nevertheless, it seems a long way from Robespierre or Mao to what we mean by political correctness. Today, the phrase "political correctness" is generally accompanied by a smile--an uneasy smile, but a smile nonetheless. The phrase describes some exaggerated bit of left-wing moralism--so exaggerated that it is hard to take seriously. We smile when we read about an elite American college that has enrolled the sin of "lookism"--the unacceptable belief that some people are more attractive than others--into its catalogue of punishable offenses. We laugh when hearing that a British academic has condemned Frosty the Snowman as a white "male icon" that helps "to substantiate an ideology upholding a gendered spatial/social system." We scoff when we hear about the University of Michigan professor who complains that J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books "conventionally repeat much of the same sexist and white patriarchal biases of classical fairy tales." We smile, we laugh, we scoff. But most of us do so uneasily.
Why the uneasiness? There are several reasons. In the first place we know that such strictures, though preposterous, are not without consequence. Indeed, the phenomenon of political correctness is a great teacher of the often overlooked lesson that the preposterous and the malign can cohabit happily.
There is also the fact that the odor of malignity, of thuggishness, is never far from the lairs of political correctness. The student accused of lookism can be severely penalized for the offense, as can the student accused of racism, "homophobia", or "mis-directed laughter." In some cases, the academic thought police even attempt to regulate what is not said, as when an editor of a student newspaper was removed from his post because he had given "insufficient coverage" to minority events. We laugh when we read about poor Frosty, but the laughter dies when we consider that the professor who would have us melt Frosty is also someone responsible for the education of students. It is amusingly ludicrous to burden Mrs. Rowling's entertainments with feminist rhetoric, but then we remember that books can be banned or slighted for less.
PC's Allergy to Humor
MILAN Kundera's novel The Joke traces the fortunes and amours of a young student, Ludvik, after his exasperatingly earnest girlfriend decides to show the authorities a postcard he had written to her as a joke: "Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!"
As a result of this whimsy, Ludvik finds himself expelled from the Communist Party and the university and is eventually conscripted to work in the mines for several years. Among other things, Kundera dramatizes the dynamics of political correctness. He is especially good at portraying one of its signal features, humorlessness. One of the points of The Joke is that totalitarian societies cannot abide a joke; humor is anathema; political correctness is a kind of geiger counter that registers deviations from the norm of earnestness. Any deviation is suspect, any humorous deviation is culpable.
The allergy to humor that is integral to political correctness is one reason the art of parody has suffered in recent years. Then, too, a parodist, to be successful, must be able to count on his audience's ability to distinguish clearly between the parody and the reality being spoofed. The triumph of political correctness has long since blurred that distinction. Whose ideological antennae are sensitive enough to register accurately the shifting claims of victimhood and entitlement? A mayoral aide in Washington, DC, uses the word "niggardly" in conversation with a black colleague; the colleague takes offense because he thinks "niggardly" is racist; the aide promptly offers his resignation, which is accepted. True? Or parodic exaggeration? True, all too true.
What Kundera gives us is a fiction about--at least in part about--political correctness. But documentary evidence is also near at hand. One can consult Solzhenitsyn, for example, or study the pronouncements of British think tanks like the Runnymede Trust, whose 400-page report on "The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain" a couple of years ago contained the surprising news that the word "British" has "racist connotations." Even worse, it turned out, is the word "English." "To be English", the report informed us, "is to be white. Britishness is not ideal, but at least it appears acceptable when suitably qualified, such as Black British, Indian British, British Muslim and so on." The report continued with this alarming announcement: Britishness, as much as Englishness, has
systematic, largely unspoken, racist connotations.
Whiteness nowhere features as an
explicit condition of being British, but it is
widely understood that Englishness is racially
coded. The unstated assumption is that
Britishness and whiteness go together like
roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. There has
been no collective working through of the
imperial experience.
The absence from the national curriculum
of a rewritten history of Britain as an
imperial force, involving dominance in
Ireland, Africa, the Caribbean and Asia, is
proving to be an unmitigated disaster.
Note that phrase "rewritten history." If the people who gave us the Runnymede Trust report have their way, history will be subject to a lot of rewriting. Among the many recommendations made by "The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain" was the demand that British history be "revised, rethought or jettisoned" in order to meet the requirements of "inclusivity." The report makes many other recommendations--it calls, for example, for race equality and "cultural diversity" inspections in schools, and suggests that television franchise holders be required to appoint a specified number of Black and Asian staff.
Such examples multiply themselves a hundred-fold with the greatest of ease.
Item: A school board in San Francisco seeks to require that 70 percent of school reading be books by "authors of color." One board member explained: "Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, for instance, has a bias against African-Americans. And Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, while a great work, has an economic bias. It characterizes people based on their class."
Item: A mid-level executive at a large bank is overheard wishing a colleague "Merry Christmas." Her superior takes her aside and gravely tells her that such language might be construed as offensive and warns her against indulging in such public displays of religious sentiment.
Item: A doctor I know at Good Samaritan Hospital outside Chicago writes a letter to the hospital's "Cultural Diversity Team." He points out that their Diwali Festival celebrating Hindu culture neglected to mention the appalling abuse of women that is a prominent feature of that culture. A firestorm erupts. The president of the medical staff informs the letter writer that "many individuals reading your words ... have found them disturbing, insulting, and ... elitist" and warns further that "continued correspondence in the same vein ... will be viewed as harassment and contributing to a hostile workplace environment." In other words, cut it out or get out--which is not, incidentally, a bad characterization of the PC understanding of dialogue.
On an even more ominous front we have the activities of the European Union, that bastion of political correctness, whose tax-exempt ministers are appointed, not elected, who seem to be accountable only to themselves, who meet in secret and issue binding diktats that affect the daily lives of people all over Europe. It is nice work if you can get it.
A few years ago, the EU made it illegal for journalists to criticize its policies. Last year, it decided that racism and xenophobia were crimes that could carry a prison sentence of two or more years. "Racism" and "xenophobia" they defined as harboring an aversion to people based on "race, colour, descent, religion or belief, national or ethnic origin." I do not love thee, Dr. Fell, the reason why I cannot tell--but it is certainly not because of your race, nationality, skin color, religious beliefs, sexual preferences, or any physical or mental disabilities--sorry, differences--from which you may suffer.
As these examples suggest, contemporary political correctness, though it may have originated and matured in the academy, is not only an academic product. It thrives in the academy, true, as bacteria thrives in rotting flesh. But political correctness has metastasized. It now thrives outside academia wherever a certain type of intellectual congregates: In the corridors of the European Union, for example, or in anxious bureaucracies like Oxbridge, the BBC and the United Nations.
I hasten to add that by "intellectual", I do not mean "bookish"; I do not mean "intelligent." I mean characterized by a certain lofty moralism--smug, progressive, abstract, activist. Writing in the June 2003 issue of The New Criterion, the political philosopher Kenneth Minogue anatomized this attitude as a form of "Olympianism." "There is", Minogue wrote, a dire purposiveness about the Olympian passion
for signing up to treaties and handing
power over to international bureaucrats who
want to rule the world. Everything down to
the details of family life and the modes of
education are governed and guided so as to fit
into the rising project of a world government.
The independence of universities in choosing
who to admit, of firms choosing whom to
employ, of citizens to say and think what they
like has all been subject to regulation in the
name of harmony between nations and peace
between religions. The playfulness and creativity
of Western societies is under threat.
So too is their identity and freedom.
The intrusiveness that Minogue describes is an expression of what is perhaps the most stultifying characteristic of political correctness: its addiction to displays of benevolence, to the emotion of virtue. When the Harvard professor Barbara Johnson justified the suppression of conservative points of view on campus with the argument that "professors should have less freedom of expression than writers and artists, because professors are supposed to be creating a better world", she provided a good example of how the imperatives of political correctness are at odds with the principles of open debate. Or consider the case of Peter Kirstein, who until recently was an obscure professor of history at Xavier University in Cincinnati. Professor Kirstein was one of many who received a form-letter email from a cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy soliciting advice about an upcoming conference. Kirstein's reply catapulted him to temporary notoriety: "You are a disgrace to this country and I am furious you would even think I would support you and your aggressive baby killing tactics of collateral damage." Kirstein went on to excoriate the United States Air Force for imperialism, cowardice and bringing "death and destruction" to "non-white peoples throughout the world."
What is interesting is not so much Kirstein's loathsome little missive, which was hardly more than an off-the-shelf specimen of politically-correct academic rancor, but the self-infatuated conviction of virtue that informs it. On his website, Professor Kirstein lists the twelve points of his "teaching philosophy." It includes helpful items such as "Teach peace, freedom, diversity, multiculturalism and challenge American unilateralism." But the most telling of his twelve points is the first, which he prints in bold face: "Teaching is a moral act."
Now, there is undoubtedly a sense in which teaching is a moral act. But its morality is like happiness according to Aristotle: it is achieved not directly but indirectly through the responsible engagement with the tasks at hand. Indirection--moral subtlety, an appreciation of human imperfection--are resources deliberately slighted by the politically correct. In their pursuit of a better, more enlightened world, PC types let an abstract moralism triumph over realism, benevolence over prudence, earnest humorlessness over patience.
As has often been noted, an absolute commitment to benevolence, like the road that is paved with good intentions, typically leads to an unprofitable destination. In Physics and Politics, Walter Bagehot summed up the point when he observed that The most melancholy of human reflections,
perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question
whether the benevolence of mankind does
most good or harm. Great good, no doubt,
philanthropy does, but then it also does great
evil. It augments so much vice, it multiplies
so much suffering, it brings to life such great
populations to suffer and to be vicious, that it
is open to argument whether it be or be not
an evil to the world, and this is entirely
because excellent people fancy they can do
much by rapid action--that they will most
benefit the world when they most relieve
their own feelings.
Bagehot wrote in the 1870s. His words are if anything more pertinent now.
Benevolence is a curious creature. Its operation tends to be more beneficent the more specific it is. This was a point that James Fitzjames Stephen, the great 19th-century critic of John Smart Mill, made in his book Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: The man who works from himself outwards,
whose conduct is governed by ordinary
motives, and who acts with a view to
his own advantage and the advantage of
those who are connected with himself in
definite, assignable ways, produces in the
ordinary course of things much more happiness
to others ... than a moral Don Quixote
who is always liable to sacrifice himself and
his neighbors. On the other hand, a man
who has a disinterested love of the human
race--that is to say, who has got a fixed idea
about some way of providing for the management
of the concerns of mankind--is an
unaccountable person ... who is capable of
making his love for men in general the
ground of all sorts of violence against men
in particular.
Political correctness tends to breed the sort of unaccountability that Stephen warns against. At its center is a union of abstract benevolence, which takes mankind as a whole for its object, with rigid moralism. This is a toxic, misery-producing brew. In On Enlightenment, the Australian philosopher David Stove got to the heart of the problem when he pointed out that it is precisely this combination of universal benevolence fired by uncompromising moralism that underwrites the cult of political correctness. "Either element on its own", Stove observed, is almost always comparatively harmless. A
person who is convinced that he has a moral
obligation to be benevolent, but who in fact
ranks morality below fame (say), or ease; or
again, a person who puts morality first, but
is also convinced that the supreme moral
obligation is, not to be benevolent, but to
be holy (say), or wise, or creative: either of
these people might turn out to be a scourge
of his fellow humans, though in most cases
he will not. But even at the worst, the misery
which such a person causes will fall
incomparably short of the misery caused by
Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Ho Chi Minh,
or Kim II-sung, or Pol Pot, or Castro: persons
convinced both of the supremacy of
benevolence among moral obligations, and
of the supremacy of morality among all
things. It is this combination which is infallibly
and enormously destructive of human
happiness.
Of course, as Stove goes on to note, this "lethal combination" is by no means peculiar to communists. It provides the emotional fuel for utopians from Robespierre to the politically-correct bureaucrats who preside over more and more of life in Western societies today. They mean well. They seek to boost all mankind up to their own plane of enlightenment. Inequality outrages their sense of justice. They regard conventional habits of behavior as so many obstacles to be overcome on the path to perfection. They see tradition as the enemy of innovation, which they embrace as a lifeline to moral progress. They cannot encounter a wrong without seeking to right it. The idea that some evils may be ineradicable is anathema to them. Likewise the notion that the best is the enemy of the good, that many choices are to some extent choices among evils--such proverbial, conservative wisdom outrages their sense of moral perfectibility.
ALAS, THE result is not paradise but a campaign to legislate virtue, to curtail eccentricity, to smother individuality, to barter truth for the current moral or political enthusiasm. For centuries, political philosophers have understood that the lust for equality is the enemy of freedom. That species of benevolence underwrote the tragedy of communist tyranny. The rise of political correctness has redistributed that lust over a new roster of issues: not the proletariat, but the environment, not the struggling masses, but "reproductive freedom", gay rights, the welfare state, the Third World, diversity training, and an end to racism and xenophobia. It looks, in Marx's famous mot, like history repeating itself not as tragedy but as farce.
It would be a rash man, however, who made no provision for a reprise of tragedy.
Roger Kimball is Managing Editor of The New Criterion. Among his recent books are The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (Encounter Books, 2000) and Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee, 2002). This essay is adapted from the Charles Douglas-Home Award lecture delivered at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival in Wales, May 2003.

Sesame Street Is Too Much

Sweeping the Clouds Away
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.
Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”
Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.
Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.
Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.
The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.
I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”
Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.
Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.
The biggest surprise of the early episodes is the rural — agrarian, even — sequences. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud. This pastoral scene rolls to an industrial voiceover explaining dairy farms, and the sleepy chords of Joe Raposo’s aimless masterpiece, “Hey Cow, I See You Now.” Chewing the grass so green/Making the milk/Waiting for milking time/Waiting for giving time/Mmmmm.
Oh, what’s that? Right, the trance of early “Sesame Street” and its country-time sequences. In spite of the show’s devotion to its “target child,” the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster” (as The New York Times explained in 1979), the first episodes join kids cavorting in amber waves of grain — black children, mostly, who must be pressed into service as the face of America’s farms uniquely on “Sesame Street.”
In East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.” The figure was even higher in Washington. Nationwide, though, the number wasn’t much lower, and was largely determined by the whims of the PBS affiliates: 80 percent in houses with young children. The so-called inner city became anywhere that “Sesame Street” played, because the Children’s Television Workshop declared the inner city not a grim sociological reality but a full-color fantasy — an eccentric scene, framed by a box and far removed from real farmland and city streets alike.
The concept of the “inner city” — or “slums,” as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of “Sesame Street” — was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn’t worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer. The Upper West Side, hardly a burned-out ghetto, was said to be the model.
People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.
Points of Entry
Caveat teletor: Volumes 1 and 2 of “Sesame Street: Old School” are available on DVD, which you can sample and buy on Sesameworkshop.org. With a few episodes, extras and celebrity appearances by the likes of Richard Pryor and Lou Rawls, “Old School” sounds harmless enough. But are you ready to mainline this much ’70s nostalgia?
The Way Old: YouTube is great for performance art. If 1969 is not far back enough for you, how’s 1935? The Oscar-winning short film “How to Sleep,” by the Algonquin Round-Tabler Robert Benchley, can be found here in sumptuous black-and-white; search for his name and the film’s title on YouTube.
Come of Age: Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the men of “My So-Called Life” and “thirtysomething,” have at last introduced their online-only young-adult series, “Quarterlife.” It started Nov. 11 on MySpaceTV.com, and it marks the first time a network-quality series — a long indie film, really — has been produced directly for the Internet. If the old times unnerve you, welcome to the new times.