Calling A Spade A Spade–How Language Terrorists Destroy Meaning, Purpose, And Intent

The Cordillera Club, a well-known environmental group has recently issued new language guidelines for all its members.

In our desire to be respectful, inclusive, kind, and compassionate, we must be careful in our use of language to avoid terms terms which are offensive to people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, ethnic minorities, and the disabled. While strides have been made to reduce the use of racial epithets, and black people can now go about without fear of insulting, demeaning language; and while gay and transgender Americans need no longer hear the snide, injurious remarks about their sexuality, the disabled have yet to see steps taken to remove prejudice against them.

We, as a club devoted to preserving and protecting the environmental health of the planet and who have dedicated ourselves to promoting social justice for all those who live on it, encourage our members to love, accommodate, and respect those whose abilities may be other than our own.

In this spirit we recommend that one avoid the following usages. Do not say ‘stand up’ for anything, for there are millions of Americans who, through no fault of their own are confined to wheelchairs and cannot stand.  Do not use ‘see’ in any metaphorical sense (‘I see what you mean’ or, ‘Ah, now I see’) for there are many Americans who find this casual reference to visual ableness demeaning.  They may not be able to see with their eyes, but have a surpassing intuitive, and natural sensory ability which enables them to understand the world around them far better than most sighted people.

The offhanded, callous use of ‘smell’ (“I smell a rat”” is equally offensive to the sensory deprived, those suffering from COVID, brain injury, or childhood trauma. “I have to hand it to you” is unacceptable, assuming that handedness has anything to do with concession, compromise, and respectful disagreement.

We are a compassionate, considerate organization who will never cease our fight for equality, justice, fairness, and respect.  Please join us in our efforts.

The howls of derision were unexpected by the Club and its Executive Secretary, Danforth Hopkins who, in his rectitude and absolute conviction of right never even suspected criticism of any kind.   How could anyone take exception to his moral, principled public posture? ‘The deep state must be deeper than we thought’, he told his board members.  “The Trump virus is still deadly”.

Everyone around the table nodded in agreement and shook their heads in disbelief.  Those in wheelchairs applauded and shouted, “Hear, hear!”.  People of color stood, bowed their heads, and raised their fists in solidarity.   The LGBTQ+ contingent looked at each other with knowing smiles. The old, straight fool at the podium had finally come to his senses.

The conservative press had a field day.  “The Cordillera Club’s new policy beggars the imagination” said one in ‘an insensitive swipe at the poor, the mendicant, and the unfortunate.’ Even the most committed members of the Left cringed at the Club’s directive.

Already coming under fire from conservative governors like Ron DeSantis of Florida (‘Woke dies here’), and seeing their darling, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, pilloried in the press for her reverse racism and self-serving, Trump-style political braggadocio, they knew that a line had been crossed.  Granted, not everybody paid attention to the Cordillera Club, but by taking the cancel culture to its far-fetched, illogical extreme, it simply added fuel to backward, cracker resistance.  “We should have a word with him”, said a member of the Squad referring to the Club’s Executive Secretary.

The culture of ‘inclusiveness’ had already gone baroque long before Secretary Hopkins’ unfortunate counsel.  Phalanxes of young volunteers had already been hard at work identifying, tagging, and noting for expungement thousands of offensive words and terms, especially those referring to individual differences. 

There would no longer be fat people because obesity – an elitist term devised by the intellectually corrupt medical establishment – is a non-starter.  Physical descriptors of any variety are irrelevant since all people are the same and should be looked at as members of one, homogeneous group. 

Short people will disappear, the prominence of facial features – a beak nose, shifty eyes, hollow cheeks, receding chin, big ears, beetle-browed foreheads, receding hairlines – will all have to go.  Focus on such irrelevancies served only to demean the intellectual and moral integrity of the individual. Pigeon-toes, piano legs, knock-knees, and goose necks are out.

At the same time blackness has been raised to mythical status.  The African American comes from a highly evolved culture of environmental sensitivity, emotional insight, social logic, and intellectual perception unmatched in human history, admirers say. The sin of his subjection to racism, white oppression, and social marginalization is all the worse because of his origins.  ‘Black’ is a legitimate descriptor because of its universal importance.  ‘Gay’ follows suit, for other-gendered people represent the same inherent superiority as black people.  Gays represent an efflorescence of true sexuality, not one imposed by the heterosexual elite.

The policing of language is to be expected since doctrinal purity is the goal of social reformers.  Inclusivity is not only a matter of neutralizing differences among individuals, but cleansing the past of its elitist, biased, judgmental culture.  Removing all traces of the antebellum, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow South – expunging his history, denying that two hundred years never existed – is a matter of righteous principle.  All social, cultural, and literary history must go. 

William Faulkner was, as deconstructionists are quick to point out, was a racist, misogynist writer who ignored the moral dimensions of slavery and overlooked its inhumanity while glorifying the plantation owner and his Cavalier tradition.  Absalom, Absalom considered by most critics to be the most important work of American fiction ever and one of the world’s greatest, is thought by inclusivists to be nothing more than an apologia for the Old South, and must be removed from bookshelves everywhere.  Faulkner must be discredited and dishonored, not put up on the elitist, white man’s pedestal where he for too long has sat.

Pope Julius II, sponsor of Michelangelo and his painting of the Sistine Chapel, annoyed and frustrated at the artist’s slow, meticulous pace and anxious for the work to be completed before his death, said, “Michelangelo, when will you make an end?”; and so it is with Americans who are anxious for the disastrous, socially divisive, and destructive woke movement to end, to disappear, to leave no traces. 

History does that on its own, of course.  Movements come and go, history’s cycles revolve without end, without purpose, and without consequence.  Wokism, radical progressivism is now in its death throes and will be mourned by no one.