Reflections of a stormy petrel

I just watched the first two minutes of a BBC show, and then turned it off because I knew exactly how it would end. The show was Garrow's Law, and it opened with a mob murdering someone during an election. Since Garrow is a heroic lawyer, we know that he will uncover the facts behind the mobbing; and what convinced me to give it up was the way the camera panned in through the mob to point to one bystander - the obvious candidate to be the crucial and heroic witness who leads Garrow to the truth. And the witness was black; the only black there. Once I had seen that, I knew the whole story.

Then I found myself thinking. And I realized that, just as I had seen this kind of death-dealing obviousness and preachiness in products of the modern media industry, I don't think I had ever seen it in fanfics. I have seen terrible fanfics; I have seen fanfics - most of them, I would say - that featured viewpoints I disliked, even disliked violently; but I don't think I can remember a single fanfic that proceeded by this kind of box-ticking predictability - murderous white mob? - check; innocent black whose decency and truthfulness will solve the issue? - check. I have seen fics whose authors I would have been glad to shake till they rattled; fics whose wrong-headedness, whose political or religious parti pris, made me sick; but if I have read anything that was so obviously predictable and foredoomed to move along the same lines and make the same points, it was because of the writer's lack of skill. It certainly was not because of any determination to take the story through certain predetermined points. In fact, fics whose implicit politics infuriated me were nonetheless a lot less offensive to me than this BBC production, although I would actually support a good deal of its views of history and values. It was the sheer dreary obviousness, the box-ticking predictability of it all, that offended me to the point of stopping the program within two minutes of the start.

What I am trying to say is that the ruinous effect of Political Correctness on writing - especially writing for Hollywood and TV - is not an expression of the zeitgeist or of anything that individuals, misguided or not, might want to say off their own bat. I have seen fics whose values I wanted to shred like confetti, but nobody who writes fics throws in, say, a good black character, just because there is a box somewhere that says "good black character", "corrupt white establishment" and the many other similar cliches are obliged points through which the story should go. In other words, the really poisonous, story-killing variety of PC is not a feature of individual writers' imagination. When left to themselves, even the most radical writers don't write that way.

It is a function of the corporate mind; of the corporate timidity, the corporate need to be seen to be on the right side in anything that pressure groups are sensitive about, the need not to draw certain negative terms to oneself. Writers who are writing for themselves, to please themselves and their readers, don't write like that. They may be perverse, stupid, prejudiced, or sick; but they don't tick boxes.

The absurdity of the political and media reactions to the Fort Hood murders is palpable. (And, to his credit, President Obama made a clear and deliberate move away from it in his speech, attacking by implication the religious motivations of the murderer and denying his notion of God and of eternal justice.) So: set yourself that absurdity not as a given, but as a problem - and you will see that certain conclusions inevitably arise.

Problem: are the people who deny the obvious (the religious reasons for the murders, and the cool and evidently pre-planned way in which they were carried out) stupid, ignorant or blind? Answer: none of the above, so far as anyone can tell. They are professionally successful and prominent persons in positions (military command, journalistic profession, political leadership) in which access to information is a given. Stupidity beyond the norm is imaginable in one such person; not in a whole mass. Likewise blindness. Ignorance is not even in the picture.

Problem: you therefore have a number of public persons, persons prominent in the public eye, who deliberately talk nonsense, and do so in a chorus. What is more, they do so in order to be heard, in places and times where the general public must hear them. Why do they do that? Because they expect to be believed? Answer: unless they are indeed all stupid, they do not expect to be believed. And indeed, most of them put their denials not in the form of denials, but of questions - things to be considered before anyone comes to a "hasty" conclusion. And yet they go before the general public with this kind of, well, stuff.

Problem: if they do not expect to be believed, why do they express themselves thus, why do they seek prominence and publicity for their statements, and why do they do it in a chorus? Answer: they are obviously, as a group, trying to achieve a certain result. They are applying pressure, as a group, to a group - namely, to the public. It is obvious that they are using their positions of prominence and visibility to achieve a certain result with the public.

Problem: what are they trying to achieve? Answer: all too obvious. They really and truly are afraid that the general public will go out and start beating up innocent Muslims, or indeed anyone who looks like a Muslim. And let us notice one remarkable fact: this is a fear that, to them, trumps even the need to acknowledge obvious truth in a disastrous crime. They would rather look like a gaggle of babbling dolts than fail to do what they can to stop the lynch mob populating the streets. And remember, we have already concluded that most if not all of them are perfectly aware that they are talking nonsense. They know that they are looking like a gaggle of babbling dolts.

Problem: is the issue really so serious? Answer: in real life, not in a million years. The belief in equality, the revulsion against group prejudice and intolerance, the contempt for group violence, are as widespread among the common public as they are among the societal leadership. There are fringe and underclass groups who are in fact capable of such behaviour, but they are both small and despised. Some violence there can indeed be - I have seen the results of a queer-bashing attack on friends of mine - but it is not the work of the mainstream of society. The groups that carry it out are despised, isolated, often criminal, and at any rate hardly likely to pay attention to the pronouncements of journalists, politicians and generals. Resisting the temptation to group violence in our time and world is hardly necessary, and in so far as it is necessary at all, such public self-abasements are wholly irrelevant to it.

Problem: if making complete fools of themselves in public is neither going to achieve their goal to prevent public violence, nor do anything to reinforce their standing, why do these privileged persons do it? Ahh, now we have come to the centre of the riddle. They do so because they believe they have to; and they believe they have to because they really believe that the mass of citizens under their feet is violent, uncivilized, ever in danger of bursting into group violence. They regard the average American (or European) citizen as both morally and intellectually their inferior; a kind of ill-trained beast, ever in danger of reverting to violence and ever looking for "others" to hate.

Problem: why do they indulge such an unrealistic view of the average American or European citizen? Answer: if they did not, where would be the difference between them and the ordinary citizen? And if there is no difference, what would justify their vast wages, their houses and servants, their position of influence, power and pampering? An aristocracy must justify their position by being ready to defend the society it dominates. And to take a common position mutually reinforces their positions.

I have long been complaining about the rise of the new aristocracy. Here is another good reason to dislike it.