George Orwell's Newspeak was in many ways prophetic of modern politically correct language, but he made two important errors. First, Orwell's Newspeak used crime in compound words (crimethink, crimestop, etc.) to indicate anything that was beyond the pale, whereas Nowspeak has found hate to be more effective for that purpose. Second, Orwell defined goodsex as "sexual intercourse only for procreation" and sexcrime as "sexual intercourse for pleasure" -- implying, to put it mildly, values somewhat different from those currently endorsed by real-world totalitarianism. So, in the spirit of updating and correcting Orwell, I offer this addition to the PC lexicon:
hatelove: biologically natural relations between a man and a woman within the bounds of marriage
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It's a felicitous enough coinage, I think you'll agree, capturing something of the spirit of blackwhite ("the ability to believe that black is white, to know that black is white, and to forget that one ever believed the contrary") -- but, you might ask, what is actually so hateful about hatelove?
Glad you asked.
1. Being disproportionately practiced by privileged white people, hatelove is inherently racist and elitist. Furthermore, its procreative aspect (see 3 below) means that it leads to the production of more people of the hatelovers' own race and class, something only a white supremacist would want to do. In essence, hatelove boils down to a deliberate act of genocide directed against the Other.
2. Hatelovers may use the "consenting adults" excuse to argue that their predilections are their own business, but in fact each and every hatelove relationship contributes to the cancer of toxic heteronormativity. Heteronormativity is (as Studies Have Shown) one of the leading causes of suicide, so in a way hatelove is a kind of murder.
3. Worst of all, hatelove is known to produce fetuses -- parasitic and often dangerous growths which, conveniently enough, never affect white cisgender men. This makes hatelove a form of misogynistic and transphobic violence. Moreover, each fetus thus engendered will, if (foolishly and irresponsibly) allowed to develop to maturity, go on to release as much as 30 tons of deadly carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere, thus directly contributing to the destruction of the planet.
If that's not hate, what is?
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This is, of course, satire, but we live in a world where satire dates very quickly, as it never takes long for reality to catch up with it. The SPLC already classifies pro-marriage organizations as hategroups (I recommend writing such terms as single words to emphasize their Newspeakiness), and I venture to predict that it won't be very long before we start hearing rhetoric very close to that used in this post.
5 comments:
I know someone who was a fairly high level lawyer, and is honest; he told me (to summarise) that when the Hate Crime legislation was introduced it pretty much destroyed the coherence of law (the kind of thing that the highest level of the system works to maintain) - at a very basic level; because it made no legal sense.
I regard hate crimes as like alien DNA, a parasite or cancer that will destroy the host (law) unless it is itself destroyed... which isn't going to happen. It is just another of many factors that will (sooner or later) bring down civilisation.
I'm sorry... did you just say you know a high-level lawyer who is honest?
This whole thing can be set somewhat in the past, when such things were still just-about possible...
The past really is a different country!
Wm - Most contemporary politicians and academics would take this post at face value and would not recognize it as satire. Sadly, this kind of rhetoric already exists and has existed for some time in mainstream academics/media/politics. It was par for the course when I completing my pedagogy degree in NYC - that was 15 years ago - even more so once I began working at the Board of Ed.
And here in the EU . . . well, I won't wade into all of that now.
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