Shamrocks and Milk Fall Behind Iron PC Curtain

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 18, 1999 | by Ralph Reiland

Now it's shamrocks that have caught the eye of the sensitivity police, along with, of all things, milk and Martha Stewart. All three, say the czars of political correctness, are too controversial and factious for public display.

In Boston of all places, where large numbers of citizens trace their ancestry to Ireland, the city's Housing Authority has pronounced the little green clover cutouts to be just too "controversial" for common view, i.e., symbols that should be avoided if residents don't wish to be judged as too aggressive, too antisocial and too anti-neighborly. The shamrock censoring is part of the Housing Authority's "diversity program," a project that aims to make citizens "more sensitive to the feelings" of their neighbors. "In particular, the Housing Authority wants `project dwellers' to understand the effect that certain publicly flaunted symbols can have on others," explains Pete Hamill in the Wall Street Journal. "Among the `controversial decorations' are the Confederate and Puerto Rican flags, the swastika and the shamrock."

It's easy to understand the swastika ban, and even the Confederate flag prohibition, but it's much trickier when it comes to the prohibition of the Puerto Rican flag and shamrocks. There, it's more a case of raw numbers, a circumstance of differences in group power, a case of the politics of victimhood, envy and group identity saying that no group should have any more than any other group. If a project dweller from Zaire or Iceland, for instance, can't pull together a big-city parade, then it's "unfair" for him to be exposed to a virtual plethora of "flaunted" and "controversial" symbols on Puerto Rican Day or St. Patrick's Day.

In America's 30 Years War, Hungarian-born historian and concert pianist Balint Vazsonyi writes about his firsthand experience of living in the Soviet Union when it imposed police authority upon every aspect of life. Individual freedom, serf-sufficiency, privacy, property rights and personal liberty were replaced by government-mandated group identities, social and economic levelling, group preferences and income redistribution. "A large red letter identified your ancestry on every form attached to your record," he writes. "If your father worked in a factory, you could do no wrong. If your father owned a small store, you could do no good." In the socialist scheme of things, anyone with too many shamrocks or too many stores becomes the enemy.

Taken to its logical conclusion, whether in Boston or Budapest, the drive to eradicate all group inequalities and individual differences that might fuel social tension produces, inevitably, an overblown statist clique that's large enough to prescribe, in Vazsonyi's words, "a set of conditions to which society must conform, if necessary through coercion or by force." Inch by inch, whether through higher taxes, greater regulation, more speech codes or greater income redistribution, it's a slippery slope that attacks personal sovereignty and undermines America's founding principles of individual rights and limited government.

In another stab at uncovering group oppression, reports columnist John Leo, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals "is arguing that milk is a racist beverage because tens of millions of African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and American Indians are lactose-intolerant, while most Caucasians are not." Milk, the perfect drink for the paleface inheritors of unearned privilege? In this new stretch of victimhood, is Jim Beam racist if Presbyterians have less trouble with alcohol than Indians?

With Stewart, it's her cleaning tips and shopping skills that have upset the Modern Language Association, or MLA, the world's largest surviving gang of tenured Marxists. In its preconvention call for academic papers, the MLA, taking note of Martha's quick rise up the capitalist food chain, has asked the nation's language professors to produce papers on the following vital national topic: "How does Martha Stewart's work serve to construct notions of whiteness and middle-class heterosexual identity?" Martha Stewart's Kmart towels as propaganda for straight suburban sex? And even worse, asks the MLA, isn't Stewart sending a sly wink to old-fashioned Western pillage? "What is the function of nostalgia in Martha Stewart?," asks the MIA. "Is it an imperialist nostalgia?"

It's what journalist Charles Sykes calls "the rise of the Annoyed Person," the creation of a milieu where it's "profitable to cultivate indignation and profess victimhood." Wounds become advantages, milk becomes racist, flaunted shamrocks become suffocating and Stewart becomes an imperialist lackey. Deficiencies, in short, become entitlements.

Ralph R. Reiland, an associate professor of economics at Robert Morris College in Pittsburgh, is coauthor of Mom & Pop vs. the Dreambusters: The Small Business Revolt Against Big Government.