From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
The East Germany of Our Souls
Ten years after, writers get word of the PC wars.
"It is the practice of fools."
This was the rather unhedged opinion of a humanities professor at Columbia University last week in the now famous flap over New York State's ludicrous bowdlerizing of literary excerpts on standardized tests. Most everyone has heard by now of how the state's bureaucrats felt that no student should be "uncomfortable in a testing situation," and so when the Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer writes "most Jewish women," the state ensures that the potentially discomfited teenagers instead read, "most women." Any offense imaginable was deleted from the exams.
Hellfire (another word they abjure) rained down on the deleters' heads.
"Who are these people who think they have a right to 'tidy up' my prose?" thundered novelist Frank Conroy. "The New York State Political Police? The Correct Theme Authority." Galactically famous nature writer Annie Dillard, reading her revision, gagged at "such a lacerated passage--one which, finally, is neither mine nor true to my lived experience."
This is really rich. This takes the cake. In June of 2002 a mother discovers that children's standardized tests have been adjusted for reasons of race, class, gender, religion or lifestyle and the whole world, including all of Manhattan, rises up to complain. In the words of sportscaster Dick Enberg, "Oh my!"
One may ask: Where were you people when we needed you? Where were all you First-Amendment-hugging novelists, columnists, newspaper editors, publishers, lawyers, college presidents, CEOs, mothers and fathers when battle after battle was fought the past 20 years to save this country from ever arriving at the perfectly absurd, perfectly predictable acts against literature and the human mind committed by the New York Board of Regents?
I know where you were. You were holding the door open for them.
In fact, someone should defend these poor people. Why should they take the fall for this? They weren't the ones who created the arguments that led to the banning of "Huckleberry Finn" from high-school reading lists and libraries across America, making Mark Twain a literary nonperson for generations hence. They weren't the ones who ordered their employees to attend mandatory corporate counseling sessions on offensive office speech. They weren't the editors who agreed that their newspapers would henceforth write about "people of color" because some people demanded it. And they weren't the ones who hauled college professors before administrative kangaroo courts because some 19-year-old objected to the content of the teacher's class. The New York education bureaucrats learned cultural cleansing from their betters--as did the religious fundamentalists who divined the new rules and started seeing witches and pagans in textbooks.
Back when these and countless other battles in the PC wars were fought, the people who got so upset this month about the editing of Sacred Literature were nowhere. They were good liberals. They were silent.
When, for instance, Columbia University took gender politics over the cliff by attempting to enact a sexual harassment code that reversed and trampled centuries of due process, the faculty kept its head down. Just as faculties at so many other institutions pulled the curtains when one of their own got mobbed in the street for some alleged offense against this new and damaging orthodoxy. In the 1990s, when former Humanities Endowment chairman Lynne Cheney opposed the often silly revisionism of the National Standards for U.S. History ("construct a dialogue between an Indian leader and George Washington at the end of the [Revolutionary] War"), many of the people now up in arms mocked her as a conservative crank.
The Regents' goofy censorship is such a flyspeck compared to the larger ruin this movement has brought. Substituting "thin" for "skinny" and "heavy" for "fat" is merely the work of people whose minds work like almost everyone else's now; we all carry in our heads an informal list of imagined verbal offenses. They don't want teen testers to feel uncomfortable; we don't want our dinner partners to feel uncomfortable. We don't need censors; we do it to ourselves. Welcome to the East Germany of the soul.
An optimist would say that the great upwelling of famous names against the New York bowdlerizations suggests light at the end of our politically tunneled vision (hours after the publicity, the state undid its deletions policy). Or maybe nothing will change. This single sally against one windmill in Albany may only allow the nation's literary gods and goddesses to tell themselves that they too fought the fettering of free expression, even as Frank Conroy's "political police" still make arrests, unopposed, for the crime of the century--insensitivity.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
