This morning, in a not unusually pensive mood, I was mulling over Barak Obama's impending presidential candidacy and what it would mean for the aspirations not only of his for presidency, but of Hillary Clinton's. As I considered the possibilities, it struck me as ironic that basically two different camps of political correctness would effectively be doing battle here: eg, the feminist movement vs. the Civil Rights movement. My mind started reaching for analogies that I could fit inside an article headline.

The first analogy I have to repeat even though it does draw this thread off track somewhat. I thought of the basic stoner philosophy (why am I always thinking of stoner philosophies? But I digress...) that asks, if cats always land on their feet and bread always lands butter side down, could we create a perpetual motion machine by strapping a piece of bread butter side up on the back of a cat? The thought was that Obama and Clinton would create some kind of mind draining collision between these camps. Now you have just a glimpse of how my mind works. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Anyway, to the point. In reaching for an analogy that was not terribly confusing or vague, I finally settled on "PC Vortex". While the metaphor worked, it was not my first choice. My first choice was a pretty good one, but would have pretty much resulted in varying websites on the Internet burning me in effigy.

You see, without thinking, the first analogy I drew was "Obama vs. Clinton will create a Political Black Hole". I no sooner than typed it into the headline window before I KNEW that this title was pretty much a pre written guarantee of charges of hate speech. I mean, if my flaming of one Fred Harteis (to all newbies: LONG story. Ask me to tell it to you sometime when it WON'T detract from an article like this; in the meantime, google "Fred Harteis and you MIGHT find the genesis of all of this. It's kinda funny in a train wreck sort of way. But again with the digressing) netted flame articles on websites of his acolytes, can you imagine what a headline talking about a "PC black hole" and using Obama in the same title would do? I shudder to think of it.

And this, of course brings me to my point (I, um, DO have one, I swear)...

The fact that I even had to think about self editing a good, appropriate analogy because of fears it would be clipped by the PC police and haunt me as long as I choose to run for public office is, in a word, quite frightening. I wasn't thinking of an adjectival overlap (did I just invent a word there?) when I thought of the title, I was just thinking of a title that would be brief enough to sum up the thoughts I was having on the matter. Nothing more, nothing less.

But there's a whole camp of race baiters out there who would rush to put a Klan hood on my head and a swastika armband on my arm for merely THINKING about the analogy. And I'm inclined to think that such thoughts are to THEIR shame, not mine.

In exactly this manner, political correctness has shredded and made a mockery of the first amendment. We must weigh our words ever so carefully, and double and triple check for double meanings that might offend this or that class of people. And as we do so, our rights become sacrificed on the altar (whoops, that's anti-animalism!) of such political correctness, and our true feelings are suppressed. Ironically, I believe that this works against the aims and goals of political correctness, as people who have such feelings and are unable to express them are more likely to act on them. And actions always, ALWAYS hurt far worse than words.