The World’s Most Meaningless Term
By …must be “politically incorrect.” A classic example:
“That’s when my public school principal (in Orange, CA) decreed that the ’69 World Series would be played over the school PA system. With the games starting at 10 AM local time, I could hear most of the game at recesses and lunch. I was entranced; I was enthralled. Brooks Robinson; Tom Seaver; Boog Powell; Donn Clendenon. I have been a baseball fanatic — and an all-around sports fan — ever since.
“Playing the World Series over the school PA system — what a concept! It doesn’t happen anymore — primarily, because MLB makes more money when all the games are played at night; secondarily, because it would probably be politically incorrect.”
Oh sure, the official reason they don’t play World Series games over the school PA is because the games aren’t actually played in the afternoon. But it must also somehow be part of the nefarious conspiracy derived from the epistemologically decentering form of multiculturalism inspired by Edward Said. God knows I burn with rage at the idea that my students may have skipped class to go to Opening Day yesterday–everyone knows that the Islamofascistsecularistmulticultralistrelativist “PC” movement hates baseball.
In addition, have you ever noticed that most of the people who piss and moan about the fact that World Series games are now played when the typical worker can actually watch them because it was fun to find creative ways to hear the game are the same people who piss and moan about the fact that the games sometimes go on past 10:30? Because it would obviously ruin your kids’ lives forever if they stayed up past their bedtime a couple times a year. Which leads us to an even bigger pet peeve, complaints about 8:20 start times that seem to start with the assumption that everyone in the country lives in the eastern time zone. To state the obvious, someone with a 9-5 job can choose to stay up late, but they often can’t choose to leave work at 3.
(Via Holbo. The attempts to wedge the horrible failure to play World Series games that aren’t actually being played at the time during school days into the “PC” rubric reminds me of his classic review of Dead Right, which cites the following “everything is everything” musings of reactionary hippie David Frum: “Conservatives, however, see the things they dislike in the contemporary world–abortion, the slippage of educational standards, foreign policy weakness, federal aid to handicapped schoolchildren–as all connected, as expressions of a single creed, a creed of which liberalism is just one manifestation.” Like, like, whoa, man. I think it was all Edward Said.)