LEE DRESSELHAUS / L’Observateur / February 16, 2000

So…it’s finally happened. Bedtime stories, tales such as Little Red RidingHood, The Three Little Pigs, Snow White, and Hansel and Gretel have taken the hit.

They have been Rockered.

It is no longer politically correct to tell those tales the way they have been told for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Why? Because of some of the offensive stereotypes portrayed in them, that’s why. Therefore, a writer named James Finn Garner has decided to tell themfrom the new politically correct point of view. I just picked up a copy of alittle thing called “Politically Correct, The Ultimate Storybook,” and let me tell you, this is great. The people who decided to gag John Rocker with a$20,000 fine and a 70-something day suspension would be proud of this book.

In Garner’s hilarious versions of those stories everything is in politically correct-ese. I’ll roughly quote a couple of them here so you can see what Imean.

The wolf in Little Red Riding Hood knew the shortcut to Grandma’s house because his status outside society had freed him from a slavish adherence to Western linear thinking. He was also able to dress in Grandma’s nightdress because he was unhampered by the rigid traditions of what was masculine or feminine. Little Red, who was bringing Grandma fat-free andsodium-free snacks in order to salute her in her role as a matriarch, screamed when the wolf grabbed her because he invaded her personal space.

When the woodchopper intervened and started to kill the wolf with his axe, Red stopped him with furious accusations of being a sexist Neanderthal who obviously assumed that womyn and wolves couldn’t solve their own problems without the aid of a man.

Cool. And the way “womyn” is spelled above is not a typo. Go figure. It gets better.

The three bears of Godilocks fame, Papa, Mama, and Baby lived together as a nuclear family, which they were sorry about because since the nuclear family has traditionally existed to enslave womyn (there’s that word again), and imprint notions of heterosexual roles into the next generation. The porridgeisn’t hot, it’s thermally enhanced. Goldilocks is a melanin impoverished youngwommon (!), who was also a rogue biologist who had been watching the bears so she could collar them with radio transmitters, utterly disregarding their right to privacy. After the bears discover Goldilocks they eat her upbecause, despite the fact that they are supposed to be vegetarians, they feel that they can be flexible because of their being multicultural.

They had their Goldilocks and ate her too.

If I had John Rocker’s address I’d send him a copy of that book.

I realize that this book is written tongue-in-cheek, and is intended to poke holes in this haze of political correctness we live in, but it really isn’t far from what’s going on these days.

It seems that free expression has gone the way of the passenger pigeon and the dodo bird. For some of us that is. In the entire history of this country it has never been against the law to be a loudmouthed idiot. Now, not only can you be fined substantial sums of moneyfor shooting off your mouth, you actually can lose your career. The newphrase for being politically horsewhipped for expressing an unpalatable view is “being Rockered.” John Rocker is a big mouthed 20-something jock who shot his face off and said some offensive things. So? How seriously should you take someone likethat? This whole firestorm has been and is ridiculous.

The Speech Police are at it again, and with a vengeance.

My main problem with the whole thing is this – the Speech Police appear to be very choosy about who they pound. Where were they when one “communityleader” referred to New York as “Hymie Town?” Where were they when Louis Farrakan can come right out and say things about white people that would get someone of the opposite color crucified if he applied the same degree of disdain to people of color? The roll call of players in the last Superbowl with criminal records read like something out of a parole officer’s file cabinet. Yet, they played, and gotpaid pretty darn well for it. Nobody fined any of them for being criminals,either. That, apparently, is all right. Saying something offensive is not, however. It can cost you $20,000, justlike it did John Rocker. It also might get you sent to a re-education camp.Oops, wait, that was in the old Communist-bloc countries wasn’t it? They called it “sensitivity training” in Rocker’s case. Sorry. My mistake. Got thetwo things confused.

So, boys and girls, the moral of the story is this. You can rip people off. Youcan steal. You can even be accused of murder. And you can go right on yourmerry way. But don’t you ever, EVER, say something that can be interpretedas offensive.

The Speech Police will getcha for that.

Copyright © 1998, Wick Communications, Inc.

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