Sticks and stones

My oh my, aren’t we sensitive. Use the word ‘man’, singly or in compounds, and you brand yourself as a troglodyte everywhere, Personhattan and Personchester alike.

Tell a joke along the lines of “an Irishman, a Jew and a black man…”, and you’re a racist troglodyte.

Mention in jest that one can tell a gay bar by the fact that the stools are upside down, and you’re a homophobic troglodyte and, quite possibly, a criminal.

Universal scorn is your immediate punishment, accompanied with suggestions that “there ought to be a law…” Calm down, dears, the law already exists. Or if it doesn’t, it soon will. No one says anything we’re mandated to regard as offensive and gets away with it.

Thing is, most people aren’t really offended by masculine personal pronouns and some such. To think that they are would be tantamount to diagnosing a pandemic of madness, and one has yet to hear a government health warning to that effect.

People react that way because they’ve been brainwashed to do so. The combined efforts of the state, the media and our non-education create a zeitgeist that plays by contrived ethical rules.

Though it’s false through and through, most people have no mental strength to swim against the zeitgeist current. They are vulnerable to propaganda, both overt and surreptitious.

So no, no pandemic of madness is under way. But there’s no question that such vulnerability testifies to at least a mild form of mass idiocy.

Because everything about modernity is supposed to be progressive, this is a progressive condition. When it comes to mandated and affected sensitivity, what was a silly quirk when I first came to Britain, 31 years ago, has become unassailable etiquette.

In those days, a few chaps from the office and I often went for lunch to a local pub that had two pool tables and its own team. Since hustling pool was part of my misspent youth, I could hold my own and even once won a pub tournament.

That earned me the affection of the landlord we called Big Al on account of his girth. He’d always flash an avuncular smile when I walked in and say, good-naturedly: “Here comes the Russian c***.”

In response, I’d order a pint and ask Al how the fatties were doing. We’d then play a frame or two, which I’d usually lose.

Today something like that would be classed as a hate crime. I’d be expected to froth at the mouth, threaten to call the police or report Big Al to the Equality Commission.

It’s hard to escape the observation that, as people get thicker, their skin gets thinner. In the process, one of the most endearing traits of the English, a sense of humour and an ability to laugh at oneself, is falling by the wayside.

People are denied the right to say anything they wish as a joke, for shock value or simply because they like the line. We’re held responsible for every word we utter, and every word is taken at face value regardless of the speaker’s intent. Nothing is a joking matter any longer.

For example, if the IRA is discussed in mixed company, some people will look askance at anyone saying “I could murder a McGuinness”. A joke? A pun? Not on your nellie. It’s the utmost in crudeness at best, and quite possibly a statement of murderous intent.

And if the object of a quip is a member of an ethnic minority, a cripple, a mentally retarded person or a homosexual, the wag can confidently expect everyone present to contort his face in a gurning grimace of sanctimonious opprobrium.

The other day I was watching my lapidary five minutes of Sky News, where some lachrymose gorgons were waxing cloyingly sentimental about a boy with “special needs”, who, according to them could still have a rewarding career.

“Yeah,” I said to Penelope. “As a doorstop. Or else, with some rudimentary training, he could learn to bring you your slippers in his mouth.”

My long-suffering wife is used to such humour. But had I said the same thing at a large dinner party, I’d be seen as a ghastly man, which I probably am. But I’m not so ghastly as to hold such views in all their literal seriousness.

It was simply a line I thought funny at the time (I know opinions may differ on that score). That was the top layer. Underneath, however, it was Newton’s Third Law of Thermodynamics at play: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

When the zeitgeist pushes, some intrepid individuals will push back, and this doesn’t just apply to jokes, funny or otherwise. The counteraction may have far-reaching social consequences.

People will always bend under the weight of the zeitgeist. However, when the weight becomes oppressive, they may spring back to action.

Racism may well strike back at hysterical anti-racism, misogyny at fire-eating feminism, xenophobia at enforced ideological internationalism, fascism at ‘liberalism’ run riot and so forth.

Because human nature isn’t a physical phenomenon, the problem with an opposite reaction may be that it won’t be equal. It hardly ever is when popular resentment spills out.

The reaction to a king who didn’t respect Parliament wasn’t a king who did. It was Civil War.

The reaction to France’s weak monarchy wasn’t a stronger monarchy. It was revolutionary terror.

The reaction to the wishy-washy liberalism of the Provisional Government in Russia and the Weimar Republic in Germany wasn’t a better liberalism. It was Bolshevism and Nazism.

One detects all over Europe an incipient reaction brewing against the ideological influx of cultural aliens and the frenzied effort to erase the borders of nation states, with national laws overridden by international bodies. What form this reaction will take is anyone’s guess.

But not mine. I’m loath to impose on you my inveterate pessimism. Cracking irreverent jokes is safer – and certainly better than speculations about the cracking of human skulls.