We have so much to learn from Americans

Civility. Intuitive politeness (outside New York, that is). Self-reliance. Enterprise. And lots of other good things I haven’t mentioned.

Yet we never learn such good things. We only ever learn bad ones, such as crudeness, egalitarian familiarity, parochialism, ‘body art’, bad grammar – and no such list would be complete without political correctness.

I first heard the term from my son, then a schoolboy in California, where the term might have been, and certainly should have been, invented. I used the word ‘negro’ in his presence, which to me was a stylistically neutral term with no pejorative connotations whatsoever.

That’s when my son taught me that new term, and at first I couldn’t understand why my incorrectness was political. Moral or social perhaps, but what does politics have to do with anything? Another few seconds of contemplation, and I remembered that these days politics has something to do with everything.

I even recalled Thomas Mann’s saying, “All intellectual attitudes are latently political”, and thought he had a point. Anyway, though the term ‘political correctness’ was new to me, the underlying attitude wasn’t. My first job in the US was at NASA, and government outfits race ahead of the rest of the country towards what is now called wokery.

The personnel manager told me in no uncertain terms that my female colleagues were neither ‘women’ nor, especially, ‘girls’. They were ‘persons’, and if I called them anything less I’d get in trouble. I protested that, if I identified a woman in the next room as a ‘person’, my interlocutor wouldn’t know if was talking about a man or a woman.

The apparatchik explained that this wasn’t the point, although he fell short of telling me what the point was. Anyway, I learned how to circumvent that injunction by reserving the word ‘person’ for women only and referring to men as strictly ‘guys’ or ‘fellows’, thereby divesting them of their personhood but finding myself on safer grounds.

Then, some 15 years later, I emigrated to Britain and gratefully inhaled lungfuls of fresh air. By then (circa 1988) political correctness had got out of hand in the US, and some locutions in common British parlance would have been grounds for prosecution there.

Finally, I thought, a spot of sanity unsullied with the miasma of mandated verbal lunacy. Well, that didn’t last long.

Since I like to analyse social phenomena dynamically rather than statically, I’m usually more interested in trends than in the here and now. And the general trend I spotted was that all American perversions migrate to Britain sooner or later. This observation is ironclad, but it raises a question: sooner or later?

How long does it take the British to lap up the perverse crumbs falling off America’s table? (The tasty American bits find little demand here, as I’ve mentioned earlier.)

At that time, it took somewhere between ten and five years, with the lag steadily shifting towards the latter duration. Thus Britain gradually caught up with America in the wokery stakes, and then began to pull ahead, slowly. But then the Internet kicked in, and things began to accelerate exponentially.

Whatever gaps in lunacy existed between the two countries got to be filled within a year or two, then within a month or two, then within a couple of weeks – and now I’m happy to report that we don’t have to wait longer than several days if not hours for the shockwaves of American explosions to reach our shores.

The latest vindication of this observation comes from the scores of tents being pitched on university campuses across Britain, as they have been in America for some time. These encampments are tastefully decorated with Palestinian flags and all the usual placards. Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle, Warwick have all been taken over by pro-Hamas fanatics spewing hate.

Students at an academically awful Leeds University are refusing to say how long they are going to continue to occupy land around the university buildings. They pledge to remain “indefinitely”, until the university is “no longer complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian people and crimes against humanity”.

What they mean by such criminal complicity is their university accepting donations from firms even tangentially involved in arms manufacturing. After all, there’s no guarantee that those weapons won’t fall into the blood-stained hands of Israeli genocide mongers.

Of course, if universities no longer accept funding from technology firms, tuition fees may go up, which will be reason enough to stage more protests. One wonders how students find any time to study their subjects, even if these are conveniently fractured into moronic modules precluding any education worthy of the name.

No student protests would be complete without the accompaniment of death threats to Jews on campus, such as those that forced a Jewish chaplain at Leeds University into hiding, together with his whole family.

Jewish students are complaining about being “harassed and excluded”, which shows how little they understand the newly, if implicitly, amended British constitution. It proscribes racial or ethnic discrimination, except against Jews. It guarantees freedom of any religion, except Christianity. And it stipulates equality before the law, with favourable exemptions for members of putatively oppressed minorities.

I detect a direct link between these student camps and concentration camps, but I realise I’m in a distinct minority there. My only hope is that, having borrowed the idea of pro-Hamas encampments from their American counterparts, our students won’t also borrow the attendant violence.

Some such activities in the US have resulted in battles between pro-Hamas and pro-Israeli groups, but at least the American police still have the guts to do something about the tents. Hundreds of arrests have been made at Columbia, UCLA and elsewhere, with policemen clearing encampments and occupied buildings.

Our police are so far inert, looking at the tents with indifference and, if past such events are anything to go by, barely concealed sympathy. Who said police have to be immune to brainwashing? Not me.

If push comes to shove in Britain, the copycat situation could turn even worse than in the American original because of the much higher proportion of Muslim students here. I’ve once met a young Muslim who wasn’t sympathetic to the idea of murdering every Israeli (from the river to the sea). His name was Asif.

This is to say that their participation in riotous protests has to gravitate to 100 per cent. Relatively speaking, there are fewer Muslims on American campuses, although exponents of other religions or mostly none are doing their level best to take up the slack.

The upshot of this is obvious: follow American current events with attention, ladies and gentlemen. If there’s something you hate, brace yourself: a few days later it’ll come here.

This isn’t much of an advanced warning, but some. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick… but I’d better not develop this metaphor.