On Public Speech and the inequities thereof:

Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature a few days ago, and in today's New York Times she addresses the issue of "political correctness" after having been criticized by the Yale professor and literary critic Harold Bloom of having received the award because granting it to her was "the politically correct thing to do."

Lessing has some interesting things to say on the subject, while avoiding Bloom's usual bombast. (Was there ever a more pompous ass in literature?) One cannot help but consider the current state of racial affairs her in the States in light of the recent less than politically correct behavior of many of our young people and the recent arrests, charges, and so forth concerning nooses and abusive language.

Being politically correct, of course, means that one ought not to say hurtful things about one's neighbors, but it has come to be both a bullying tactic and perhaps even worse a mask, a thin veneer under which a strong undertow of bigotry is allowed to continue.

For many of our young people, being politically correct has come to mean nothing more than to live with one's head buried in the sand, if not in some region of our anatomy too nefarious to mention here.