We're going to bleach, blanch, and boil our society until it's turned into a tasteless mass.
A guy by the name of Jeff Smith (who wrote for the Tucson Weekly) said it best:
"... Last week I saw on CNN that some politically correct school board back east has 86'd Halloween from the curriculum or the extra-curriculum on religious grounds. Separation of church and state and all that. So the Great Pumpkin goes the way of the Christmas crèche and the Pilgrim Thanksgiving, and grammar schools all across the nation are stuck with a glut of orange construction paper.
Question: How are America's children going to learn anything about our culture if tight-assed educators eliminate every observance that has roots, however deeply or distantly, in the spiritual world?
Answer: We are becoming a nation without culture.
The second half of the CNN story told of yet another school district that has banned Halloween and taken the next logical step, by cutting out the custom of making and trading cards for Valentine's Day. It is, after all, Saint Valentine's Day. They're downsizing the observance and renaming it, scout's honor, Special Person's Day.
Isn't that special?
I guess the prevailing wisdom is that it's wrong to offend the six or eight surviving Rosicrucians by allowing our children to cut out jack-o'-lanterns and panhandle for candy, but it's fine to offend 270 million normal people who just thought we were showing the kids a good time.
Along this same troubled line of thinking, one notes the push to eliminate certain colorful place names that have been construed to give offense to the more delicate sensibilities of various classes of people.
I thought it was pretty rich when I heard that Sioux Falls, Iowa, was getting pressured to change its name, on the grounds that the founding fathers had misappropriated artifacts from another culture, to which they had no right, and that they compounded the affront by using a term the indigenous copyright-holders did not prefer (Sioux, rather than Dakota or Lakota--which, if true, why do they give a rat's *** about the Anglicized term anyway?) and while we're on the subject, whatever happened to the founding mothers, huh? And what's with this Anglicizing?
There's still no official language in America. And are we talking North America, including Canada, or what?
No end of mischief available here, so I had to get my licks in, and called Art Jacobson to let him know that in this self-same spirit, next year's Indianapolis 500 was being renamed The Native-Americanapolis 500. He just said that was a shame, but he was real busy and had to ring off.
Which is when I knew the whole thing had gone too far.
Anyway they're changing the road signs on I-17 north of Phoenix, near Black Canyon City. The old sign told you where to turn off for Squaw Peak. The new one will read: "Picacho de Native-American Significant Other."
If Stephen Vincent Benét were alive today he'd rather be dead..."
, and that oh so special man area
