Burn Those Triggering Words!

Here is a ditty from the TLS’s “NB" column of November 13^th. “Among the more attractive awards of the season is the Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize. The six winners of 2015 are grouped together in a book daring titled A Eulogy for Nigger, after the leading essay by David Bradley, a superb series of digressions on the author’s attachment to the taboo word.” In the meanwhile the victims' chorus is working overtime— the Jews who are referred to by the complainant in The Merchant of Venice, the disturbed folks and who have been called schizos and psychos, the transsexuals who have been called trannies, the women and men who are referred to by derogative terms for their genitals and let’s not forget all the pejoratives used against the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese and "the Russkies", the term Buck Turgidson employed in Dr. Strangelove. If you hated university life, here is your great chance to be expelled. It's like getting an honorary degree for those who run the risk of getting tarred and feathered at Columbia, Yale, Princeton and certainly any branch of the University of California where the primary form of oral sex practiced on campus lies in the tongue twister known as “affirmative consent.” Three cheers for Lenny Bruce and George Carlin! The language police are everywhere, waiting for you to show up with your copy of A Eulogy for Nigger, though Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus will do. Thousands of impressionable and highly sensitive students who are easily “triggered” will join the mob. Remember back in the 60’s when women showed their liberation by burning their bras. If you attended one of these auspicious institutions you may want to set fire to your diploma before, like in the Ray Bradbury fantasy re-enactment of Nazism, Fahrenheit 451, they burn your books.

The Campus Un-American Activities Committee

Berlin Book Burning (1933)

Considerable controversy was generated by President Obama’s recent deployment of the N word in a radio interview. It’s lucky that he’s the president and also happens to be black. “It’s good to be the king,” Mel Brooks famously intoned in The History of the World Part I. But the language police are everywhere. Even though it’s already 2015; it’s clearly a form of the Newspeak which George Orwell envisioned when he wrote l984 back in l948. Curiously much of this policing emanates on campuses which had previously been considered to be bastions of humanism. Remember Mario Savio and the Berkeley Free Speech movement? As David Brooks comments in a recent Times Op- Ed piece, “The Campus Crusaders,” (NYT, 6/2/15), “Today’s campus activists are not only going after actual acts of discrimination—which is admirable. They are also going after incorrect thought—impiety and blasphemy. They are going after people for simply failing to show sufficient deference to and respect for the etiquette they hold dear. They sometimes conflate ideas with actions and regard controversial ideas as forms of violence.” Triggering is the word that’s used by today’s thought police who are intent on protecting a series of rather fragile sensibilities, at the expense of free expression. What is fueling all this sensitivity? Why have words taken on a such a power that that certain epithets and expletives cannot even be used contextually, say in a work of fiction like Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus without causing the situation that Ray Bradbury envisioned in Fahrenheit 451. Huckleberry Finn has also run into problems (“"Huckleberry Finn" and the N-Word Debate,” CBS, 6/12/11) with one publisher offering a sanitized edition for use in schools. Campus activists should remember that it was the German Student Union that advocated the burning of the books back in l933.