OPINION:
Jonathan Swift was the first great satirist in the English language. Satire is a wicked art because to make it work the artist must get satire close to the real thing. When Swift proposed that the way to deal with poverty in Ireland was to eat Irish babies many took him seriously. There was no outbreak of cannibalism in the British isles — though many mothers have often told their infant offspring that “you look good enough to eat” — but there was an outbreak of outrage among Swift’s readers who thought he was being entirely serious.
Others have tried satire since. Evelyn Waugh’s send-up of newspapers and journalists everywhere in his novel “Scoop,” is still in print 80 years later. “Scoop” is the modern gold standard for satire. Waugh poked great fun at stuffy newspaper proprietors and the men who work for them. For example, when Lord Copper, the ignorant proprietor of The Daily Beast, asked his managing editor whether Hong Kong was the capital of China, the editor knew better than to tell the whole truth that would expose the proprietor’s ignorance. “Ummm, well, up to a point, Lord Copper.”
Satire was thought to be a dead art, but now there’s a rising generation of satirists on the university campus in America. Some of the best are at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. They have put together pretend guidelines on the university’s Employee Forum to assist university staff in avoiding “microaggressions” against students and others, cautioning against “offensive phrases” such as wishing someone a nice “Christmas vacation,” or referring to a man a woman might be with as her “husband or boyfriend,” or wishing someone a nice “golf outing.”
The guidebook reminds staff that organizing vacations around Christian holidays “further centers the Christian faith and minimizes non-Christian spiritual rituals and observances.” A conscientious employee would never tell a female colleague, for example, “I love your shoes!” In the first place, no woman actually pays any attention to shoes, and to compliment a woman on her appearance is to say, “I notice how you look and dress more than I value your intellectual contributions. How you look is really unimportant.”
The guide discourages inviting someone to play “a round of golf,” because that assumes “employees have the financial resources/exposure to a fairly expensive and inaccessible sport.” Assuring “people of color” (not to be confused with “colored people”) that you “don’t see color” is equivalent to “minimizing/denying a person of color’s racial/ethnic experiences.” A good citizen wouldn’t do that.
Microaggressions against “sexual orientation” include using the terms “husband” or “boyfriend” when addressing a female colleague, or “wife” or “girlfriend” when addressing a male colleague, instead of the asexual “partner” or “spouse.”
At faculty award ceremonies, employees are warned not to ask honorees to “stand and be recognized” for their achievements, which assumes “that everyone is able in this way and ignores the diversity of ability in the space.”
The spirit of the Chapel Hill campus echoes across campuses everywhere. At an event last year titled “Managing Microaggressions,” students at the University of Virginia warned that identifying oneself as an “American” is a microaggression, presumably because everyone isn’t an American, and saying so could be taken as the speaker saying everyone should be an American. Calling America a “melting pot” or “the land of opportunity” is microaggressive at the University of Wisconsin.
The work of such an imagination in full flight should be rewarded. Jonathan Swift would be pleased. We commend the University of North Carolina and its student body, if we may call it a body, since not everyone has a nice body. This is the way to puncture stifling political correctness. Parents can finally be assured that their money is not always wasted. Satire is not intended to be taken literally, but done well, as at Chapel Hill, it does the job. (They are joking, aren’t they?)
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