Novelist Andrew Klavan has a very interesting essay in City Journal which he begins this way:
The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don't have to lie. I don't have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don't have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. I don't have to say that everyone's special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don't have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don't have to pretend that Islam means peace.
Of course, like everything, this candor has its price. A politics that depends on honesty will be, by nature, often impolite. Good manners and hypocrisy are intimately intertwined, and so conservatives, with their gimlet-eyed view of the world, are always susceptible to charges of incivility. It's not really nice, you know, to describe things as they are.
This is leftism's great strength: it's all white lies. That's its only advantage, as far as I can tell. None of its programs actually works, after all. From statism and income redistribution to liberalized criminal laws and multiculturalism, from its assault on religion to its redefinition of family, leftist policies have made the common life worse wherever they're installed. But because it depends on-indeed is defined by-describing the human condition inaccurately, leftism is nothing if not polite. With its tortuous attempts to rename unpleasant facts out of existence-he's not crippled, dear, he's handicapped; it's not a slum, it's an inner city; it's not surrender, it's redeployment-leftism has outlived its own failure by hiding itself within the most labyrinthine construct of social delicacy since Victoria was queen.
I don't know that calling these euphemisms "white lies" isn't a bit overstated, but Klavan's point is nevertheless well-taken. We have allowed ourselves to fall into the grasp of a PC culture that makes it a "sin" to use certain words which mask the truth of things. We're so reluctant to appear insensitive or judgmental that we shrink from saying anything that'll make us sound callous or unsophisticated.
What Klavan doesn't tell us, however, is that this is not an exclusive practice of the left, although they are doubtless the biggest offenders in our socio-cultural life, but the right, especially the military, also employs euphemisms, some of which are almost laughable. One example that sticks in my mind was that offered by a military spokesman who, at a news briefing, explained how our troops "addressed" an enemy position with an M-1 Abrams tank.
Anyway, read the whole article.
RLC
