'You're stupid', replied President Trump to a reporter who had asked him a stupid question, one with no substance and only asked to try to make him look bad. 'You are a stupid person', he went on, 'a very stupid person', after which he made a few desultory comments, and proceeded to the next questioner.
Now, this language was shocking to the progressive Left which for years had chosen to ignore the truth, to revise English to be as gentle, inclusive, and welcoming, and to foist on the American public an airbrushed version of reality. There are no fat people in America, they said, only 'otherly statured'. There were no dwarves or midgets, only 'little people', and most importantly no one was stupid. The bell curve no longer described the human equation - a cluster of very dumb people at one end, a cluster of brilliant people on the other, and the rest falling under the great arc of the middle.
Children who used the word 'stupid' were quickly corrected and disciplined. 'We don't use words like that', one mother was overheard saying to her young daughter in Turtle Park.
'OK', said the little girl, 'but he's dumb...a retard', an accurate, precise, absolutely correct description of Johnny Paluka, a clod of a boy who didn't know left from right. The boy was indeed on the far asymptote of the bell curve.
'Oh, Dottie', said her mother. 'We don't say things like that'; but the little girl, too young, untried, and innocent of any far-flung notions of false propriety, insisted that she was right. 'He belongs in the broom closet'.
Now, this little episode was not unique - children observe objectively, judge intelligently, and respond truthfully until they are hammered into some fantastical adult image.
'Who did you play with, today, Jamie', another mother in another park asked her son.
'Billy Farnham', responded the boy.
'I don't think I know him. Is the the one who lives on Randecker's Lane?'
'No. He's the fat one'.
His mother recoiled in shame. 'We don't say things like that', she warned.
'But he is fat, Mommy', her son replied. 'The fattest boy in the class and the fattest boy I have ever seen'.
Despite the school's attempts to encourage inclusivity - to be sure that the 'mentally challenged' and the 'otherly statured 'boys were included in playground activities - they were shunned, laughed at, and ignored. The children were acting like every member of every society has since the very first human settlements - ridding the group of the outsider. The bell curve was no different in Paleolithic times. Homogeneity, the integrity of the majority, the purity of the masses have been bywords of human communities since we came down from the trees.
No amount of socialization, engineered harmony, or prescriptive behavior can change this basic, inalterable, ineluctable fact.
Much has been made of bullying in these days of social justice; and yet it has been another persistent aspect of growing up and beyond forever. Children learn how to deal with bullies. Either you avoid them, kowtow to them, or fight them; and each reaction describes very telling psycho-social behavioral traits and anticipates how you will survive in the adult world.
'Sticks and stones' are warning signals - life after childhood will not be a fairy tale, and the savvy child will learn to react either in kind with a well-placed, well-timed counter insult, stony indifference, or avoidance.
Shaming works wonders. Fat girls under the catty pressure of their bitchy classmates quickly lose weight. Boys under peer pressure shape up, lose their annoying tics and habits, and become part of the group. When challenged, dummies try their best and reach the upper limits of their native ability.
Calling out horrendously poorly chosen dress, shoes, or hairstyle works like magic. The accused for the first time looks in the mirror with conforming eyes, and the next day looks like everyone else.
Uniqueness, individuality, a well-defined personality expressed by words, appearance, and action are not affected by this call to conformity. There is a measure of suppleness in social criticism. The masses recognize a special person of merit despite some cloying inconsistencies. Charm can overcome ugliness, respect and deference can quiet catcalls, intelligence overwhelms social ineptitude. Not always, for suppleness too has limits to its extension, but often.
Political correctness is nothing less than an Orwellian attempt to deny reality. What you see before your very eyes is not as it seems. An obese woman in a bikini is not an oddity, a self-indulgent, arrogant misfit, but a beautiful person the equal of any Hollywood starlet. Yet since Ancient Greece and Rome, the standard of female beauty has not changed in the least. The statues of Aphrodite and Athena resemble the most beautiful women of today. The features of both are symmetrical, perfectly aligned, and balanced. Their bodies are long, lithe, and graceful.
The Orwellian reformists insist that such standards are themselves false, created by a misogynist men who can see no further than a woman's exterior. Yet the truth speaks loudly. Look at the cover of any men's or women's magazine and see the same classic beauty.
Beauty is definitely not in the eye of the beholder.
So, why not accept acknowledged standards of intelligence, beauty, and behavior and be tolerant of those who fall far from them? Why call out the less intelligent, less beautiful, less endowed as 'stupid, dumb, retarded, clumsy, fat, short, and ugly'?
Because such outspoken honesty is the best way to encourage adherence to the norm - to standards of human beauty, intelligence, and physical ability and most of all encourages the less endowed to perform to their maximum, always trying to achieve the highest standards while knowing they will always fall short.
The Left cannot get over Donald Trump's aggressiveness and his refusal to accept its Orwell-speak. The progressive agenda - insisting that there are not two sexes but many, all arrayed on a fluid gender spectrum; that inner city black is the inheritor of African sentience, intelligence, and environmental awareness and should be placed atop the human pyramid; that all cultures are equal and none should be assumed better or more developed than others - is contrived fantasy, anti-historical, revisionist, and ignorant of the foundational makeup of society.
Finally and at long last, reality is seen as what it is, not what it should be. History is back, the record of human settlements, empires, and civilizations again open for objective inspection, and the difference between individuals, societies, cultures, and religions there for inspection.
Trump is not 'presidential', progressives say as if there were such a standard. They only mean not behaving as they would like; but Trump, for all his outrageousness is both quintessentially American and presidential. The days of fear-of-the-dark presidencies and the faux compassionate, idealistic years of fairytale land are over.
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