Louis: Random notes on PC: 1. At the Brecht Forum in NY last monday, I heard Joseph Buttregieg, a blue-chip Gramsci scholar, speak on "Popular Culture in the US: A Gramscian Perspective". He commented that it is interesting that Allen Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" became a best-seller. That such a scholarly book could become a best-seller indicates that cultural illiteracy is not such a problem that the right-wingers posit. He said that the left has not had a proper rebuttal to the "PC" right-wing assault because it is simply mired in Yale and Duke-styled "theorizing" and can't even reach a mass audience with its message. He thought that a cultural studies perspective that is grounded in Gramsci's Marxism might do the trick, however. The best book on "political correctness" from the left, by the way, is Russell Jacoby's "Dogmatic Wisdom". I urge everybody to rush out and buy a copy or two. It makes a great Christmas gift. 2. My first exposure to "political correctness" was at my uncle Irving's house in Brooklyn in 1956 or so. Irving was a member of the furrier's union and had a picture of Krushchev on the living-room wall. I was 10 years old and wanted to watch "Amos and Andy". He said,"We don't watch that show in this house--it's prejudiced". Isn't it possible that one of the original thrusts behind "PC" was from the CP? Isn't it possible that Popular Front culture (folk-dancing to Spanish Civil War songs, etc.) would throw a damper on any culture that wasn't "politically correct"? 3. The Socialist Workers Party, in its internal meetings, would consistently use the term "politically correct", not in reference to movies, music, etc., but in reference to which faction to support in Angola, etc. A few years after I left this dreadful cult, I placed a personal ad in the New York Review of Books (when you try to put together a social life after 11 years in such a group, you resort to desperate measures) and said that I was looking to get married and raise "politically correct" children. This was in 1980. I was being ironic at the time. Perhaps my ad was what started the whole controversy.
