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They tell me that postmodernism’s in the saddle now,
Having swapped its thoroughbred to mount a sacred cow;
Laying waste the landscape of a culture as it rails
In righteous deconstruction of...
Dead White Males.
They tell me indiscriminate discrimination rules;
Eurocentric rubbish has been scoured from our schools;
There’s no room in curriculums for sexist fairy tales
To sow the seeds of tyrannies from...
Dead White Males.
They tell me multicultural academies must rid
Their blushing shelves of Shakespeare — or Chaucer, God forbid!
For Raleigh, Swift and Dickens and Wordsworth in his dales,
Walt Whitman, Donne and Tennyson are...
Dead White Males.
Envoi
“D.W.M.s,
Chuck ’em in the Thames.
Plait a rope and string a gallows,
To the libraries! Wheelbarrows!
Strip the stacks of books by liars —
Shred ’em! Hurl ‘em in the fires!
That’ll learn ’em, those who wrote ’em,
Saw their balls off at the scrotum!
Fetch a hammer! Fetch the nails!
Crucify all
Dead White Males!”
“A minefield of unimaginable minorities waiting to be offended” — Harold Evans on American Universities. Political Correctness of any stripe starts with the best of intentions — as a clarion call. It then passes through various stages — as an irritating background whine or strident name-calling, for instance — until, at last, it emerges as the massed braying of lunatic donkeys. Unfortunately, all that is needed for the adherents of this New Ignorance to wield real power is for people to do nothing. In an age of information technology, sticks and stones can break your bones!
