Frogs and
snails and puppy-dogs' tails-
That's what little boys are made of...
 other Goose wasn't
kidding. My 6-year-old boy Ollie and his little pal have had a new
game these past few weeks: World Trade Center. What you do is, you
stack up two towers of wooden blocks, or anything else that will
stack, then you crash toy planes into them, yelling: "Wheeeeeee!
Boooooooom!!" My wife caught them at it in the living
room and scolded them indignantly. Half an hour later I found them
out behind the garage, playing ... guess what? World Trade Center:
"Wheeeeeee! Kah-B-O-O-O-O-OM!!!!"
I confess I
am not going to lose much sleep over this. A certain appetite for
violence is right and proper in boys, according to me. I'd be upset
to think my son approved of the World Trade Center attacks, but
I don't blame him for being impressed by them. Sure, I need to have
another go at explaining the difference between (a) wanton violence
by entrepreneurial psychopaths in the grip of crazy ideas, and (b)
measured violence done in the interest of justice or self-preservation
by authorized agents of a civilized state. At age six, however,
kids have an awful lot to learn, and you can't expect them to learn
it all at once. There are tenured professors at prestigious universities
to whom the distinction between (a) and (b) is not clear, so it's
not too surprising to find that one's first-grader is blithe about
it.
What these
six-year-olds are displaying is a lack of Emotional Correctness.
Now there is a phrase I wish I had thought up myself —
but then, I wish I had written A Man In Full , invented Collateralized
Mortgage Obligations, and asked out Claire Cooper when I was 17.
Sometimes another person gets there first, you just have to resign
yourself and move on.
Emotional Correctness
means having the right feelings, just as Political Correctness means
having the right opinions. "Right," in both halves of
that sentence, means: "Approved of by schoolteachers, municipal
union bosses, corporate Human Resources officers, Katie Couric,
Hillary Clinton, the New York Times, and any college professor
of any subject that does not require the extraction of square roots."
In the wake of the September 11th attacks (a phrase we have all
typed so often now that I would set it up with a hot key on Macro
Express, but for a vague feeling that it would be Emotionally
Incorrect to do so.... I'll get to the point in a minute, I promise)
a great blanket of Emotional Correctness settled on this land.
One of Roz
Chast's New Yorker cartoons in late September caught the
mood. A woman is standing outside a bookstore looking with a dismayed
expression at a book that is on prominent display in the store window.
The book has a huge sticker on it saying: NOW WITH 50% LESS IRONY!
Irony was out, see, along with satire, sarcasm, parody, lampoon,
travesty, caricature (thanks, Mr. Roget) and definitely black
humor. New Yorker in fact took a big hit in the wake of the
etcetera. They pulled all their cartoons, which of course meant
that there was no point opening the thing at all. The second week
they brought back cartoons, but as the "This-Week's-Magazines"
round-up in the New York Post pointed out, took care to make
sure that none of them was very funny.
The Post,
recently subject to an anthrax attack, has been having its own troubles
with EC. The October 20th edition ran a cartoon by Sean Delonas.
The cartoon had a left-hand frame showing some Post editors
in conversation, one of them emitting a speech balloon saying: "What
sort of twisted sicko would send us anthrax?" In the right-hand
frame was a twitching Mort Zuckerman at his desk licking an envelope,
a big jar labeled ANTHRAX close at hand. Zuckerman publishes the
Daily News, the Post's rival newspaper. The Post
has since been swamped with letters and e-mails saying: "That's
not funny!" Personally, I laughed out loud; but then, people
tell me that I am to good taste what Zsa Zsa Gabor was to women's
lib.
Look: We are
well into this thing now. The shock has worn off. Our jaws, that
were hanging loose in horror and disbelief seven weeks ago, are
now set firm with defiance and determination. I am truly sorry for
those who have died from anthrax, and for the others who are ill.
The anthrax attacks are of a piece with the suicide bombings, though
— we all know that. It is all one thing, and we are, as I said,
well into it now. We need some humor at this point to help us along,
and I don't think we should be too fussy about what makes our friends
and colleagues laugh. Humor is an important part of the process
of collective healing. Humor, even — perhaps especially
— dark humor, is in fact a healing and a soothing thing altogether.
It is a defiant assertion of our humanity in the face of the unspeakable.
Or not quite "in the face of": as now, it comes up in
the period of release when the unspeakable has receded a little.
It is all a matter of timing. If you have ever been together with
others in a really terrifying white-knuckle situation, you know
there is no joking at the time. Soon afterwards, though, someone
makes the first wisecrack, and all present laugh a little too loud,
even hysterically perhaps, by way of release.
Military humor
is like that. Anyone who has been around soldiers much knows that
they are not shy about laughing at the dangers and horrors of their
work. "Sarge! Sarge! I've lost my leg!" "No you haven't,
son. Look, it's over there in that bush..." Combat memoirs
are sometimes very funny: Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That
is an instance. Towards their enemies, fighting men are even less
restrained. The squaddies (British Army enlisted men) sent off in
1982 to recover the Falkland Islands, which Argentina had re-named
"The Malvinas," sang, to the tune of Cliff Richards's
Summer Holiday:
We're all
going to the Malvinas.
Gonna kill us a **** or two...
(The omitted
four-letter word is an anagram of "icps.") I'd tell you
the song the squaddies in Ulster were singing when Irish terrorist
thug Bobby Sands was on hunger strike the year before, but after
my "Israel,
Taiwan, Ulster" piece last week, my e-mail-box is already
clogged up with outraged IRA fans droning on about the Saxon Yoke,
800 years of oppression, and the wickedness of Oliver Cromwell,
so I shall refrain out of concern for the tender sensibilities of
terrorist supporters. BTW, where can I get one of those mirrors
on a long handle for spotting bombs under my car?
Notwithstanding
the reservations implied in all that, I find I have much less of
a problem with EC than I have with PC. Looking back at my own responses
this past seven weeks, in fact, I find that, with one or two minor
lapses, I have been EC more or less by instinct. Far as I'm concerned,
that makes EC much more acceptable than PC. Nobody is PC by instinct.
Rather the contrary, in my opinion: PC goes against all the grain
of civilized human thinking. Right now, though, I feel I am starting
to lose my bearings a little. Plainly it is now OK to make jokes;
but what is it OK to make jokes about? I don't think I'm
ready for World Trade Center jokes, and in fact don't think I ever
shall be. I'm ready for jokes about pretty much anything else, though,
including — especially! — jokes about that pig-ugly sob
who planned and launched those attacks, and his legions of rag-head
disciples. Oops — am I allowed to say "rag-head"?
Am I allowed to poke fun at his religion? (At the time of the Iranian
hostage crisis, the London satirical magazine Private Eye
ran a photograph of a mosque congregation all knelt over with their
foreheads touching the ground, above the caption: "In Teheran,
the search for Ayatollah Khomeini's missing contact lens continues...")
Or is this one of those things like Jewish humor, which only Jewish
people are allowed to indulge in? Have I meandered out of the zone
of EC into PC? It sure is hard to keep this stuff straight. Katie,
Hillary, could you give me some guidance here, please?
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