Tiptoe through your two lips

OK, now get this straight: Black folks are not articulate. Never, no way, no-how. Not Barack Obama, not Martin Luther King, not even Alan Keyes, who makes every president since Lincoln sound like Porky Pig.

And just why can’t you call a black person articulate? Well, because that would mean that most of the other zillions of blacks in this wide world must therefore be inarticulate! (Sure, you could drive a coach-and-four through the logic hole in this sentence, but the priesthood of the Politically Correct doesn’t care. For them, language is just a tool for Orwellian thought control, leading eventually to Orwellian political control.)

By the same reasoning, calling Jessica Alba “pretty” equates to calling all other women ugly. Welcome to the global PC party, and please park your brains at the door.

A sincere compliment may now be lambasted as a slur or gaffe whenever the PC elite decide it’s not cool enough, and if you’re not up to date on their code words, you’re guilty of an insult. Good old American politeness has metastasized into a parody of common sense, demanding with grim religious fervor that you adhere rigidly to the overblown PC rules and regulations, or pay the price.

That price can be steep. Just ask any good-hearted soul who has lost his job or been forced to undergo humiliating punishment (“sensitivity training”) for committing some invisible offense that even a Philadelphia lawyer might not comprehend.

My father once greeted a group of black teenagers on a Watts street corner with a sincerely cheery, “Good morning, boys!” and was met with a surly chorus of, “Where you from, mon? Mississippi?” He was lucky to escape with his hide intact. The key to understanding the young fellows’ ire: their readiness to hear in Dad’s greeting a hostile arrogance that simply wasn’t there.

In contrast, the National Federation of the Blind recently passed a resolution condemning the use of politically correct terms to describe blindness.

And deaf people now object to being called “hearing-impaired.” The time-honored “deaf” is A-OK with them.

It’s refreshing to find that the blind don’t see – and the deaf don’t hear – a hostile arrogance that just isn’t there. It’s a case of the blind leading the sighted.

Where, oh where, have they taken my language?

I awoke one morning to discover that the entire Near East had disappeared, gone without a trace. In its place sat the now-bloated Middle East, stretching from the Libyan Desert to the Hindu Kush.

Gone were all my fireman friends … along with those ever-helpful waiters and stewardesses … and even the legions of old folks. (The brilliant Stan Freberg picked up on this trend way back in the ’50s with his parody song, “Elderly Man River.”)

But hey, the PC shift wasn’t all bad: At least we got rid of those fat people and wetbacks and juvenile delinquents (who were neatly replaced by plus-sized folks, undocumented workers, and troubled youth).

Even before my time, alms had been taken over by the government, which rechristened it poor relief, then later morphed it into public assistance, which sounds noble even if it expanded into Social Security, which is bankrupting the whole country.

As a bonus, we stopped all the heart attacks, replacing them with cardiovascular events – which do sound like something you surely wouldn’t want to miss out on.

All this reflects the trend noted by George Carlin: the multiplication of syllables at the expense of meaning, as in the war-by-war progression of shell shock, battle fatigue, operational exhaustion and post-traumatic stress disorder. Carlin also laments, as do I, the banishment of toilet paper, sneakers, false teeth and the city dump. It’s not easy to make a whole dump disappear, but they did it.

So what’s the point of PC? Is it just a post-adolescent argot designed to separate the insiders from the rest of us? Is it merely the latest in the annual parade of slang words to boost the self-image of the nouveau hip?

Afraid not. PC is far more sinister. It’s newthink obfuscation, deliberately designed to separate the average Joe and Jane even further from reality.

PC is what William S. Lind rightly calls “cultural Marxism,” a coating of multiculturalism atop the now-outdated political Marxism-Leninism. See his landmark essay on the subject.

But most of all, PC is the growing basis for a new morality, defined not by righteous behavior, but righteous terminology. This twisted morality is intended to be in turn the basis for a new, highly intolerant religion that brags endlessly about its tolerance, even citing it as the hallmark of its fairness and enlightenment.

Now if all this strikes you as bitter, I assure you it’s not. In fact, some of my best friends are PC.