The insanity of political correctness

Albert Einstein once said, "Earth is the insane asylum of the Universe". Sometimes I think he is right.

Bill Leake, the famous cartoonist,would no doubt agree with Albert Einstein. Last Wednesday Bill Leake gave a speech to mark the release of a book of his cartoons called Trigger Warning. In his speech he lamented the advice an older cartoonist gave him when he was just starting out.

When I met the great cartoonist Bill Mitchell about 34 years ago, he said, "Mate, a cartoonist only has to be funny once a day, but it's a lot harder than you'd think." He was right, but he had no idea how much harder it would be for me than it ever was for him.

For a start, for Mitchell to come up with a cartoon, all he had to do was take a serious political issue, exaggerate it to the point of ridiculousness, then draw what he saw when he got there. But I can't do that because the ideas our politicians come up with these days are utterly ridiculous to begin with. And if you're starting at the point of absurdity, where do you go from there? I mean, what am I going to have to come up with to make teachers in the Safe Schools program look ridiculous when they actually start giving jobs to gimps? And how long do you think it will be then before some gimps' rights campaigner accuses me of gimpophobia? It's only a matter of time.

Another reason the job's so much harder now than it was for Mitchell is because, unlike him, I can't just breezily assume people are looking at my cartoons hoping to get a laugh. Ever since conceptual art supplanted transcendent art, all art has been reduced to the level of graffiti. And to people reared on postmodernism and cultural relativism who can't tell the difference between Picasso and Banksy, I'm not a cartoonist drawing cartoons for a newspaper; I'm an artist exhibiting his work in a gallery that gets hundreds of thousands of visitors through the doors every day. And the work of a man like that has to be taken very seriously indeed. It has to be analysed. It has to be deconstructed. It has to be decoded by these people in a search for hidden meanings. And because art, like political activism, is a form of therapy, it's supposed to reinforce and confirm their prejudices, not challenge them.

Well, bugger that. Political correctness is a poison that attacks the sense of humour. Luckily for Mitchell, it was tipped into our water supply at around the time he retired and, since then, it's infected an awful lot of people. As the senses of humour of people suffering from PC atrophy, their sensitivity to criticism becomes more and more acute until they get to the stage where everything offends them and they lose the ability to laugh.

For people with chronic PC, feeling offended is about as good as it gets. A good cartoon gives them an excuse to parade their feelings of moral superiority in 140 characters or less, scrawled on the toilet door of social media where every other humourless halfwit who's seen the cartoon and felt offended too can join in…

Then, in October last year I realised there's another group of people who are just as capable of making life hell for me if they fail to be amused by my wit and artistry. It's just my luck that causing offence has been made an offence at the same time that taking offence has become fashionable. So now there's a mob that won't only punish you if your cartoon offends them, they'll punish you if it's ­offended someone else. They may be a little less murderous than your Islamist terrorists, but they're no less unhinged and dangerous. They're also driven by the same authoritarian impulse to silence anyone who transgresses against the unwritten laws of political correctness. I'm talking about the thought police at that rogue totalitarian outfit, the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Well, bugger them, too. Thank goodness for deplorables like you, that's all I can say. I knew I was in the company of fellow subversives, dissidents and weirdos when I opened my remarks with a potentially explosive "ladies and gentlemen" and no one complained.

Sadly, Bill Leake died of a heart attack two days after his final speech. Some of his journalist friends said that he died of a broken heart because of the vitriolic attacks on his person. Whatever the case, his passing makes his final words all the more pertinent.

If you believe today that a man is a man and a woman is a woman, you are a deplorable who is not keeping up with the times. No matter that every woman has two X chromosomes while every man has both an X and Y chromosome.

If you believe that every child needs a mother and a father, no matter what a family court judge may say, you are a homophobic bigot.

If you, as a man, say that children should not be subject to the radical sexual ideology of the Safe Schools advocates you are a fear mongering male supremacist.

Interestingly Bill Leake gave his final speech on 8 March and opened with these words,

Ladies and gentlemen, I know it is International Women's Day, so first I must apologise for not being a woman.

Bill's wry wit sums up the feeling of many men who feel as if every day they have to apologise for the biological reality of their manhood, whether it is International Women's Day or not.

That same political correctness attacks mothers who want to be full time carersfor their children, as it does fathers. Bill Leake is right to say it is a poison.

So, what can we do as mother and fathers who care for the future of our daughters and our sons, and who want to take a stand against the insanity of political correctness or should I say Cultural Marxism through our society?

We must take advice from Dr Ben Carson, world famous neurosurgeon and politician who said, "there is no society that can survive without values and principles and if we get caught up in political correctness, that nothing is right and nothing is wrong, then we go the same route as Ancient Rome. They did exactly the same thing, They forgot who they were. They stood for nothing and the fell for everything and they went right down the tubes".

So keep speaking up against the insanity of those who want to foist their errant beliefs on us and our children in the name of political correctness.

One more thing! Above all, don't forget to laugh. As Mark Twain said, "Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand". Robert Frost, with a touch of humour, probably inspired by Albert Einstein put it this way, "If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane".