Taking Back The Language

The defining moment for me during last night’s election results was this one: Newly elected Liberal MP in Kings-Hants (NS), Scott Brison:

“There’s not a lot of room for Red Tories in a party with a lot of red necks.”

This morning, I’m wondering where the outrage is.
There is none, of course, because it’s acceptable in the media to use cultural slurs against Western Canadians.
And sadly, it’s been acceptable to us for too long. Or it never occurs to us that the slur is serious, intentionally dehumanizing and directly aimed at core conservative values and belief systems integral to our heritage and western history. A couple of weeks ago I took a swipe at the CBC’s Michael Enright for “criticizing the media for assuming” that the conservative Fraser Institute was the Droolers and Knuckledraggers Association. He never did “get” it. He was incapable of recognizing that his use of those terms, in and of themselves, to describe conservative thought was dehumanizing, whether or not he was defending the Fraser Institute in this instance. He wasn’t criticizing the marginalization of conservatives by the media, he was criticizing them for automatically dismissing the Fraser Institute as part of that “drooler” crowd.
The biased conduct by the national media during this campaign has been brazen. From day one, a blatant double standard has been applied to the Conservative party members who dared open their mouths and express personal conservative values. Social conservates in the Liberal Party enjoyed a free pass, their “gaffes” unreported, the contraversial backgrounds of Liberal advisors unexamined.
The media drove the agenda, hijacked the campaign and framed every discussion on so-called “social issues” as an “us vs them-who-would-kill-gays and enslave women”. Stephen Harper was branded as “scary” . Apparently, Liberal corruption at the senior civil service isn’t “scary”, but invoking the constitutionally entrenched notwithstanding clause is the chainsaw massacre of Canadian Politics.
The same thing happened to health care. No rational debate of private vs public ever occured. It was good vs evil, right vs wrong, Canadian vs the evil baby-killing American system. During the Klein health care frenzy nobody turned a camera east to the blatant Canada Health Act violator – Quebec.
The Conservative campaign has to take some blame for that. They shied away from those direct comparisons. In the well-predicted hindsight of a zero seat performance, it was an opportunity squandered to put Paul Martin’s challenge under a public microscope and pound home the message of “double standard”. They didn’t, and why they didn’t I will never know.
If Canadian conservatives, both big C and small c, are ever to find a voice in this country and rescue it from it’s headlong collapse into international disintegration – we must begin at both the top political echelons of the party, and the grassroots, by reclaiming the language and demanding our own share of protection under political correctness guidelines. It is not a silly “get even” suggestion. It is critical, if we are to remove this tool from the hands of the opposition.
The most obvious first target is to eliminate the use of the word “redneck” as an acceptable tactic to stifle debate before it occurs. Make the use of the word “redneck” as unacceptable as “redskin”, “raghead” and “frog”. Then we can go to work on “hillybilly”, “cowby” and all the other sniggering cultural insults as they surface. It’s an easy one to attack because it’s so common and used so casually. Tackling “redneck” would seed doubt in the minds of moderate Canadians that maybe – just maybe – it is not appropriate to marginalize conservatives with cheap namecalling tactics.
This week Conservative party officials should hold a news conference. That news conference should have a sole purpose – to demand a public apology from MP Scott Brison for his derogatory cultural slur against Western Canadians.
Get this namecalling issue on the table. Stop allowing the left to write the Encyclopedia of Political Correctness. Point out just what terms like this are intended to do, and that their use is a cheap device to avoid debate. Until that happens, western Canada will remain vulnerable to being political dismissiveness as uneducated, unintelligent, unsophisticated, and untrustworthy. And so long as we permit it, we have no one but ourselves to blame.
It’s time to demand respect, and to settle for nothing less than 100% compliance in the language of both the left and the media.