DENVER—Every time I perform, I start out with a few comments about Safe Spaces and Trigger Warnings.
I flash onto the screen a picture of a sensory deprivation chamber in a hostel in downtown Cleveland and say, “This is your safe space. It’s not here.”
And then I show a 15-second clip of a guy emptying about 47,000 rounds of machine-gun fire into a battered car, and I say, “Whenever I feel like pulling the trigger, I probably will.”
That’s why I was a little startled at the meet-and-greet after the Saturday-night show at the Denver Film Festival. A handful of people had driven down from Fort Collins, all of them somehow associated with Colorado State University.
Colorado State may not be high on your list of trendsetting institutions, but anyone who follows political-correctness battles is well aware of it. To use just one example, the “Director of Diversity and Inclusion at Associated Students of Colorado State University” (yes, that’s a thing) recently said that students shouldn’t use the phrase “Long time, no see,” because it’s offensive to Asians.
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I’m not exactly sure why it’s offensive to Asians, but if I had to take a wild guess, it’s because someone in the “diversity and inclusion” business has become so immersed in systems of policing the language—they think about it so many hours of the day—that they’ve ingested every example of pidgin English spoken by every actor of every nationality in every movie and TV show of the past century until they consider themselves experts on phrasing that sounds ethnic. A light bulb goes on in their collective judgmental heads and they say, “That sounds like something Charlie Chan would say.” And if your response to that is “So what? Charlie Chan was a brilliant Honolulu police detective who solved all his cases,” the response would be something like “Cultural appropriation! Cultural appropriation!”
We don’t realize it because it’s buried so deep down in our subconscious selves, but saying “Long time, no see” means we hate Asian people.
As I say, this type of imaginative speech-scolding emanates regularly from Colorado State, which must have an army of inventive censors poring over everything that is written, spoken, or dog-whistled by its 33,000 students. It doesn’t really make sense, though, since Colorado State is a land-grant college just like Texas A&M, Iowa State, Mississippi State, and all the other schools created in the 19th century to foster the study of agriculture, military science, and mechanical engineering. You expect this kind of insanity from Yale—and you get it from Yale—but you don’t expect it from a school that historically trains farmers and machinists before they ship off for their three years in the Marine Corps.
