ON A MATTER OF SEMANTICS...

Did you know that “overpopulation” is actually viewed as a judgmental word? A word that has become “racially, religiously and ethnically sticky, and thus totally uncool.”

Well, I only learned this recently.

But it is apparently a fact that for decades no one in the demographic field has touched the word “overpopulation” with a bargepole. Instead, a genre was emerging: semantic escape from verbal commitment. Another way of putting this is to say that 'semantics' are a means used to elude the properties of a gist that are essential to it being it. And political correctness, thus understood, is an extremely agile conviction, an amalgam of lingua franca, pig-headedness and wishful thinking; but astonishingly, it is a conviction - indeed a doctrine - that remains a central tenet of urban cosmopolitanism in the West.

Indeed, it is hard to run against a movement. And I’m being sensible here.

Converting “queer” into “gay,” was the antidote to arguably the most notorious and certainly the most ambiguous sex-related phenomenon of the last century. As Raymond Chandler said in The Long Goodbye: "The queer is the artistic arbiter of the age. The pervert is the top guy now." Or you can turn a blatant miscarriage of justice into a politically correct comedy featuring O. J. Simpson as a saint. One ought to realize, of course, what kind of havoc can be wreaked with this sort of story by a director with an ability to believe his own fantasies and the requisite measure of hidden contempt. So instead of using the term “overpopulation” why not refer to it as “Non-invasive Consensual Acknowledgement Of Global Demographic Surplus Bounty (NCARGDS)?

Well, I am afraid the answer isn't that simple; and let’s cut to the chase on this, shall we?

Humanism is an ancient philosophy based on the idea that human existence may be bettered through reason. So when, in the deteriorating relationship between the global economy and the earth's ecosystem, the sun disappears in a gritty haze and traffic crawls through a noontime gloom with headlights ablaze on a planet swept by hate, xenophobia and toxic industrial effluents, there is, so far as I am concerned, no such semantic support structure. In fact, my thinking is not only “correct” - it is visionary. And like all visionary nightmares, I’m compulsively and horrifyingly attracted to it.

(Alternatively, of course, you can always try and solve a problem by pretending it doesn’t exist!)

Written in my own hand on 28 May in the year of grace 2008.

Dreamy