Eat more cookies

So the other day, Mit Romney got in trouble with the media for referring to Boston’s “Big Dig” disaster as a “tar baby” he’d rather not have touched. (Check out http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19990212 for a description of the origin of the tar baby story in American folklore.) Romney’s context was that the term is slang for a “sticky situation” in which the deeper one gets involved, the harder it is to extricate oneself.

Unfortunately for Mr. Romney, the term is also used as derogatory slang for people of color, so he’s been villified in the media for his insensitivity in using the term at all. This kind of stuff gets lots of people’s undies in a bind when the person who says the offensive term is, like Romney, a presidential hopeful for 2008.

Now I’m no friend of Romney, but c’mon people! He obviously did not know that “tar baby” was a pejorative, and we should cut the guy some slack. You know it’s entirely possible that this white man was raised in a family that did not use derogatory racial epithets. Just how does a white person in America learn all the words we’re “not supposed” to use? Do we need to provide white kids with a “dictionary of potentially offensive terms one should never use”?

We may think we’re making the world kinder and gentler with political correctness, but there is a cost: Our public officials turn into mindless automotons who refuse to say anything that hasn’t first been approved by their “handlers,” all in the name of electability. God forbid someone speaks in public with a little spontaneity!

Now leaving soapbox.
(tjo)