The comedian says he didn't mean to cause offence. Only the feeble-minded would use that as a defence
Considering how many political-correctness-gone-mad stories turn out upon inspection to be thoroughly untrue, you could easily get the impression that this particular philosophy, along with its hated enforcer, the PC brigade, has run its course.
Whether people got bored with PC, or decided its work was done, or subsided into that passive sogginess that so troubles the prime minister, it is unusual these days to find a loony council accused of rewriting our treasured nursery rhymes or of exchanging Christmas for Winterval.
When, with the notable recent exception of Southwark council's intriguing "Colour Thief" substitute for Guy Fawkes night, did we last witness a cultural cringe extreme enough to inspire once-familiar allusions to McCarthyism, Big Brother, Stalinism, Newspeak, totalitarianism and, most popular, fascism?
Even the BBC's recent messing with AD and BC failed to achieve comparisons with Nazi Germany: epic political correctness fail. Somewhere between 2005 and today, a whole strand of modern life went missing.
All credit, then, to Ricky Gervais for outing the zillions of secret thought police who are still, as it turns out, hiding here unremarked in the manner of the Stasi, on the qui vive for any citizen, such as Gervais, with the courage to exercise his freedom of speech. In this case, as widely reported, the comedian simply likes to use the word "mong", as often as possible, whether as an insult, eg: "Susan Boyle ? looks like a mong" or as a meaningless pun, eg: "Good monging."
Why does he do this? Since it is not, manifestly, to make people laugh, the most convincing explanation is that Mr Gervais needs to act like an obnoxious bully on Twitter in order to make himself look defiantly transgressive and thereby draw attention to the fact that he has a new show starting on BBC2, featuring to transgressive comic effect a dwarf. After an exhaustive search for the perfect title, BBC2 came up with Life's Too Short.
As for "mong", there was always the danger that the sheer scale of Gervais's daring would not be instantly recognised outside showbusiness circles, where, in the face of relentless political correctness, the term has evidently not been censored out of existence. Elsewhere, apparently, the fashion is more for "retard" or, explicitly, "Down's", when people want, in a spirit of malice, to suggest someone is acting like a person with learning difficulties.
Anyway, it took some moments before Gervais's heavy mong-tweetage, which was accompanied by photographs of the comedian pulling mong faces, provoked enough criticism for the talented gurner to retaliate with the following rebuke: "Just to clarify for uptight people stuck in the past. The word 'mong' means Down's syndrome as much as the word 'gay' means happy."
Perhaps the ellipses of Twitter, not always the subtlest of media, explain why it is so hard to connect the changing definition of gay, a word with a wholly benign original sense and which was deliberately adopted by homosexuals, with the partial dilution of "mong", derived from mongoloid, a word first applied to Down's babies in the 1860s and rejected as offensive by clinicians and affected people since the 1960s.
You might as well argue that for Gervais to say "mong" is just like the Duchess of Cornwall saying "wicked".
Actually, if the word is as harmless as he claims, there is no reason why we should not hear the duchess remarking, after an arduous handshaking session: "I feel totally monged out", where mong means, according to Gervais, wearing the mantle of Samuel Johnson, "dopey" or "ignorant".
In reality, according to people on both sides of the mong argument, Gervais is wrong: its meaning has scarcely evolved at all.
Loyal fans have confessed that they, too, love using the word, as part of a proud, disability-derived vocabulary that also includes flid, scoper and spaz.
Others, including close relations of people with learning disabilities, have powerfully described what it is like to be called a mong by thugs who are unlikely to become enlightened on this point when they find they are language-sharing with the world-famous comedian.
Rather than decide, on this evidence, to avoid giving comfort to people who have harried disabled people into the grave, Gervais thought for a bit and created, for the benefit of "the humourless PC brigade", a brand-new word, combining tweet and mongol, "twongols", a coinage which may be as welcome to his critics, since it confirms that he does indeed enjoy jeering at people with Down's, as it is delightful to his supporters, who simply cannot understand why spazzers should enjoy special protection from the thought police.
Are we not, as at least one Gervais fan has proposed, witnessing a return to Nazi Germany? Good point. You certainly have to go back a long way to find this level of extreme, open contempt for disabled people, even if they never benefited as much as other minority groups from the enhanced sensitivity and respect which accompanied the absurder excesses of political correctness. Somehow, without the oppressive censorship alleged by George Bush and today's Gervais supporters, most women, ethnic groups, gay people, religious worshippers, Travellers and, outside the government, fat people really did see a decline in dehumanising incivility from people who only, really, needed to learn how it sounded from the receiving end.
With his choice of disability as the focus for wordplay and tests of his rabble-rousing influence, Gervais has, one hopes usefully, illustrated where habits of political correctness ran out of steam.
Uncomplicated by any humour that would serve the "all great jokes are offensive" defence, his "mong" Twitter stream constitutes a perfect argument for reviving the spirit of PC until people who would never use the N word or speak obscenely to women come to accept the equal barbarity and betrayal of the most vulnerable that is Rickyspeak.
Of course, his personal limitations are also usefully on display. One day, Gervais may wish that some guardian angel or kindly inner censor had stopped him from exposing such a complete affinity with thick playground bullies who target the one kid who can never retaliate.
For every fellow spaz-baiter now worshipping Gervais on Twitter, there will be another who follows the same Twitter stream and notices a dependency on victimisation, as opposed to mental agility, to a degree that might trouble a less confident comedian.
Still, perhaps the dimensions of his talent will be perfectly matched to those of his co-star in the new BBC2 comedy with the title by Mr Pooter. Even if Gervais has disgraced himself it sounds unmissable. How, without watching In Short Order, or Coming up Shortly, or The Long and the Short, or whatever it's called, can we ever hope to understand why Carol Thatcher had to be sacked and the Ross/Brand call was an appalling outrage, while BBC2's self-styled mong specialist gets himself a brand-new show in which he is paid to make fun of dwarfs?
If in doubt, watch his trailer.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/23/ricky-gervais-offensive-downs-syndrome
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