Not a matter of freedoms (of speech and expression)
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that is becoming a source for
Indian-themed jokes
The folks over at VDare are having quite a field day with their Indian-themed posts. They even got into a bit of trouble with a letter from a reader mildly admonishing them for talking about slumdogs and curry smells when writing about Indian immigrants. They also got pretty creative describing the tip of the iceberg of Obama's Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra's troubles (I won't spell it out here, since the whole blog post is quite funny and worth reading. Hint: the metaphor deals once again with one of India's scrumptious dishes.)
Patrick Cleburne responded to the polite, but clearly hurt Indian reader that he doesn't plan any time soon on changing this kind of innocuous humor.
This is exactly what I said to the brouhaha that occurred after "Canada's most irritating lefty got himself into trouble" when he wrote about "kick[ing] things off with BBQ cat and rice at the Yang Sheng."
These are harmless, standard jokes. It doesn't really have much to do with political correctness, as Kathy Shaidle maintains, but with a shared tradition of jokes and pleasantries.
There's not much fun to making ethnic jokes because we have rules and laws that protect our freedoms of speech and expression. The point of such jokes is that they do make a jab at the "other", and while doing so, give us a sense of solidarity and cohesiveness, as in "Us vs. Them". But with the onslaught of multiculturalism, ethnic jokes are verboten, as the conservatives who descended on the Lefty Kinsella showed.
Of course, the solution to all this is to minimize the differences - the fewer the Chinese, the more we can make harmless jokes about them, and the less they will make a national and international furor out of these harmless jokes.
Having said that, Kathy certainly does her share of humorously (and more often pugnaciously) putting the "other" in his place. From wikipedia, she is a native of Hamilton, Ontario. Now, I have great respect for Hamiltonians. Perhaps it is the no-nonsense life of a steeltown, but I've always liked their direct approach to things. Now if only Torontonians would take example.
