1993 Year in Review : CORRECTNESS : To PC or Not to PC--That Was the Question

Just when you were beginning to worry that your dog might file a lawsuit unless you call him a Canine American, along comes an anti-trend that just may rescue you from your earnest and well-meaning confusion about just how to be politically correct.

While 1992 may have been a year of practicing safe politics in entertainment and the arts, of trying not to offend any segment of America on the issues of race, sex, religion and violence, it looks as though 1993 has brought a new wave of political in -correctness your way.

For better or worse, 1993 has been a Beavis and Butt-headed kind of year, with the backlash against political correctness in your face everywhere within the entertainment industry’s traditionally liberal circles. Even the term itself has been reduced from two imposing words to the wimpy diminutive PC .

As in last spring’s provocative movie “Falling Down”--starring Michael Douglas as a laid-off defense worker who snaps during an L.A. traffic jam and sets off on a crusade of revenge--a number of the entertainment industry’s most popular figures are as mad as hell about adhering to a PC code of behavior--and are not taking it anymore.

The talk waves in New York and Los Angeles continue to be dominated by Howard Stern, reigning king of ethnic, scatological and misogynistic humor and proud creator of the self-explanatory musical innovation “Butt Bongo.” Also remaining popular on radio were Patrick J. Buchanan, the tireless one-man crusade for the religious right, and girth-impaired ultraconservative Rush Limbaugh.

Perhaps the most blatant political incorrectness of the year was the Ted and Whoopi thing at the Friars Club. In case you were in a coma during October, that’s when boyfriend Ted Danson showed up at a Friars roast of Whoopi Goldberg wearing blackface and spouting racial slurs. While the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, then-New York Mayor David N. Dinkins and director Spike Lee voiced their outrage, Ted, Whoopi and the Friars defended their right to be offensive within the context of the previously all-male Friars’ longstanding traditions.

And more from the Where-There’s-Smoke-There’s-Friars Department: At a Friars roast of Roseanne Arnold earlier this year, jokes were aimed at comedian Sandra Bernhard’s sexuality and appearance.

Speaking of sexual incorrectness, expect Michael Crichton’s soon-to-be-released novel “Disclosure” to raise feminist hackles in 1994 by dealing with a case in which a woman harasses a man in the workplace. Crichton’s novel “Rising Sun” has already been blasted for Japan-bashing, as was this year’s movie version.

In pop music, while some politically correct local radio stations banded together earlier this month to ban three offensive words--a derogatory term for an African American and two denigrating references to women--the rock group Guns N’ Roses headed in another direction with a widely criticized decision not to delete its version of a Charles Manson song called “Look at Your Game, Girl” on its new album.

In a recent Times story on radio’s Stern, Dan O’Day, a programming and on-air talent consultant, summed up Stern’s influence in a way that captured the tone of the year as a whole: “You’re going to see imitators all over the country now, and they are going to be loud and opinionated and obnoxious and dirty.”

Speaking of loud, opinionated, obnoxious and dirty (that spells “L.O.O.D”), let us turn now to television, which celebrated

Butt-headedness on a grand scale this year. July marked the debut of comedian Bill Maher’s series “Politically Incorrect” on cable TV’s Comedy Central, which has explored such topics as “reverse sexism” (by which women misuse the legitimate concerns of feminism to subjugate men) and delights in poking fun at such earnest PC actions as celebrities wearing red AIDS ribbons: “I’ve been at many Hollywood functions where they hand them out like holy water. If you don’t wear one, does that mean you’re for AIDS?” Maher has said.

And last, but not least, Butt-headed are MTV’s highly popular animated characters Beavis and Butt-head, two adolescents who rejoice in bathroom humor, misogynistic jokes and their own dull-normal IQs. A sort of Neanderthal Siskel and Ebert, they offer couch-potato commentary on MTV videos, providing such insights as “that sucks.”

While 1993 may have been the Year of the Butt-head, ironically, it may also have left us with one of the few truly politically correct terms still available to those determined to maintain the PC posture. This egalitarian term implies nothing about gender, age, race, religion, sexual orientation, income level or where you can park your car.

Anyone can be a Butt-head--or more correctly, a Butt-head American.