IT also strikes me as perverse and strange that in an age where someone who is old has to be called chronologically gifted so as not to smack of ageism, someone like the harridan of the right, Ann Coulter, can slander and slam her little black heart out in mass media without being shut down, and the great liberal tradition of our best hopes can be somehow mislabeled with hateful names by folks who make good money doing so in print or on the air... I believe that political correctness is a bad idea, and that individual manners is a preferable alternative. When self-defined, voluntary codes of right action become mandated as group totems and shibboleths, they lose all their meaning.

A