Salocin

Wednesday morning, 6.00am. Tommy Norton wakes up in his Greenwich Village apartment. He does not notice the ruby glow on the horizon, the sight of the day dawning has long since lost all meaning for him. He has no time for such trivialities - the market opens in 149 minutes. He has already lost a full minute.

He walks to the bathroom and avoids making eye contact with the mirror while he rinses his face. He slept 4 hours last night, and his waking moment was filled with a dream in which he was being chased around central park in his underwear, in a blizzard, by an investment memorandum that wanted to skewer him with its pitchfork and bore an unsettling resemblence to Hillary Clinton. He makes a mental note not to watch the evening news while reviewing project plans in future.

He brushes his teeth while trying to identify the stale remains of a taste in his mouth. Tequila? Bourbon? It can be so hard to tell. The headache is familiar, present mostly at the temples and forehead, low down above the bridge of the nose.

Something's wrong. He can't put his finger on it, but something is terribly, awfully wrong. Different. The order of things is broken. It'll come to him.

His cupboard is filled with shirts arranged by size, all of them still in the cellophane wrapper the building laundry service uses. There are many sizes. The smaller ones are on the far left, untouched since they were laundered and pressed when he moved to New York after graduating from Harvard. One day he'll give them to charity. He reaches to the far right and, not for the first time, wonders if quality dress shirts shrink in the wash. It takes him 23 seconds to find two matching cufflinks in the pot on the dresser, a further 43 seconds to fit them to the cuffs of his shirt.

His subconscious is still working at the problem - the break in reality - trying to figure out what it is. It has the area of effect, the epicentre of the psychic earthquake, identified as the bedside table, but can seem to make no more progress from there.

His suit is picked off the back of the chair and he struggles briefly with the trousers, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, leaning heavily on the chair, which creaks threateningly. He then picks a pre-knotted tie from the 7 bundled together in the dresser drawer, scoops up the one he removed last night from the floor and drops it in with the others.

He turns towards the bed as he dons his jacket with a flourish. He is facing the bedside table. He pauses, his hands on the tie knot, checking it. Something terrible has happened, and he is moments away from understanding what it is.

There is a little black box on the table. It appears inert. He does not recognise it. There is something frightening about it - it represents a distance, a gap, a lack. It is dead. His mind struggles with understanding, the digital clock reads 06:13 the sleep is still too fresh in his mind. A sense of panic begins to rise in his throat, he feels nauseous. He puts his hand back on the chair for balance, trying to control his heartbeat. He is sweating, he is going to have to change his shirt. In his mind he sees a blinking red light. It is a pulse. A heartbeat. A lifeline. It is missing. The box is dead.

---

In the news today : BlackBerry's blackout leaves millions bereft.

Whether you're reading about Indian outrage over Richard Gere's behaviour towards Shilpa Shetty, or the homosexual rights movement's outrage over the words of a certain Grey's Anatomy actor, more and more news stories seem to be about the terrible offence experienced by communities or interest groups in response to a word, or a gesture, or an act.

I have this uncomfortable sense of dozens of special interest groups lying in wait for some unsuspecting public figure to make the smallest slip-up, giving them the slightest reason for offence. They have the hotlines to the journalists prepared, the righteous indignation armed and ready, and can't wait for the opportunity to leverage this for every bit of publicity and sympathy they can harvest in the name of their cause.

I find the complete lack of tolerance inherent in these organisations to be a deeply disturbing indication of their inner natures. It's fair to assume that teams of individuals are now trained to critically review the pronouncements of most recognisable individuals to assess the risk of offence to any possible group or party. A whole new field of work must have opened up – new job titles with it – “Senior Communications Correctness Officer”, anyone?

I have little patience for all this.

When I read about the reaction to Richard Gere's kiss, my first reflex was to think that, if these people were so intolerant, so quick to have the bile rise in their throats, and in response to something that – in a world as multi-cultured and varied as ours – could not have been expected to cause offense by those involved, then these offended parties did not deserve either an audience for their indignation, nor an apology for the act itself.

In the case of the “Gray's Anatomy” outrage, it was the use of a specific word (“faggot”) to describe a homosexual that got the gay rights lobby all fired up. Clearly, it's not hard to ascertain that this isn't a very appropriate thing to say, so the blame remains. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the reaction beggars belief. The agenda of the complainants is obvious: to create such a furore that the word becomes blacklisted, removed from language – that anyone using that word is instantaneously on the wrong side of right-and-wrong.

I'm against this sort of manipulation of the public psyche, and I'm against the form of witch-hunt that follows someone making such a statement. The actor in question, Isaiah Washington, was forced to issue a completely over-the-top apology, rife with self-flagellation and overwrought contrition, that was extreme to such a point that it was hard to take seriously.

"I apologize to T.R., my colleagues, the fans of the show and especially the lesbian and gay community for using a word that is unacceptable in any context or circumstance. By repeating the word Monday night, I marred what should have been a perfect night for everyone who works on "Grey's Anatomy." I can neither defend nor explain my behavior. I can also no longer deny to myself that there are issues I obviously need to examine within my own soul, and I've asked for help.

...issues I obviously need to examine within my own soul...

For crying out loud – he used a word. To hold this as proof-perfect of deeply-set prejudice is unfair in the extreme, but he was left with no choice but to act with extreme contrition because the self-appointed victims of his words, in their over-zealous defence, put his career in the balance.

Voltaire, the French poet, writer and philosopher, famously said, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. It frightens me that the allegedly progressive movements of our time, that defend the rights of minorities, the disadvantaged and the oppressed, have decided that the best way to achieve their aims is through attacks on this essential freedom Their favoured method of operation appears to be to take a single statement, or a single act – in many cases inspired by alcohol, exhaustion or stress rather than a thought-out argument (think Mel Gibson) – throw accusations and cast aspersions on people's characters that are far more damaging that the offence itself, and in this way garner publicity while illustrating the terrible consequences of ever uttering a single word against their chosen protectorate.

They deserve to be condemned for their intolerance and their willingness to take hostages far more than their targets deserve to be condemned for their lack of discretion.