American on tour in China many years ago was distracted from his sightseeing itinerary by loud, angry shouts which seemed to be coming from a cluster of people on a side street in downtown Peking (now Beijing). Close investigation revealed two coolies, face-to-face, angrily shouting invectives at each other, surrounded by curious onlookers. After witnessing the altercation for a moment or two, the American turned to one of the older spectators and asked, "Why doesn’t one of them punch the other in the mouth?" The old man recoiled in horror at what had just been asked him. "Oh no," he replied, "each man knows that the first one who resorts to violence will be deemed by the onlookers as being the first one to have run out of ideas."

A marvelous story. Or should I say parable, given that it both reiterates and illustrates a great truth, well-expressed in an old nursery rhyme, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me"? Clearly, it was OK for the two coolies to call each other names and say the most vile things about each other as long as they didn’t come to blows. Right on, I'd say.

Now, with your permission, I’d like to expand the reach of that story to reflect what I believe to be a disturbing and dangerous trend in this country over the last several decades.

You see, I submit to you that there are now two other kinds of violence, each far more common today than the physical kind. I call them "administrative violence" and "social violence."

By "administrative violence" I mean the establishment and implementation of a speech code by some authority — e.g., a level of government, a large company, a college campus — with violators severely dealt with.

And by "social violence" I mean peer pressure manifested by excluding wayward folks from all normal social activities as punishment for exercising their right of free speech.

All in the name of "BROTHERLY LOVE," "HARMONY," "CIVILITY," you name it.

In a pig’s eye, says I.

I think that the PC police do what they do because they’re the ones who’ve run out of ideas.

You know, the irony of it all is that the PC police seem to believe that what they do is totally consistent with the best democratic traditions of the Founding Fathers. But from what I’ve read, those old boys didn’t seem to be the least bit concerned about each other’s "sensitivity" all the time they were hammering out two of the finer documents ever to see the light of day — the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Which brings to mind the process by which oysters produce pearls. They’ve gotta be irritated into doing it.

And who can forget Harry Lime’s incisive comment in The Third Man: "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Think about it.