december: I had vowed to cease this topic, but your logical and effecive arguments have brought me to ruination.
Happy to help! Don’t thank me, thank Cecil. 
What you say about the song is true. I said the wong was positive, because it celebrates the singer’s joy at being admitted into an Indian tribe. Certainly the treatment of Indians in that song is oodles kinder than the treatment of Roman Catholics in Piss Christ.
Ai yi yi, december, I try to help, but you just mix everything up again in a huge heap of inapt analogies!..Okeydokey. My point about “I’m an Indian, Too” was not that it was somehow hateful or hostile—you need not plead with me to remember that it’s not “unkind”—just that it leans on lame stereotypes that are now widely considered embarrassing and offensive. Ain’t nobody going out there to burn Irving Berlin in effigy for having written it, okay? The producers of the revival have just decided that its taste level is not acceptable for modern audiences.
And how on earth do you get to the notion that Serrano’s “Piss Christ” is analogous, as a source of offense, to “I’m an Indian, Too”? You seem to have a muddled notion that all types of “offensiveness” are the same thing. They’re not. “Piss Christ” is offensive to the beliefs of many Christians (why do you think it’s just RC’s, btw? you do realize that not all Christians are Roman Catholic, don’t you?) because they feel that Serrano placed the crucifix in a beaker of urine in his photograph deliberately to mock the crucifix and what it stands for. (I’m not at all sure that that is what the artist meant by it, personally; when I looked at this reproduction, the immersion in urine (with cow’s blood in the composition too, btw) seemed to be intended to imply some hellish fiery glare of physical torment and degradation, which IMHO is not at all an inappropriate or insulting motif for the sufferings of the Passion. What do you think?)
In any case, that is not the same thing as an offensive stereotype of Roman Catholics in particular. A portrayal of Roman Catholics as mindless drones being cringingly servile before hypocritical, manipulative, wine-swilling, choirboy-fondling priests would be an offensive stereotype. Mocking someone’s beliefs (assuming that that’s what Serrano really intended) is not the same thing as reducing their individuality to a set of uniform and laughable characteristics. It may not be any kinder, but it’s not the same thing.
Also, don’t forget this show is a comedy.
Right. As such, the audience has a right to expect the songs to be funny; all the more reason, IMHO, to remove “I’m an Indian Too”.
The characters of Annie Oakley, her siblings, and Buffalo Bill are crudely drawn. “Doin’ What Comes Natcherly” is a more offensive song than “I’m an Indian, Too” – except that Indians are PC icons.
I agree that “hillbilly” jokes are (understandably, although unfairly) less likely to provoke outrage and resentment these days than “redskin” jokes—the stereotypical “hillbilly”, after all, is white, and almost all stereotypes about white people are less emotionally loaded than ones about minorities, because they haven’t been so harmful to their subjects in the course of the last several decades or centuries. But I also note that “Doin’ What Comes Natcherly” relies somewhat less on group stereotypes than “I’m an Indian” does; Sister Lou and all the rest of them are, after all, characters in Annie’s own family. You can almost sort of believe that “Doin’ What Comes Natcherly” is really just about a group of comic individuals. You can’t even begin to pretend that “Hatchet Face” and “Falling Pants” and “Running Nose” and the other “Indians” are intended as individuals.
*In fact, your other examples also support the point I was making. As you say, certain stereotypes about Indians and Blacks, and (to a lesser degree) Jews are not PC. However, it’s open season on criticism of Catholics, Fundamentalists, military people, White men, police (AKA “pigs”), Southerners, Republicans, Italian, etc. *
Oh mercy, here we go again. In the first place, there is no “PC orthodoxy” in favor of promulgating offensive and insulting stereotypes about anybody, okay? There is no bloody “PC doctrine” saying that you must treat blacks and Jews with respect as individuals but it’s perfectly fine to go up to a random Southerner and say “Well hello theah, Colonel, Ah bet you-all are just a-hankering to get out on the veranda and sip yourself a fahn mint joooolep, aren’t y’all?” (Bleah, the things I go through to fight ignorance. :))
In the second place, yes, as I said above, most stereotypes about members of the cultural majority (and all the stereotypical categories you mentioned there are associated with white Christians, aka the cultural majority, you’ll notice) don’t provoke the shock and outrage that tends to follow on bigotry about minorities. I certainly don’t condone that inequality, and as I stated, it is emphatically not part of any “PC code”. But can you understand that one very important reason for that inequality is simply that stereotypes about the cultural majority tend not to be as damaging as those about minorities? Yes, it is indeed a damn shame that anyone should think it’s okay to sneer at white southern Republican military men. But have you noticed that white southern Republican military men are nonetheless running the country? A very important reason that those stereotypes aren’t as shocking as the ones about blacks, Hispanics, or gays is that they are taken much less seriously. That doesn’t mean I condone them or that I don’t know that there are situations where they can be taken seriously and have great power to hurt. But it does not mean that objections to stereotypes about minorities are therefore automatically invalid or hypocritical, either.
(Can you imagine a TV program like The Sopranos, but where the gangsters are all Black or all American Indian?).
Of course not, for the reason I just stated.
*I can remember laughing at Tom Lehrer’s song, “Be Prepared,” decades ago. Boy Scouts have been an acceptible target long before the issue of gay exclusion came to the forefront. *
Oh december, you’d make angels weep. You’ve got it exactly backwards! I remember "Be Prepared perfectly well too (“Be prepared! And be careful not to do Your good deeds When there’s no one watching you. Be sure to hide those reefers Where they will not be found, And be careful not to smoke them when the Scoutmaster’s around; For he only will insist that they be shared—be prepared! Be prepared To hide that pack of cigarettes, Don’t make book If you cannot cover bets…”). But it’s not an offensive stereotype of Boy Scouts: it’s parodying the squeaky-clean image of the Scouting organization! Christ on a croissant, december (oh no! was that anti-Catholic?? mea culpa!! :rolleyes: ), isn’t it as plain as day to you that Lehrer was not intending to encourage the impression that all Boy Scouts are selfish, hypocritical, pot-smoking, sister-pimping, book-making, liquor-swilling, Girl-Scout-humping juvenile delinquents?!?!! The reason the goddamn song is funny is because it is so obviously inventing a “Scout” that completely contradicts all the ideals that the Scouting organization really and consciously maintains!! Don’t you see the difference between that and an offensive stereotype? (sob wring, Collounsbury, save me!! I’m trapped in the maelstrom of december-illogic! ack…gulp…guk…the whirling chaos…all round me…cannot…brea—)
These examples all demonstrate the point that PC supports some groups to the max and attacks other groups at will.
One last effort…In the first place, that wasn’t your goddamn “point” originally; you were trying to claim that “PC” arbitrarily censors perfectly reasonable and harmless expression, which you miserably failed to demonstrate by the examples you gave. In the second place, no, as I have already said, “PC” does not sanction any “attacking other groups at will”! If what you mean is that human beings are unfortunately prone to making nasty bigoted generalizations about one another based on certain identity categories, why yes, that would seem to be true, wouldn’t it? Isn’t it a pity? Seems to me that instead of bitching and whining and moping and kvetching that we’ve managed to raise our collective cultural consciousness high enough to feel ashamed of at least a few of these nasty generalizations, you should be striving to raise it a little higher so we can get rid of some more. In other words, what we need is not less PC, but more PC. So get out there and start working on it, buddy: after tonight’s exchange, I definitely feel you owe it to me.