Nothing Is Normal
August 10, 2015
Sarah Terwilligar’s attempt to fly to heaven as the world is to come to an end, from Upper Canada Sketches by Thomas Conant, 1898
THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:
In a poem so oft-quoted that it embarrasses me slightly to quote it again, W. B. Yeats, gazing with a prophetic eye on the disintegrating world of modernity, writes
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The next stanza begins: “Surely some revelation is at hand.” In the disintegrating world of 2015 in North America, however, people seem morally blind and deaf and, in their stultified state, impervious to revelation. On the contrary, the media-satiated masses have accepted that the abnormal – the diametrically abnormal – is normal. The policemen of the reprogrammed mind keep whispering: “Nothing to see here – keep moving” and indeed, the reprogrammed mind acts as though there is nothing to see here – while the imperative of conformism dictates to keep moving, always moving, under the theory that all motion, including that of a catastrophic collapse, is equivalent to progress. The meaningless shibboleths echo everywhere – democracy, diversity, sustainability, equality – while once-great cities such as Detroit, Baltimore, and Philadelphia descend into a chaos of lawlessness and hopelessness amidst a desert of abandoned buildings, falling to ruin, punctuated here and there by liquor-stores, check-cashing businesses, and Plexiglas-enclosed bodegas where a package of beef jerky costs seven dollars. Murder is a way of life – and ninety-nine times out of ten no one cares.
Revelations nevertheless are at hand, of a grotesque type that only the eye of a Dante Alighieri or a Hieronymus Bosch could effectively decipher and represent to an audience. A few courageous self-taught journalists who are willing to do the jobs that graduates of journalism schools are unwilling to do have recorded on video many hours of horrific lunchtime conversations with representatives of a private, for-profit abortion-provider – which, despite its private, for-profit status receives taxpayer subvention – who casually negotiate the highest bid for their gory, ever-replenished inventory of organs harvested from the unborn. In the heyday of slavery, it was a crime to murder a slave. Where is the William Lloyd Garrison who rises up to fulminate against a new slavery more repellent than the old one – but, like the old one, imposed largely on black people, who are disproportionately the consumers of Planned Parenthood’s “services”? The buyers of dismembered infant-parts are, of course, universally white, college-educated, upper-middle-class people, who see themselves as the nation’s entitled elite. The talking heads of network television who graduated from journalism school suppress the story: “Nothing to see here – keep moving.”
The sitting regime in the White House has been waging war on the historical American nation since it came to power by virtue of a fractional majority at the ballot-box in 2008, with no loyal opposition to speak of and an ironclad pretence that everything is still normal. The Obama administration cherry picks among the laws that it is willing to observe and treats those that might impede its agenda as non-existent, which they might as well be, since no check is forthcoming. Barack Obama is the most divisive chief executive since Abraham Lincoln. The emergent crop of Democratic Party candidates consists of a harridan whose actual career is having enabled the sexually predatory habits of her so-called husband and an out-and-out communist – not “socialist,” for that is a mendacious euphemism – who calls himself “independent” and is called that by people who graduated from journalism school so as not to identify him properly.
In the world beyond the USA, Islam is in one of its regular spasms of aggressive, murderous self-righteousness, perpetrating moral enormities akin to those of the Aztecs and the Nazis against its usual victims. These are primarily Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and anyone else who prefers a non-sacrificial religion to its cult of eternal immolation. The man who is supposed to be the leader of Christianity – his non-recognition by non-Catholic Christians in that office notwithstanding – mimics the chief executive of the USA in saying little about it while Egyptian Copts and Chaldean Baptists are slaughtered like animals in a wave of butchery that ranks with the Turkish massacre of the Greeks and Armenians in the early 1920s: “Nothing to see here – keep moving.”
The litany is endless, so I end it with that, arbitrarily, and I come back to the blindness and deafness of the good little monkeys of the West – of Europe and North America – who see no evil and hear no evil and let evil off its leash in consequence of their willful aversion to notice that nothing is normal.
As readers of The Thinking Housewife possibly know, I spend a few hours every week with my foot on the bar, leaning against the counter, in my favorite public house. I confess to a thirst for beer, but the real attraction of the place is conversation, which beer tends to lubricate and to make candid. The regulars of the establishment, many of whom I count as friends, and all of whom I count as intelligent, educated people, have, as far as I can discern, no sense that nothing is normal. Quite the opposite: They discuss the presidential hopefuls on both sides of the party-divide as though those hopefuls were normal people. I wish to make no Gnostic claims to special knowledge unavailable to other people; but, like the late Lawrence Auster, I believe that people have a faculty that Plato called noesis and that might otherwise be called old-fashioned common sense based on social competency. When I exercise my adult eye, I do not see normal people in the candidate line-ups. I see narcissism, know-nothing-ism, preening postures, a lack of education, a lack of culture, a lack of wisdom, impoverished tongues, the shifty eyes of probable moral turpitude – and that is merely the Republicans.
In the Democratic contenders thus far I see an aging virago motivated by a seething mass of resentments and a cold conviction of absolute entitlement who, if she lived in any Italian village, would be healthily shunned by everyone and all. In the USA she is the equivalent of an aristocrat. Bernie Sanders is not the equivalent of an aristocrat, but he would like to be one. How to describe him: His only character comes from the character of the ideology that he espouses; he is a pair of spectacles and an unattractive speaking-voice uttering platitudes, vicious ones, indeed, that were already self-deconstructing and self-damning in 1848. Of course the repellent Kardashians, Kennedys, and Hiltons, and all the Hollywood-types are also aristocrats, which tells us what it means to be an aristocrat in a time when nothing is normal, but everything is turned upside down. Freaks of surgical self-mutilation claim attention as heroes. Conscience is treated as an outrage. My eye is struck by the ugliness of today’s public people. But then again my eye is struck by the ugliness of everything contemporary.
And yet, the dominant perception is of normality, as though 2015 was 1925; as though Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were normal people, not monsters of vulgarity of one kind or another. A remarkably intelligent man who is a good friend calmly says to me that, after all, why abolish Obamacare, as is sometimes tepidly suggested by a pre-humiliated voice that instantly disappears back into conformity – why not fix it? To my friend, Obamacare is a piece of normal legislation, not a revolutionary intrusion of an ideologically fanatical regime with the final purpose of mandating human behavior. Other friends and acquaintances, who are certainly not dull or uneducated people, see nothing abnormal in the storm of hate directed against the Confederate Battle Flag, or in the Supreme Court decision on homosexual marriage. They all complain about taxes, it is true, but they can see no connection between the greedy maw of the IRS and the radical arrogance of a dictatorial government abetted by politicized institutions.
Revelation is at hand, surely, to paraphrase Yeats, but the resistance to revelation, which is the same as the resistance to reality, is intransigent and powerful. Reality will always trump the evasion of it, but the longer that evasion is sustained, the more catastrophic the coming-to-terms is likely to be. What we sow, we shall reap.
[Note: Illustration courtesy of It’s About Time]
