Friends,
The late Lord Kenneth Clark, in his famous “Civilization” television series from the 1970s, once said: “if something is too silly to say, you can always sing it!” Indeed, as we survey the fetid pile of completely absurd, inane and now revealed “fake news” stories that surfaced last week about the so-called “Russians Did It!” narrative, perhaps if we had a comic opera composer of the stature of, say, a Gioacchino Rossini or Gaetano Donizetti (from 19th century Italy) in our midst—or at least, perhaps, a good ole’ Grandpa Jones from Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry—that might could happen. But, sadly the days of great comic opera are past…and Grandpa Jones has traveled on to that great cornfield in the sky!
Still, you have got to wonder.
After attending traditional Latin Mass this past Sunday (I refuse to attend the New Mass, as I believe it dangerous to my spiritual health), a friend asked me: “Boyd, does the news media think we are complete fools? Do they think that after all this week’s reports, these examples of ‘fake’ news, that we would take them seriously, that we would not somehow see through what they’re trying to do with this Russia thing?” My response was twofold: first, yes, they continue to believe that many, if not most Americans will believe the fakery they spew forth as “news” and as truthful. And, second, the sad fact is that millions of Americans have been so conditioned over the past several decades that they do accept and believe much of what is spewed forth.
The Mainstream Media are like the story of the Englishman who went to France and proclaimed: “When I go to France, I speak English. And if they don’t understand me the first time, I speak louder!”
As I’ve written previously in MY CORNER (e.g. June 10, 2017: “Parallel Reality: The Insanity of the Deep State”), there is a form of real lunacy that infects much of our society and afflicts a considerable portion of our dominant culture, or what passes for culture. It is not only pervasive on what is identified as “the Left” in our society, but its enforced standards and limitations deeply affect what passes for opposition thinking in “movement conservatism” and among the Republicans, over on the (pseudo) Right. Its major achievement, I have repeated more than once, is to have subverted and reconfigured our very language and means of expression, to have inflected our words and idioms with a Progressivist coloring, and in numerous cases, to have created terms and terminologies which not only serve as verbalized ideological weapons, but at the same time, limit entry and most rejoinder conversation from those who might dissent.
In a real sense, our very language has been possessed by a kind of linguistic totalitarianism. And like other forms of enforced totalitarianism, it bans some words and usages as it creates others for its own political and cultural use.
Think about words and phrases you are told you can no longer say, at least publicly. Many of them have to do with race or sex (particularly how we describe blacks and women). I recall a few years ago that the Washington DC school district decided to ban the use of the word “niggardly” because it sounded too much like, well, you know. And things are far worse now, as we have moved on to banning such traditional designations as “male” and “female” at certain universities, and replacing them with “sex neutral” terms (since, we are told, the use of such words is offensive to some students and, after all, students may not have decided which sex that they want to belong to!)
Then, there is the proliferation of new terminologies, incubated in a form of what I would call a kind of Marxist liberation “theology,” and a whole language that wallows in such redefined words and expressions as “empowerment,” “overthrowing male dominance,” “white supremacy,” “racist oppression,” and “deconstructing whiteness.” In our universities we have whole new academic “disciplines” dedicated to “feminist and gender studies” and to “Afro-American studies.” Just recently a close friend (who has an earned doctorate) sent me a couple of links to courses and concentrations in “Critical Race Theory” at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Pathway majors, including advanced study, are offered in the English department and as an essential part of the Law School curriculum and program (The UNC Law School is already well-known as a hotbed of extreme Marxist pedagogy.)
These efforts in academia are not new; they’ve been around for decades. The propagators have been very successful in shaping much of our intellectual discourse and, as a result of that, our general culture and politics. Their ideas have served as the cutting edge in the Progressivist cultural Marxist revolution that has so weakened the already fragile foundations of our Republic. Their success has been predicated on a template—a standard—increasingly accepted and integrated in the thought processes of both so-called “conservatives” and the “farther Left.” That critical standard is the Idea of (Inevitable) Progress, and that progress is always to the Left.
It is fundamentally anchored in a nebulous concept of “equality,” an equality which is never reached, which is just over the next hill—just beyond the next obstacle--that must be destroyed, defeated or deconstructed—whether it be to enforce compensatory affirmative action in race or in gender, assure abortion rights, proclaim same sex marriage, or the newest egalitarian talisman, push transgender rights and “gender fluidity.”
Although each revolutionary change is usually heralded under the rubric of “greater civil rights,” or “greater freedom of choice,” its enactment has the same effect: the continued desultory retreat of our traditional Western and Christian culture, the surrender to the advancing putrefaction of our inherited civilization, our religion, and the moral fabric of our society.
The Revolution can never stop or cease its frenetic activity, for to do so would mean its evil would thereupon collapse. Its form of lunacy requires endless activity like the Sufi whirling Dervishes. Lacking the certitude of the God-given promise of finality and grace, and of a Heavenly reward, all meaning and justification in life devolve into a convulsive and frenzied embrace of “process,” and the inextinguishable desire to create a terrestrial Paradise here on earth. Somehow, it is speculated, death, itself, may be eventually overcome…but what, in truth, the Progressivists themselves don’t realize is that by effectively denying their “creature hood” in the “image of God” and with the special gifts and relationship proffered by Him being perverted or killed off, all that is left is that never ending “process,” the continual revolution, which leads to a darkened and miserable death, alone and in despair.
We supposedly live in a “democratic society,” yet the perversion of our republican principles—warned of by the Framers of the Constitution and by writers like James Fenimore Cooper (in his The American Democrat) and Alexis de Tocqueville—has produced a democratic tyranny more onerous and grasping than anything earlier authors could have imagined.
The great Southern writer and poet, Donald Davidson, years ago in his long narrative poem, “The Tall Men,” described where modern Democracy led:
Democracy, a fuddled wench, Is bought from tousled bed to bed. Base voices in white vests defile The echoes of great voices dead.
It is only in the kind of modern democracy that we have permitted to be inflicted on us that the Progressivist Revolution could be successful.
Without tradition, without inherited law and custom, without a religious framework by which to judge and make decisions, without a faith that nourishes, anneals and offers forgiveness—without these, we are only random atoms, without meaning and without destiny and without Hope…at the mercy of the Revolution.
No comments:
Post a Comment