January 21, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Celebrating Robert E.
Lee Day While Thousands of Women Go Marching Off to Hell
===============================================
Friends,
I
was in Raleigh, North Carolina, yesterday to join well over 300 North
Carolinians gathered in the House of Representative chamber of the historic
1840 State Capitol to celebrate North Carolina’s 29th annual
celebration of Robert E. Lee Day. It was an inspiring ceremony that reminded
the attendees of the precious historical legacy and cultural inheritance that
we have received and that is so gravely endangered these days. I came away encouraged:
there were men, women, and children, various members of the military and
surviving veterans of World War II, Korea, Vietnam and Desert Storm, with their
families, all joined in memory of those who went before us, those who
selflessly defended their homes, their land, and their faith, so that we might
enjoy and experience those gifts…and pass them on to our children.
When
I walked the short distance from a crowded parking lot to the State Capitol, I
noticed that my car was surrounded by dozens of other cars emblazoned with
bumper stickers with such messages as: “Dump
Trump,” “Keep Your Hands Off My Vagina,” “Abortion Free and Legal,” “Open
Immigration NOW!,” “Lesbians Unite to Smash the Right,” “Resist!”—those are just
the ones I noticed. And I wondered if, when I returned, my little Kia (with a
Confederate license plate) would be scarred or damaged by those latter-day liberated
amazons. As walked up the sidewalk to the Capitol I noticed hundreds of
women—most of whom I would have certainly avoided had I met them at a social
gathering—headed for a rally, an event concurrent with our event, just a few
blocks away on what is called the Bicentennial Plaza, a much larger event for
certain, but in no way comparable in quality or merit.
It
was the Raleigh extension of the “Women’s Resist” movement, a grab bag manifestation
of a whole motley crew of what is best described as an expression of “feminist,
anti-racist, anti-sexist, Marxist and anti-Trump sentiment,” which was held on the one
year anniversary of the inauguration of Donald Trump as President of the United
States.
Despite a mammoth Pro-Life Rally in Washington
the day prior—perhaps as many as 200,000 participants and the president
addressing them (the first president to do that)—it was the women’s march that was practically the only thing the
media could or wished to concentrate on, those hundreds of thousands of #Resist
movement women (with some of their poor, bedraggled husbands and
brainwashing-in-process young daughters and sons in tow), now supplemented by
the supposedly sexually-abused #MeToo” militants, out in the streets
demonstrating for a variety of feminist and civil rights causes.
If
there was and is anything that should convince us of the absolutely deleterious
and poisonous effects of modern public schooling and university education, and
the effects of our entertainment Behemoth, it was to behold those women (and
their menfolk) heading to their rally. Most carried signs, bearing expressions
which, when not just foul-mouthed or profane, partook of what I would call
“illiterate-speak.” That is, sloganeering based on fiercely weaponized and
half-baked nuggets, those bits of ideas spread throughout our dominant culture,
which for them are in fact unquestioned in any close detail and which under normal
circumstances would not bear up under any close analysis or inspection.
Those
women live their lives based on Progressivist slogans, incorporating a deconstructed—or,
rather, reconstructed—language of short catch-all phrases and terminologies,
buttressed by pseudo-scientific gobbledegook: “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobe,”
“voting rights,” “gender equality,” “transgender rights,” the list is
interminable. Their explanations and definitions are usually circuitous, and
generally all come back to a foundation in what they call “equality” and
“liberation” from traditional—and thus “oppressive”—rules and moral (and
natural) law, which they almost always misunderstand or simply ignore. In
other words, those foundations that have created our civilization and given it
life over the past more than twenty centuries are discarded, become mere
impediments that must be overthrown in the way of Progress, or, at the least,
radically altered and transformed or re-interpreted.
One
thing you can be sure of is that tomorrow we shall see another “right” invented
for whatever new barbarity will be intuited to have been miraculously found in
the “penumbra of the Constitution,” and that there will some Federal judge or
judges out there who will, then, confirm that that is exactly what the Founders
and Framers truly intended, whether it be for some dehumanized “metrosexual” male
who all of a sudden “declares” that he “feels” like a woman and demands that he
be allowed to use a lady’s restroom, or for some husky female who decides that
she should be a tackle on the Minnesota Vikings football team so she can run up
against Javon Roosevelt who weighs in a 320 pounds (and has three convictions for wife abuse).
Now
it is transgender rights and gender fluidity, but tomorrow it will be incest
and polygamy, no doubt. And there will
be a series of “experts” and assembled PhDs in psychiatry and counseling
brought in to testify that such practices are indeed just fine and—shall we
even use the word?—normal.
Yes,
that is most assuredly what James Madison, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and
other fathers of this republic envisioned!
Right?
I
have argued previously that what we see presently in our society, and not just with
the so-called “women’s movement,” is a form of collective madness, the existence
of an artificial counter-reality, a condition in which certain broad strata of
our population, ingesting decades and, yes, centuries of both intellectual and
spiritual disinformation, have constructed around themselves a pseudo-reality
to match their ideological indoctrination: reality for them must match what
they have been told and instructed to believe. So, instead of accepting the
God-given reality and the natural order as created, instead of accepting their
own creaturehood and an understanding of the flawed nature and limitations of
humanity, itself, they construct a revolutionary counter-existence to explain
things and events, what German philosophers might call “gestalt,” as a way of
justifying their beliefs and resulting actions.
And
thus there is the need to diagnose and explain why the rest of us—those who
reject their worldview—do not accept the new template and the new reality they
propound. Whether it be the attempts of historic liberalism of the 19th
century to define traditionalist and royalist thinking as “reactionary,”
“anti-democratic,” and “opposed to the inevitability of Progress,” or more
recent efforts in the old Soviet Union, when not exiling dissenters to the
Gulag, to send those who opposed the new orthodoxy to mental and psychiatric
hospitals for treatment and “re-education,” those who advance the
counter-reality, which in essence is a rebellion against God and His creation,
seek to disauthorize and delegitimize their opponents.
Just
this past week a veritable gaggle of “expert” psychiatrists and non-medical
pundits spent an inordinate amount of time on air, “diagnosing” Donald Trump as
“mentally unfit” for office. Obviously his physical examination tests were
skewed, obviously his doctor (who was also Obama’s) was lying…this is what we
were told. Even as I caught a bit of NPR riding in my car to Raleigh (the
program “What! What! Don’t Tell Me”) and later that night (Jimmy Fallon), the
unhumorous attempts at humor characterizing Trump as “mentally abnormal” were
shot through with bitter scorn and hatred, a drippingly vile condescension
exhibited not just toward the president, but at anyone who would not follow the
new dogmatism and accept the new reality.
(Remember FBI agent Peter Strzok’s description of being able “to smell
Trump supporters at WalMart”?)
The Progressivist syllogism goes as follows:
-What
we in the media, academia and the dominant culture dictate and proclaim is true, cannot be legitimately contested by any sensible person;
-But
Donald Trump and millions of those “deplorables” in the despised “fly-over
country” (to quote the pornographic novelist Philip Roth) deny and dispute what
we demand they accept;
-Therefore,
Donald Trump (and all those unwashed deplorables) are “mentally sick” and
“unadjusted,” requiring counseling and correction, and if that doesn’t work,
condemnation and exiling from the public square.
(And,
let me point out, that one doesn’t have to agree with the president on every
issue—I certainly have my disagreements on some issues—to fall victim of this
new dogmatism.)
And
thus we see the broadly erupting epidemic, which becomes fiercer as the days
pass, of suppression of “dissident”
speech on college campuses in the name of “protecting” students from racism,
sexism and homophobia; of firing or penalizing employees who question the Progressivist narratives on race and sex; the censoring of
those on Facebook or Google who question the new and very dogmatic templates; and
the abject fear of any politician
(Democrat or Republican) or any public personality of transgressing the
steadily-moving-to-the-Left goal posts on race or sexual “liberation.” To do so
will result in overwhelming demands for a complete and groveling apology—and
perhaps a handsome donation to the NAACP or Planned Parenthood, to help make up
for the “sin” committed against the new dogmas.
I
have termed the counter-reality that produces this palpable intellectual and
spiritual totalitarianism as a form of lunacy, a kind of madness that inverts
and attempts to pervert creation and nature, itself, so as to match a synthetic
and imposed, essentially anti-human, ideology. To protect itself from dissent
and probing questions, it must continually be on the offensive, continually
convulsed and convulsive like all fanaticisms, and always on guard that some
“reactionary,” in some place, will speak up and notice its intellectual vacuity
and artificiality…and its horrid and genocidal effects.
Those
women yesterday professed that they were marching for “equality,” for the
expansion of something they called liberty. But they have no idea of what
genuine liberty is or entails.
In his volume, The Poet and the Lunatics (1929),
Chesterton’s character Gale asks the question: “What exactly is liberty?” He
responds, in part:
“First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some
ways the yellow bird was free in the cage…We are limited by our brains and
bodies; and if we break out, we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be
anything.
“The lunatic is he who loses his way and cannot return…. The man who
opened the bird-cage loved freedom; possibly too much... But the man who broke
the bowl merely because he thought it a prison for the fish, when it was their
only possible house of life—that man was already outside the world of reason,
raging with a desire to be outside of everything.” [Italics added]
True liberty, and its exercise, requires that it have an object
and a terminus. In our European and Christian civilization, with its fundamental
inheritances from the three great historic centers of learning and wisdom—Rome,
Athens, and Jerusalem—that means we are entrusted with essential rights and
liberties that are both inherited and defined by who we are as a people and by our
relationship to our Creator and to those institutions that give us existence
and life. This is our inheritance; we have no other. To attempt to overthrow or
pervert it is to open the doors to self-destruction.
Those women I saw yesterday, and the millions of other Americans
like them, are modern revolutionaries, and, to use Chesterton’s parable, are lunatics,
“already outside the world of reason,” whose unrestrained rage to destroy is
only matched by their profound inability to actually create anything of real
and lasting value.
And thus that smaller crowd at Lee Day at the State Capitol, while
overshadowed in numbers (and by media coverage), represented hope and recovery,
and the blessed assurance that our battle goes on…and that numbers and fame, while
significant and certainly important, are as nothing if we are on God’s side.
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