January 25, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Newest Essay - Published by THE REMNANT
Friends,
I pass on to you today my latest published essay from THE REMNANT, a very traditionalist Catholic journal (January 22). It is a slightly edited version of the MY CORNER installment of January 21, titled, "Celebrating Robert E.
Lee Day, While Thousands of Women Go Marching Off to Hell." It's gotten a number of views and has been picked up widely.
Dr. Boyd D. Cathey
___________________________________________________
THE REMNANT
January 22, 2018
Celebrating Lee Day, While Thousands of Women Go Marching Off to Hell
https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/fetzen-fliegen/item/3676-celebrating-lee-day-while-thousands-of-women-go-marching-off-to-hell
Written
by Dr. Boyd D. Cathey
I was in Raleigh, North Carolina, on
January 20th to join over 350 North Carolinians gathered in the old 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 impressive
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
veterans—not just Confederate soldiers but all veterans—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 I 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 of
thought; those bits of ideas spread throughout our dominant culture, which for
them are in fact unquestioned and which under normal circumstances would not
bear up under any close analysis or scrutiny.
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 in the way of Progress
that must be overthrown, or at least radically altered, 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 be some federal judge or judges out there
who will confirm that that is exactly what the Founders and Framers of the
Republic 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 a player 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!
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,
religious 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,”—no matter what the example—those who advance the
counter-reality (which in essence is a rebellion against God and His creation)
seek to deauthorize and delegitimize their opponents.
Just recently 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:
Premise #1: What we in the media,
academia and the dominant culture dictate and proclaim as true cannot be
legitimately contested;
Premise #2: But Donald Trump and
millions of those “deplorables” in the despised “fly-over country” (to quote
the condescending pornographic novelist Philip Roth) deny and refuse to accept
what we demand they accept;
Conclusion: 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 to fall victim of this
new dogmatism —I certainly have my disagreements on some issues.)
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 totalitarian templates; the abject fear
of any politician (Democrat orRepublican)
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), G. K. 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 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.
Published in Fetzen Fliegen
Read 2340 times
Dr. Boyd D. Cathey
Boyd D. Cathey,
a native North Carolina, received an MA in history at the University of
Virginia (as a Thomas Jefferson Fellow) and served as assistant to
conservative author, Dr. Russell Kirk, in Mecosta, Michigan. Recipient of a
Richard M. Weaver Fellowship, he completed his doctoral studies at the Catholic
University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain. Then, after additional studies in
philosophy and theology, he taught in both Connecticut and in Argentina, before
returning to the United States. He served as State Registrar of the North
Carolina State Archives, retiring in 2011. He is the author of various articles
and studies published in several different languages about political
matters, religion, and culture and the arts.
No comments:
Post a Comment