The Coverage Of What’s Being Labeled “L’Affaire Jenner”

     ...puts one of the saddest, most pitiable things any man has ever chosen to have done to himself on a par with such trivialities as Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon, ISIS’s campaign of extermination of non-Muslims, Vladimir Putin’s determination to recreate the USSR, and China’s steady development of an amphibious assault capability sufficient to overwhelm Taiwan.

     And now I have Gentle Readers emailing me about l’affaire Jenner. Wanting to know where I stand on this supremely important subject. Asking why I’ve been silent about it for so long. The most...interesting email I’ve received to date included this deathless phrase: “Why the reticence, Fran? Does your Catholicism pain you in your freedom organs, or is it the other way around?”

     Well! As if I’ve ever exhibited any reluctance to offer an entirely unsolicited and baldly offensive opinion about anything. I have one, and you’ll receive it anon. But on a subject of such world-shaking gravity, I prefer to open with the thoughts of an authority with whom no one can dispute:

     The priest gazed out the west-facing window for a long moment. “I want to say a few words about...mutilation,” he said. “Something that’s slowly becoming commonplace, but which the Church cannot and will not approve. There’ve been some high-profile cases of it recently, haven’t there, Hank?”
     Hallstrom nodded. “I can think of two, a model and a famous athlete.”
     “I had the same two in mind.” Father Ray rose from his armchair and ran his hands down his trim, muscular frame. “I am a combination of two things: what God has given me, and what I’ve done to develop it. The first of these is immutable. God decreed it. His will in the matter cannot be countervailed. The second is merely the consequence of my decision to make the most of that gift—to develop my body in a direction natural to it with proper exercise and dietary discipline. As that does not in any way cross-cut God’s gift, or whatever element of his plan resides in me, my use of his gift is entirely acceptable.”
     He resumed his seat. “Mutilation is not. These pitiable souls who insist that they were ‘born into the wrong body’ are badly damaged, mentally and emotionally. My heart aches for them, each and every one. They desperately need treatment, counseling, acceptance, and the charity appropriate to those whose minds are diseased. But instead we have a media praising the self-mutilators for ‘courage’ and ‘heroism,’ when what they mostly need is to have it sandblasted into their skulls that what God does is well done, that He does not make junk.”

     The reason you can’t dispute him, of course, is that Father Ray – more specifically, Father Raymond F. Altomare, who became the pastor of Our Lady of the Pines Parish in Onteora County, New York upon the passing of the greatly beloved Father Heinrich Schliemann, and who served as a critical spiritual advisor to Stephen Graham Sumner during the latter’s campaign for the presidency – is a fictional character. Nevertheless, he is entirely correct. (Yes, you’ll get to read the story that features the above passage; it’s just not quite ready yet. And no, it’s not about a troubled soul who seeks a sex change.)

     Health is not a matter of opinion. One is healthy to the extent that one’s bodily elements do what they’re designed to do, without crippling or lethal undesired side effects. It’s acceptable for one who is somewhat unhealthy to seek redress of that which ails him, which in some cases might involve surgical methods. It’s acceptable for one who is more healthy than not to work to increase his health, or his fitness, by various measures. But he who is healthy, yet looks at himself and says “this is not what I’m supposed to be,” and invokes surgery to alter himself into something other than God intended, is insane. As Father Ray says above, he needs “treatment, counseling, acceptance, and the charity appropriate to those whose minds are diseased.”

     It’s quite possible that Bruce Jenner has been driven insane by the foofaurauw that has erupted around his kinda-sorta family (i.e., the Kardashians). Nevertheless! His act – and this applies to anyone who seeks gender-reassignment surgery – marks him as someone in desperate need of mental and emotional assistance.

     Some years ago, science-fiction writer John Varley wrote a series of stories in which sex changes and other bodily transformations are normal, even customary “options” indulged by the long-lived members of his fictional societies. Quite a number of readers found the idea appealing. Either this suggests that there are more lunatics running around loose than we normally imagine, or it illustrates the depths of fantasy of which the human mind is capable.

     The human creature is, broadly speaking, of two parts: a “who” and a “what.” Your “who” is the product of your individual choices and their consequences, which depend on your context, capabilities, and character. Your “what” is graven into your genes. It was determined at conception. If you insist upon denying it, you will thereafter find yourself, in the common parlance, in a world of hurt.

     Bruce Jenner, once the foremost athlete in the world, has chosen to enter that world. I doubt he’ll be spared the consequences.

“Don’t Enter Reality Without It!”

     I refer, of course, to the magnificent, fantastic, utterly indispensable:

Get Out Of Reality Free Card!

     It simply must exist! How else could we explain phenomena such as these:

     Remember Lilly the Human Train Wreck, the mentally ill feminist Tumblr blogger who filed a federal complaint against her university? She did not like being quoted on my blog:

     Check it out. He “wrote an article” on me. He victim blames me the entire time. He hates that I am bi. He thinks I’m insane since I have mental illnesses. We need to get him off the internet. https://twitter.com/rsmccain This is his twitter. Please report him for harassing me!!! And report other abusive things he says to or about other people.

     I’m “harassing” her? By quoting her?

     Apparently, in the worldview of those who believe their words should carry no undesired consequences, being quoted is a felony. It should either be impossible, or should occasion severe punishment for the violator. But that’s not all the Card is good for:

     ONE late summer afternoon when I was 17, I went with my mother to the local bank, a long-defunct institution whose name I cannot remember, to apply for my first student loan. My mother co-signed. When we finished, the banker, a balding man in his late 50s, congratulated us, as if I had just won some kind of award rather than signed away my young life.

     By the end of my sophomore year at a small private liberal arts college, my mother and I had taken out a second loan, my father had declared bankruptcy and my parents had divorced. My mother could no longer afford the tuition that the student loans weren’t covering. I transferred to a state college in New Jersey, closer to home.

     Years later, I found myself confronted with a choice that too many people have had to and will have to face. I could give up what had become my vocation (in my case, being a writer) and take a job that I didn’t want in order to repay the huge debt I had accumulated in college and graduate school. Or I could take what I had been led to believe was both the morally and legally reprehensible step of defaulting on my student loans, which was the only way I could survive without wasting my life in a job that had nothing to do with my particular usefulness to society.

     I chose life. That is to say, I defaulted on my student loans....

     Am I a deadbeat? In the eyes of the law I am. Indifferent to the claim that repaying student loans is the road to character? Yes. Blind to the reality of countless numbers of people struggling to repay their debts, no matter their circumstances, many worse than mine? My heart goes out to them. To my mind, they have learned to live with a social arrangement that is legal, but not moral.

     Maybe the problem was that I had reached beyond my lower-middle-class origins and taken out loans to attend a small private college to begin with. Maybe I should have stayed at a store called The Wild Pair, where I once had a nice stable job selling shoes after dropping out of the state college because I thought I deserved better, and naïvely tried to turn myself into a professional reader and writer on my own, without a college degree. I’d probably be district manager by now.

     Or maybe, after going back to school, I should have gone into finance, or some other lucrative career. Self-disgust and lifelong unhappiness, destroying a precious young life — all this is a small price to pay for meeting your student loan obligations.

     So the Card will absolve one from freely chosen material obligations too! Where can one apply for this marvel of modern life?

     Yes, you may well shudder.

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     The remarkable thing about the above stories isn’t the whining demand to be excused from the foreseeable consequences of one’s freely chosen course. There’ve always been deadbeats, and a fair number of them whiners. No, what’s significant here is the aggressive counter-moralism: the strident proclamations that the laws of cause and effect woven into the very fabric of reality are somehow wrong.

     Whence cometh such notions? Who has been telling these...persons that what they want, no matter how absurd, is theirs by right, without let, hindrance, or consequences? More urgent still, who will discipline them for their follies? Will some sensible relative or friend take “Lilly” aside and tell her: “Look, you ninny, when you post statements on a public website, they’re susceptible to being quoted, and there’s nothing you can do about it” -- ? Will Lee Siegel, the author of the second quoted piece, be held to account, whether for his act of passive burglary by refusing to repay a freely contracted loan, or for denouncing the mechanism that allowed him to acquire a college degree?

     Commentators such as I, Stacy McCain, and Linda of Right As Usual can sift the ordure of modern life for such items so you can employ your time to better effect. We can point to the inevitable consequences of tolerating such scurrilities and plead with you to take appropriate action. We can’t do much more than that.

     The Card is the problem. A staggering number of pseudo-adults are waving it in our faces and demanding that we honor it...and owing to their well-intentioned but misguided acceptance of the contemporary conception of “tolerance,” quite a number of persons who should know better are doing so.

     Don’t kid yourself. The Card is seductive. If you were offered one, with a credible guarantee, perhaps backed by the force of the federal government, that it would be honored, you’d be tempted at the very least.

     Seemingly consequence-free freebies are like that.

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     I have a personal story for you. It concerns a young woman of my acquaintance for whom I’ve come to have the highest respect. Let’s call her Jane.

     Jane works as a therapeutic masseuse. Her trade is very hard on her physically. She’s good at it – I can attest to her skills personally – but it causes her quite a lot of pain, owing to injuries she sustained some years ago. Yet she perseveres, because she, her husband (another therapist), and their young son badly want to own a home, a difficult hill to climb here on Long Island. They’ve been living with her in-laws while straining to save enough money for an adequate down payment.

     Jane has become quite valuable to me; her skills assuage several of my chronic pains. I only found out about her sufferings quite recently, and indirectly at that. When I discovered them I dithered over changing masseuses, but realized that that would achieve nothing. Jane’s services are in high demand, so some other old crank in a decaying body would take the slot I’d vacated.

     However, I have significant financial resources, and I wanted to do something to ease Jane’s burden. So I offered to help her with the down payment on a house.

     She thanked me but declined the offer. “I have to do this myself” was all she said. I dropped the subject at once, and I think it was well that I did.

     Jane would refuse the Card. No barrage of seductive offers, whether snail-mail, email, or telephonic, could persuade her to accept one. She has a visceral understanding of personal responsibility. For some that comes from an innate sense for the laws of reality. Many others learn it only by trial and painful error – the consequences of their bad decisions.

     We need more Janes. We need to bludgeon the “Lillies” and the Lee Siegels with the consequences of their decisions until they shut up and slink away from sheer embarrassment...assuming they can feel that precious corrective to folly. With all levels of government actively colluding to give them a free ride at our expense, this will be difficult to say the least, but it’s morally imperative. Not to do so will empower them to seduce other susceptible young Americans into accepting the Card.

     Take away their Cards. The rest will follow.

Reality And The State

     The following is in part an extension of the thoughts in “Mimes” and in part an addendum to Dystopic’s superb essay “Good is Evil.” I hope you’ve read them both.

     The great majority of psychiatrists purvey an expensive, jargon-heavy pseudo-science for which little to no objective basis exists. The consequences of investing one’s trust in one can be severe, especially if the psychiatrist is hooked on some au courant mental-health snake-oil nostrum. However, there are a few who will tell you, unabashedly and in simple language, what you need to know to “get well”...which almost invariably amounts to: Cowboy the fuck up and face reality.

     The late M. Scott Peck was one:

     What are these tools, these techniques of suffering, these means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively, that I call discipline? They are four: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing. As will be evident, these are not complex tools whose application demands extensive training. To the contrary, they are simple tools, and almost all children are adept in their use by the age of ten. Yet presidents and kings will often forget to use them, to their own downfall. The problem lies not in the complexity of these tools but in the will to use them.

     Here’s another:

     Why, after all, is the truth said to be sacred? Why can’t we indulge the parts of ourselves and our culture that suggest we can slip the bindings of reality and use our imaginations to pretend we have more friends than we do, or that we aren’t facing mortal enemies abroad, or that our leaders need not be authentic, so long as they are entertaining, or that our companies need not prove their value, assuming they can assert it, convincingly?

     The answer is this: Human beings suffer in exact proportion to the extent that they depart from the truth. This is a structural beam of the individual and collective human mind and soul, perhaps literally encoded in our DNA, and it defines our place in the universe. Human beings need the truth as much as we need food. Jesus and Gandhi both proved it by fasting, when necessary, until certain truths became known to them and others. And, for the sake of this argument, it matters not at all to me whether you believe that this elemental need is woven into us by God or by science. It just is.

     Dr. Ablow’s last three words are the one and only key to emotional health: What is, is. Deny it at your peril.

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     Mimes was about the deliberate destruction of the objective meanings of words in service to an overt agenda that contradicts reality. Good is Evil reviews the Orwellian use of the deliberate contradiction of verifiable realities to induce passivity and submission in one’s targets. Reality, of course, is “the point:” the point the destroyers want to obscure, and the point you must see despite all the obstacles to it. But here’s the Ace kicker: the destroyers know the truth; they simply don’t want you to know it.

     Smith who knows the truth has a tremendous advantage over Jones who doesn’t. If Smith is a man of good will, he will attempt to “clue Jones in,” so the two of them will see the same reality and can cooperate in coping with it. But if Smith is morally deficient – a destroyer – he will attempt to profit from Jones’s misconceptions.

     One of the things the destroyers know is that government – the institution that is allowed to use force against others – cannot produce anything but deprivation, destruction, and death. The bedrock political deceit is the notion that the use of force against peaceable others is justifiable – perhaps even mandatory – if it can “solve” some “problem” or achieve some “desirable end.”

     Government is not “just another word for the things we do together.” As George Washington apparently did not say, “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”

     The destroyers know that, too.

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     Remus’s essay “Frankly My Dear” is one of the most popular ever to grace this site. Why? The reason is simple: It tells the truth about a subject on which our eyes have been averted from the facts to make room for pretty lies. Other Liberty’s Torch essays that have proved popular share that central virtue: truth about a subject dominated by attractive fictions.

     Dr. Ablow was more right than even he might know: People hunger for the truth. They know, in their heart of hearts, that they’ve been deceived, that the grand, ever-expanding campaign of public deception rolls on, gathering force from second to second. They suspect that they know why. But misbegotten notions about “politeness” and “political correctness” have inhibited the great majority of them from speaking out.

     Schematic: A politician lies to you. You smell it and accuse him of trying to deceive you for his own advancement. How does he respond? With manufactured outrage. Perhaps he’ll accuse you of “racism,” or “sexism,” or “lacking compassion,” or of “questioning his patriotism.” If you’re typical, the accusations will either silence you or disgust you into abandoning the field.

     Have a few truths:

• The biggest racists and sexists in America are politicians, as studies of politicians’ staffs have confirmed.
• Politicians are completely uncompassionate; they merely seek more of your money with which to buy votes, regardless of the havoc that results.
• To go into politics in this year of Our Lord 2015 is virtually a Certificate of Un-Patriotism. A true patriot would have no truck with the lying, thieving, murdering apparatus government in these United States has become. Rather, he would seek to empty the halls of power completely, perhaps as an overture to demolishing them once and for all.

     How many of us are willing to say any of that into a live microphone, perhaps at a politician’s “town hall” meeting?

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     A final thought for this morning: Along with the many words whose meanings are being undermined or utterly destroyed, there are words and phrases whose utility is for nothing but deception. Their destructive power screams to have them excised from our political discourse. Today, one eclipses all others for cogency: public service.

     “Who is the public? What does it hold as its good?” cried Hank Rearden at his “trial” for an “illegal” sale of Rearden Metal to Ken Danagger. Do you have an answer, Gentle Reader?

     I have never held elective nor appointive office. I have never worked in government. Yet I am a public servant, and have been all my life. I produce products that are voluntarily purchased by my customers, to their material profit or non-material benefit. In all probability, this is also true of you.

     What of the individuals to whom the title “public servant” is normally applied? How do these richly compensated, perquisite-heavy barons of the “public good,” to whom nothing but more power and prestige really seems to matter, actually “serve” the public?

     I’d love to see one of them compelled to mime it.

This was a comment on another site

And it put me into some seriously deep thought about what is happening in this nation today:

THE WRATH OF THE AWAKENED SAXON
by Rudyard Kipling
It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late,
With long arrears to make good,
When the Saxon began to hate.
They were not easily moved,
They were icy — willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the Saxon began to hate.
Their voices were even and low.
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show
When the Saxon began to hate.
It was not preached to the crowd.
It was not taught by the state.
No man spoke it aloud
When the Saxon began to hate.
It was not suddenly bred.
It will not swiftly abate.
Through the chilled years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the Saxon began to hate.

That really made me sit and think. You?

When Others Have Already Said It Ably...

...I feel no need and little incentive to repeat it in my own terms.

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First up, the inimitable Fred Reed:

Two questions, methinks, arise from Ferguson's latest outburst. The first, political, is "Why does the country tolerate it?" The second, more anthropologically interesting, is "Why the eerie incapacity of underclass blacks to understand evidence, or law, or much of anything?" Of the countless explanations given for the poor performance and poor behavior of blacks in the US, one of them dares not speak its name: Low intelligence.

Yet it fits all the evidence. It explains why Africa never built cities, why it did not invent writing, why there was no African Fifth-Century Athens. It explains why Rhodesia, prosperous and an exporter of food when run by whites, fell immediately into hunger and barbarism when whites left. It explains the dysfunction of black societies from Africa to Haiti to Detroit. It explains why blacks invariably score far below whites and Asians on tests of IQ, on the SATs, GREs, on entrance and promotion exams for fire and police departments.

It explains the need for affirmative action and for departments of Black Studies in universities when black students can’t handle real courses. It explains why the gap in academic achievement never closes. It explains the criminality, the violence, the poor impulse control, the dependency on welfare, the unemployment, and the inability to integrate themselves into a high-tech society. It explains the constant scandals involving teachers in black schools giving students the answers on standardized tests.

Further, it explains why none of the programs intended to raise performance of blacks in the schools ever work. Head Start didn’t work. Integrated schools didn’t work, nor segregated schools, nor black schools with white teachers nor black schools with black teachers. Expensive laboratories and free computers didn't work. Schools run entirely by blacks with very high per-student expenditure (Washington, DC for example) didn’t work. There is no indication that anything at all will ever work. Low intelligence is the obvious explanation. There is precious little counterevidence.

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Second, consider this from Sara Noble:

Time Magazine published an article by freelance writer Darlena Cunha. It provides a good trip through the liberal thought apparatus. It’s a frightening trip.

Cunha wrote an article about the Ferguson riots titled “Ferguson: In Defense of Rioting”. The violent protests that destroyed 25 businesses and put many in danger are, according to her, “part of the American experience.” Only the “mainstream” can enjoy the “luxury” of “peaceful protesting,” she says.

It’s a perfect example of how these new liberals think. They’re not your grandfather’s liberal.

Without considering the facts or the evidence, she said the “anger” in Ferguson was “inevitable” because a “police officer” shot “a young, unarmed black man in the streets.” She wrote “inevitable” as if the rioting is to be expected and she wrote “in the streets” as if Michael Brown was dragged into a gutter.

“Riots”, she states, “are a necessary part of the evolution of society.” People aren’t living in a “universal utopia” and they don’t have “basic human rights”.

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Third, ponder this, from Lee Cary via Doug Ross:

On the morning after the Grand Jury No True Bill decision was announcement, it was clear that the policing authorities followed a planned, minimum-response strategy. They offered little resistance to looting and property destruction, perhaps in order to avoid bloodshed and media scrutiny.

The outcome: On the morning after, there were few, if any, reports of serious injuries. No media videos went viral showing police physically subduing looters. No ambulances were filmed loading bleeding rioters or police. Just the burned and broken evidence of an orgy of looting and property destruction....

When the welfare state begins to dial-down, and the value of EBT cards atrophy, some of those neighborhoods will burn at the hands of their own thug-teens. And policing authorizes will either be unwilling, or unable, to confront the lawlessness....

Meanwhile, the well-established, well-funded, social-activist organizations, many that have been active in Ferguson for months, hope to use Ferguson as a catapult to a sustained, new, civil rights movement. They are professional, crisis ambulance-chasers. The Ferguson looters are their cannon fodder. Wilding is a just one means to their social-transformation end.

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Fourth and last, the great Thomas Sowell:

One of the reasons for being glad to be as old as I am is that I may be spared living to see a race war in America. Race wars are often wars in which nobody wins and everybody ends up much worse off than they were before.

Initial skirmishes in that race war have already begun and have in fact been going on for some years. But public officials pretend that it is not happening, and the mainstream media seldom publish it at all, except in ways that conceal what is really taking place.

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What’s that? You didn’t come here to read a collage of quotes from other writers? You’re here for my peerless ranting? But Gentle Reader, haven’t we been here enough times already?

It’s on.

(Cross-posted at Liberty’s Torch.)