In addition to the other corruptions of our major national establishment and institutions, I think that I am most annoyed by the corruption of language. Certain euphemistic terms have come to be kind of newspeak in the Orwellian sense. In themselves such expressions are bland, anodyne and seemingly harmless, but what they mean in reality is horrific. Reproductive health care; that sounds so much better than ‘abortion’. Gender-affirming health care instead of ‘amputating breasts and male genitalia, surgically removing vaginas and massively administering puberty-altering drugs’. ‘Diversity, equity and inclusion’; there’s another harmless-sounding term, which actually means conformity, hamstringing the talented, and exclusion of the designated disfavored categories of people. ‘Disinformation’ is a much more elegant term for information that may discomfit the progressive ruling class or counter the established narrative, and ‘systemic racism’ means that minority criminal offenders are automatically excused, no matter how violent or vicious the crime they are charged with.
So, what other examples of corruption of the language can you suggest? What other newspeak terms have, as the expression has it, gotten your goat in a big way. Add in the comments.
Society
Rigid Conformity
I suppose to me personally that the additional tragedy with regard to so-called “trans kids” is the absolutely unyielding and rigid characterization of tastes and preferences as being specifically either male or female. This tragedy is aside from the aspect of irreversible chemical and surgical mutilation of otherwise normal body parts attached to troubled teenagers and gaslighted small children, but the whole rigid concept of personal traits, tastes and enthusiasts all being locked into the notion of being ‘male’ or ‘female’ and that if a child displays one or another of that set or tastes or behaviors antithetical to his or her biologically-determined gender … well, then that child must therefore be chemically and surgically altered to conform.
Blackout
A lot of things came together this week – and one of them is the absolute end of my patience and grim toleration/indulgence of certain intellectual trends and racial sub-groups in our society. Curiously, this comes during a period of the mourning for and burial of the late sovereign Queen Elizabeth II, which in combination with some other news elements initiated this particular train of thought. My toleration of certain elements in our society has reached a critical point; to whit, I am done with black racism … and yes, black racism is an existing and very poisonous thing, as much as enablers and perpetuators of that variety of racism deny it, and our National Establishment Media try and sweep it under the rug, denying the very evidence of our lying, racist eyes. Some brutal and egregious rape-murder-kidnapping-assault happens in a city like New York, Memphis, St. Louis, Atlanta, a mass punch-out all-hands brawl in a fast-food restaurant, an amusement park or on a cruise ship, an organized mob loots a retail outlet … if there are no pictures initially of the perpetrators of such outrages against civic good order … well, everybody knows.
Everybody knows that an elderly person of white or Asian ancestry is more apt to be knocked out in the street by a male thug of color. Everybody knows that schools in urban black majority areas are snake pits of venomous disorder, places which well-meaning teachers flee. Everybody knows that the Black Lives Matter mass movement set a new land-speed record in going from cause to racket, materially benefiting only the original organizers and their subsequent investment in pricy real estate in upscale neighborhoods. Everybody knows, or at least suspects that reported racist incidents, such as Jussie Smollett, the BYU Volleyball imbroglio, the noose garage pull-down at NASCAR – all ballyhooed in the national media will eventually turn out to be self-aggrandizing fakes. The initial offence is headline news. But the apologetic walk-back is usually reported on page whatever. Huh. Imagine that.
Another Texas Road Trip
We took Wee Jamie on another road trip, this last weekend. My daughter and I have decided that we should dedicate one day a week to “Not Doing Work Stuff” – and have an outing of at least half a day, doing something … something diverting. This long weekend demanded a whole day of ‘Not Doing Work Stuff.’ My daughter suggested a road trip to Fredericksburg, and I thought that we should check out the Museum of the Pacific War, as it has been at least five years since I visited it. It was indisputably the last war which we won, after all. The first time I went to the War Museum was maybe in 1995 – when it was all still contained in the old Nimitz Hotel on Main Street, and an annex down the road – IIRC, a side-less pole barn. (And Fredericksburg was still a sleepy little town with an attractive Main Street, with local-oriented business situated in profitable commercial real estate, where they tended to close shop and roll up the sidewalks at about 5 PM. Well, that has come to a screeching halt, I assure you.)
We took the back way, to Fredericksburg, after stopping at a local restaurant for a breakfast which turned out to be more substantial than expected – a local outlet for the Maple Biscuit Company. The fresh-squeeze orange juice was fantastic, and yes, I would know about all that, having grown up with orange trees in the back yard. The biscuits and sausage gravy were so generous and so good that we were resolved to split an order next time. (This was the last place I saw anyone wearing a mask, BTW. The staff were all masked-up.) The back way to Fredericksburg meant driving up 281 to Johnson City, passing memories all the way; Blanco, where we had done market events at the Old Courthouse, and where once we scored some amazing deals at an estate sale at an old house just off the highway. Johnson City, where we had a wonderfully fun three-day long market one year, for the lighting of the Courthouse, the weekend after Thanksgiving. (We had to stay two nights for that in a cabin at the Miller Creek RV resort, which meant that we barely broke even.)
Johnson City, when I first went through in the late 1990s, was sad and depressing in comparison to Fredericksburg. It seemed to be hanging on based on the relation to LBJ, the Johnson ranch and various residences where LBJ’s family had lived. Now it is the beginning of the Texas Wine Road and has a new lease on tourist life. Some years ago, I had suggested that the Hill Country had all the components save castles, villas, and quaint hilltop towns to become the New Provence, since they produce such Frenchified specialty items as lavender, wine, olive oil, goat milk cheeses … and wine. Oh my gosh, have they gone into producing wine. Someone has even built a castle! The usual maps of the Texas Wine Road usually include only the top twelve or fifteen of the biggest and most well-established of the wineries along 290 – or at least, those with the flashiest central building. As we discovered, just about every commercial or retail business along that road was posted as a winery, and even a couple of places, like Wildseed Farms, which initially specialized in some other commodity – like peaches or wildflower seeds – had added on a wine tasting room. If you started at the two wineries just outside Johnson City to the south and stopped at every single winery or tasting room and had a single glass … your liver would be screaming for mercy when you got to Stonewall, and you’d be on the list for a liver transplant once you got beyond Fredericksburg itself.
Rebellious
Americans – both those born on this soil and those who weren’t but who got here as fast as they could – are natural rebels, stiff-necked, stubborn, and not inclined to bow the knee and truckle to those who think they are our betters. Oh, it might not seem so in these dolorous times; too many of our fellows seem just too ready to be passive, landless serfs with an appetite for crumbs and approving notice from the wanna-be-nobility’s table, and too damned many outright want to be the nobles, or their willing henchmen/women/whatever. But a preponderance of us are not that ready to be pushed into servitude to the State – witness the drubbing at the pools that the voters of Wyoming gave to the presumed princess-heir of the landed house of Cheney yesterday. Losing an election by a 40% margin is not just the voters saying ‘no, thanks’, it’s the voters escorting the candidate to the city limits, brandishing buckets of tar and bales of feathers while snarling, ‘…and don’t come back!’
Ah well – I have long disapproved of political dynasties – the Kennedys, the Bushes, the Murkowskis, the Gores and their similar and lesser-known political ilk. The only political dynasty that was ever any good for America as republic and in the long term was that of John Adams, and that was back in the day when we all were pretty adamant that there would be no patents of nobility issued, tither formally or otherwise in this blessed experiment in citizen governance. For myself, I hated the choice I had between two scions of political dynasties in the 2000 election. What – a choice between two sons of political privilege? I think I held my nose and voted blindly, and can’t remember who for, not that it made much of a difference then or now. Although one of the two has retreated to a relatively quiet life in Texas, and the other has chosen to humiliate himself on the international stage as one of those campaigners for radical actions to oppose climate change, traveling hither and yon at great expense on energy-spewing jets.