And Now For Something Completely Indifferent

I was going to write about the spiritual virtue of calm detachment, but somehow this post was quickly hijacked by an incendiary remark by Petey. However, I like the title, so I think I’ll keep it. It actually has some relevance to what we’re about to discuss, but I will probably expand upon that tomorrow.

Perhaps you have noticed--how could you not--that the Left and the MSM are always in full hysterical mode. One day it's this, the next day it's that, but it's always something. It is what I call the "tempest of the day," and I myself try to avoid it except to view it from afar with bemused detachment.

You can tell it's hysteria, because as soon as the hysteria dies down, you may ask yourself, "what was that all about?" A few weeks ago it was the vice president accidentally shooting his friend. Yesterday it was the moonbat generals. Whatever it is, the hysterical press will quickly move on to something else, just like a woman.

I didn't say that!

One of these days Petey is going to get me in real trouble. Now I've got to try to explain what he meant--if I can figure it out myself. And to the extent that I can't, I'm going to rely on some self-aware female readers out there to back me up.

Let me first say that traditional metaphysics views sex and gender in precisely the opposite way as do modern secularists, who regard sex as an objective biological fact and gender as an arbitrary and superficial cultural invention. In the traditional view, gender is actually a universal property that inheres in every created thing. It is antecedent to biology, so it is quite natural that it should appear in a complementary way in biological organisms.

One of the first things you learn in graduate school when studying hysteria is that it is derived from the word for "womb" (think of "hysterectomy.") In the ancient world it was thought that the cause of hysteria--which involves a rapidly shifting and often shallow display of affect--was caused by a "wandering womb." That is, instead of staying put in one place, the womb roams throughout the body, causing various physical symptoms and “affect storms.” The ancients believed that the "cure" for hysteria was pregnancy, as that caused the womb to "settle down" and remain in place.

Of course, this theory sounds hysterical to us now. But bear in mind that Galen was actually a careful observer. Ancient physicians were empiricists who paid close attention to phenomena. It's just that their theories of the phenomena fall short in light of modern scientific explanations. But the phenomena are nonetheless real and in need of explanation. After all, we still use the same word--hysteria---with the same characteristics, etymology and connotations.

Call Galen’s theory foolish, but it is well understood that a woman will become more conservative if she has a child--provided she is not an unwed mother, which may simply make her more female, er, I mean liberal. The key is actually to have an appropriate relationship with her complementary gender--just as it is with men. For a man who is not tempered by his complementary opposite will either be a beast or a shemale.

This, by the way, is the reason why a woman can make a baby but not a man. For a boy to become a man, he will require “male mothering” from a manly role model. It is very rare that a boy will be able to obtain this from his mother alone, no matter how hard she tries. This explains why the plague of unwed motherhood leads directly to the plague of barbarous boys in the body of a man.

So please, do not misunderstand--when Petey talks about female energy in a seemingly disparaging way, bear in mind that he is specifically referring to what happens when it is wrenched from its natural context, which is in relationship to male energy. A different, but equally noxious, pathology results from unhinged male energy, as we see in the Arab world, where females are degraded and devalued. (I was about to say "unmoored" male energy, but that's the problem... It's definitely Moored.)

I am hardly the first to notice that the man-woman gender complementarity spontaneously appears in the political field. Republicans are the Daddy party, Democrats the Mommy Party. If you don't already clearly see that, I'm not going to try to convince you. I've discussed it in the past.

This bipolarity is, in and of itself, not a bad thing. As a matter of fact, it is the natural and inevitable thing, just as marriage is. Speaking of which, you will notice how man-hating feminists, unwed single mothers, and feminized men are perhaps the largest constituency of the Democratic party. Each of these, it should be emphasized, represents a perversion of female gender. For they represent "pure" or unbalanced female energy in the absence of its complementary opposite. Thus, I hope you understand what Petey means when he says that Democrats and the liberal media are just like women, only worse.

It seems that when a woman marries--or simply even has an appropriate relationship with her complementary gender--she automatically becomes more conservative. But here again, marriage itself is not the necessary variable. For example, a girl who feels loved by a strong, virtuous and noble father has almost zero chance of becoming a leftist. Nor will she have any interest in marrying a fe-man such as Jimmy Carter or John Kerry.

I accidently caught a bit of Jane Fonda on Larry King last night. Not surprisingly, her dysfunctional father was a big liberal. Equally unsurprisingly, she has married two of the bull goose loony leftists of all time, Tom Hayden and Ted Turner. If I were Noam Chomsky, I'd ask for her number. (Interestingly, she now claims to be a Christian, so long as it does not clash with the deeper truth of feminist dogma. Having struggled with bulimia for some 25 years, I suspect that she will have the same ambivalent relationship to God as with lower forms of nourishment.)

I also heard some of the Rumsfeld press conference yesterday, and it was a fine example of a proper man engaging with histrionic liberal energy in an appropriately calm and detached way. As a matter of fact, the man who is foolish enough to "take the bait" and engage with the histrionic on his or her own level falls very far indeed. He will enter the murky world of the "purely female," where he cannot win. He has recapitulated Adam's big blunder.

You will notice this whenever you try to debate a leftist. You will notice it when you read dailykos or huffingtonpost or the New York Times op-ed page. Vanderleun has referred to the pathetic men of these worlds as our "modern castrati," but I would fine-tune that assessment, for these are not so much men without a phallus but women with one (or who imagine that they have one). A Maureen Dowd and a Kos What's-his-name are actually the same monstrous hybrid gender.

A few months back there was an excellent piece by Vasko Kohlmayer at American Thinker, entitled Gallantry: What Liberals can Learn from George W. Bush (in what follows, my comments are in brackets). In it, he writes how "The other day, the American people saw George W. Bush once again addressing his critics in connection with the NSA’s surveillance program. Despite the fact that he has been [histrionically] accused of the worst of possible motives--of willfully and deliberately breaking the law to spy on his fellow citizens--the President tackled this and other gratuitous charges without a trace of anger or bitterness [i.e., in an appropriately manly way]."

Kohlmayer continues: "A relative few presidents in this country’s history have endured the kind of vicious and spurious attacks that have been leveled against George Bush. Completely abandoning any sense of decorum or statesmanship, some of the highest officials in the Democratic Party have repeatedly called him a liar, a loser, an election-thief, an airhead, and a fraud. Regularly likened to Hitler, there have been books discussing his assassination. Recently he was even dubbed the world’s greatest terrorist by one of America’s once-prominent entertainers.... Sadly, such views are increasingly becoming part of the mainstream liberal outlook."

Nevertheless, "no matter how malicious they have been, George Bush has always faced his critics with affability and goodwill. Even his most bitter enemies--hating him as they do--would be hard pressed to fault him for being uncivil or personally unpleasant [i.e., for being like them]. He displays none of the [hysterical] unkindness, harshness or anger one would normally expect from someone engaged in a political struggle against those who frenziedly seek his destruction."

In fact, "Bush’s gallant manner has become something of a trademark. His comportment has served him well, for he has triumphed in almost every great battle he has fought, including two heatedly-fought national elections. His successes tend to drive his opponents into what can only be called spasms of political hysteria [emphasis mine], and not knowing what else to do, they crank up even further their already outlandish rhetoric. Their near-madness is indeed a sight to behold."

Kohlmayer points out that "liberalism’s present day haplessness is not primarily due to a lack of argumentative skills on the part of its advocates." Rather, it is a deeper predicament, for their "real and ultimately insurmountable problem is that most of their beliefs and positions are inherently indefensible," for example, multiculturalism, higher taxes to help the economy, socialized medicine, an ever larger and suffocating state.

However, contemporary liberalism is not based on thought but on feeling. Give them credit: at least the feelings are very strong ones. Nevertheless, "So profound is [liberal] desperation and impotence that often they can think of nothing better than heckling, throwing, and squirting salad dressing at conservative speakers. It is both telling and ironic that this often happens in universities which are supposed to serve as forums where opposing points of view are freely and openly discussed."

It should come as no surprise that this histrionic attitude prevails in the gynocracy of wackademia. Manly virtues are utterly alien in that ovary tower of feminist experiments against reality. If you accidentally act like a man--take the case of Lawrence Summers--you will be mercilessly castrated, even if you cravenly apologize and immediately close your eyes and revert back to liberal hysterical blindness, as Summers attempted to do.

Thus, the only hope for liberalism "lies in deception and personal attacks. They must lie about what they believe and demonize those who disagree. Over time this tends to make them vicious, bitter and hateful. One needs to look no further than Howard Dean, Teddy Kennedy, Chuck Schumer, Noam Chomsky, Al Gore, Michael Moore, Harry Reid and the aging Jimmy Carter for confirmation that this is indeed the case."

"What a glaring contrast with the gracious deportment of George W. Bush. In him we see the human aspect of conservatism at its best--kindly, affable and good-natured," similar in a way to Ronald Reagan. How do such men do it?

They do it because they are not merely men in a state of nature or the phallic women of the left. One major reason is that they have (and had) appropriate and psychologically generative relationships with their complementary gender. As a matter of fact, both Reagan and Bush were vertically transformed in part by women--real women.

As was this barbarian.

Petey? I don't know. I think he's still single. That would explain a lot.

*****

Natural man vs. semi-civilized beast (click to enlarge):