Imagine There's No Gender

It's easy if you try / No men among us / Unless they're gay or bi...

That's what they want, right? Gender equality, by which they mean gender equivalence, which equates to compulsory hermaphroditism.

I guess I just don't understand this liberal compulsion to auto-castrate. Where does it come from? What drives it? Is it the transformation of a more primary drive -- something from nature -- or is it wholly learned?

If so, what is the lesson? How do we end up in a world of parasitic Julias and puerile Pajama Boys? Who failed in their duty to teach these boys to properly despise their lack of manliness? Who neglected to transmit the male logos?

As an aside -- maybe not -- my job as a parent is to forge a man out of the raw material of my boy. I mean, right? The other day, I mentioned that I help coach his little league team. First playoff game was yesterday. Yes, we prevailed with a walk-off hit in the bottom of the last inning.

A moment of great Parental Pride occurred in the 4th, when Tristan was struck by a pitch and did exactly what I've advised him to do: don't rub, maybe give the pitcher an exasperated look, toss the bat aside with great disdain, and take your base. Show a little contempt at this feeble attempt at domination. Pathetic. {spit}

Or, if you really want to freak out the pitcher, just shake your head and chuckle to yourself.

Oh, and I gave him one more little piece of advice: if you get hit, return the favor by stealing second and third on the next two pitches. Mission accomplished.

By way of context, no other kid does this, and most of them dissolve into tears even when it can't possibly hurt that much. (Like on the butt cheek of a plump kid? Please.) Coaches rush forward and surround the player like a bunch of nervous hens. I'm not bragging, I just don't understand how the culture changed so dramatically in one generation.

Anyway, it's not as if I had to drill it into him. Rather, I mentioned it just once -- I think after a big leaguer got hit -- and the Principle resonated.

"Right. Don't even give the pitcher the pleasure of thinking he hurt you."

And as Mrs. G said to the other parents, don't bother asking him where he got hit, because he won't tell you.

But now we celebrate the exact opposite reaction. We can't call it a virtue, so what is it? For example, liberals fall over themselves to determine who can be more sensitized to "micro-aggressions."

Micro-aggressions? MICRO-AGGRESSIONS?! You're actually teaching children to scour the social environment for reasons to to feel victimized? That in itself is a MACRO aggression, dickhead!

For example, I read the other day how it is supposed to be offensive to ask a Spanish-speaking individual where's he's from, because it implies that he's not from Here. It's deeply anglonormative and privileged or something, or maybe like asking a fat lady when the baby is due.

If the inquirer were actually being aggressive and obnoxious, wouldn't the appropriate response involve something along the lines of simple Fuck You? But what kind of nut says FUCK YOU! in response to a friendly and innocuous inquiry? If it's a micro-aggression, why not just be microscopically offended, or in other words, ignore it?

There seems to be a kind of perverse privilege that goes along with being absurdly sensitive to these imaginary slights. It's a little like the art world, where the only way to prove your distinction is to claim to appreciate things that would repel an ordinary person, such as this genius who creates her masterpieces by dropping paint-filled eggs from her nethermost ladybitz.

Lady? That's aggressive too. Dennis Prager mentioned the other day that at some elite university, the gay-bi-lesbian-cross dressing crowd wants to ban use of the phrase "ladies and gentlemen" as Deeply Offensive. In the microscopic sense.

Anyway, the egg-chucking artist is an exception to the Giuliani Rule of "If I Can Do It, It Isn't Art," because I can't do that and it's still not art.

Hey, wait a minute.... Shouldn't I be offended that I am being excluded from this vaginormative art form?

That is all. I admit it. I got nothing. Go Cards. If you really want to win this thing, you have to be ready to give up the body:

Monogamy and Monosophy, Counterculture and Counter-Cosmic

Now that I think about it, I guess I've spent my whole (numerically) adult life being part of the so-called counterculture.

That is, just as the left was transitioning from a supposedly freewheeling counterculture to today's dreary, repressive, intolerant, and conformist dictatorship of virtue, I personally transitioned from the ambient bonehead illiberal leftism of my protracted adultolescence to the bohemian classical liberal neo-traditional orthodox hoodooism of our Founders.

Which means that I have never known what it is like to have folks like me in charge. Wait, I take that back. Jerry Brown, who was our governor from 1975 to 1983, is also our current governor. Thus, I suppose he once mirrored my own insanity. I was a moonbat under Moonbeam.

In fact, right now, the biggest issue confronting our failed state is whether Brown will sign a bill mandating that on birth certificates, men can be listed as mothers and women as fathers.

In other words, the question is whether the state can supersede biology and determine for itself who is a mother and who is a father. I don't see why not, since this is simply a corollary of the premise that sex has nothing to do with marriage. To paraphrase Dennis Prager, if sex is irrelevant to marriage, then it is surely irrelevant, period. Everyone is whatever sex they wish to be, which means that our only order is disorder.

It also means that the will has triumphed over reality, or power over truth.

Please note that disorder is not the same as chaos, which would disclose itself as outward or apparent randomness. Rather, this is the imposition of a disordered order, which is something else entirely, for if a woman can be a father, it means that you and I are no longer fathers or mothers (since the new definition vacates the plain meaning of father- and motherhood).

Remember, with rights come responsibilities -- or rather, vice versa, since rights flow from intrinsic cosmic responsibilities. Freedom without responsibility equates to unalloyed nihilism, just as responsibility without freedom equates to the purest tyranny.

But in the upside down and inverted world of the left, parents (or at least those with wombs) have rights with no responsibilities, whereas infants have responsibilities with no rights. What are the infant's responsibilities? Well, first of all, to not be conceived if it should inconvenience the one who has the right to bear it.

Failing this, the child has the duty -- both cosmic and constitutional -- to die for the sake of his mother's sacred right to convenience. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for the comfort and ease of one's indisposed and/or irresponsible parent.

Likewise, the infant no longer has the right to a mother and father, even if such things existed. But the adult, perversely, has the right to be a mother or father, even if this is clearly an impossibility, any more than my aunt can be a trolley car. You might say that with the left's abiding hostility to language -- or aggravated logophobia -- all things are possible.

The human race is and has always been a race between those who believe in the Absolute and those who want to be the Absolute. At the moment the latter have taken a commanding lead, but I wonder if this hasn't always been the case? If the good guys have ever been ahead, it wasn't for long.

In the Bible, according to Ratzinger, "the cosmos and man are not two clearly separable quantities, with the cosmos forming the fortuitous scene of human existence, which in itself could be parted from the cosmos and allowed to accomplish itself without a world."

Rather, cosmos and man are one (or not two), in that they share an underlying order. This is obvious in the case of science -- e.g., physics, math, and logic -- but it is equally true of ethics, which is grounded in the order of natural law.

Conversely, if our rights are grounded in man, then we have no rights, because what is man in the absence of the Absolute? That's right: nothing. Or, nothing but Obama, i.e., the arbitrary and lawless rule of man.

Thanks to the tenured boobs of multiculturalism, we now have multiple histories -- feminist history, black history, queer history, Chicano history, etc. But even supposing such inanities exist, they can only be understood in light of a universal History. In the absence of an Arc of Salvation -- i.e., cosmic progressivism -- such silly pseudo-histories can have no meaning whatsoever. Which is why the neo-Marxian statism of an Obama is just upside down Christian millennialism.

We say: one mankind, one morality, one truth, one history, and one cosmos because One Cosmos. Or, in an eccentric formulation that occurred to me the other day, monosophy and monogamy -- one wisdom and one woman -- are intimately related, and it might even be that in the absence of monogamy, the cosmos -- discovery of the one transcendent order -- would be impossible.

Bob, why would you say such a strange thing? Well, for starters, in order for there to be a cosmos, there must be human beings. Animals know nothing of any extra-terrestrial, transnatural cosmic order. So, what are the conditions necessary to discover this deep unity?

It seems to me that this cannot be an exterior, outward, or simple monism. This is a lower oneness for which we have no use. If reality were this simple, it would be too simple to account for us.

Rather, this reality must be -- how to say it? -- the simultaneous discovery and co-creation of a dynamic and living unity woven from the diverse -- at once complementary and/or polar -- threads of multiplicity. How is this possible?

Let us suppose that male and female are the (or an) instantiation of one-as-two. This is -- or was -- the assumption of our western his & heritage, i.e., male-and-female He created them. In short, the "unit" of mankind appears as two-knit, or as two becoming one flesh via the living third. To notice that homosexual (or any other form of) non-marriage cannot achieve such higher unity is to be cognizant of the vast realm of Beyond Obvious.

There is much more to say about this, but I'm backed up in my work, and besides, Tucker says it well enough.

(And RS, if you're out there slacking off at work again, don't worry, your book will soon be on the way. I'm just a little behind in my correspondence and everything else.)

Six Years with a Rotten Unicorn? Cheer Up, the Worst is Yet to Come!

Let's discretely change the subject and get back to what this blog does so well, which is what now?

In these latter days of totalitarian triumphalism, it's easy not to be our usual optimystic selves. And I mean this literally. Dennis Prager talks about how unhappiness is the cheap and easy path. It is the way of the Weak Man. Happiness, however, is a Serious Problem, and if nothing else, Raccoons are dead serious about their utter frivolousness.

Prager makes the excellent point that happiness is a moral imperative. Why? Because being around miserable people makes one miserable. Therefore, it is your cosmic duty to be happy, or at least confine your unhappiness behind closed doors, because seriously, you're bumming everyone out.

As they say in China, a fish rots from the head down. But as Iowahawk says, a unicorn rots from the horn down. Thus, it is an extra challenge to be happy with this rotten unicorn in office.

Why should this unicorn be so grim? After all, his wife has everything a man could possibly want: broad shoulders, muscled arms, a strong jaw, a 34 inch waist...

Not unlike Ronald Reagan. Now, there was a happy man, and his infectious happiness seemed to flow to the rest of the citizenry -- trickle down euthymia.

But it had the opposite effect on the permanently aggrieved, AKA the flightless wing of the left. They weren't happy under Reagan, and they are just as unhappy under his pneumagraphic negative. I detect a pattern, or at least an independent variable. One senses that the left won't be happy until everyone is as miserable as they are.

In contrast to President Buzzkill, Reagan didn't mope around like some misunderstood adolescent. But then, Obama's only qualification for office was having written a juvenile autobiography revolving around the psychic hole where his alcoholic and polygamous father should be. I guess that makes him our first alienated teen president.

Does anyone else find it ironic that an enthusiastic pothead should be such a morbid buzzkill? Maybe he just got high in order to flee from his depressed self. I would too. No, that's not true. I'd drink more.

Depressed characters can also be drawn to depressing ideologies and people, because it normalizes their depression. Or in other words, if you're married to Michelle Obama, you have a ready explanation for your depression. And an ideology like morbid neo-Marxism is both a cause and consequence of depression. Like Hitler, Marx was anything but a happy kampfer.

One thing I often tell patients is that a clinical depression is very much like a viral illness. Once it takes hold of the psyche, it's analogous to the virus that infiltrates the nucleus of the cell and starts making copies of itself.

In the case of depression, it starts producing depressed, morbid, and worrisome thoughts and feelings. At a certain point you have to tell the patient -- or yourself -- "Knock it off already! That is your depression speaking. It is no longer you speaking."

This is especially true in cases where medication is indicated, because then it really is an absurcular psycho-biological phenomenon. Such individuals pour out a steady stream of negativistic thoughts and feelings that easily affect the people around them.

Politics got you down? Feeling a little like this lately?:

Well, get used to it. This is how it's going to be for the rest of your life. These demon possessed political vampires are not going to go away, and they will never give up until everyone is as miserable as they are. You're just going to have to learn to be happy in spite of them, and in fact, just to spite them. If you are unhappy, then you've allowed these psychic terrorists to win.

I was looking for a quote by Ratzinger to the effect that Christianity will shrink to something analogous to what it was during its first three centuries. He is the temporal pessimyst to Pope John Paul's eternal optimyst. I didn't find the exact passage, but this is even more to the point. He sounds like a new testavus for the restavus prophet:

"The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.... As the number of her adherents diminishes... she will lose many of her social privileges... As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members....

"It will be hard-going for the Church.... The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution -- when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain....

"Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

"And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death."

Just don't count on it. That way you won't be disappointed. The Wee Church of Perpetual Slack is for the few. If it starts attracting the rabble, then we're doing something wrong. Just thank God reality is never what it is, but is always pointing above and beyond itself to our true home, which this world can't be. If it is, then the rancid unicorn has a point.

Unnatural is the New Natural

I'd like to write about something else, but it's difficult to think pleasant thoughts when the left is provoking so many unpleasant ones.

In fact, the left isn't satisfied with compelling disordered thought, but must also punish ordered thought -- such as the spontaneous reaction of that Miami Dolphins player to the KISS. That poor heterophile is in a World of Pain for his mundane normalcy, and re-education camp is only the beginning. He could cheat his way through college, beat his wife, have eight children out of wedlock, or try to injure other players, but be uncomfortable with two men kissing in public? The Ludovico medical facility for you!

"Choice! The boy has not a real choice, has he? Self-interest, the fear of physical pain drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. The insincerity was clear to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice."

They want us to believe that Michael Sam is Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and Cesar Chavez rolled into one big victim. No doubt we'll soon be treated to heartrending scenes of him being led into the locker room by NFL officials (calling all photoshoppers):

This represents the complete inversion of reality by the left, since racism is wholly unnatural, while heterosexuality -- AKA sexuality -- is the most natural possible thing in all of nature.

Of course, science cannot pronounce on "norms" per se, but all of biology is oriented around the Prime Directive to reproduce. It is as close as science comes to admitting that the world is incoherent in the absence of teleology.

Thus, sex does not explain reproduction; rather, reproduction -- the end -- explains sex. Take away reproduction, and sex obviously makes no sense. It would be like ears in the absence of sound or eyes in the absence of light.

The difference between racism and so-called homophobia is that the former must be learned. Children are not born racist. Rather, they have to be taught to be racist, either by parents or by the culture.

My son, for example, has friends of all races, and if it weren't for the grown-ups talking about it, he would scarcely notice. He just doesn't care. He judges others purely by the content of their play, not the color of their toys.

Which, for the left, won't do. Rather, he will have to be indoctrinated to believe that he is secretly racist, that he is the beneficiary of "white privilege," and that everyone who doesn't look like him is his victim. As Obama would say, his greed rules a world in need.

Conversely, so-called "homophobia" is not learned, but rather, spontaneous. No normal parent wants their child to be exposed to the image of two men kissing on the lips, but if mine were, he would regard it as weird or creepy or maybe a puzzling attempt at humor, with no one ever having to tell him so. In any case, I wouldn't confuse him by trying to convince him that his natural reaction is immoral and that he must learn to deny his own feelings. Rather, I would downplay it and say something like, "yeah, it's weird, but some people are like that."

Please note that there is nothing whatsoever here that smacks of violence or aggression (let alone justifies it). Indeed, violence toward homosexuals, like racism, must also be learned. On those few occasions (that I know of) that gay men have come onto me, I was either a little discoonbobulated or maybe even flattered, but nowhere in me was there an impulse to physically lash out.

I have no idea where such an impulse would come from, but I suppose it might well be rooted in something that could legitimately be called homophobia, i.e., insecurity with one's own sexual identity, or unconscious homosexual urges that must be projected and violently punished.

Thinking back on my own boyhood, everyone was "homophobic" in the nonviolent sense. In fact, it never really occurred to me that something called a homosexual actually existed, only that masculine virtues were honored and enforced by the group. If someone were called a fag or a homo, it had nothing whatsoever to do with actual homosexuals, but rather, just enforcing the Code.

Now those words are forbidden, but you can't eliminate the underlying reality, so you see the same thing at play when someone is called a wimp or a wuss. The purpose is not to insult homosexuals, but rather, to encourage the guy to Man the hell Up.

Since I help coach little league baseball, I frequently must deal with failure to Man Up, but not only are there no permissible words to describe it, there is also pressure to deny that it is even occurring. So there are courageous players and wimpy players, but no vocabulary with which to talk about it.

Seriously, you can't even joke that there is No Crying in Baseball. My son knows that, but at least half the players don't, which is not just unseemly but frankly self-indulgent and narcissistic. I mean, if sport can't at least teach you to cope with adversity and failure like a man, what good is it?

On a couple of occasions I have mumbled that someone was throwing like a girl, but that was a pretty rash and reckless thing to do. It was as if they had never heard the expression before, or I had said something like FEEL FREE TO GROW SOME TESTICLES, BITCH!

Most of the kids -- even those with fathers -- have already been so indoctrinated with political correctness that you can't even point out that some guy on the other team is a bad player. And not in an insulting or mocking way, just as a neutral fact. If there are good players, then it stands to reason that there are bad ones. It doesn't mean they're bad people or that this permits you to ridicule them.

For example, it is an ancient adage in baseball that you don't throw a change-up to a bad hitter. A bad hitter won't be able to catch up with your fastball, so if you throw him an off speed pitch, you're doing him a favor.

Well, one of our kids was experimenting with a change-up. I told him, "just make sure you don't throw it to a bad hitter," and he was momentary nonplussed. He understood the principle, but reframed it as not throwing a change to a player who is "er, not a, er, really great hitter," or something like that. Political correctness forbids one to call things what they are, to feel one's feelings, and to see what is before one's eyes.

CreekOfConsciousness

Once again I have little time for a post. So, why bother? Just a habit, I suppose. I've been doing this for almost ten years now, and old school Raccoons will recall that it used to be every day. I used to occasionally mix in the odd repost, which I haven't done lately. Why not? I don't know. I have the idea of a ceasefire at the ten year mark in order to finally look down there, see what we have, and maybe try to organize it into book form. Of course, it would have to be multiple books. Should I do it by year? By subject? Or -- my preference -- to somehow intuit the nonlocal organizing principle behind the whole thing and then put it together around that? However, suppose we find the center. Then what? Is it a spatial center? A temporal one? Must be both. In fact, we have to begin with the principle that the cosmic center is God, or O. Or better, the metacosmic -- or macrocosmic -- center is God, while the intracosmic -- or microcosmic -- center is man. Which reminds me. One of the most foolish cliches of the left is that modernity somehow displaced man from the center of things. You know the drill: first heliocentrism. OH NO! Then geology: the HORROR! Then Darwin: MAKE IT STOP! But do you know anyone who is freaked out by these things? Yes, the sun doesn't revolve around the world, earth isn't 6,000 years old, and animals are subject to natural selection. This is a purely quantitative view of reality, so it presupposes what it would attempt to prove, which is the usual cosmic nothingbuttery, as in, existence, history, and man are NOTHING BUT whatever. However, religion, if it is about anything, is about qualities, and no amount of quantity adds up to a single quanlity, not even "lots," because that adjective would require the comparison of one quantity to another. So, what is the nature of this presumptuous speck of tenure who pronounces on the nature of ultimate reality? Isn't the statement I AM NOT THE CENTER a little like the statement ALL CRETANS ARE LIARS? In other words, in order to characterize the nature of reality, one must haver a commanding view of everything, and such a view is only possible from the center out and top down. Otherwise, one is just looking at things from the terminal point of a two-dimensional line, or from the end back. To rise above that line is to be at the center of a new perspective. Animals cannot do this. Imagine a frog at the bottom of a well. He will assure us that reality is a little bright disc surrounded by darkness which alternatively appears and disappears. If man is nothing but a contingent animal produced by accidental forces and pressures, then he is no more able than a frog to characterize the nature of reality. God is the name we give to ultimate reality, and not even the smartest frog knows anything about God, so take that, Descartes.