Weekend Reflections: The Coma of Reason

My old friend Tim Birdnow, who has a real gift for isolating the civilizational portent of “local news,” had a great piece Friday at American Thinker, “Progressive Jihad on the Prairie,” about a suburban school board member in Illinois, Steve Springer, who had the audacity to criticize social justice indoctrination for children and special bathroom privileges for boys who “identify as” girls, and then, to top off his trifecta of common sense, mocked the idea of public schools providing special religious accommodations for Muslim children, as follows:

Next up?? Yes, next will be a place for Mohamed to wash his little feet and face Mecca three times during the school day[.]

For his trouble, this school board member, who happens to be — sit down and try to remain calm — a Republican, is under massive assault by the predictable bizarre alliance of CAIR (Caliphate Agitation for Islamist Revolution) and leftist subversives from the teachers union and beyond. Needless to say, though happy to join forces with the progressives to destroy their common enemies — reason, adulthood, and free speech — the Islamic “lobbyists” of CAIR are concerned only with the man’s non-deferential reference to Islam.

As Tim explains:

This is the Alinskyite tactic of “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Springer, an older American whose speech may be a bit antiquated, had the misfortune of falling afoul of postmodern leftist sensibilities.

I wonder: would CAIR be upset if Mr. Springer had substituted, say, Catholics for Muslims? Had he said, “What’s next – supplying rosary beads and giving out Communion?,” would they – or any of these sensitive offendees – have become upset? It was Springer’s choice of Muslims that wound these people up.

And it’s interesting to note that CAIR, an Islamic organization, remains strangely silent on Springer’s other “sins” here. The organization berates him for “Islamophobia” but does not mention its own homophobia, which is inherent in Islam. When ISIS threw gay men off the tops of buildings, it was following Koranic law, and CAIR knows it. That is because Muhammad said gay people “should be thrown from tremendous height then stoned.” The Taliban used to bury homosexuals in a pit and topple a stone wall on them. Flogging and even execution were common in places like Saudi Arabia. I direct you to the Koranic verses 15:73; 7:80-82; 26:165-175; 27:55-58; 29:28-29.

The full article is an excellent example of shining the light of truth on an issue deliberately embedded in obfuscation by totalitarian “activists.” Please read it here.

Speaking of gender identity, from Right Scoop comes the wonderful story of Terry Miller, who set high school records in the girls’ 100- and 200-meter sprints at Connecticut’s State Open track and field championships — because he is a boy.

Miller, a “transgender” athlete — that is, a boy who imagines he is a girl — was competing in the boys’ competition earlier this year, but not setting any records. I suppose if he/she decides to identify as an ant next year, he/she will be shattering records all over the place, and likely go into the Ant Pantheon as Athlete of All Time. 

And just to round out this feel-good story, the runner up in the 100-meter race was also a boy. Congratulations to all — especially the parents who encouraged their sons to find the easiest way to glory, even if it meant making a mockery of their sport and demeaning the efforts of the girls who trained to compete in the — sorry to be so blunt — GIRLS’ competition.

Can’t wait for Connecticut’s Golden Gloves championships, where boys will be beating the hell out of girls in every female weight division, and being lauded as brilliant boxers by sports reporters too gutless to ask, “Hey, didn’t they used to teach us that boys shouldn’t hit girls?”

Why — I mean literally, logically, in this climate, why? — may I not identify as a wrathful, flood-producing God and demand that everyone drown himself, so as not to deny me my preferred identity?

What is the meaning of all this — apart from its obvious surface meaning, namely that reason is on a long hiatus, and apparently will not be back until a real wrathful God has His way with what’s left of our identity-fluid civilization?

The meaning is that there is no longer any rational boundary at all that the progressive zeitgeist will stop at in their urgent, breakneck race to destroy the last obstacle to the fulfillment of their power lustful dreams — that last obstacle being human nature itself. The goal of progressivism, since its beginnings in early German idealism, has been nothing less than the complete overturning of human nature in favor of the political creation of a new, collective, artificial humanity, one which, no longer limited in its submissiveness by the old natural inclinations to self-preservation and self-development, will acquiesce at last to the pyramidal hierarchy of the progressives’ ideal totalitarian State.

A world that succeeds in systematically undermining the concept of biological, static “gender identity,” along with its now-antiquated related notions of masculinity and femininity (male and female natures), will be a world without family, a world without natural forms of intimacy, a world without man’s natural protectiveness and woman’s natural attachment to protective men. In other words, it will be a world without the natural manifestations of order and coexistence that sufficed, however imperfectly, for thousands of years, before progressivism concocted its mad scientist’s fantasy of a manufactured species of relativized, pleasure-addicted, endlessly malleable instruments of production for the ruling elite — happy slaves.

If who or what I fundamentally am is to be determined by me on a daily basis, subject to my feelings or moods, then I stand in no definable relation to anyone around me — especially since those around me are also fluidly self-defining in the same way. We thus have no natural interrelations, and no way to understand ourselves among others. Our relations, then, can only be made quasi-comprehensible by means of artificial rules of behavior, rather than by the ever-maturing understanding of the soul that once constituted the framework and natural guideposts of adult human experience. The State, which provides the aforementioned rules of this unnatural, ever-changing game, thereby becomes indispensable to human life at the most basic and all-encompassing level. Social relations having been deprived of all rational grounding, there is only government to hold us together — or rather, more accurately, to tether us to one another, since late modern humanity is no more capable of being truly together in the proper personal, familial, or political senses, than a shovelful of coal being heaved into a furnace may be called “a community of coal.”