Sultan Knish
After a great deal of fuss about national security and terrorism,
sentence was passed and Bradley Manning, the man at the center of the
storm who used a Lady Gaga CD to smuggle out classified information,
announced that what he really wanted was to live as a woman.
Posting a photo wearing the least convincing wig outside of clown college, Manning announced that
from now on, his name will be Chelsea.
Life might have been simpler for everyone if Manning had just gone
straight to the bad wig. In the age of Obama, his right to pretend to be
a woman would have been protected with more vigor than the lives of
American soldiers serving in Afghanistan.
But that's not what Manning really wanted.
In 1974, Jerry Dean Michael, a mentally ill ex-con and con-artist, put
on a wig and pretended to be Liz Carmichael, the widow of a NASA
engineer with a car that could 70 miles to the gallon.
"I'll knock the hell out of Detroit," Michael declared, in his persona
as Liz Carmichael. "I'll rule the auto industry like a queen." That last
line was a joke that it took a while for anyone to get.
Liz Carmichael and his plans to rule Detroit, now a place filled with
feral dogs and politicians which probably would have been better off
ruled by a lunatic queen with a fiberglass car for a throne, received
nearly as much attention then as Bradley Manning did now. Unfortunately
Liz's car, that was going to revolutionize the automotive industry could
no more run, than Michael or Bradley could become women.
Michael fled, was arrested, released on bail, fled again and was arrested living, once again, under a female name.
Outside an organic grocery store, a Free Bradley Manning rally leaflet
sits next to a poster for "Let Me Die as a Woman". The movie, a 70s
pseudo-documentary from the appropriately named Doris Wishman trying to
branch out from her usual line of work filming nudist colonies for the
discerning film buffs of Times Square, followed men who wanted to be
women.
Back then that sort of thing fell into the shadow world at the edge of
cities where gay bars, prostitutes and the other people falling into the
hole inside social norms wound up. It held the fascination of the
transgressive for those who were looking to push the boundaries of
society to the edge and over it, but even they understood that it was
interesting in the way that reading Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook
His Wife for a Hat was because that what they were seeing were the
results of serious psychological and social trauma.
A few weeks ago, Don Ennis, an ABC News producer who had originally
announced that he now wanted to be called Dawn, let everyone know that
he picked up a touch of amnesia and was no longer in touch with his
female identity. With a plot line like that, Ennis should have been
working on ABC's soaps, instead of its news division.
But the amnesia line worked. And everyone at work probably breathed a
sigh of relief at not having to listen to Don speak in a high falsetto
anymore.
A few missing brain cells and Don no longer wanted to die as Dawn, because Don was never Dawn.
What was once shocking and exploitative has become tediously prosaic.
One day a balding middle aged man decides that he really is a woman,
begins wearing a wig to work and all his liberal colleagues rush to
learn about his new and exciting identity. But the man inside the wig
hasn't left behind his old problems. So he develops amnesia and takes
the wig off.
When the formerly taboo becomes the habit of boring middlebrow liberal
men looking to escape their boring lives cranking out daily stories
about racism for the media establishment, it says a great deal about how
the formerly transgressive loses its taboo and about the resulting
state of social disintegration and its accompanying absurdities.
The old idea, last current in the 70s, that gender is a construct is
back in full swing. Every media outlet is now doing cheerful stories
about some little boy being raised as an "Adorable Transgender Little
Girl" by his Munchausen-by-proxy parents and the intolerant schools who
won't let him use the wrong bathroom.
Gender as a construct is one of those mechanistic progressive fantasies
straight out of a Brave New World society where every aspect of human
identity can be customized. Like most of the futuristic dystopias, it
ends badly.
John Money, the psychologist who coined the term "Gender Role" insisting
that gender transcended sex, inflicted his theories on a little boy
named David Reimer, who was raised as Brenda under a regime that could
be best be described as horrifying child abuse. Reimer eventually
reclaimed his masculinity and told his story in a book, "As Nature Made
Him"; a title that the LGBT community would today consider a hate crime.
Every news story about a boy being raised as an "adorable little girl"
is the story of another David Reimer being abused by the indefatigable
identity politics of the insane.
In New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie made his state the second place
after California to outlaw therapy that tells boys that homosexuality is
not innate and that they can choose to live a normal life. Christie's
cynicism was already legendary and his pandering to gay donors is
unsurprising.
The testimony that convinced the New Jersey Senate to allow the gay
lobby to launch another assault on the family by targeting the private
relationship between parents, children and therapists included a deeply
moving tale by James Goldani, a drag queen with a history of drug abuse,
now calling himself Brielle, of being electroshocked at an ex-gay camp,
whose horror was only slightly undermined by being derived from a Ru
Paul Movie, "But I’m a Cheerleader."
That was a minor detail that no one particularly cared about. In a
parade of congenital liars with mental problems claiming victimhood,
what was one more absurd lie?
The idea codified by the new law is that sexual preferences are so
innate that they cannot and should not be changed, but that gender is
entirely mutable and should be changed by anyone who wants to.
That's not a scientific conclusion, but a political one. The goal of
politicizing victimhood is to maximize minorities making it easy to
become a minority, but very difficult to stop being one. What the gay
rights lobby has done is "lock down" its supply of recruits from New
Jersey and California. And there are a whole bunch of more states to go.
The bigger your minority group is, the more influence you have. And in
the new post-everything America, you have the right to be transgender,
but not ex-gay. But the gay rights lobby is not the only victim group
that would like similar feudal privileges over potential members. Any
group can have its identity politicized in the same way.
There are radical deaf rights activists who would like to ban Cochlear
implants that allow deaf children to hear because they are an attack on
"Deaf Culture". If they ever organize themselves as effectively as gay
groups have, it's not too hard to envision Governor Christie signing a
law that outlaws parents from curing their children's deafness because
it will cut them off from Deaf Culture.
Deaf culture, like gay culture, is both recent and a construct. It's an
innovation in response to a disability. A missing element. The
difference is that with deaf culture the nature of the disability is
obvious and the cure really works.
Identity politics is pride in victimization. It gains its entire
identity from embracing dysfunction and refusing to change. But despite
all the pride parades, the assertions of identity, the "Born this way"
torch songs, the underlying dysfunction remains.
Bradley Manning betrayed his country for the same reason that he put on a
blond wig; because he is mentally ill. It's the same reason that Jerry
Dean Michael tried to pass off a toy car as the future of the automobile
industry and why countless transgender con artists engage in
self-destructive behavior.
Crazy people mix destructive and self-destructive behavior together into
a toxic cocktail. That is about the neatest summary of the gay rights
movement that there can ever be.The brave new world of identity politics
is confusing mental breakdowns with identity and missing elements with
culture.
With the construct of race nearing exhaustion, the miners of grievance
chose to fragment gender and the family into a thousand pieces. Their
triumphant progeny is Bradley Manning, a man filled with confused
hatreds and no sense of direction. One of Gaga's Little Monsters,
lashing out at his country from behind a blonde wig.
Our
society has become a puzzle of broken pieces that don't fit, a strange
mesh of identity politics, identities that can agree on the agenda of
the left and little else. Under all the rainbow umbrellas are broken
people struggling for relief, acting out, breaking things and breaking
themselves. All the cheerful assertions that the next wave of insanity
is really the next civil rights movement sound as hollow as they do in
ghettos where the broken family is not an aberration, but the norm.
These are not all disparate elements. They are parts of the same
problem. The family is at the center of a healthy society. When the
family collapses, so does the society.
The left has turned dysfunction into its banner, it has made it seem
trendy and progressive, but what it has really done is shattered the
American family as badly as it shattered the Russian economy with its
speculative theorizing and radical projects.
There is no path to restoring America, except through the restoration of the American family.
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