The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Madness Takes Its Toll

Posted on | March 4, 2019 | Comments Off on Madness Takes Its Toll

After a week spent focusing on politics at CPAC, permit me now to return to the insanity enveloping our culture:

 

Liam Hemsworth recently married Miley Cyrus, a decision he will regret “but once and that will be continually.” The new Mrs. Hemsworth, 26, is featured in the latest Vanity Fair:

Miley Cyrus may be in a heterosexual relationship with husband Liam Hemsworth, but she still identifies herself as a queer person — and sees their marriage as an opportunity to change how people view love, gender, and sexuality.
In a wide-ranging interview and a personal essay for Vanity Fair‘s March cover story, the music star got candid about why she and Hemsworth tied the knot in December, and how it hasn’t shifted her place in the LGBTQ+ community.
“The reason that people get married sometimes can be old-fashioned, but I think the reason we got married isn’t old-fashioned — I actually think it’s kind of New Age,” Cyrus, 26, said. “We’re redefining, to be f—ing frank, what it looks like for someone that’s a queer person like myself to be in a hetero relationship.”
“A big part of my pride and my identity is being a queer person . . . What I preach is: People fall in love with people, not gender, not looks, not whatever. What I’m in love with exists on almost a spiritual level. It has nothing to do with sexuality. Relationships and partnerships in a new generation — I don’t think they have so much to do with sexuality or gender. Sex is actually a small part, and gender is a very small, almost irrelevant part of relationships.” . . .
Cyrus took inspiration from her “favorite woman in the world, Hillary Clinton” and realized that she and Hemsworth were “stronger together.” . . .
Cyrus also penned a personal essay for Vanity Fair, talking more about her queerness there.
“Being someone who takes such pride in individuality and freedom, and being a proud member of the LGBTQ+ community, I’ve been inspired by redefining again what a relationship in this generation looks like,” she said. “Sexuality and gender identity are completely separate from partnership.”

The word for this is crazy. And if you recall how Johnny Depp was more or less destroyed by her marriage to Amber Heard, it is not difficult to predict what Miley Cyrus will likely do to Liam Hemsworth. In a society warped by feminist ideology, however, the common belief is that women are universally victims of male oppression, which means that as soon as the Cyrus-Hemsworth marriage collapses, it is his reputation that will be destroyed by accusations of abuse, etc. Meanwhile . . .

Charlotte Allen calls attention to the sad tale of Emma Thomas, a British girl who moved to Thailand and spent five years of her life, ages 24-29, in a relationship with a mooching womanizer who was “cheating on me with multiple partners from the start.” And now? The epiphany:

A year of self-love has changed me for the better, seeing me evolve into a happier and healthier version of myself. I didn’t know what it was like to love yourself, know your worth or feel “good enough” until I made myself a priority for the first time in my life.

You see this is bogus “wisdom.” Her problem was never a lack of “self-love,” but rather an excess thereof, i.e., an arrogant and mistaken confidence in her own judgment. Charlotte Allen concludes:

In days of yore young women spent their twenties looking for husbands. In fact, they started to worry quite a bit if too many years of their twenties passed without their having found…a guy who would at least take them out to dinner now and then if not put a ring on it. And their mothers or aunts or grandmas warned them that if you wanted a husband, it was a big mistake to shack up with any man who wasn’t serious about marrying you because you’d be cutting yourself off from access to men who were.
But now, we have…female freedom. And the above is what we get.
I want to know what’s wrong with women.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Young people quite generally are nowadays encouraged to believe they can make their own rules and ignore the wisdom of their elders without risk of averse consequences. To quote Ace of Spades: “I gotta be me, as the douchebag credo goes.”

Narcissistic self-regard is the kind of pride that proverbially goeth before destruction, but quoting ancient proverbs is probably “hate speech” now, and so we are not allowed to warn young people against trusting their own untutored judgment. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil” is also now probably hate speech, and did I mention that the alleged True Conservatives at a certain #NeverTrump site are now engaged in celebrating abortion and mocking pro-lifers?

Quem deus vult perdere dementat prius is more ancient wisdom that we aren’t supposed to impart to young people anymore. Last month, I attended a panel discussion of transgender madness at the Heritage Foundation, where I quoted Jennifer Chavez, a board member of the radical Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), who shared emails from parents of teenagers caught up in the insanity of “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD). The transcript of Chavez’s presentation is now online at The Public Discourse:

I was shocked when my thirteen-year-old daughter told me she was really my transgender son. She had no masculine interests and hated all sports. But as a smart, quirky teen on the autism spectrum, she had a long history of not fitting in with girls.
Where did she get the idea she was transgender? From a school presentation — at a school where over 5 percent of the student body called themselves trans or nonbinary, and where several students were already on hormones, and one had a mastectomy at the age of sixteen. In my daughter’s world — in real life and online — transgender identities are common, and hormones and surgeries are no big deal.
I took her to a gender clinician seeking expert guidance. Instead, he accepted her new identity and told me I must refer to my daughter with masculine pronouns, call her by a masculine name, and buy her a binder to flatten her breasts. He recommended no therapy, and there was no consideration of the social factors that obviously affected her thinking. I was directed to put her on puberty blocking drugs. I was falsely assured that these drugs were well-studied, and that they were a perfectly safe way for her to “explore gender.” I was told that if I did not comply, she would be at higher risk of suicide.
I have nowhere to go for proper help. Therapists are actively trained and socially pressured not to question these increasingly common identities. In Washington, DC, and many states with so-called conversion therapy bans, questioning a child’s belief that she is of the opposite sex is against the law.
I have been living this nightmare for over four years. And despite my best efforts, my daughter plans to medically transition when she turns eighteen later this year.

First, notice how the phrase “on the autism spectrum” is now used as a synonym for socially awkward or just nerdy. This diagnosis-as-explanation is a quite recent phenomenon. Twenty years ago, parents weren’t using this vocabulary to describe their children, and I suspect that the notable deterioration of adolescent social skills is not the result of any actual epidemic of autism, but rather reflects changes in society and culture. The pseudo-diagnostic jargon of saying “my kid is on the autism spectrum” is perhaps less embarrassing than saying “my kid is an unpopular dork,” even if the two sentences are more or less synonymous.

Can’t parents say, “Hey, stop being such a weirdo”? Is that hate speech, too? Something else parents aren’t allowed to say, I guess: “Hey, you’re spending too much time staring at your iPhone.”

How about some old-fashioned common sense? Or is that illegal now? Parents can still use the carrot-and-stick approach to encourage appropriate behavior and discourage inappropriate behavior, but what do I know? I’m not an “expert,” just a father of six whose kids turned out all right — so far, at least. I suppose it’s entirely possible anyone might get sucked into the swirling vortex of cultural craziness, but these things are never entirely random. There’s always a backstory whenever you see kids get towed under by social trends, which was true in terms of my own adolescent misadventures as a dopehead hoodlum in the 1970s.

Probably I’m too judgmental, too opinionated, too negative in my attitude toward current social problems. But isn’t it obvious that a shortage of judgment is the underlying problem? If grown-ups weren’t afraid to bluntly speak the truth — “Stay away from that crazy Miley Cyrus, son” — maybe young people wouldn’t get themselves mixed up in all this insanity. Even if we cannot reverse the general trend of moral and cultural decline, we can at least try to protect our own children from the undertow of decadence and depravity. Imagine what the parents of Liam Hemsworth must be going through. The shame! The horror!


 

Category: Culture

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