True perversions, and their allied fetishes, are based, in part, on a boy's terror at discovering the female's genitals, where her lack of a phallus indicates, to his immature mind, that a woman is a man who has been castrated. The sight of a girl's or woman's genitalia creates so much anxiety that the little boy has to look away and learn to "not see" such a frightening sight. Please note, this is hardly universal and the boy's vulnerability to just such an outcome depends in significant ways on his relationship to his parents, especially his mother, in his earliest years. In a true sexual perversion, the adult man prefers non-vaginal sex because intercourse creates too much anxiety for the now adult little boy.
There are several corollary statements that bear mentioning. In a person with a perverse orientation not only must the differences between male and female be denied, but they must also deny generational differences. To some extent, our "youth culture fetish" in this country reflects just such a disavowal. When those who used to proudly proclaim, "Never trust anyone over 30" have all turned 60, their only option is denial of time passing and an insistence on remaining youthful forever, even if it requires expensive and sometimes dangerous plastic surgery.
[For anyone who finds the notion of castration anxiety to be fanciful, I can assure you it is a factor in the mental life of most boys, though rarely does it cause such an outcome as a perversion. Likewise, there are women who grow up feeling inferior because they see themselves as castrated; sometimes this is felt as a literal state, for others it is more of an ex post facto explanatory metaphor.]
A perversion has other elements, as well, but for my purposes I want to use it as the model for disavowal of reality in the face of severe anxiety. I have treated adults in psychoanalysis who function as perfectly reasonable people but have a perverse relationship to certain aspects of reality.
The Utopianism of the Western liberal elites (fusion with the all-nurturing mother) is expressed in their wishes to force equality of outcome and dependence on the state. The Islamic fascists' wishes to force their Utopian ideas on the world (based on the belief in the angry Paternal Allah, who answers all questions and promises paradisical fusion with the all-nurturing mother in the afterlife) are expressed through their holy violence aimed at restoring the Caliphate) can only thrive in the precincts of those who are ready, able, and willing to disavow anxiety laden realities.
[As an aside, the cultural norms in much of the Arab world leads to circumcision during the age when a child's castration anxiety is at its height (that is, during the Oedipal phase, ~4-6, or during the recrudescent Oedipal phase in early adolescence.) The unfortunate outcome of late circumcision, in a vulnerable boy, is a tendency to exacerbate paranoid and authoritarian trends. This is worth a post of its own when time allows.]
As I have described, Political Correctness rests on the denial of differences between men and women; it demands a perverse relationship to reality. Furthermore, in the PC world, since only white men can be oppressors, it follows that it is necessary to "not see" on a regular basis. This has caused the greatest failure of the LSM. The liberal bias of the LSM is not particularly troubling; what is troubling is their refusal to acknowledge their bias and their attendant blindness. The bias requires that all news stories adhere to the proper PC perspective; this can be dealt with easily enough by learning to read the news "between the lines." What is more difficult to deal with is the LSM refusing to see stories that cannot be altered to make them adhere to the PC world view.
This morning, Peggy Noonan has a piece in the WSJ Opinion journal, A Separate Peace America is in trouble--and our elites are merely resigned. Her thesis is that ominous portents are clouding our vision of the future and many of those who should be helping right things have disengaged:
I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with "right track" and "wrong track" but missing the number of people who think the answer to "How are things going in America?" is "Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination."
....
Our recent debate about elites has had to do with whether opposition to Harriet Miers is elitist, but I don't think that's our elites' problem.
This is. Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.
As I read her article, I was reminded of Jonathan V. Last's piece in the Weekly Standard last Friday, Rule America?, subtitled "Liberal elites ruined Britain as a hyperpower. Could America meet the same fate?" He writes that after WWI, the British elites recoiled in horror from the death and destruction of that savage conflict and gave in to their wishful Utopianism (a strain of Socialist Utopianism has been a part of the British zeitgeist for a century):
In 1933, the Oxford Union - a debating society and one of the strongholds of liberal elite opinion - held a debate on the resolution "this House will in no circumstances fight for king and country." The resolution passed. Margot Asquith, one of England's leading liberal lights, wrote that same year, quite sincerely: "There is only one way of preserving peace in the world, and getting rid of your enemy, and that is to come to some sort of agreement with him. . . . The greatest enemy of mankind today is hate."
This was incorrect in 1933 and is incorrect now. The idea that if only we could speak sweet reason to our enemies, we will have peace, is motivating much of the British elites to this day, and infects many of the liberal elites here at home.
The American left, too, eerily echoes its British counterparts. Consider the "Peace is Patriotic" bumper stickers; the howls of protest against the nomination of John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations, for fear that he might be too assertive of American values; the comparison - by Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) - of American soldiers at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis and Guantanamo Bay to the Soviet gulag; the protest cries of "No blood for oil" and the left-wing fringe speculation that the endgame of George W. Bush's 9/11 fear-mongering would be to cancel elections and establish a fascist police state.
The liberal opponents of the British Empire were proved wrong, but their misplaced disillusionment was enough to sap the vitality of imperial confidence. After rising one last time to fight Nazism, the sun set on the British Empire.
Likewise, it is pleasant to believe that the crisis of confidence in today's liberal elites won't affect the outcome of our war with Islamist extremism. The greater worry concerns what happens next. Will protestations of liberal elites become mainstream diffidence about America's place in the world? Will we, too, stop believing that America stands firm, as a great force for good - and then see our place in the world diminish?
If our liberal elites continue to press the country toward disengagement and isolationism, based on their fantasy that the victims are never at fault for their violent acts and will become loving and peaceful citizens of the world if only we stop oppressing them, we will find ourselves in a replay of the rise of Nazism, with incalculable results. A blood bath in Iraq would be guaranteed; escalating terrorism with failed states once again becoming havens for monsters would ensue; madmen with nukes would be yearning to use them and biological warfare would be much more likely to be let loose in the world. Without American leadership, the sea lanes at choke-points in South East Asia and the Persian Gulf would become even more dangerous than they are now, with privateers and pirates emboldened by the enfeeblement of the only nation in the world that is at all capable of protecting the weak.
Losing our way and surrendering to the multi-cultural PC view that all cultures are equal except for the American experiment, which is far worse, would be a disaster. We may all wish to "give peace a chance" and that "all you need is love" were true, but there are savages out there who believe that they know all there is to know, and they can not be tamed by rational discussion, they can only be destroyed or surrendered to; if you have any doubts, the new Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, made some clarifying statements yesterday, which renders the preferred goal of the left, surrender and retreat, a suicidal equivalent.
Iran's hard-line president called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and said a new wave of Palestinian attacks will destroy the Jewish state, state-run media reported Wednesday.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also denounced attempts to recognize Israel or normalize relations with it.
"There is no doubt that the new wave (of attacks) in Palestine will wipe off this stigma (Israel) from the face of the Islamic world," Ahmadinejad told students Wednesday during a Tehran conference called "The World without Zionism."
"Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury, (while) any (Islamic leader) who recognizes the Zionist regime means he is acknowledging the surrender and defeat of the Islamic world," Ahmadinejad said.
Dr. Sanity responds:
I'm sure there will be all sorts of apologists with rationalizations and explanations about the supposed "victimhood" of the Palestinians and the grave "crimes" that Israel has committed against the Muslim world. But for anyone who isn't blind, deaf, and completely and totally irrational; we have heard from the horse's mouth the hatred and fanatical zeal that will--without any hesitation whatsoever--send a few nuclear warheads toward the Jewish nation as soon as they are capable of doing it. If you have any doubts about this, then you are likely one of the pathetic apologists mentioned above.
And the way that the nations of world twiddle their thumbs as this is happening; and allow themselves to be manipulated by this sick religion makes it clear that they don't particularly care and intend to let it happen.
Just as they let Hitler happen. Only this time, the Islamic version of the final solution has some real technology to play around with.
Israel, and the Jews, have always been "the canary in the coal mine" but I would add that when next the Jews find themselves trapped at Masada, they are unlikely to go quietly.
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