Progeria: A Sign of the Times

"It is hard to ignore the signs of regression, sexual and otherwise, that mark our civilization and humanity."  —Diana West, The Death of the Grown-Up

      "An old predator

at last chewing on himself 

is a ridiculous sight."

—James Tate, “Pastoral Scene” 

Everywhere we look we find a world in a state of total disarray, a world dissolving into a sinkhole of triviality and pettiness, a world in its dotage before it has even reached the threshold of adolescence, a world replete with the vanities of gown-up infants devising and perpetuating a theater of embarrassing inanities. I list only the merest handful of recent episodes of a cultural etiology that is pervasive and palpably obvious, but that only seems to be getting worse as time goes on. This is by no means breaking news, but it remains no less startling and relevant. 

The latest instance of the ongoing banality and delirium afflicting the cultural ethos comes from the airline industry. As Fox News reports, the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) has suggested that employees “stop using terms purportedly offensive to women and LGBTQ individuals.” Terms like “cockpit” should be replaced with “flight deck,” and “manpower” by “people/human power.” 

Masculine generalizations are anathema. (Does this mean that pilots and airline executives will stop drinking cocktails?) The ALPA’s  diversity, equity and inclusion language guide stipulates that phrases like “husband/wife,” “boyfriend/girlfriend,” and “mother/father” should be discontinued in order “to promote inclusion and equity” and to avoid offending “different family structures.” 

The guide also suggests avoiding masculine terms like ‘guys’ when addressing groups, “since the word is not inclusive of ‘women, transgender people and people with different gender identities.’” Same old politically correct bafflegab that governments, corporations, and institutions have adopted for years, but the picayune state of mind it increasingly represents resembles that of toddlers mucking about in a designer crèche. It is hard to believe that such people are grown men and women rather than cradle-squatters. 

Also from FOX: We learn of the of the San Francisco mayoral debate in which incumbent Democrat Mayor London Breed tasked challenger Mark Farrell to name three drag queens and three LGBTQ advisers to his campaign, as an opportunity to “redeem himself” — from what, exactly, is not clear. Instead of manfully taking issue with Breed, Farrell responded by ingratiatingly affirming that he had two members of the “queer community” on his staff. In addition, “Farrell emphasized his track record of supporting San Francisco's LGBT community.” 

A city compelled to reduce the number of its schools owing to crime, budget, and enrollment factors and that has been ranked as the “worst run” city in the U.S. finds itself quibbling over the status of drag queens, gays and LGBQIA+++ communities, in other words, bickering over silly, nugatory, fashionable absurdities that have only contributed to producing a culture of lilliputian dandiprats or parody figures treading the boards. When mature debate is replaced by asinine twaddle, and serious negotiation by burlesque, we know the nation is in steep decline.  

Nor can one help remarking the devastating frivolity of the Democrat administration, a veritable haven for puerile deviants such as Tyler Cherry, Biden’s new communications director who uses plural pronouns, is married to a man, and is partial to flowing gowns; Biden’s former nuclear waste disposal deputy, drag queen-like and recidivist thief Sam Brinton; and the utterly preposterous transgender Rachel Levine, serving as U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health. They should be understood as grown children cosplaying at a protracted costume party and having a whale of a time before their mother comes to fetch them home. The examples they afford of piddling pubescence are as distressing as they are laughable. 

Then we have the complete idiocy of the university crowd, as exemplified by the latest vaudeville production mounted by the University of British Columbia. The University is preparing a drag island retreat or queer campOUT for 14-21-year-olds that promotes “queer, trans, two-spirit, questioning, and allied youth lifestyles.” 

The camp director, whose drag name is Gaia Lacandona, wants to encourage (chiefly male) participants “to shed their imposed identities, to apply eyeshadow and glitter, wear diverse clothes regardless of their gender assigned at birth, walk the runway, and pretend to be an animal outside or an alien from outer space.” (Gender is defined as a “social construct,” a playword for “sex “which is obviously not assigned at birth. Sex is given, and is a rigid determinant of gender. Anyone of sound mind knows this.)

It is not only the anomalous antics of a carnival society that we confront, a spectacle of ostensibly serious people in positions of authority behaving like comic thespians and intellectual pygmies. We now find ourselves living in a decadent and risible world in which men celebrate their heterodox sexuality in lavishly obscene events called Pride Parades. What, one wonders, is there to celebrate? Gay sex is now accepted almost everywhere as a social right and privilege. From a cultural standpoint, it’s no big deal. Why is it necessary for cities and administrations to host lewd and profane pageants of essentially naked men and shameless pederasts exhibiting the prurient twerk of sodomy and other anatomical revelations? San Francisco Pride regales us with “nude men riding around on bikes” and “waving to children.” 

As C.A. Skeet writes at PJ Media, “Pride was just a parade in the big cities. Then it became a day. Then a week. Now it's a month. Now it's in schools, department stores, fast food chains, and library reading rooms.” To make matters worse, “Drag queens and drag shows are intentionally targeting children.” 

In this zany barnyard world, men are encouraged not only to act like women but to actually become women. It is no surprise in these circumstances that men are applauded for marrying men and calling them husbands — it makes no difference if it’s a progressivist lefty like Democrat Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg or a libertarian-conservative commentator like Dave Rubin. Politics is beside the point. Such people may claim a compatibility of souls that has nothing or little to do with sex, which is admittedly a justifiable position and eminently sensible. 

But the sex is still there, and it is a form of sexuality that is non-puerperal, sterile, unproductive, and ultimately, nothing more than an assertion of fallow and effete self-sufficiency. As Roger Scruton points out in "A Political Philosophy," “human sexual emotion is a kind of language, the vehicle of a moral dialogue” that may be misconstrued, “directed away from the person to the body.” The problem is that desire “can target those who have not learned its language.” 

Perhaps Scruton is right, but for my part, I regard such relations or relationships not as immoral but as ridiculous. People are free to experiment and to make their romantic, common-law, and sexual choices no matter how foolish or bizarre — this is a non-starter in any discussion regarding love and eroticism. But this does not absolve contracting partners, who have opted for the heteroclite and abnormal as a lifestyle, from the appearance of participating in an arid grotesquery. 

One thinks of the famous injunction of the 16th-century humanist François Rabelais: “Do what thou wilt.” Following Rabelais, Aleister Crowley’s "The Book of the Law" asserts the basic principle “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law,” which stresses personal freedom and the pursuit of one's true path in life. There can be no objection to Crowley’s dictum so long as one remembers that it comes with provisions. 

“Do what thou wilt” is fine, even if it does not contribute to the flourishing of society, but do not impose it on others whether by coercion or indoctrination, and do not flaunt it. Sexual practices are individual decisions or compulsions that are personal matters, not legislative issues. In their aberrant form, they should never have been elevated to the status of an institution and a collective tribute to the spirit of barrenness. Marriage is for those who are able, in fact or in principle, to make children, not just adopt them. 

This is why the rainbow flag is a contradiction in terms, a symptom of cognitive dissonance. As we read in Genesis 9:7-13 (reprising Genesis 1:28), God instructs Noah after the flood “be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein” and to seal the bond “I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.” 

Gilbert Baker is no substitute for God, and a striated emoji is not code for plenitude. The rainbow is a symbol of natural fecundity, but the rainbow flag is a desecration of the biblical injunction. It is the negation of fruitfulness and abundance. Where there is no progeny, there is no succession. Where there is only pretense and affectation, there is no longevity, no communal sustenance. There is only childish playacting and much ado about nothing. There is only a proscenium of strutting caricatures.

What we are witnessing in all such instances is the language and ideas of a klatch of juveniles who have yet to pupate, who have been so pampered and coddled by an affluent, supra-liberal culture that they have never had to undergo the strenuous and painful rite of passage from whimsical childhood to productive adulthood. And like children, they are obsessed with games of LARPing make-believe, of trying on new identities, of “let’s pretend,” of épater la bourgeoisie, of sexual hijinks, of violating conventional norms. In the last analysis, they resemble a mob of uncabined preschoolers at their customary mimicries.

Such phenomena are sure signs of prolonged infantilization, not so much the death of the grown-up, as Diana West anatomizes in her fine book of that title, but rather the deferral of the grown-up, the state or condition of maturity that has been suspended, put on hold, prorogued. These people have never grown up in the first place.

What we remark here is something quite extraordinary, a race of adult rug rats. It is not quite like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the story of a character who ages backward from senescence to infancy, but a kind of progeria, a genetic disorder in which children age at an extremely rapid rate but remain children. 

Plainly, this is only a metaphor to describe the distorted and paradoxical development we observe almost everywhere we look in a diminished society of faux grown-ups who seem both too young to govern or lead and too old for their pranks to be taken at face value. We should never apologize for regarding them as frankly ludicrous, as purveyors of comedy gold. Nor should we hesitate to call them out for what they are, callow specimens of a vacant and expiring culture and enemies of good sense, social trust, and communal obligation.

How one longs to be part of a society of healthy adults, of serious people who believe in merit, competence, normative traditions, good humor, sane commitments, and responsible service to others. One recalls political philosopher Russell Kirk who in "The Conservative Mind" articulates the quality of life mature people seek, which entails a belief in “the rule of law, equality before God and the courts, a respect for tradition, including the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman and the procreation and raising of children.” 

Kirk argues for a “vindication of the norms of human existence…despite the follies of the time” — and, we might add, despite the follies of a dwindled folk busy at their farcical agendas. Clearly, we need more than one adult in the room.