I’m suffering the sudden onset of optimism.<\/p>\n
Don’t worry, the condition probably won’t be fatal or chronic. I’ll be back to my normal, healthy, pessimistic self in a week or two. But meanwhile I can’t get rid of this feeling that everything may turn out okay<\/em> out there in the world. Well, not everything<\/em>. But outcomes of the current madness may be better than we expect.<\/p>\n I feel this way precisely because everything’s falling apart.<\/p>\n And all kinds of people are recognizing that everything’s falling apart or has already fallen and can’t be raised back up. That’s the part that suddenly cripples me with optimism<\/em>. Even people who exist in the thick of our cultural and political insanity are beginning to recognize and respond to reality.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n The first thing I noticed is that even some mainstreamish conservative commentators are giving up on serious, respectful opinion writing and resorting to pure mockery and derision — toward government, toward media, toward the cultural insanity in general. Cue Roger Kimball commenting<\/a> on a rosy piece by NPR’s favorite “conservative” David Brooks (who is generally indistinguishable from NPR’s favorite liberal, E.J. Dionne):<\/p>\n Really, I am delighted to learn that we have embarked on a \u201cjourney\u201d through a new American Renaissance. Had I not been told that, I might have naively assumed that the country, which seems to me to be more divided than at any time since the 1850s, was on the verge of implosion. I am so happy to learn, then, that we are in for unicorns and rainbows, not attorneys general warning about \u201cdomestic terrorists\u201d and \u201cwhite supremacists.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Michael McKenna, in an otherwise serious piece about the consequences<\/a> of Biden’s 2020 “campaign about nothing” can crack off a dismissive sentence like “The shrinking number of people (mostly journalists) who care about Congress have been glued to their computers and televisions this past week, breathlessly following the twists and turns of the soap opera that is the infrastructure legislation.”<\/p>\n When nutty left-wing commentators claim that millions of people don’t want to go back to jobs because they’re traumatized by “fallout from the Trump presidency, continued police shootings, and the consequences of Jan. 6”<\/em> — not because they’re being paid more to be unemployed, not because they got a taste of freedom and learned they hate the job culture, not because commutes and co-workers and bosses and cities suck — smart cookies like Charles C.W. Cooke can only ask, incredulously, “Has the average member of the press corps ever actually met anyone in America?”<\/p>\n Continues Mr. Cooke:<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t a conservative-vs.-progressive thing. It\u2019s not a Republican-vs.-Democrat thing. It\u2019s not a coastal-elite-vs.-flyover-country thing. It\u2019s not even a Trump thing. It\u2019s a journalists-vs.-normal-people thing. Outside of the narcissistic and incestuous Thunderdome that houses the American media, it remains the case that people simply do not think in the way that the Beltway-media class believes they do. They are not traumatized by the daily news. They do not make key life decisions based upon the behavior of the president, nor wait for him to leave office before deciding that they are so disturbed that they no longer wish to work. They are not fixated upon the latest congressional MacGuffin or the implications of a given riot or the occasional mistakes of the police. And when they are looking to enjoy a good \u201ccultural drama,\u201d they do not look for it in the same places as the editors of the Washington Post do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And if you’re an old Alfred Hitchcock fan, you’ve got to agree that “Congressional MacGuffin” is an act of derision right up there with “the shrinking number of people who care about Congress.”<\/p>\n This is not the way professional commentators used to talk about current affairs. This is not “respectfully differing” or intellectual analysis of issues. But nor is is the childish howling of the Twitter mob or the deceptive babblings of CNN or the perpetual hysterical indignation of young New York Times<\/em> prodigies. This is something much more formidable and telling. This is smart, serious people who have given up taking the current regime or current culture seriously<\/em>. <\/p>\n This is people who have moved onto the next stage: Understanding that a country’s Great Institutions have become simply … irrelevant.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n Even over in that part of society where laughter and levity are forbidden (I speak here of the “woke” and the poor unfortunates in their orbit by happenstance or affiliation), things are cracking apart and both woke insiders and watchful outsiders are beginning to realize it.<\/p>\n Take the LGBTXYZ movement <\/p>\n We have lesbians rightly and righteously objecting to being threatened with extinction by the sudden tsunami of sexually confused adolescent girls (and what adolescent of either sex isn’t sexually confused?) being encouraged by supposedly responsible adults to transform into boys. <\/p>\n We have “traditional” lesbians and gays being condemned as anti-trans bigots (by their fellow LGBTetc activists!) for preferring to have relationships with people born to their own sex. Stop and think about that for a minute: fellow LGBT+ activists hating on lesbians and gays for … being lesbians and gays. And gaslighting the Ls and Gs by telling them<\/em> they’re the haters.<\/p>\n We have female athletes rightly and righteously outraged over competitive male wrestlers being accepted into the Olympics<\/a> as female wrestlers (the link is the Babylon Bee<\/em> version of the news, which tends to be one completely accurate step ahead of the real news). <\/p>\n And we now even have white (oh, the shame) LGBTetc. event organizers objecting to BIPOC-LGBTQRSTUVW event organizers charging them “reparations fees”<\/a> to participate in LGBTetc events. <\/p>\n (Of course the It’s the People’s Front of Judea vs the Judean People’s Front all over again. And that’s just a single example from the endless “woke” intertribal wars.<\/p>\npoor, reasonably objecting would-be participants<\/del> white oppressors were quickly told to shut up<\/a> and performed the standard groveling apology. But still. There’s a movement starting here.)<\/p>\n