Sadly, this is barely a parody anymore

Scene: Typical middle-class suburban living room. A woman in her mid-thirties is pacing up and down with a cell phone pasted to her ear.

Woman: Hello? Kate? Is Tommy there? No, he hasn't come home from school. It's 5:30. Is Larry there? Has he seen him since school let out? Yes, yes, fine, I'll wait. No? Does Larry have any idea where...

(knock on the door) Kate, there's someone at the door. I gotta go. (opens the door. Two Police Officers are at the door.) Oh my God. Has something happened to my son?!

Cop 1: (to Cop 2) It insists upon gendering the child. We've got a live one.

Woman: What's going on here? Do you have information about my son? Tommy. Where is he?

Cop 2: Person, may we come in?

Woman: What?

Cop 1: It asked if we may come in. May we come in, person?

Woman: Why are you addressing me as "person"?

Cop 2: Because you are a person, a sentient human being who is capable of Public Reason.

Cop 1: Or should be capable, at least.

Cop 2: So, may we come in, person?

Woman: I suppose you may, er, people. (Cops walk in) Do you know anything about my son? He has not come home from school. Please, please, tell me that he is alright.

Cop 1: Calm down, person. This child is fine and finally safe.

Cop 2: Yes, person, it is safe.

Woman: "It"? My son is not an "it". My son is a human being.

Cop 2: I have had about enough of this. We got all we need. Let's haul this person in now, colleague.

Woman: What? What are you talking about?

Cop 1: There was an incident at lunch today. The child that the state has heretofore allowed you to raise was caught using heterosexist language. The principal concluded that it must have learned such perverted language from its parents and immediately called social services for its protection.

Woman: You've taken him away from me?

Cop 2: What did you think would happen, you pervert?

Woman: Pervert? What is this? You can't do this. Where is my son? Where is my son? I demand--

Cop 2: Okay, hold it right there. Person, we are placing you under arrest. Would you, please, put your hands behind your back?

Woman: What did I do?

Cop 1: Person, please, we don't want to use force.

Woman: You have to tell me the charge against me.

Cop 2: You have absolutely no shame, person. Colleague, hold it down. (Cop 1 wrestles the woman to the floor, and Cop 2 cuffs the woman's hands.)

Woman: (yelling) What have I done? Where is my son? Why are you doing this to me? Where is my son? Where is he?

Cop 2: You have the right to remain silent, person, and I suggest you shut the fuck up right now.

Cop 1: Person, I arrest you on the charge of reckless endangerment of a child and the sexual abuse of a minor.

Cop 2: You pathetic pervert. How dare you sexualize an innocent child! How fucking dare you, you pervert!

Woman: What did I do? Just tell me, please! Tell me, please. What did I do?

Cop 2: You shameless whore!

Cop 1: Er, Colleague, "whore" is usually gendered. Careful now.

Cop 2: Oh, sorry, colleague. Thanks, friend.

Cop 1: What are friends for?

Woman: (now crying hysterically) Just tell me, please, what did I do?

Cop 1: You really don't understand, do you?

Cop 2: You are not only a filthy pervert, but a dumb one at that.

Cop 1: You use gendered pronouns with your child.

Woman: Is that a crime?

Cop 2: You shameless pervert! I can't fucking believe this.

Cop 1: Okay, person, are you familiar with the Socratic Dialectic?

Woman: Huh?

Cop 2: A method of questions and answers, by which reasonable persons arrive at what is Publicly Reasonable. But, Colleague, this is an incorrigible sex offender. Reason won't work.

Cop 1: But it is a person and as such not beyond rehabilitation. Let me give it a shot, Colleague.

Cop 2: You're wasting your time, but okay.

Cop 1: So, person, why do you refer to the child that was placed in your care as a 'he'?

Woman: Please, get off me. I can barely breathe.

Cop 2: Just answer the question, pervert.

Woman: Because he's a boy. Why do they let crazy people like you have guns?

Cop 1: Did it tell you that it wanted to be a boy?

Woman: He's a boy. He's always been a boy.

Cop 2: And why do you say this, pervert?

Woman: Because he is a boy, you lunatics!

Cop 1: How do you know it's a boy? Eh? Answer!

Cop 2: Yes, answer you disgusting pervert! (Cop 2 presses its boot against the woman's head)

Woman: I can't breathe! I can't breathe!

Cop 1: Why do you think your child is a young male, person?

Woman: BECAUSE HE HAS A PENIS, YOU IDIOTS!

Cop 1: And isn't that objectifying an innocent, pre-pubescent child as a sex toy?

Cop 2: Yes, isn't it, you piece of shit pedophile? (Presses its boot harder against the woman's head)

Cop 1: Okay, we've had enough. It's time to go to the station. (Cop 2 removes the boot from her head, and both Cops lift her up).

Cop 1: And after we book you, we're gonna put you in the general population. They really don't like pedos in the general population.

Cop 2: (laughs) Yeah, they sure fucking don't.

Exeunt

Wittgenstein's Beetle in a Box

Something that is intelligible can only be so if it corresponds to something that is identifiable. For instance, sadness is (usually) identifiable by tears, anger by raised voices and tense glowers, and so on. Gender identity, on the other hand, does not have, according to current gender theory, any outward expression at all. Anatomy does not express gender identity because lots of transwomen have penises. Dress and behavior cannot express gender identity because such gender stereotyping would put gender in an oppressive box, and the whole idea of current gender theory is a rebellion against exactly that. So, if gender identity does not attach to anatomy, dress, or behaviour, to what outward expression does it attach?  Professor Reilly-Cooper contends (as do I and, I would hope, any person with a functioning intellect) that it does not attach to any outward expression at all and is, thus, as incommunicable and unintelligible as Wittgenstein’s Beetle in a Box. (That link is to Dr. Reilly-Cooper's hour-long talk on 'gender identity'.  You may not want to watch the whole thing although I highly recommend that you do.  If you just want to hear her point about Wittgenstein's Beetle in a Box, she makes it at the tail-end of her lecture, starting at 1:04:12.)

Why can't we all just get along?

Christian: Original Sin.

Freudian: The Death Instinct.

Hegelian: Beats me, History was supposed to have ended in 1806.

Marxist: Because Hegel was wrong, the Historical Dialectic has not ended and will not end until the last Capitalist is strangled with the rope he sold to the revolutionaries.

Libertarian: Because no one listens to me.

Nietzschean: Because some of us don't want to be that namby-pamby emasculated Last Man who sings Kumbaya as he euthanizes himself.

Queer Theorist: Because TERFs won't obey us.

(Feel free to add to this list.)

The Carousel by Rainer Maria Rilke

For a little while in a roof's shade,
Brightly painted horses turn in a band.
They have all been taken from a land
That hesitates before it fades.
A pinching harness keeps them bound,
But all have courage in their eyes,
A crimson lion terrifies,
And now the china elephant comes 'round.

Just as in the woods there's a buck,
Except that it's saddled and carries
A little blue girl all buckled up.

And on the lion rides in white a young
Boy and holds on with a small warm hand
As the animal shows his teeth and tongue.

And now the china elephant comes 'round.

Bright young ladies are also there,

Almost too old for these wooden mounds,

In the middle of the leaps and bounds,

They look up, around, at us, anywhere.

And now the china elephant comes 'round.

And so it goes--faster, hastening its end,

It circles and it turns and has no aim,

A red, a green, a grey sent around,

A small inchoate outline of a face,

And sometimes we see a smile triumphant

And bless'd that sparkles and is spent

On this blind and breathless game...

Hallowe'en and its Discontents (a post for Miss Lutheran)

[The occasion for posting this really old piece is learning of yet another frustration that dear Miss Lutheran is having with the Evangicals. She apparently sends her little boy to a grade school run by these lunatics, and they, presumably thinking that Hallowe'en is a satanic festivity, have made its celebration strengstens verboten. The School will have a Harvest Party instead. Yeah, I am sure first and second graders love dressing up as stalks of wheat. Ah, geez. This is just one reason (among many) why I would never be an Evangelical. This is also a reason why I don't consider myself a "traditionalist" Catholic anymore. "Trads" have a very strong tendency to frown upon any hint of fun. In fact, the piece below I originally wrote in response to anal retentive, Puritanical objections made by my fellow "trad" Catholics. These nuts don't want you even reading Shakespeare because patent blasphemies like "'Slid" will put you on the primrose path to the Mass in the Vernacular, and then it's only a matter of time before you will be leading the gay lifestyle in San Francisco and clamoring for priestesses who have burned their bras. The only fun these neo-Cromwellians seem to permit is making fun of Vatican II or ejaculating while anticipating the return of the Inquisition.

Anyway, this Evangelical School will let the kids dress up for the Harvest Party, but they may not dress as ghosts or even as superheroes like Batman or Spiderman. I hope some precocious kid piously asks if he may dress up as a New Testament Character and then comes to the party as the Gerasene Demoniac. Evangelicals are idiots.

Oh, for those who care, I am still deathly ill. Maybe I'll die before the first Presidential Debate. That would be a blessing.--Sebonde]

Must everything be kindlewood for a religious war? Well, yes. Sigh. Hallowe'en is fun. Why? It's fun to dress up as Dracula and affect a really thick Transylvanian accent. That should be reason enough to justify it. But, in this hyper-ideological age, fun unfortunately is not reason to do anything. Double sigh.

Okay, so let's be serious. There are two objections to the celebration of Hallowe'en (I insist upon the apostrophe, by the way) by Christians: 1) that, whatever its history may be, Hallowe'en has been taken over by the Satanists, Wiccans, and neo-Pagans and is, therefore, not an appropriate festivity for Christians and 2) that Hallowe'en has simply become a clever capitalist trick to rot our Children's teeth with really bad candy.

I answer that the Hallowe'en that is now being celebrated by the Darkside Wackos does not bear any resemblance to our Hallowe'en. Our Hallowe'en is based on the principle that because evil does not like to be mocked, we should by all means mock it. When a little five-year-old girl dresses up like a witch by putting on a conical made out of cardboard and smearing her face with green paint, she is being gloriously silly. The real witches hate this because to them witchcraft is a deadly serious business. They also hate it when this little girl goes around citing incantations with a high-pitched cackle of complete gibberish. How dare this little ignorant girl reduce our traditional spells to childish nonsense! This makes the real witches burn with indignation, and this is precisely why the little girl should have fun in her little witch costume.

Now, the Darkside Wackos that celebrate Hallowe'en are not silly. They are deadly serious. The Wiccans who dress up as Witches actually think by doing so they become Witches. So, they got to get the dress right. A cardboard conical hat? What, are you kidding? That would be too tacky! Yuck! No, they got to have the real thing. I have no clue as to what real witches wear these days. Robes made out of bat fur? A Necklace of the eyes of Newt? I don't know, but whatever it is (maybe whatever the Wiccan industry declares to be the Maleficarum fashion these days), they gotta have because, as we all know, clothes make the witch, eh? Also, these guys aren't satisfied with fake blood. No, no, no. They must have real blood. And so, of course, no rubber knives. I think you get the point. Of course, everyone will grant this distinction, but it will be objected that the distinction is not all that distinct for does not dressing up a witch bespeak a desire actually to be one? And, too, since everyone is dressed up as a witch, how is one to tell a good, silly witch from a deadly serious, fashion-conscious witch. In answer to the first objection, an actor who believes he is really King Lear is ripe for the Funny Farm.

Kids, it is true, have an over-active imagination, which could put them irretrievably into Neverland. Perhaps. I think this danger is exaggerated. Kids are also some of the best Thomists around, meaning they see things as they are. As long as the costumes are as cheesy as those in Doctor Who, kids won't be in any danger of blurring the distinction between fantasy and reality. I would suggest that it is precisely because kids know how to distinguish between reality and fantasy so well that they have such glorious imaginations. The ones who blur this distinction are a pretty dull lot. Take for example those who spend one third of their lives watching television (or those who swoon during a speech by Barack Obama).

As to the objection that it is hard to distinguish the good Hallowe'en from the bad, I think I have answered this, at least implicitly. Good Hallowe'en is silly and cheesy. Bad Hallowe'en is solemn and boring. I think this difference is intelligible enough. If you are at a Hallowe'en Party where instead of bobbing for apples, you have to hold hands in a circle and pray for the favor of a Celtic Goddess, you can safely assume you are at a bad Hallowe'en Party. If you are at a Party where the blood tastes like ketchup and you can see the zippers on the gorillas, you are amid silliness and, therefore, safe.

As to the objection that Hallowe'en has become another clever capitalist trick, so has, unfortunately enough, Christmas. Abusus non tollit usum