Motus Mentis

Justin Smollett was arrested today. His story of having been attacked by Trumpist rednecks because he is black and gay was indeed a hoax, as I think most of us pretty much knew from the beginning.

The story now is that he perpetrated this flim-flam because he was dissatisfied with what he was being paid for his role in the TV series Empire, and wanted to attract attention to himself in order to get a raise. (I’ve heard that Mr. Smollett was paid $65,000 per episode. There have apparently been 75 episodes since 2015, which would mean the disgruntled actor had, in the past four years, been paid close to five million dollars. Poverty is relative, especially among media stars.)

I suppose this latest angle is intended to put the whole thing on more ordinary, avaricious terms, and to deflect the eye from the embarrassment of Narrative Collapse. What looked like a splendid opportunity to slander white, straight America in the usual way went blooie, and very spectacularly so — and so now Mr. Smollett must become just an ordinary grifter trying to enrich himself by telling lies. The media have commodious and well-lubricated memory holes for just this sort of thing, and I’m sure l’affaire Smollett will be broomed into one just as soon as some suitable new distraction comes along.

But even the new story, the greedy-grifter story, tells a story of its own.

So: Jussie Smollett wanted to attract attention to himself, in order to get a raise? Well, what kind of attention would a person in that position seek to attract? Favorable attention. Positive attention.

When I was a kid, in a bygone epoch before the principles of ordinary existence were flipped upside down, someone who wanted to attract favorable public attention would do so by making some sort of heroic, benevolent, or self-sacrificing gesture. He’d join the Army and go to war, if he were lucky enough for there to be a war. Perhaps he’d start visiting children in hospitals, or sponsor a program for wounded veterans. Maybe he’d save a family from a burning building, or donate a kidney. Something like that.

Now when I say that “the principles of ordinary existence were flipped upside down”, I don’t mean that human nature itself has changed. That doesn’t happen. So Mr. Smollett would still be seeking to attract favorable attention by performing a heroic, self-sacrificing, and benevolent gesture. And that is, of course, just what he tried to fake. The only thing that’s different, in this new epoch, is what that means.

In short, Mr. Smollett went out there and took one for the team. It’s never any fun to be attacked and frightened and humiliated and doused with bleach, but in a time when a Narrative of persistent and ubiquitous racism and anti-homosexual bigotry is essential for the Progressive cause, and when it is more important than ever to keep up the attack on a traditional American nation that all good people nowadays are taught from childhood they should viscerally despise, such manifestations of evil are in tremendous demand — and because the Narrative is, by now, baloney from top to bottom, the demand far exceeds the supply. For Justin Smollett to endure this humiliating assault, then, was a priceless gift — and in return he expected to become a hero, a martyr, a sacred object.

And so he did! He was worshipped by our grateful media. His name reverberated in the halls of Congress, and actually catalyzed new “anti-lynching” legislation. He was fÁªted on television and radio. I’ll bet he was well on the way to getting that raise.

What does all this mean? It means that we are now in a time of holy war, in which the greatest honor is given to martyrs. Now, that’s nothing new — most wars become, in some sense, religious, or at least moral, crusades. The First World War, for example, did so quite explicitly, as I noted in this post a couple of years ago. And the great Jihad of Islam against the West expresses itself very clearly as a pitiless holy war with martyrdom as its highest glory. The reason that the Vietnam war was such a disaster was precisely that it failed to arouse that sort of religious fervor.

Holy wars are not about winning a patch of land or access to seaports. They are about taking up the flaming sword of God, and eradicating evil from the earth. The Other becomes the enemy of all that is good and holy, and the soldier of God is called upon to destroy him.

To die in such a cause is a ticket straight to heaven — and so, in these cheapened times, is just being doused with bleach and called a bunch of names. If you’re black and gay, that is.

But what it all tells us is that the holy war is on, and it’s here. It’s within our own borders. And we, friends, are the Other.