Motus Mentis

I think perhaps I’m turning the corner, now: no more fever, at least, though I’m still shockingly depleted. I say “shockingly”, but I suppose I should face facts: I’ll be sixty-two in April, and although I’ve always had the constitution of a lion, and have almost always managed to fight off whatever virus or bug has threatened to get hold of me, nothing lasts forever. Perhaps I’ll even get a flu shot next year. I have to say, though: if this is to be the “new normal”, I say the hell with it.

I’ve been too addled to read much, or write at all, and haven’t really paid any attention to the news. I did notice, though, that our mainstream news outlets seem to be fawning over Kim Jong-Un’s sister, who is attending the Olympics, and that they have got some well-deserved heat for it. (CNN, for example, said she was “stealing the show!” — as if she were Kate Middleton or some other society-column luvvie, instead of the director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the world’s most brutally oppressive dictatorial regime.)

Again I am tempted to use the word “shocking” — because it ought to be — but by now it’s hard for me to be shocked by this. Our culture has become so degraded, its organs of perception and discrimination and comprehension so atrophied, that we’ve lost all moral and intellectual depth, and all sense of extension and persistence in time. We have become as children, captured by one shiny thing after another, informed only by the feelings of the moment.

Even the one thing we now seem to care about to the exclusion of everything else — the ostentatious piety of championing “victims” and denouncing their “oppressors” — is forgotten here. Think of that! Here we have a real oppressor — one whose family actually enslaves, tortures, starves and murders truly helpless men, women, and children — and she is wafted to celebrity by a doting press. How is this possible? The answer is simple: she is not Western, not male, not capitalist, and not white — and Donald Trump has declared her family to be enemies of America. This should tell you everything you need to know about what really motivates our mass-market media.

It’s easy just to go numb to it all — it’s in our nature, after all, to get used to awful things that don’t go away — but every now and then the awful depth of this insanity, this pathology, jumps back into focus, and it is terrifying.