Print this page
Friday, June 5, 2020

NEWS FROM MANHATTAN ISLAND: New Normal, Old Normal, and the Living Dead

By: 
Rate this item
(48 votes)
NEWS FROM MANHATTAN ISLAND: New Normal, Old Normal, and the Living Dead

New York City:Our gubernatorial Führer has announced that Monday, June 8th is the day that New York City begins its reopening. It will do so under the mandates of the “New Normal”.  The city authorities have prepared for the reopening by stocking up on 2,000,000 free masks that volunteer drudges regularly making their rounds through the streets offer to the indigenous slaves. They, to my horror, grab at them with their thick rubber gloves as though they were manna in the desert.

On Monday, when the first wave of the outside slave population returns to work, it will walk from Grand Central, Penn Station, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal to its sanitized places of incarceration through endless rows of shops boarded up against looters. Meanwhile, my university has announced its provisional plans for its new normal reopening. These amount to a proclamation that it is transforming itself from an already admittedly pointless institute of decayed learning into a full-fledged hospital. I am supposed to teach through a face shield to a handful of masked victims scattered about the classroom while the rest of the inmates listen in from the safety of their home cells. Here is the new normal: a loony bin ruled by the loopiest and most dangerous of the lot.

Let me hasten to note that the Regime seeks to win the slave population over to the unquestionable need to keep its chains securely fashioned with reference to that golden word “new”. Everything is supposed to be “new” about our Global Covid Fatherland. Since it is all “new” no previous standards for judging what is being done are said to have any significance. Hence, our obligation to obey the dictators, who, in their enlightened absolution, infallibly grasp what “new” measures are required for us to grovel forwards. The slaves around me are still swallowing this nonsense hook, line, and sinker. An angel from heaven could not convince them to rip the mask of bondage from their mouths. It is demanded of them, not because it does anything to protect them from illness, but because it is, as Dr. Fauci says, a “symbol” of the incredibly new normal.

But the only thing “new” about the predicament that we are in is the extent of the organization and the acceptance of what is just plain insanity. Yes, there have, of course, been outbreaks of mass hysteria all through our history. Still, never in the course of human events has so much been done to destroy so much and so many for so little a reason. What is “new” today will be looked upon in the future---if our Masters allow us a future and we can escape from their lies---as a collective attempt at suicide which westerners at the time of the Black Death would have looked away from in sheer disbelief and mortal embarrassment.  new subscription ad

Our “new normal” perfection of the organization and acceptance of insanity could only have come about due to one reason alone: the fact that it is firmly rooted in and has grown out of an already disgusting “old normal”. Indeed, the “new normal” is merely the “old normal” carried to its logical conclusion. And this, once again, is simply the creation of a loony bin inhabited by the living dead.

My whole career as a Catholic historian and a Traditionalist activist has been one of explaining and fighting precisely against this “old normal”, which was nothing more than a hideous disfigurement of earlier western civilization, and both economically as well as sexually perverse in its materialist morality. This Established Disorder, centuries in the making, has long been suffering from a sickness unto death. Its demise is not to be lamented. As I said in my last article with reference to the post-conciliar caricature of the Roman Catholic Church that has now been consigned to the rubbish heap of history: “good riddance to bad trash”.

A perfect tool for briefly outlining the sickness of the “old normal” is the above-mentioned comment of our medical Duce, Dr. Fauci, regarding the mask as “symbol”. A “symbol” stands for something. It can be a physical object, as with the mask, or rhetorical, as with a word or a slogan. Nevertheless, whether physical of rhetorical, a symbol contains a teaching that the people accepting it must probe to the core in order to grasp what it fully means and demands of them.

The “symbols” of the “old normal”, which sought to build a world founded upon a replacement of the laws of God’s Creation with those provided by willful, fallen, human beings, were rhetorical in character: “words”. Few in number---“freedom”, “nature”, “the will of the People”---they have proven to be all too effective in promoting their nefarious, diabolical teaching, as the historical study of the construction of the Established Disorder from the sixteenth century onwards so readily indicates. Taken all together they have formed a rhetorical “word game” leading straight to the “new normal” nuthouse. For Luther, the Founding Father of modern “freedom”, believed that man possessed no “liberty” whatsoever. The Enlightenment Founding Fathers of the call to follow “nature”, either started with or came to the conclusion that its “laws” were blind and changeable; a minefield best utilized by men without access to divine or permanent rational and scientific wisdom to do with whatever gave them “power”. Finally, the revolutionary Founding Fathers of obedience to “the will of the People” have repeatedly shown that what this means is dictated by the desires of the strongest to do with nature whatever they wish, based upon passionate materialist desires for power that they themselves have no freedom to resist.

masked population covid

Woe to those who take these word rhetorical symbols at the foundation of the “old normal” at facemask value, without seeing what the word games formed from them really mean and are really meant to teach! Fooled by what seem to be their innate value, at least as understood according to existing interpretations of common sense, their victims get hopelessly entangled in the web woven by their rhetorical manipulators and carried down a highway that they honestly do not wish to travel. And if they finally wake up and react against spending the rest of their lives at the Bates Motel to which they have been led, they do not have the faintest clue as to how this happened and how to defend themselves against their own destruction. What will their enemies say? Did they not leap for joy when first offered their freedom, their natural rights, and their democratically run societies? Perhaps they have always been hypocritical supporters of these wondrous foundation blocks of the old normal; Fifth Columnists lying low until the opportune moment to strike out against what everyone---i.e., the strong willed gang members currently dominating society---knows to be unquestionable goods!

A classic but by no means sole example of the hopelessness of those trapped in acceptance of the real significance of the rhetorical symbol is offered for us by the French Revolution. French revolutionary rhetoric has been a study of vast importance for historians and I have no intention of going into the whole of this terrifyingly fascinating topic here. If anyone wants a bibliography on it I can provide it for him. Let us simply return to the appeal to “The People” as a guide to the problem. Louis XVI at his trial in 1793 could not for the life of him understand why he was being tried as an “Enemy of the People”. He loved the French People and had been saying so throughout his reign. He still loved them in 1793. But he could not grasp the fact that the radical Enlightenment leadership of the revolutionary movement that had finally, gained power in 1792 through use of brutal force defined “The Will of the People” as the desire of the dictatorial elite on the Committee of Public Safety to build a utopian new world. They saw his refusal to go along with this definition as proof positive of the King having been a lying, hypocritical “Friend of the People” from the day that he donned his symbolic facemask---the tricolor ribbon---that quickly became the badge of accepting that friendship as understood in their bloody and destructive sense of the term.

Louis could find no words to counter the word game that had ben played, but he was not alone in his bewilderment and predicament. More moderate---“liberal”---revolutionaries with the words “The People” forever on their lips, were to climb the steps to the guillotine shortly after him due to their failure to understand what the radicals knew that freedom and nature and the popular will fully taught. Nor, for that matter, did the 99% of the population at large that detested what Robespierre and Saint-Just and the other Jacobins were after. If a reaction had not taken place, they would have had to be butchered as enemies of all that was good alongside the King, the liberals, and that convent of contemplative Carmelite nuns whose conviction that there was something more than meets the eye in nature left to its own devices was too dangerous to leave untouched.

Such a reaction, thankfully, did take place. Part of that reaction involved the elaboration in the nineteenth century of solid, coherent Catholic arguments explaining exactly what was wrong not just with the French Revolution but the whole construction of the Established Disorder since the sixteenth century and how to fight and overturn it. Alas, the teams of people building that Established Disorder, the “old normal” as of January 1, 2020, proved to be mightier than those wanting to maintain the citadels of western Christian civilization. Moreover, those who should have been commanding the troops inside that fortress, including popes and bishops, bit by bit gave way to the Established Disorder and played along with its rhetorical word games, opening themselves up for redefining freedom, nature, and the will of the People according to its wishes. They did such a good job of this in my own city the New York archdiocesan cultural center down the street from me seems to have had no trouble bordering peacefully upon the abortion mill next to it. It has paid the price. The abortion mill remains open as an essential service. The cultural center has been closed as being not. Well, I suppose one should give the devil his due. That latter statement is absolutely accurate. The cultural center sat there, like the Long Parliament, “longer than any good that it had done” for the Catholic cause.

But let us now get back to my local Führer and our general medical Duce, and the fraud of a “new normal” so unique to history that the slaves must unquestionably follow the Masters of Them That Know into its pioneer territory. To reiterate, the “new normal” is simply the “old normal” more efficiently organized for the thorough going destruction of proper human freedom so as to achieve the same materialist goals to the detriment of the well being of People as a whole. The WHO, the CDC, and Duce Fauci have all indicated that the facemask serves no medical purpose, thereby indicating that its real value is the symbolic one of driving home the broader teaching of our need as individuals to chain ourselves up for our supposed “good”. That “good” is purely secular and materialist in character. As the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has recently said, it is a good that amounts merely to the protection of raw existence itself, to pure biological continued, to naked life as the living dead, with no social relationships, culture, or religion to give continued survival some value. And so much does this logically lead to C.S. Lewis’s description of the “abolition of man” that even the purveyors of such hoo-ha try to back away from it, finding loopholes for their favorite sons, about which more below. One wonders---as is always to be expected with the Established Disorder, now seeking to disguise its unchanged nature by substituting the word “new” for “old” in conjunction with the same diabolic understanding of the “normal”---which elite is going to be allowed to escape from the Bates Motel to pursue its pet economic or sexual perversion unhindered.nyc protestors

Allow me to finish these meditations with reference to the crowds that gathered in the square in front of my apartment building several days ago at the height of the protest demonstrations in New York City leading to the looting and fortification construction that the returning slave population will see on Monday. I listened to them chatting---with a massive gin and tonic in my hand---for over an hour. Some of them were blacks who were actually protesting police brutality. Many were youths in their early twenties coming from the suburbs---this I knew from hearing them express surprise that not all of Manhattan was a slum. They were frat boys and sorority girls looking for a good time after enduring the trials of the Party-less Plague. Most of the crowd members were homosexual and lesbian activists nostalgic for their lost Gay Pride Week. A very nasty looking bunch were out and out petty hoodlums discussing the best way to fence the goods they had already looted and the booty they hoped to gain that evening. Why should they not all be there? After all, Duce Fauci gave them a loophole, admitting that people could “take a risk” if their libido insisted upon it.

As even the mainstream media in its unparalleled and incurable stupidity noted, not a single person making up this crowd had the cause of the Covid Revolution on his mind: they were all violating the rules of social distancing even as they were all dutifully wearing the Mask of the Wuhan Death, the symbol of a teaching central to the Established Disorder: that we human beings are mud and nothing but mud.  The old normal can be described through a paraphrase and taming down of Napoleon’s comment regarding Talleyrand, the fellow traveler of the Revolution from the outset: “it was a piece of dung wrapped up in silk”.  All that the new normal will do is pull the silk away. The end goal of the both the old and the new are exactly the same: the destruction of the human person as a child of God.

I honestly cannot say whether this new stage in the development of the Established Disorder will involve yet another elite using its limited form of revolting materialist freedom as it sees fit in the name of the enslaved population at large, or whether, finally, what one of my favorite Catholic thinkers of the nineteenth century called “this living lie, this perpetual struggle against the nature of man and of Creation and of the Creator God that it cannot win” will come to its crashing end. I doubt that any of the just complaints of blacks living in projects having problems with the police will be resolved. It seems to me more likely that some predictable combination of the materially and morally perverse leaders of the old normal, better organized to exploit the new normal will come out on top. But there is one thing of which I am absolutely certain: that the rhetorical symbols and the physical symbols that have accompanied the Established Disorder on its Death March through history be spat out by Catholics like bits of tainted meat. They are the work of the devil.

 

Dear friends, there is no need for us to dance this danse macabre. We have the arguments from our forebears in fighting revolutionary thought to explain our position clearly. They show us that we cannot work within a new normal which is only the conclusion of an equally revolting old normal. We cannot accept the Established Disorder under any of its forms. We want God. We want a Christian Order. We want Christ as our King. We want the Mass that will give us the spiritual strength to fight for it. AND WE WANT IT NOW.

We had better start fighting tooth and nail for these goods, because no one is going to hand them to us on a silver platter.

Stay Strong!

Viva Cristo Rey!

[Comment Guidelines - Click to view]
Last modified on Monday, June 8, 2020
John Rao | Remnant Columnist, New York

John C. Rao, Ph.D. is an associate professor of history at St. John's University, director of the Roman Forum/Dietrich von Hildebrand Institute, and former president of Una Voce America.  In 1977 he received his D.Phil. in Modern European History from Oxford University. Notable works include Americanism and the Collapse of the Church in the United States, Removing the Blindfold, and Periphery. His latest book, Black Legends: The War of the Words Against the Word, a guide to the history of the Catholic Church, was published by The Remnant Press in 2012. A student of Dietrich von Hildebrand and a close friend and collaborator of Michael Davies, John Rao has been a frequent contributor to The Remnant since the early 1980s.  He is known for writing his Remnant columns from Rocco's Cafe, an Italian pastry shop in Greenwich Village Manhattan.

Latest from John Rao | Remnant Columnist, New York