Engels in the Air
Atlanta, GA
April 25, 2022
Last week, another brick fell from the wall.
For twenty-four months they’d been mortared into place, two weeks at a time: shelter-in-place, social distance, stay “essential”, swab your nose, work from home, wear a mask, receive a shot, inject another one, get a booster, and follow “the science”.
The masons assured us that the barriers being built were necessary to shield society from a viral horde. But the barbaric germ had already infiltrated, and would remain among us regardless the defenses our bureaucratic bricklayers demanded we build.
The walls have done more to divide the village than to defeat an invader. For all we know, that was their purpose. While partisan peasants bicker with each other, their feudal overlords can loot us all.
Mercifully, in various places and to different degrees, these dystopian partitions have begun to crumble. In some cases, they succumbed to a cautious chisel. In others, they were allowed to discreetly disintegrate.
The happiest occasions are when a sledgehammer hits one of the more ridiculous rocks. One was swung a few months ago, when the Supreme Court demolished the Administration’s employer vaccine mandate. Another came down last Tuesday.
Effective immediately, the mask charade is no longer imposed when walking thru an airport or sitting on a plane. Passengers are again free to breathe air as they fly thru it. Those traveling on buses, subways, taxis, and trains were simultaneously emancipated.
When the announcement was made, cheers erupted in airborne cabins, rows, and seats across the country. Stewardesses cried tears of joy upon learning they’d no longer be forced on a phony pretense of “public health” to muffle their mouths or police passengers.
But as the stones come down, the domineering masons are loathe to relinquish their totalitarian trowels. The conniption among the crazies is in full force. Some are outraged that a duly appointed judge had the temerity to do her job, and to recognize the constitutional absurdity of the CDC compelling travelers to wear a mask.
Many of these enlightened critics made a revealing point to criticize the age and sex of the young woman who issued the ruling, and to contrast their own “compassion” with the instinctive quest of normal folks to find a modicum of freedom. They accused reasonable people of being “selfish” vermin because they resented the useless tactics these harpies demanded.
For two years, emotional blackmail has been the debased coin of the covid realm. More was minted after the masks were removed. Disregarding months of inarguable evidence, our hypochondriac busybodies reverted to the tired trope that unmasked faces will pile corpses in the sky.
The fanatics who’ve been wrong about everything are reviving hysterical predictions that unvaccinated children, “immunocompromised” relatives, and the ill elderly will be placed in jeopardy by insensitive seekers of fresh air.
Projecting their buttinsky tendencies on everyone else, they assume the rest of us care what they wear, and that we’ll instinctively harass them if they don’t veil their visage. Yet most people simply want to be left alone, to do what they wish to accommodate their needs.
But that is unacceptable to our moral meddlers. To them, their method is the only medicine. It must be prescribed to everyone, and dispensed from a single bureaucracy in an all-powerful State. They displayed their righteousness when the masks were removed. To play the rôle of heroic martyr while assuming we care, they rail to the wind that they will continue to cover their fragile faces.
Psychos, weirdos, and half-wits have always been among us. Families, friends, churches, and sanitariums have done what they can to cure their condition or care for their needs. But in recent years these maniacs have had outsized influence. Leaders don’t merely acknowledge their needs, they enable their neuroses.
We’ve institutionalized what Chesterton called the modern and morbid habit of sacrificing the normal to the abnormal. Around numerous pyres and atop every volcanic rim, cultural tradition is offered up to the fickle god of the latest fad.
Within a couple years, our once vigorous society regularized (among other lunacies) covering faces, abolishing the sexes, destroying statues, and compelling medication. None of this is normal. Within living memory of any ten year-old, all of it would’ve been considered insane.
But we now have large contingents trying to convince us that anyone who resents these insidious inversions is incorrigibly selfish or morally depraved. That those who resist the unending upheaval of their cultural inheritance are unfit for society and must be silenced, if not expelled.
Bad as they are, the idiotic prescriptions and proscriptions of recent years are simply symptoms of a more pernicious purpose. It’s tradition itself that our social revolutionaries want destroyed. Casually and colloquially, we refer to these nefarious nitwits as the descendants of Marx. But they’re more aptly described as disciples of Engels.
In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels asserted that unlike the modern West with its nuclear family, primitive society was a communal culture of promiscuous pairing, shared sex and group “marriage”. Because any one woman mated with many men, the paternity of her children was usually uncertain, and property and names necessarily passed down the maternal line.
By definition, there is no history on pre-historic man. But the revisionist anthropologists on whom Engels relied presumed (based on no evidence) that because they visited some “modern” tribes with matriarchal cultures, pre-historic society must’ve been structured in a similar way. Engels accepted this feeble hypothesis, and ran with it…right off a cliff.
He inferred that the implication of this assumption required the modern, “patriarchal”, and “hierarchal” society in which he presumed he lived…and that so many “progressives” insist we suffer under today…be radically dismantled and immediately overturned. The second half of his book was a blueprint for doing so, and one that abominable architects in Russia, China, Cuba, and Korea unrolled at the expense of 100 million innocent lives.
Obviously, mask mandates don’t amount to mass murder. But the cultural upheaval of which they’re indicative has over the last two centuries been the broken ground on which heads have rolled and gulags have risen. The mask requirements, medical mandates, electronic surveillance, and other “mitigation measures” of the last two years epitomized an acceleration of destructive trends already in motion.
As recently as 2008, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton all assured Americans that they believed what everyone always knew – that marriage was by definition a union between a man and a woman. A man could no more “marry” a man than either one of them could conceive a child.
We’re now expected to believe that even that is untrue. To deny that men can bear babies is now enough to haul the naive heretic before the “woke” Inquisition.
Hearing the hysterics, you’d think every other person is transsexual or “immunocompromised”, and that the rest of us must rip up established norms to ostensibly ensure none of these vulnerable victims ever encounters a moment of discomfort. This is the path of Engels, and the road to ruin.
We must turn from it, to preserve sanity, and protect civilization. A healthy society doesn’t impose universal rules based on rare exceptions. It shouldn’t force chemo on the community because a few of its members are suffering from cancer. But a dysfunctional culture thrives on chaos, and continually contrives new crises to consolidate control.
For the upper echelons of our anointed elites, incessant arguments about insane issues are ideal “debates” to distract the peons. If we stay at each other’s throats, we’ll be less inclined to dangle them from theirs. But that doesn’t mean the absurd arguments shouldn’t be refuted. Like noxious weeds in an abandoned garden, they’ve been allowed to fester in the fertilizer of neglect.
They should’ve been uprooted sooner, but sane people initially dismissed them as silly or ignored them as innocuous. They now cover the ground like kudzu in Georgia, and will be much harder to pull out. Last week, we were happy to see that some soil of sanity had been reclaimed.
For the moment we’re relieved that Engels has been pushed from the sky. But we stay vigilant while he remains in the air.
JD
